Tea at Trianon: Aristocracy

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

Sunday, December 21, 2025

Aristocracy

From Paul Gottfried at Chronicles:

This timely anthology, focused on what could be called the aristocratic wing of the “conservative tradition,” chooses some unconventional thinkers, not all of whom would be recognizable to serious historians as conservatives. One might question whether Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, and Julius Evola should count as traditional conservatives. But the authors of the essays on Nietzsche, Evola, and Spengler (Michael Harding and Grant Havers) argue they are relevant to conservative thought because they were all devastatingly critical of the modern notion of equality and stressed the value of aristocracies.

Although historical conservatism as a body of thought and political practice emerged from the French Revolution, there is also an American tradition of criticizing democratic equality and defending traditional social elites that represents what Russell Kirk called “the conservative mind.” Irving Babbitt, Henry Adams, and Robert Nisbet, who are all deservedly treated in this anthology, stood for this peculiarly American kind of conservatism, one that outside of our surviving conservative traditionalists barely exists anymore.

Alexander-Davey explores “aristocratic liberal” thought in his essay on the 19th-century German novelist and political theorist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823-1897), who was a moderate European conservative during what might be described as the silver age of European conservatism. (The golden age occurred during the European restoration following the Napoleonic Wars.) Alexander-Davey treats both Riehl and his Russian near-contemporary Konstantin Leontiev as “prophets of anti-modernity.” (Read more.)