Tea at Trianon: The Constitution and the Importance of Writing It Down

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, September 20, 2020

The Constitution and the Importance of Writing It Down

From The National Review:

All that being said, the long tenure of our Constitution — the oldest one in continuous use, just as America’s exceptional system is the oldest continuous system of republican and democratic government — owes much of its importance and durability to another crucial fact: The Framers did not merely agree on a system of governmental powers and individual rights, they wrote the rules down. This was a key departure from British practice. Britain in 1787 had a Parliament, and the Magna Carta of 1215, and the Bill of Rights of 1689, but it nowhere had a single rulebook ratified by the people that could not be changed without their consent. The British “Constitution” to this day is a concept rather than a written document, and Parliament has very little constraint in changing it. The British system has evolved so much since 1787 that it is far less recognizable today than the American system of the day: The King controlled many appointments and much national policy, the House of Lords had significant governing powers, and the Commons was not elected in anything even vaguely resembling representative terms or proportions. The system has endured in large part due to the British habit of unspoken agreement, pragmatism, and tradition, but what was truly novel in America was the insistence of the Founding generation that the rules must be written down, and that they must constrain everyone. The entire American concept of constitutionalism can be summarized in four words: “You can’t do that!" (Read more.)