Tea at Trianon: An Impermanent Paradise

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, May 31, 2011

An Impermanent Paradise

It's called California. Charles A. Coulombe discusses the history and the dream.

In 1769, our royal founder, Charles III of Spain, was afraid that the Russians would swoop down from Alaska, annex the then-unsettled Alta California, and menace New Spain. He dispatched (and funded) an expedition to evangelize and claim California, headed by the saintly Franciscan Friar Junípero Serra. By the time Mexico forced California into independence from Spain in 1822, the Spanish had built up a rather impressive infrastructure: 21 missions stretching from San Diego to the Bay Area; four presidios; two civilian pueblos; a network of ranchos, and, running like a vertical spine through most of the land and tying us to our sister colony of Baja California, El Camino Real —the King’s Highway.

Despite the best efforts of leftist activists and Indian revisionists to convince you otherwise, Spanish California was quite a pleasant place for most of its denizens. But again, paradise would not last. As in the rest of Latin America, overthrowing the Spanish crown led to a dreary cycle of civil wars and petty dictators, albeit in a typically Californian comic-opera manner. As a result, when the Americans conquered California during the Mexican War, resistance was halfhearted or nonexistent in many places, though los Californios showed what they could do at the Battle of San Pasqual. (Read entire article.)