Tea at Trianon: A Film Noir Moment

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

A Film Noir Moment

Jeffrey Tucker discusses some classics films of the noir genre, saying:

Film Noir is not riding any wave of popularity so it is the perfect time to anticipate a trend. These movies from the 1940s are not only brilliant and beautiful but also entertaining in their own right. They look completely different to us now from what they must have looked like then, and I don't mean merely to inspire a sentimentalism for days gone by.

These were times when Mises's was writing Human Action in English, Hazlitt was working at the New York Times, and Ayn Rand was marketing the Fountainhead to Hollywood. These authors, writing on manual typewriters and submitting the results only in hard copy, were the champions of markets and technological progress. They saw what others did not, namely, that the innovations of the time, as wonderful as they seemed, were only the beginning of what was possible under freedom.