Tea at Trianon: Saving the Secular Easter

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, April 9, 2021

Saving the Secular Easter

From Charles Coulombe at Crisis:

When I was a boy, however, Easter ran second only to Christmas in the public-attention department. Public schools featured Easter Egg hunts, and the egg coloring displays dwarfed the little ones we know today. The Easter Bunny was Santa’s great rival, complete with television specials and songs all his own—and limited though his wares were in comparison to those of the right jolly old elf of Yuletide, we kids rushed to the door to find the Easter baskets he had left quite as quickly as we rose to see what had been left under the Christmas Tree.

It wasn’t all about sales and gluttony, either. Just as the busy, secular world had to halt and pay some lip service to the religious side of Christmas (as they must even now, despite all the attempts to smother it in “Holiday”), so it was with Easter. A surefire draw for celebrities in Southern California was the Easter Sunrise Service at the Hollywood Bowl, where, starting in 1921, tens of thousands would annually turn out for the generic Protestant ceremony. But not to be left out, New York skyscrapers, as late as the 1950s, at least illuminated their tall lengths with crosses—as a black-and-white postcard that has gone viral on the internet shows.

But New York made another important contribution to the secular Easter that endures in a somewhat cartoonish if enjoyable manner: the Easter Parade on 5th Avenue. Back in the late 19th century, the presence of four well-to-do congregations on that famous thoroughfare (the now-defunct St. Nicholas Dutch Reformed, 5th Avenue Presbyterian, St. Thomas Episcopal, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral) ensured a large number of equally well-dressed worshippers on Easter morning. While the men were soberly arrayed in morning dress, their ladies wore all the latest fashions—especially as regarded hats and bonnets. In time, their striving to show off their elegance became almost a caricature—and after the 1960s, it became one. Today, a stroll in the Easter parade is a lot of fun, but it is much more like a circus than a fashion—still less a religious—exercise. (Read more.)