Tea at Trianon: Bring on the Board Games

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

Saturday, May 31, 2025

Bring on the Board Games

From DailyJSTOR:

In their study of gaming and education in the long nineteenth century, David Wallace Adams and Victor Edmonds called out a few contributing factors, with increasing secularism near the top of the list. Colonial America and its antecedents may have been driven by religious ideas of propriety and success, but as the 1800s marched on, core American Protestantism had to stand up to individualism and a cultural hunger for self-made success. Quoting Richard M. Huber, who wrote on the American idea of success, they note that it wasn’t “not simply being rich or famous. It means attaining riches or achieving fame.” In this way morality came to be attached to success, foreshadowing the prosperity gospel and muscular Christianity. “A virtuous life, then,” write Adams and Edmonds, “was the path to a successful life.”

For a culture occupied with ideas of success and virtue, and whether they were both necessary in tandem, education operated as a means of cultural transmission, writes Jennifer Lynn Peterson. With childhood increasingly recognized as a distinct stage of life and education in the later nineteenth century, school texts and children’s books were one way to suggest to children a certain sort of morality and social grounding. (Read more.)