Tea at Trianon: The Yellow Brick Road

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

Monday, November 17, 2025

The Yellow Brick Road

Follow the Yellow Brick Road – A Guide to Inspiration, Motivation and Melting a Witch – Steve Scott's Kindle Publishing Blog

From Fortune:

The Wizard of Oz remains one of the most watched American movies of all time. The staple of Christmas viewing back in the days when people sat in front of terrestrial TV, this American children’s story is all about money.
More specifically, it concerns the populist movement that fought to bring the U.S. off the Gold Standard against the backdrop of late 19th-century deflation. While most Americans see The Wizard of Oz as an innocent children’s fairy tale, the film is a highly political allegory. It is the story of class struggle and a culture war between the financial elite and the workingman, the moneyed East Coast and the rural South and West, and the established political parties and an insurrectionist movement—the Populists—that emerged in the 1890s. In the film, we can read Oz, the evil Wizard, as the embodiment of the banking elite and also a stand-in for gold, oz being the symbol for an ounce. The Yellow Brick Road represents the Gold Standard itself, a pathway made of gold bars. Dorothy is the farmer’s daughter from Kansas, the state geographically smack in the middle of the country, representing that mythical place, middle America. The Scarecrow is the Midwestern farmer, put upon by falling prices, and the Tin Man is the industrial worker whose wages are also falling, impacted by deflation associated with the Gold Standard. The Cowardly Lion is the merged Democrat-Populist candidate in the 1896 presidential election, William Jennings Bryan. (Read more.)