Tea at Trianon: The Anglo-American Dilemma

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, April 8, 2024

The Anglo-American Dilemma

From Charles Coulombe at The European Conservative:

In Britain, George III reconciled himself to the new state of affairs, and never attempted to unseat the oligarchy again. Across the Channel, however, things were going very badly. French intervention in the American Revolution had been essential to rebel success. But France got nothing out of its victory, save bankruptcy and the importation of Lockean ideas to the nobility, via such as Lafayette. When the eruption of an Icelandic volcano ruined the crops in 1788, France was faced with famine. Louis XVI—despite his financial, military, and governmental reforms that had allowed France to emerge victorious from the recent war—had neither money nor credit to buy grain to relieve the starving. The following year he called the Estates General together for the first time since 1614. The would-be French oligarchs, such as Lafayette and the Duke of Orleans, sought to overthrow what they considered Royal absolutism. They unleashed forces over which they soon lost all control, and the results were the horrors of the Revolution, the rise of Napoleon, and the titanic effort of all Europe—not least, Great Britain—to defeat him. This in turn, beginning in 1810, would enkindle the bloody wars of independence in Latin America.

The resistance to the revolution in Continental Europe and Latin America engendered the Conservatism of those countries, with de Maistre as its foremost exponent alongside many more from each country that had been affected. This was the era of the Restoration, the Holy Alliance, and the Congress System, all designed to keep the horror from emerging again. But British “Conservatism” was something quite different, and it ultimately played a great part in the unravelling of that whole structure. (Read more.)