Tea at Trianon: If the Glorious Fourth Had Not Happened

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, July 8, 2023

If the Glorious Fourth Had Not Happened

From Charles Coulombe at Catholicism:

Of course, it was Louis XVI’s economic, governmental, and military reforms that made the French victory over Britain in the Revolution possible — after almost a century of defeats at the hands of the British and their Continental allies. But in the end, it was a pyrrhic victory. Not only were many of the French officers who served in North America infected with the ideas of the Enlightenment and had their Catholicism weakened thereby, the treasury was emptied by the conflict. As a result, when an Icelandic volcano’s aftermath ruined the French crops in 1788, the royal treasuries and granaries from which aid would have flowed to the starving were empty. Thus was born the Great Hunger, which in turn led successively to the convening of the Assembly of Notables, the Estates General, and at last the French Revolution, in which the King, his Queen, Marie Antoinette, his son the “lost Dauphin,” and his sister, Servant of God Madame Elisabeth, all lost their lives; his brothers, the future Louis XVIII and Charles X were forced into exile. The horrors of the Revolution engulfed France and all of Europe, raging on until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815.

But in our new timeline, none of this happened. No American Revolution meant no French Revolution: no driving of countless Monarchs into death or exiles; no slaughters in places like the Vendee and Tyrol; no Reign of Terror; above all, no assault on the Church, save what the Enlightenment — bereft in this timeline of the United States as a claimed example of their principles made concrete — could eat away at among the literate. Spain was not invaded by Napoleon, and so the bloody wars of Latin American Independence did not occur. Neither the Holy Roman Empire nor the Papal States collapsed; the Miguelist and Carlist Wars, the Mexican War, the 1848 Revolutions, the Crimean War, Italian and German Reunification, American Civil War, Franco-Prussian War, the Portuguese and Russian Revolutions, the World Wars, and so many conflicts down to our own time did not occur. Oceans of blood and countless architectural and artistic treasures were spared. Without this heavy historical burden, life to-day in our mythical 2023, where altar and throne remain as powerful as ever they were, is paradise! (Read more.)