Tea at Trianon: The Rise and Fall of the Holy Roman Empire

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 23, 2025

The Rise and Fall of the Holy Roman Empire

From Charles Coulombe:

The French Revolution would ultimately doom the venerable old Imperial edifice. By 1795, Revolutionary France had annexed Belgium and the Left Bank of the Rhine. The martyred Marie Antoinette’s brother, Francis II, had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1792. In an attempt to shore up Germany against the French menace, Francis allowed the annexation of hundreds of smaller German states by the larger ones. It was hoped that the score that remained would be better able to resist the foe, now ruled by Napoleon Bonaparte. But the defeat of the Second Coalition in 1804 led Napoleon, who had begun to speak of himself as the new Charlemagne, to have himself crowned Emperor of the French. At the ceremony in Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral, Napoleon took the crown from the hands of a startled Pope Pius VII, and crowned himself with it. This in turn led Francis to suspect that Napoleon wished to make himself Holy Roman Emperor. In response, he created a new crown and entity over which to reign: the Hereditary Empire of Austria.

Made up only of the hereditary Habsburg Lands, this new creation still featured the Double Eagle – the symbol of the Christian Empire that through long use had become associated with the Habsburgs. In 1806, Francis led his country into another conflict with France, the War of the Third Coalition. Defeated at the Battle of Austerlitz, he was forced to sign a treaty with Napoleon that greatly weakened Austria. In August, Napoleon created the Confederation of the Rhine, into which he compelled Bavarian and fifteen of the other larger German States to enter – while withdrawing from the Holy Roman Empire. On July 22, Napoleon issued an ultimatum ordering Francis to abdicate as Holy Roman Emperor by August 10. He did so, but declared the bonds tying the estates to him and so each other dissolved – in effect, dissolving the Empire.

It had endured 1006 years since Bl. Charlemagne was crowned. In 1815, there was an attempt to revive it; but Emperor Francis I (as we must call him in his role as Emperor of Austria) was against this idea. In its place, the Germanic Confederation, a loose grouping of the German States, was erected with the Austrian Emperor as president. In 1848, a German Empire was briefly revived, but collapsed ultimately through the then-impossibility of including both Prussia and Austria in one centralised nation. Bismarck solved the issue in 1866 by driving Austria militarily out of Germany, as a prelude to the creation of the German Empire in 1871. Comparing it to the Holy Roman Empire, Dom Guéranger observed rather caustically in his entry on St. Boniface: “Upon its ruins, like a woeful mimicry of the Holy Empire, Protestantism has raised its false Evangelical Empire, formed of naught but encroachments, and tracing its recognized origin, to the apostasy of that felon knight, Albert of Brandenburg.” (Read more.)