Tea at Trianon: The French Revolution and the American-Catholic Today

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, October 18, 2020

The French Revolution and the American-Catholic Today

From Fr. David Nix:

The fact that most American Catholic grade-school children are currently taught that the French Revolution simply brought “fraternity, liberty and equality” might explain why most Catholics today blindly believe there is “mostly peaceful protesting” in places like Portland or Chicago. Remember that the “Convention” of the French Revolution (in a Catholic country) also held that the royal family was to be “under the charge of the legislative body until tranquility is restored in Paris.” Then, they killed King Louis XVI and his wife. Most Catholics didn’t want it to happen, but they didn’t have the courage to do anything. They were shamed, without any evidence, into accepting the fact he must be evil just because the revolutionaries said so. And the cowardice of the right cost the lives of tens of thousands of Frenchmen on the right and on the left. Order would not return to France for at least seven more years. (Read more.)