Tea at Trianon: Requiem Mass for Louis XVI, Jan. 22, 2017

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

Sunday, January 29, 2017

Requiem Mass for Louis XVI, Jan. 22, 2017

From Church Militant:

On the 224th anniversary of the execution of King Louis XVI, French royalists gathered Saturday on Place de la Révolution (now Place de la Concorde) to commemorate his death. And in the Basilica of St-Denis, Prince Louis-Alphonse de Bourbon, the Duke of Anjou and descendant of the murdered king, attended a Requiem Mass with his wife, Princess Marie-Marguerite. The group that congregated on the Place de la Révolution, site of the king's execution, waved flags bearing fleurs-de-lis — symbol of Royal France — and offered speeches honoring the memory of the fallen monarch, killed by guillotine on January 21, 1793, after five months imprisonment at the hands of anti-Catholic Jacobins. Heavily influenced by freemasonry, the revolutionaries had protested against the ancien régime, represented by the Catholic Church and the Catholic monarchy. (Read more.)