Tea at Trianon: “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”

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, October 4, 2018

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”

From The American Spectator:

Could it be that it was the disappointment of these hopes, like the disappointment of so many other utopian hopes in the last couple of centuries, which turned love into hatred? The problem with teaching children that they deserve to be loved, even by strangers, the way God loves them — “The way you are right now,/The way down deep inside you” — is that they are being set up for huge disappointment when they find out that the world outside their family and the comforting parental figure on TV isn’t at all like that. I don’t believe, as I have said, that the Mr. Rogers generation are all narcissists, but I do believe that they must live their lives shadowed by that disappointment and obscurely conscious that, if life is not what their childish selves, unwittingly encouraged by Mr. Rogers, expected it to be, it must be somebody’s fault. (Read more.)