Tea at Trianon: On Ill-Gotten Gains

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

Sunday, June 15, 2014

On Ill-Gotten Gains

From Christine Niles:

There is a curious museum in the heart of Dijon, France: Musée d’Art Sacré – the Museum of Sacred Art. A more accurate name would be The Museum of Illegally Confiscated Church Property.

The building originally housed the city’s first community of Cistercian nuns, transferred from the city of Tart to Dijon in 1623. The convent was completed in 1708, and the nuns enjoyed approximately ninety years of order and tranquility – until the Jacobins arrived.

In the summer of 1792, 270 priests who had refused the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy – which would have required them to renounce papal authority – were arrested in Dijon and deported. The same happened to other non-juring clergy throughout France, although a number of them remained in the country and went into hiding.

Much like the Jesuits under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, these French priests went about in disguise, pretending to be street vendors, laborers, or patissiers, offering secret Masses to the faithful by night, in secluded woods or candle-lit attics. Those caught were imprisoned in the Conciergerie, where they continued their ministry in secret, offering the consolation of the sacraments to those awaiting the guillotine – until they in turn fell under the blade.

The guillotine was not the only fate that awaited refractory priests. In Nantes, in two mass drownings intended to put down resistance in the Vendée, more than 200 priests were gathered onto barges that were set adrift on the Loire River, and then sunk. Only one, a Fr. Landeau, escaped and lived to tell the story of these atrocities. At least one account tells of a priest and nun stripped naked, bound together in an obscene posture, and thrown into the water. These spectacles were mockingly called “republican marriages.” Catholic laity in the hundreds – men, women, and children alike – met the same deaths.

Clergy who swore the oath to follow the Civil Constitution – five bishops and half of all priests in France – went into schism. They were given comfortable positions and could serve in an official capacity as priests – as long as they remained loyal citoyens and did not criticize the Republic. These juring priests were permitted to minister to the imprisoned – but not every Catholic would accept their services.

Marie-Antoinette, for instance, curtly refused to confess to a non-refractory priest. Instead, in a little-known account, a non-juring priest by the name of Abbé Magnin was smuggled into the queen’s cell the night before she died and heard her last confession. And he offered one final Mass for her before she was taken by cart in the morning to the place of execution. (Read more.)