Tea at Trianon: George Washington and the French Revolution

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

Monday, February 15, 2016

George Washington and the French Revolution

How our first President avoided the trap. To quote:

The new president saw that his country was deeply indebted and politically divided. Though France was America’s first ally, most U.S. trade post-independence was with Britain. The finances of the newly established federal government, set up by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, depended greatly on customs duties from foreign trade. But Britain angered many Americans by refusing to abandon its military forts on U.S. territory stretching from present-day Michigan to upstate New York along the Canadian border. The British also encouraged American Indian attacks on U.S. settlers. During such tension of the 1790s, some people — including a member of Washington’s Cabinet — got swept up in the emotion of France’s revolutionary fervor.

“Was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?” Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson wrote in a 1793 letter to William Short, an American diplomat in France. “My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to the cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.”

That year was flush with: Louis XVI’s execution. France’s declaration of war vs. Britain. France’s fight against Spain, whose empire bordered America. (Read more.)