Tea at Trianon: Meanwhile, in Prague...

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, June 7, 2020

Meanwhile, in Prague...

From BBC:

The 17th Century column was toppled in 1918, days after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the birth of an independent Czechoslovak state. The statue is a perfect replica of the original Baroque Marian column. The column bears aloft a gilded statue of the Virgin Mary and will later have four allegorical figures of angels.

But was the original a treasured monument to the salvation of Prague following the last siege of the Thirty Years' War? Or was it rather a hated symbol of Catholic supremacy and the failure of the Protestant Bohemian revolt? It depends who you ask.

"It was the people of Prague who wanted this statue!" said Jan Bradna, academic sculptor, restorer and a member of the Marian Column Restoration Society. "It was they who lobbied the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand III for permission to erect it," Bradna told the BBC. (Read more.)