Tea at Trianon: O Christmas Tree

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

Saturday, December 16, 2023

O Christmas Tree

Kaiser Franz Josef with Empress Sisi and family

The Habsburgs and the Christmas tree. From the World of Habsburgs:

A festively decked tree with candles is today the foremost symbol of Christmas. However, this has not always been the case. It was not least the Habsburgs themselves who were responsible for introducing this custom in the lands of the Habsburg Monarchy.

Christmas trees as we know them today first arrived in Vienna during the Biedermeier, evidently from northern Germany. In Protestant countries Christmas had long been celebrated as a festivity of the middle-class family, as an intimate, emotional experience of the birth of Jesus – in contrast to the publicly celebrated, convivial church festivity of the Catholic tradition. The ‘new’ tranquil Christmas celebration round the Christmas tree came to epitomize a pious sense of family and bourgeois domesticity in the Habsburg monarchy during the Biedermeier era.

This rapid change of emphasis and its ready acceptance in Vienna can be explained by the profound social changes taking place in the capital during the reign of Joseph II and the Biedermeier era: the new economically flourishing patrician class began to assume a leading role during the time of the industrial revolution and was seeking new modes of expression for its sense of family values.

In 1814 reports compiled by Metternich’s state police contain the first mention of a Christmas tree festivity held in the salon of the Arnsteins, a Jewish banking family. Those attending were given lavish gifts, a custom that was not usual on Christmas Eve in Vienna at the time. The mistress of the house, Fanny von Arnstein, was from Berlin and had brought the custom with her from her native city.

However, it was via court circles in Vienna that the Christmas tree spread rapidly to the living rooms of the middle classes. The wife of Archduke Karl, Henriette of Nassau-Weilburg, who came from a Protestant family, brought the custom from her German home. Christmas 1816 saw the first Christmas tree, festively decked with candles, in the Habsburg family. Emperor Franz I attended this celebration and was so taken with the magical aura of the Christmas tree that he ordered a tree to be put up in the Hofburg at Christmas from then on. Subsequently it became the norm in Catholic families to celebrate Christmas round the tree: contemporary accounts record that while it was still almost impossible to procure a Christmas tree in 1821, by 1829 there were already street vendors selling trees at the Schottentor, the city’s north gate, and in 1851 the Am Hof square is said to have resembled a forest in the run-up to Christmas. (Read more.)