Tea at Trianon: A Grand Redesign for Paris

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

Thursday, May 3, 2018

A Grand Redesign for Paris

Leftist but interesting. From The New York Review of Books:

In medieval times, the banlieue designated a one-league-wide ring outside a feudal lord’s fortress-city over which his interdictions, or bans, applied. Over the past several decades, the word has too often meant a place of banishment.

During the 1950s and 1960s, immigrants from former French colonies in Africa and the Maghreb found work in postwar suburban factories and housing in vast subsidized apartment blocks. When the factories closed in the 1980s and 1990s, these immigrants were left marooned, cut off from the rest of French society and bereft of adequate public services. A generation of frustrated youth grew up that felt, not unreasonably, abandoned by the French republic and discriminated against for their Muslim names, their darker skin, their poverty, and their lack of skills. In 2015, Philippe Galli, then the police commissioner of Seine-Saint-Denis, estimated the Muslim population of the department at 700,000, or about 45 percent of the population. Muslims make up less than 9 percent of France’s total population of 65 million. In Seine-Saint-Denis, one third of the population is poor—the highest share in the greater Paris area, and in France overall—with the proportion of people living below the poverty line in some public housing complexes reaching as high as 60 percent. Unemployment in Seine-Saint-Denis is over 12 percent, and nearly 30 percent of young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four are unemployed. (Read more.)