Tea at Trianon: A Provocative History

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

Monday, December 11, 2023

A Provocative History

From Foreign Policy:

But what if democracies actually require secrecy?

This is the provocative question posed by historian Katlyn Marie Carter’s thought-provoking new book, Democracy in Darkness. Circulating back and forth across the Atlantic, Carter’s book looks at the evolution of different ways of thinking about the relationship between secrecy and democracy in the origins and the outcomes of the U.S. and French revolutions.

This book will be eye-opening for anyone with a passing interest in contemporary politics. The striking historical parallels to the debates that continue today extend to the richly detailed descriptions of changing positions taken by revolutionary factions—Girondins and Jacobins, Federalists, Anti-Federalists, and Democratic-Republicans—as they tried to position themselves as the spokesmen of the people.
Julian Assange positioned Wikileaks as a radical proponent of transparency. But this has led to questions about whether states are, in Carter’s terms, reflective or insulated in their approach to representation. Do they reflect the direct will of their citizens, in which case the people need access to all relevant information in order to direct their representatives? Or do they make decisions with an eye on what is best for the citizens of the nation, which might require a degree of secrecy?

Take, for example, the U.S. Constitutional Convention. As Carter explains, the heated deliberations in 1787 over the Constitution took place in secrecy—“behind the curtain”—in order for the ultimate product to be presented as a consensus, albeit a consensus known to have been worked out through debate and compromise. The representatives to the convention were supposed to act with the nation’s best interest at heart, and this could have required some decisions that would be unpopular in particular states. It wasn’t until 1819 that the deliberations were published.
Part of the rationale for the desire and need for secrecy was the reality that already, in 1787, the United States had adopted its trademark ability to make every position into a political statement. Those who supported the secrecy of the deliberations argued “that it was useful and even necessary to avoid proceedings compromised by external, factional pressure.” In other words, some delegates were already worried about the need to perform political values for their constituents rather than making decisions for the whole nation.

If those pressures sound familiar in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, they are certainly not new. The rise of citizen journalism—as opposed to official government gazettes—aided the calls for public accountability based on transparency. The 18th-century French version of C-SPAN, Le Logographe, reprinted assembly debates word-for-word, without commentary.
Carter’s attention to the press as an interested party, motivated as much by sales of papers and editors’ politics as a desire to hold government accountable, is an impressive feature of the book. Carter doesn’t merely use the press as a source for public feeling, but also interrogates its owners’ and editors’ choices, and the ways that representatives acted and made decisions based on the interventions of the press.
In 1789, for example, Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville founded his own newspaper as much to break into the publishing industry and get a foot in the door of politics as to publicize the workings of government and to make sure that “people can judge whether their representatives are fulfilling their intentions.”
In France, initial revolutionary excitement about transparent government gave way to concerns about the practicalities of governance. The size of the representative body—18 times the size of the U.S. House of Representatives at the time—and the large numbers of onlookers led to debates about the creation of smaller, more private, committees of 20 to 30 deputies who could deal with particular issues before presenting them to the whole assembly.

When the king fled in the summer of 1791, the crisis of both secrecy and representation was exposed. Louis XVI claimed that he represented France, while the National Assembly merely represented different interest groups, mired by infighting and popularity contests. But his flight spurred the National Assembly to shut its proceedings to the public.

Wanting privacy to coordinate a united response to the king, the National Assembly opened itself up to accusations of conspiracy. It lost control over the narrative. The seeds were sown for a clash. (Read more.)