Tea at Trianon: Brexit

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, May 30, 2016

Brexit

From Chronicles:

Should one of its most prosperous members vote to leave this Union, many other members will ask what a French friend recently asked me when I posed the possibility of Brexit: “Pourquoi pas nous?” Even more interesting, again, for those paying attention, is that visa-free travel is being extended to Turkey on June 1, just one week from now. Surely the significance of legally opening the doors to the descendants of those who besieged Europe for centuries is lost on a populace that seems not to know that Britain existed (and even prospered) before the drafting of the constitution of the European Union.

Brexit would allow the EU to take a hard look at their emulate-the-USA project. They could ward off the rise of right-wing parties everywhere in Europe (gasp!), which saw its most recent surge in yesterday’s near-election of Norbert Hofer in Austria. It might allow the EU to realize that the road to peace and prosperity doesn’t run through Brussels (as if Brussels can even keep itself safe), and doesn’t operate in a secularist vacuum that pretends that history, money, and religion have no previous lessons to teach us. In restoring subsidiarity to Europe by allowing free and uncoerced cooperation in areas like currency and immigration, free from ideologically-driven treaties, the EU could regain safety for the long term, a safety which is currently only preserved in the most fragile and temporary way.

And yet most cannot help but think that the epiphany of Brexit might cause a Macbethian reaction among the EU elites, who have not been above removing democratically elected leaders in Greece: already halfway through a river of misery, it would be just as far to the other side of “ever closer union” as to turn back to the original point of departure, the 1951 “European Coal and Steel Community.” Furthermore, that further bank would now be more easily reached without Britain on its back, the Britain that Churchill always claimed was “with Europe, but not of it, linked, but not combined . . . interested and associated but not absorbed.” (Read more.)