Tea at Trianon: The Eiffel Tower's Competitors

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

Friday, August 14, 2020

The Eiffel Tower's Competitors

From OZY:

With even more architectural fervor, architect Alberto de Palacio Ellisagne designed a 1,000-foot globe for the Chicago expo. Encircling the pseudo-planet would be a spiral stairway running more than half a mile long, leading up to a “North Pole,” where a replica of one of Columbus’ ships would be docked, awaiting visitors. Its Earth-size price tag (roughly $168 million in today’s currency) prevented Palacio from building his better world. It did, however, win him the cover of Scientific American.The motivations driving these monuments was a fevered patriotism that expressed itself through ambitious architecture. “The Crystal Palace in 1851 itself was an amazing ‘signature structure,'” says John Findling, author of America: World’s Fairs in the United States and Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions. “From the world’s fairs beginnings, there was an implicit competition among the largest trading nations, with the host country having ‘home court advantage’ to build these edifices. The folks who would soon be putting together the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago were consumed by the idea that they had to ‘out-Eiffel Eiffel’ as a symbol of nationalism.” (Read more.)