Tea at Trianon: A View from Abroad: The Story of John and Abigail Adams in Europe

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

Thursday, February 18, 2021

A View from Abroad: The Story of John and Abigail Adams in Europe

From University of Denver Magazine:

Most people look at the American founders as mythical figures of almost superhuman proportion and assume that the success of the American Revolution and the republic was inevitable. I have been fascinated by the fact that the creation of the American republic was in reality simply a grand experiment and that the founders, for all of their pivotal accomplishments, were at the same time very human, with all the flaws and frailties that all people exhibit. John and Abigail Adams were indeed a remarkable couple, but they were also ordinary people who had to deal with family and economic issues, and the severe health challenges, including devastating epidemics, that all their contemporaries faced during the era. (Read more.)