Tea at Trianon: Camelot in Australia

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, January 22, 2016

Camelot in Australia

From The American Conservative:

Could there be a sociological lesson here? Whilst by 1965 the very worst of Australia’s Catholic-Protestant aversion had eased, it remained active, and nowhere in Australia did it remain more alive than in Melbourne itself. We are not, admittedly, talking about Belfast-style levels of mayhem, nor about Klansmen burning down convents. But much later than 1965, whole strata of Australian society considered mutual stone-throwing by Catholic and Protestant schoolchildren to be an entirely natural, indeed legitimate, mode of political discourse. Federal and state civil service departments continued to be organized strictly on Catholic-versus-Protestant (the latter often de facto Masonic) lines. (Read more.)