Tea at Trianon: Goals of the 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

Saturday, August 18, 2018

Goals of the Revolution

From TFP:

Karl Marx saw traditional marriage as a function of the capitalist system, a way in which a man gained legal and complete possession of a woman who became his private property. To end that system, he argued that both women and men should “love” anyone that they pleased—advocating what many modern people call free love.

This is a marvelous example of Prof. Plinio Correa de Olivera’s contention that we are in a single revolution which has moved in several phases through the last five centuries. In the so-called Reformation, the process of separating the Church from marriage began. In fact many Calvinists saw marriage as a civil contract having nothing to do with the Church.

This, then, expanded into the phase of revolution known as the Enlightenment, in which any sense of faithfulness in marriage was dismissed. Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that marital fidelity was simply unnatural—and that it should be abandoned so that man could become the being that nature intended him to be. At this point, however, belief in this theory was limited to the intelligentsia. For the common farmer and shop owner, the benefits of marriage were too obvious to be dismissed so easily.

The third phase of the Revolution—Communism—further expanded this free love idea by seeing marriage was a function of capitalism that would have to be destroyed. To Marx and his legion of followers, free love would lead to the advancement of society. (Read more.)