Tea at Trianon: The American Bonapartes

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 10, 2024

The American Bonapartes

Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, "Bo"

From LBV:

Bo had actually been born in London in 1805 but his mother took him to her country when the French emperor annulled the marriage with his younger brother to provide him with an ancestral wife and make him king of Westphalia.

This meant the loss of the right to bear the surname, although decades later his cousin Napoleon III reversed that decision. Bo, who was assured of a comfortable life because his mother’s family owned prosperous commercial businesses in Baltimore, studied law at Harvard, although he never practiced as a lawyer.

He was president of the Maryland Agricultural Society and the Maryland Club, an exclusive entity founded in 1857 that four years later supported confederate cause and in the 20th century opposed Prohibition (the law outlawing alcohol).

But earlier, in 1829, he married Susan May Williams, a wealthy heir to the growing railroad sector and also a Baltimore native, whose millionaire dowry was able to do more than the promises to connect with the European aristocracy she was offered. (Read more.)