Tea at Trianon: Murder in Malta

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

Saturday, January 2, 2021

Murder in Malta

What a sad story. And I always thought it would be nice to visit Malta. From The New Yorker:

In the months before Daphne’s death, a whistle-blower from Electrogas, the consortium behind Muscat’s power-station project, had been relaying e-mails and other documents to her from the company, practically in real time. Matthew had helped his mother receive and sort through the files, “but I didn’t know who the whistle-blower was,” he told me. After the murder, Matthew tracked down the source, and brought to the U.K. a hard drive containing the leaked documents.

Reporters from the Guardian and Reuters visited the country house. Then Daphne’s sons went to London to sort through their mother’s investigative materials with a group of journalists whom they trusted more than the Maltese police. The lead was a French reporter named Laurent Richard, who had set up a nonprofit called Forbidden Stories, to complete the investigations of journalists who are imprisoned or killed on the job. For the past several years, his mission had been to counter the incentive underlying the crime—to show that, Richard wrote, “even if you succeed in stopping a single messenger, you will not stop the message.” Forbidden Stories launched the Daphne Project, and forty-five reporters from eighteen publications in fifteen countries went to work.

“Because Malta is so endemically corrupt, you can’t tell yourself that the police are going to be doing their best,” Paul said. “You can’t tell yourself that the magistrate is on it. Any moment you spend away, there is, on the other side, a force pushing against you.”

Matthew and Andrew reached out to Bill Browder, an American financier and political activist who had successfully lobbied Congress for sanctions against the Russian government, after it detained and killed his friend and colleague Sergei Magnitsky. “Do at least three things a day to annoy them,” Browder advised. “There are three of you. It shouldn’t be hard.” He noted that, after the Russian journalists Boris Nemtsov and Anna Politkovskaya were murdered, the Council of Europe, the Continent’s main human-rights body, appointed a special rapporteur to scrutinize the Russian system. (Read more.)