Tea at Trianon: Haec Sancta

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

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Haec Sancta

From Once I Was a Clever Boy:

Today [April 6] is the anniversary of the passing of what J. N. Figgis, the early twentieth century historian of political ideas, and an Anglican priest, termed " [p]robably the most revolutionary official document in the history of the world."

What is this revolutionary text? The American Declaration of Independence? The Declaration of the Rights of Man? THe Communist Manifesto? The Ninety Five Theses? Magna Carta? The Edict of Milan?

No, none of the above. What Figgis had in mind when he wrote Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius: 1414-1625: Seven Studies (1907) which had been originally delivered as the Birkbeck Lectures at Trinity College in 1900, was the Decree Haec Sancta voted on by the Council of Constance in its Fifth Session, on this day in 1415. (Read more.)