Tea at Trianon: The Big "Travel" Lie

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, March 18, 2025

The Big "Travel" Lie

Foreign travel isn't for everyone. To appreciate foreign countries one has to have read something of them and be curious. Otherwise, Disney World will suffice. From Helen Roy:

The real problem isn’t that the quote is likely misattributed—it’s that the sentiment itself has been absorbed uncritically, as if travel was inherently a signal of personal enlightenment, rather than a lifestyle commodity, as it now is. The concept of travel has become a meme, similar to what I’ve written about regarding religion, tradition, and fertility. And like all such things, it relies on a convenient caricature of those who don’t participate in the ritual: the pitiable, provincial, unwashed, unsophisticated American, hopelessly trapped on a single, unread page.
Wrapped up in the meme of modern travel, it is given that:
Travel makes you a good person, because by observing the “exotic” practices of “exotic” people, one is meant to loosen their grasp on their own petty, provincial notions of How Things Are Done. (Ironic, of course, that the Observer must regard his or her own local customs as fundamentally abandonable, never those of the Observed.)
Travel makes you a smart person. This seems to be an elaboration on the belief that novelty equals profundity. I guess it’s true that a mind trained to absorb only the superficial can be deepened by a mere change of scenery.
Travel makes you an interesting person. The absurdity of this one should be obvious to anyone who has ever met, say, a Frenchman, or a twenty-one year old political science major fresh off his semester abroad. He who harbors a sense of himself as “interesting” and “cultured” is usually betrayed by the incongruent inability to let another person get a word in edgewise.
Talking to a European (I am including many Australians here, who clearly share the one-sided beef) as an American abroad can feel like a 2003 time capsule, where the EU passport breaux pictures himself as Jon Stewart, clowning on the specter of the Toby Keith Republican, forever. They regard Americans as uncultured swine—neither good, smart, nor interesting— precisely because most have not “traveled” in the way that Europeans do. Our tube socks and lack of taste for shawarma betray us as evidence of the capital sin of provincialism!1 (Read more.)