Tea at Trianon: Orestes Brownson on National Greatness

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

Friday, May 31, 2024

Orestes Brownson on National Greatness

From The Imaginative Conservative:

Brownson’s essay titled “National Greatness” appeared in January, 1846 in his Brownson’s Quarterly Review and two years after his conversion to Catholicism. The time was witness to the immigration of the “Catholic Hordes,” an increase from 35,000 in 1790 to 1.6 million in 1850.

Rumors had churned in 1843 that Brownson, a Presbyterian and Transcendentalist, was converting to Catholicism at age 41.[3] A decade earlier he had created The Society for Christian Union and Progress and authored his first book, New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church.

He is largely unfamiliar to American Catholics, and he would likely reference our contemporary political order as heathenism founded in the non serviam of Eden and the beginning of the City of the World, the New World Order and a failed standard.

Following that date, Brownson turned his attention to his Boston Quarterly Review which became in time Brownson’s Quarterly Review.

The 1846 date is good background for Brownson’s thesis on national greatness: Texas was annexed during the Polk presidency; the Mexican-American War began; covered wagons meandered west; all representing a time the country completed that westward course of empire, but not without some shady transgressions, the one exception the first baseball game.

The issue is replete with the argument that manifest destiny was a “mission” on the part of the American people who owned a special virtue. Whether the “mission” was nationalism or imperialism, the underlying theme was one of cultural purity.

For Brownson, questions abounded as to whether or not the current circumstances were tokens of national greatness and whether God had divinely elected the American people to do this work of manifest destiny. (Read more.)