Tea at Trianon: Found Patriotism

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, July 4, 2023

Found Patriotism

From The American Conservative:

I feel similarly about the American flag. The Italian social critic Luigi Barzini was right when he described it as “strictly Louis XVI.” The red and white stripes look as if they have been copied from upholstery of the period, and the star-spangled field could easily double as the lining of some decadent Bourbon’s waistcoat. It lends itself easily to tackiness. I could go on like this at length, nitpicking at Washington Crossing the Delaware and the Jefferson Bible, but that would be puerile. America was born in the Age of Light, and it will never fully satisfy those of us with a darker cast of mind.

And anyway, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that deep within me there is some primeval attachment to the United States’s pious customs. When these customs are presented in strange or decontextualized ways, I am often overcome with a love of country. My morning routine is the perfect example. The Naval Observatory appears rather haphazard in its daily observance of the national anthem; I’m not sure it is ever played at exactly the same time. (I should add that the Observatory also plays Taps every evening at what seems like randomly chosen hours.) And the recording itself—I am certain that there is not a full band on hand every morning—is the opposite of impressive. When the swelling strain of “o’er the land of the free” echoes off the hill, the woozy horns sound oddly comic, like a parody. It gets me right out of bed. (Read more.)

Dr. Esolen on the word FREEDOM:

I’ve sometimes said that if you’re talking about freedom but not talking about virtue, you’re really talking about license, which enslaves. But I can say here that if you’re talking about freedom and you’re not talking about a free and open heart, a heart that loves, you’ve got a cramped and narrow view of the matter, and it may be that you’ve been paying too much attention to laws and not enough to the forms of devotion and allegiance that nourish a real culture. And that’s what the word free can teach us. Its origin is an ancient root that has to do not with a negative — that nobody can boss you around — but with the glorious power of love. From that root we get Hindi priy, dear, as in the common name for girls, Priya; and the Polish word for friend, przyjaciel, — boy, I am not looking forward to trying to pronounce that one — and a whole host of words in Germanic that have to do with loving and friendship: German Frieden, peace, and Freude, joy; English friend, and the name of the god Odin’s wife, Frigg, preserved in English in the word Friday, as a translation of the Latin dies Veneris, the day of Venus, goddess of love. (Read more.)