Tea at Trianon: For the Glory of France

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

Thursday, November 13, 2025

For the Glory of France

From The Claremont Review of Books:

This pattern suggests that the West has a capacity for self-criticism and self-correction that sets it apart from other present and past civilizations. Bartolomé de las Casas’s remonstrances with the Spanish Crown, Edmund Burke’s prosecution of Warren Hastings for the offenses of the East India Company, William Wilberforce’s abolitionist oratory in Parliament, and Abraham Lincoln’s Socratic refutation of Stephen Douglas on the American Great Plains reflect the same spirit. The highest virtues of the West do not stem from self-satisfaction but from an aspiration to meet an objective standard of natural right. Even two serious and uniquely Western contemporary vices—postcolonial self-loathing and exoticized multiculturalism—are recognizably corruptions of this aspiration.

Here, A Counter-History of French Colonization lacks depth on the subject of the spiritual and philosophical dimensions that define a civilization. The book’s meticulous middle section on colonial governance (“A Raw Deal (1905-54)”) deploys a great deal of economic and institutional data to evaluate the record of the empire in material terms, but says little about its religious legacy. The merits of French rule as Ghali describes it largely equate to the exports of secular, republican France: the end of slavery (which had crippled human capital development), education for women, protection for religious minorities, and the medical knowledge to begin to overcome tropical scourges like malaria, tsetse fly, and leprosy. This last success was won by brave doctors working in the Indigenous Medical Assistance system, often at the cost of their own lives. But even these real victories for human dignity are like flowers cut from their roots. Equating the West with “modernity” or “technological superiority” is a dangerous simplification. Exporting powerful tools without Christianity, which both bolsters reason and restrains it with mercy, can lead to horrors. (Read more.)