Tea at Trianon: May Day

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

Friday, May 3, 2013

May Day

How did it become political? From History Today:

With May Day, the labour movements of different countries were both 'inventing' it as their tradition and also acquiring for themselves a very old tradition with deep roots going back into pre-Christian times. It was a tradition resonant with imagery, and one that in the past has appealed to a range of political and cultural outlooks. Hence there was an ambiguity in the situation. The workers' May Days were part of a counter-culture to that of established society, yet this alternative culture derived much from the traditions and practices of the old order that the labour movement sought to supercede. Thus in many European Catholic areas May Day processions, festivals and imagery frequently drew on saints days' festivals.

In Britain the old May Day had mixed connotations, some popular – and unruly in the eyes of the 'respectable', but many conservative or sentimental. Maypoles had been banned in the mid-seventeenth century. With the return of the monarchy in 1660 the Maypoles and the May festivities were restored as part of the attempt to create a nationalistic 'Merrie England'. The boisterous and genuinely popular May Day festivities had mostly faded away by the start of Queen Victoria's reign. But there were nostalgic revivals later, inspired by the enthusiasm of poets such as Charles Tennyson and William Barnes, writers and artists such as John Ruskin, or by Conservatives influenced by 'Young England' notions. In the 1890s quaint May Day processions, more in the nature of pageants than living folk festivals, took place at the same time as the mass workers' demonstrations. The Illustrated London News in May 1891 printed sketches of both the huge labour demonstration in Hyde Park and also a medieval and Tudor periods costumed May Day procession that took place at St. Mary Cray, Kent. (Read entire article.)