Tea at Trianon: Autocracy and America

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

Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Autocracy and America

From PJB at The American Conservative:

In the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden declared to the nation and world: "We are engaged anew in a great battle for freedom. A battle between democracy and autocracy." On her trip to Taiwan, Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed Biden: "Today, the world faces a choice between democracy and autocracy. America's determination to preserve democracy here in Taiwan and in the world remains iron-clad." But is this truly the world struggle America is in today? Is this the great challenge and threat to the United States? Are autocracy and democracy in a climactic ideological crusade to determine the destiny of mankind? For if that is the future, it is surely not America's past.
Indeed, in the two-century rise of the United States to world preeminence and power, autocrats have proven invaluable allies. When the fate of the Revolution hung in the balance in 1778, the decision of an autocratic French king to enter the war on America's side elated Gen. George Washington, and French intervention proved decisive in the 1781 Battle of Yorktown that secured our independence. A decade later, King Louis XVI would be overthrown in the French Revolution and guillotined along with Queen Marie Antoinette.
In World War I in 1918, the U.S. sent millions of troops into battle in France. They proved decisive in the victory over the kaiser's Germany. Our allies in that Great War? The British, French, Russian, Italian and Japanese empires, the greatest imperial and colonial powers of that day. In our war with Japan from 1941 to 1945, our foremost Asian ally was the autocrat Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek of China. In our war with Hitler's Germany, America's crucial ally who did more fighting than any other to ensure victory, the USSR's Joseph Stalin, was the greatest tyrant of his age. (Read more.)