Tea at Trianon: Night Riders

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 30, 2014

Night Riders

A sad and disgusting chapter of American history. From History Today:

As was common among the upper-middle classes in the South at the time, Amoss had been sent as a boy to a military school, where he learned the basics of drill, strategy and tactics, lessons that would be put to good use as the conspiratorial Night Riders emerged as an underground sect within the Association that would perform the ugly work of persuasion. Secret night-time meetings were held throughout the Black Patch, with the Night Riders’ underlying purpose delivered by Amoss in firmly Jacobin terminology:

To burn or otherwise destroy the property of growers and to whip them and others who refuse to co-operate with you in winning your fight against the Trust is more than they deserve. There is no reason why a few persons should continue to make the masses suffer when their cooperation would not only be to their benefit, but would increase the earnings and thus improve the conditions of all equally.
The Night Riders’ oath, sworn by lantern light on bended knees and with one hand on the Bible, was couched in scriptural references to the paramount importance of being one’s brother’s keeper (willingly or not) and to the equally supreme necessity of total secrecy. By the spring of 1906 around 2,000 men had taken the oath and, orders in hand, spread out into the countryside to do their work. (Read more.)