Tea at Trianon: Patriotism in the Fourth Commandment

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, May 23, 2020

Patriotism in the Fourth Commandment

From The Catholic Thing:

Civility, civilization, civic, civil: each word has its root in the Latin civis, “citizen.” The grandest of these, civilization – which stands for the collective and binding refinements of a society – means, in essence, life in the “city,” the assumption from ancient times being that it was in the city that one found the best and most developed ideas, institutions, and individuals.

This derives from a time before “nation” meant much more than “a people,” as in the nation of Israel, an ethno-religious unity. It was to one’s people that one owed allegiance, and “a people” (especially a “chosen people”) was an extension of family relations, with all its intricacies of blood and intimacy. With time, a unified nation such as the United States can be a “city upon a hill,” that is, civilization is no longer just experienced in great metropolitan places.

Athens and Rome helped transform “people” into “nation,” and gave the West its Greco-Roman view of identity that was later wedded with Jerusalem in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It’s one worth venerating, even loving. But to love anything, you have to know it. To love America, we have to know America. All this is by way of lamenting the lack of love being shown to the glorious and extraordinary history of our nation and the world. To the extent that history is even taught, it’s often as a litany of grievances against those allegedly benighted ancestors who had the impudence not to have been as virtuous and enlightened as we. Education in history today is often splintered into the sort of factionalism that worried Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, and is articulated by them in Federalist Nos. 9 and 10.

Hamilton (most know of him today thanks only to the $10 bill or Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical) expressed concern that “an infinity of little, jealous, clashing tumultuous commonwealths” would emerge unless we embraced (as Gouverneur Morris would write in the Constitution’s Preamble) “a more perfect Union.” And Madison warned of “a number of citizens. . .united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” (Read more.)