Tea at Trianon: Europe’s Gaullist Revival

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, October 9, 2020

Europe’s Gaullist Revival

From The American Conservative:

European elites are well aware of the threat the pandemic poses to the project of European integration. A former aide to French president Emmanuel Macron told Politico Europe that Macron “is very focused on making sure that the French people don’t reject Europe as an entity that wasn’t able to protect them and the Europeans.” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen seems equally aware of the potential for the EU to come unglued. In early April she published an open letter to Italy, apologizing for the Union’s slow response and announcing the allocation of 100 billion euros to the hardest hit countries, starting with Italy. But Matteo Salvini, leader of the right-wing League party, was having none of it, saying that von der Leyen “could have thought of this sooner. From Europe, all we are getting are words and smoke: zero substance.” That sentiment is shared by a majority of Italians, 59 percent of whom now believe that the EU no longer makes sense.

Yet critics of the nationalist response to the pandemic see darker forces at play, particularly when it comes to Hungary. Writing in The Atlantic, the neoconservative journalist Anne Applebaum claims that Orban is using the crisis to push through illiberal policies on everything from transgender rights to government oversight. The liberal American Prospectsays that “Viktor Orban has long been Europe’s leading authoritarian entrepreneur, and his new dictatorial powers are the culmination of a decade of increasingly strong-armed rule.” But overwrought pronouncements such as these only prove the truth of the late journalist Alexander Cockburn’s observation that “American discussions of Europe swivel between rationality and hysteria.” This very much remains the case today: in recent years, Orban has emerged alongside Russia’s Vladimir Putin as one of the apex-villains of American neocons and liberal interventionists for his tough line on immigration and his conservative social policies.

But concerns over mass migration and the toll it inevitably takes on national cohesiveness have not been the sole province of conservatives like Orban. On the European left, the social democratic prime minister of Denmark, Matte Frederiksen, campaigned and won on a platform calling for stricter immigration laws. As Matthew Dal Santo noted in a piece for The American Conservative, Frederiksen “is one of the few leaders from Europe’s left that has spoken out against mass migration and the European Union’s freedom of movement on the grounds of both the deleterious effect on working class jobs and the cultural solidarity of the nation.” (Read more.)