Tea at Trianon: The Albigensian Crusade

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

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

The Albigensian Crusade

From Information and Analysis on the Life of the Church:

It is unnecessary to dwell at length on the antisocial consequences of such a doctrine. It aimed at nothing less than the suppression of the essential element of all society, the family, by making of the whole of humanity a vast religious congregation without recruitment and without a future.

While awaiting the advent of this state of affairs, which was to emerge from the triumph of the Cathar ideas, the Perfects gradually broke, as a result of the progress of their apostolate, the family ties already formed.

Whoever wanted to be saved, before submitting to the law of rigorous chastity, the husband must left the wife, the wife the husband, the parents must abandon the children, fleeing a domestic hearth which inspired them only with horror, because the heresy taught them “that no one can save himself by staying with his father and mother.” And so all domestic morality disappeared, along with the family which was its raison d'être.

This hatred of the family was, moreover, among the Albigensians only a particular form of their aversion to anything foreign to their sect. They refrained from any relationship with anyone who did not think like them, except when they deemed it possible to win them over to their own doctrines, and they made the same recommendation to their Believers.

On the day of the examination of conscience or apparelhamentum, which presented itself every month, they demanded from the Believers a severe account of the relations which they had had with the infidels. And this is understandable: they considered their fellow man only he who, like them, had become by consolamentum, a son of God.

As for the others who had remained in the evil world, they somehow belonged to another race and were strangers not to say enemies. (Read more.)