Tea at Trianon: The Underbelly of Violence Against Women

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, June 6, 2014

The Underbelly of Violence Against Women

From Pia de Solenni:

Extreme violence has always bothered me. Forget trying to get me to watch a really violent film. I will have both of my ears stopped with my hands or a nearby cushion. But violence against women seems to me particularly unseemly and not just in an ungentlemanly sense. The movie The Passion of the Christ gave me a clue about this inclination.

In the scene where Christ is being flogged, the character of the devil enters in a figure that mocks Mary, the mother of Jesus, and the birth of the Christ himself. That image stuck with me and then I realized that there’s a sense in which all violence against women mocks the Incarnation. (Read more.)