Tea at Trianon: History by Other Means

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, December 13, 2022

History by Other Means

From twenty years ago, but worth a read. From The New Criterion:

The physical grace and delicacy of the Cambodians, and their friendly good humor, sits ill with the abysmal brutality of the Khmer Rouge, and raises questions akin to those raised by stories of concentration camp commandants who wept over Winterreise after a hard day’s genocide. But if westernization proceeds too far or too fast in Cambodia, the puzzle will dissolve itself: there won’t be much physical grace left to puzzle the observer. In neighboring Bangkok, I was astonished to see how fat and lumpen many Thai children, at least of the middle class, had become. They seem, from the moment they are released from school, to need to eat their own body weight in two hours, like insectivorous shrews. Lacking the shrews’ high metabolic rate, however, they quickly grow fat, and many of them waddle rather than walk. Gone is the almost feline elegance of South-East Asia.

How easy it is to take physical grace for a sign of every other virtue! (Mary McCarthy certainly did it in her book called Hanoi.) The apparent gentleness of Cambodian life in Sihanouk’s time fooled many sympathetic onlookers into supposing that they were observing a near-paradise. François Bizot, the French anthropologist and scholar of South-East Asian Buddhism, who was twice a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge (including of its most notorious jailer and torturer, the former mathematics teacher Deuch), and who has recently published a memoir called The Gate, remembered the pre-Lon Nol, pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodians as a people infused with a Buddhist sense of proportion, content with the unceasing regularity of the rural round, with its celebrations, festivals, and comforting changelessness. Not for them the snares and delusions of progress and ever-increasing material consumption that never satisfies, whatever its level. They were wise where we westerners were merely clever.

Was it ever really thus, or has the horror that overtook Cambodia lent a roseate glow to memories of a prelapsarian country? Bizot is certainly not the only one to remember it like this: almost everyone who wrote of Cambodia at the time experienced the same douceur.
No doubt this roseate view of things captured an aspect of Cambodian reality, but only an aspect. Paradise is not of this world. Sihanouk was not above a little political murder, and political murder does not take place where there is no conflict. Moreover, as soon as the Cambodian peasants were offered what they mistakenly thought was an opportunity to escape their rice paddies, by means of education, to obtain a job in a government office with an air-conditioner or even just a ceiling fan, they did so: despite the unrivalled tender green of young rice plants. To slosh about all day—all life, in fact—in rice paddies is evidently not as romantic as it looks.

Needless to say, anything was and is better than the Khmer Rouge, either in prospect or retrospect. Books about Pol Pot and his regime are everywhere, in large quantities, just to remind people of the fact. I haven’t seen anything comparable since I visited the Dominican Republic, where within a day or two I had accumulated a small library of books about the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Compared with Pol Pot, of course, he was a humanitarian, a mere amateur of mass murder: but he was the subject of the same proportion of books sold.

Where did the ferocity come from in Cambodia, a country regarded as gentle as Germany was once reputed to be civilized, or Japan was once reputed to be refined? Every time a Cambodian smiled at me, welcoming me with a graceful gesture, I wondered whether, secretly, he hated me with an inextinguishable class or national hatred.

Leaving aside the permanent human propensity to commit as much evil as can be got away with, there are those who see the ferocity of the Pol Pot years as emerging from specifically Cambodian tendencies and characteristics; and there are those who emphasize its roots in an intellectual doctrine, or at least in an intellectual tradition, namely Marxism-Leninism and its Stalino-Maoist sub-variants. (Read more.)