Tea at Trianon: The Narrative of Lies

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

Thursday, April 11, 2024

The Narrative of Lies

From Charles Coulombe at The European Conservative:

In his Soirées de St. Petersburg, Josesph de Maistre famously wrote, that, for the three hundred years up to that point, history “had been a constant conspiracy against the truth.” These lines, which first appeared in print in 1821, are an obvious reference to Martin Luther’s theses of Wittenberg and the bloviations of the partisans of the Reformation, Enlightenment, and the French and associated revolutions. Sadly, in 2024, we must add two centuries to that tally.
The right understanding of history is absolutely essential to the right understanding of the present; without it, we do not know where we are. Orwell wrote that “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” These famous and once-familiar lines are more than an apt bon mot from 1984. They are—consciously or otherwise—standard operating procedure for government, media, and the education industry today. It is why so much of what those institutions present as history is, to be plain, a tissue of lies.

The best way to answer a lie is to refute it. This may be done in one of two ways: by lengthy, reasoned discourse, with sufficient annotations and footnotes to prove one’s point, when presented with an error by one seeking the truth; or by forceful, sharp retort, when the other’s object is to silence or destroy the truth itself. It is vital to tailor the response to the questioner: the sincere seeker will be repulsed by a snide or caustic answer, while the mere antagonist will ridicule erudition itself. In this article, it is the latter type of questioner with whom we shall deal—after all, it takes whole libraries to help the former! So let us explode a few widespread lies. (Read more.)