Tea at Trianon: Darker Shade of Pale

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, November 25, 2025

Darker Shade of Pale

From The Conversation:

When I started writing this book I was so ignorant about Jewish history. I often asked myself: why, as a Jewish scholar of South Africa, had I paid absolutely no attention to Jews? Why had my intellectual peers also not done so? I had never considered questions about how you write Jews into South African history.
So I had a steep learning curve too, reading as much as I could find, and spending lots of time in South African archives, to produce a social history intertwined with my grandfather’s story. I tried to make sense of him, and his individual Jewishness, as made and unmade by his wider society.

It started with life in the shtetl (the name for a small town with a predominantly Jewish population in eastern Europe). I deliberately started there because most migration stories start when people get off the ship, as day one of the new life. But what did they come with? What was the headspace? What were the psyches that landed, and how well equipped or not were they psychologically to cope?

And I must say that I found the world of the shtetl staggeringly unexpected. Even the smallest shtetl was status-obsessed; failure was deeply shameful, even there. (Read more.)