Tea at Trianon: The Fall of Rome, Revisited

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

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

The Fall of Rome, Revisited

Roman empire fall painting: Fall of the Roman Empire in painting: Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire, Destruction, 1836, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA. Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

I may have forgotten to cover it because in reality it was a bit of a non-event. Thomas Cole’s fanciful academic painting here shows a cataclysmic, all-consuming disaster: temples burning, mobs rioting, statues toppling, ships sinking, bodies strewn across a collapsing cityscape, which is more or less how we’ve been taught to think of it. But this is not what happened in Rome in 476. The last western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was quietly deposed and sent off to retirement. There was no sack in 476, no flames, no tidal wave of chaotic destruction. Unfortunately for romantic painters, the historical reality was gradual, bureaucratic and anticlimactic.
In 476 AD, the boy-emperor Romulus Augustulus1 was deposed, after reigning only about ten months, by the barbarian general Odoacer, and that’s the conventional date for the “fall” of the Western Roman Empire. But what actually fell was the last remaining shred of imperial authority in the West. In the east, emperors carried on in Constantinople for another thousand years. In the West, daily life didn’t suddenly stop, though it certainly changed. The Church remained standing and bishops and clerics stepped into civic leadership roles as senatorial power faded. Many Roman churches from this period are still in use, and had already provided shelter to the city’s population during the sack of 410 by Alaric.
What really collapsed was centralised administration and senatorial power. It hardly needs saying that Odoacer didn’t overthrow the Roman Empire at its peak of peace, power, and prosperity. By 476, the Western Empire was already a shadow of its former self; militarily overstretched, economically broken, politically fragmented and increasingly reliant on barbarian generals to do the actual ruling. (Read more.)