Tea at Trianon: The Spirit of de Sade

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, March 15, 2023

The Spirit of de Sade

From Andrew Klavan at The American Mind:

At the town hall in Poznan, Poland, October, 1943, SS Commander Heinrich Himmler spoke to the officers in his charge as if the extermination of the Jewish people was a difficult but noble task. “To have seen this through and…to have remained decent…is a page of glory never mentioned…” Presumably they all agreed with him. Was he right within that company? At what distance from the town hall did he become mistaken? If a country oppresses its women or enslaves its blacks or molests its children, does that only become evil at the national border? No absolute standards of right and wrong! Respect all cultures! In a pig’s eye.

But when we come to speak of the demonic, Himmler is very much to the point. Men do go mad from time to time, and cultures do grow foolish to the point of madness. Nations do perceive genocide as noble. They declare slavery a right. Abortion, even! “Dread not infanticide,” counseled Sade. “The crime is imaginary: we are always mistress of what we carry in our womb.” And people can go even further. They mutilate the young to transform their bodies into bizarre flesh costumes of the opposite sex. If the satanic Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele had suggested such “Gender Affirming Care” to his Führer, Hitler would have reeled back with a cry of horror: “what sort of monster do you think I am?” (Read more.)