Tea at Trianon: A Domestic Revolution

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, December 31, 2024

A Domestic Revolution

From DW:

"If I had known that I would have to talk about this damned kitchen for the rest of my life, I would never have built it!" said 100-year-old Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in an interview in 1998. The kitchen she designed in the 1920s rewrote architectural history and revolutionized the lives of public housing residents by creating a newly functional, fitted culinary space.

Dubbed the "Frankfurt kitchen," Schütte-Lihotzky created a piece of pioneering social architecture that has defined kitchens to this day. The designer was also a women's rights activist and was celebrated as a heroine of resistance against the Nazi dictatorship. (Read more.)