Tea at Trianon: The Spiritual Death of the West

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, April 15, 2023

The Spiritual Death of the West

I loved Raspail's novel Sire which I bought in Lourdes in 1994. From First Things:

The most important dystopian novels of the first half of the twentieth century are Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. Huxley and Orwell captured the two sides of modern despotism, one soft and seductive, the other hard and punitive. The most important dystopian novel of the second half of the century is Jean Raspail’s Le Camp des Saints (The Camp of the Saints, 1973). Its central plotline concerns an armada that transports one million migrants from India to the shores of France. It’s an invasion, an occupation of the Global North by the Global South. As the migrants land, France is thrown into chaos, along with the rest of Europe, and Western civilization dies.

Yet The Camp of the Saints is not a disaster novel. The book’s significance does not hinge on whether Raspail was correct to predict mass immigration or describe it in catastrophic terms. Rather, the novel’s genius lies in the depiction of an apocalypse in the original sense of that term. Properly translated, apocalypse is rendered as revelation, disclosure, literally an “uncovering.” The Camp of the Saints unveils the perverse logic that pervades late Western civilization, and throws into sharp relief the nihilism of guilt whereby the West welcomes its own destruction.

The Camp of the Saints was one of Raspail’s first novels, and he went on to have a distinguished literary career. His best books are an unusual kind of historical fiction, encompassing counterfactuals and tales of the sudden resurfacing of long-lost dynasties or extinct peoples. In some works, Raspail expressed what might be called a literary royalism. He imagined a quasi-fictional kingdom, Patagonia, as a transcendent poetic refuge from the prosaisms of modern politics. This outlook earned him many admirers in traditionalist Catholic circles.

A Catholic himself, Raspail sympathized with Catholic traditionalism. Before he died in 2020, he had become a vocal defender of the Tridentine Mass. At the same time, he maintained friendly relations with people across the political spectrum. He corresponded with liberal and left-wing intellectuals, as well as some socialist politicians, including President François Mitterrand and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In 2000, Raspail was nearly admitted into the Académie Française but lost a close vote. In 2003, he received the Grand prix de littérature de l’Académie française, a prize for lifetime achievement.

Unlike Huxley and Orwell, Raspail lacks international name recognition. He possesses his little fame, especially in the United States, more as a presumptive racist than as an accomplished writer. A 2019 New York Times article called The Camp of the Saints “a must-read within white supremacist circles.” The publishing house that owns the rights to the English translation has suppressed the book, making it almost impossible to find. (Read more.)