Tea at Trianon: Father and Victim

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, July 17, 2012

Father and Victim

An elegy for Louis XVI on July 14.

The French Republic was founded on a monstrous crime and the criminal act was the judicial murder of King Louis XIV and the later one of his wife Queen Marie Antoinette. Instead of wearing sashes and dancing in the streets, the French people and their representatives should be donning sackcloth and ashes. (Read entire post.)

lara77 said...: The greatest crime ever against the nation of France. When you strip the veneer of Bastille Day with its bloody national anthem and the ugly rag flag of red,white and blue you see nothing but murder, genocide, desecration and destruction. THAT is the legacy of that barbarous revolution; NOT liberty equality and fraternity.; July 19, 2012 at 11:03:00 AM EDT