Tea at Trianon: House of Lilies

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

Tuesday, August 13, 2024

House of Lilies

From The European Conservative:

The Capetians did, at times, evince a genuine piety that had nothing to do with politics. Two of their name—siblings Louis IX and Isabelle—were canonised. The dynasty promoted the creation of almshouses and patronised the construction of cathedrals like Notre-Dame de Paris, Chartres, Reims, and Sainte-Chapelle. Each is a Gothic masterpiece of pointed arches, ribbed vaults, flying buttresses, and large stained glass windows, arguably among the greatest creations of human and not just mediaeval history. But the Capetians’ grandest displays of religious zeal were, more than not, bound up with bloodletting. They consistently encouraged violence and extreme prejudice against Jewish people, burned heretics alive, set fire to churches (Robert II, ‘the Pious,’ actually torched a monastery) and produced five consecutive crusader-kings. Thus their relationship with religion was (as was typical of the time, of course) somewhat complex.
All of this is rendered in tight, direct prose which is to the massive credit of Firnhaber-Baker. She has a good sense of humour, too: liable to seem almost amused, rather than appalled, by the violently bloody episodes that punctuate (or perhaps characterise) the Capetians’ history. She has a fondness for the bizarre and the macabre. She writes of how the wife of Robert II, his second cousin, gave birth to a “goose-headed monster baby.” And how, during a terrible famine in 1031, a “wild man” in Burgundy “decorated his hut with the heads of those he devoured.” She enjoys citing the rather feline chroniclers and contemporaries who, for example, dismissed one ambitious cleric as a “skirt-chasing chancer” and Philip I as “lazy” and “fat.”

These details bring vibrant colour to what, it has to be said, is a very ambitious undertaking, given that the author canters—nay, gallops—through 15 reigns and 400 years of mediaeval history. If Firnhaber-Baker, a history professor at the University of St. Andrews, seems to take all this in her stride, then it is because late mediaeval France is her speciality. (In her previous book, The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt, she describes an episode in which angry farmers, like a mass of bloodthirsty Gilet Jaunes, rounded up knights and roasted them on spits.) But there are many books of history by equally erudite people who fail to make it look quite so easy. (Read more.)

I don't care for the description of Louis XVI as "bookish and dithering." And yet he is also criticized for hunting for hours a day. From Quillette:

I’d assumed that French kings wouldn’t hold much in the way of real royal power until the time of King Louis XIV (1638–1715), who declared (perhaps apocryphally), L’État, c’est moi, and forced French regional nobles to reside in his over-the-top palace at Versailles (where they’d dissipate their incomes via elaborate court ceremonies instead of making trouble from their provincial power bases).
But the scales have now been knocked from my eyes, thanks to Justine Firnhaber-Baker, a professor of French medieval history at the University of St Andrews. The subtitle of her new book, House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France, refers to the Capetian dynasty founded by Hugh Capet (c. 940–996), who took his royal title in 987 A.D. Every French monarch, from Hugh’s reign to the French Revolution and beyond, had Capetian blood running through his veins—including the aforementioned Louis VII, who was a direct descendant of Hugh, and the bookish, dithering King Louis XVI, who was not, but who nevertheless went to the guillotine in 1793 under the derisive sobriquet “Citizen Louis Capet.”
In fact, from 987 to 1328—the death year of King Charles IV, Hugh’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson—every single king of France didn’t just boast Capetian blood, but was the biological son of a preceding French king. This stretch of eleven generations (some of the Capetians succeeded their older brothers) and more than 300 years of father-to-son succession was astounding given the high infant and childhood mortality rate of the Middle Ages. (Read more.)