Tea at Trianon: Europe’s Unending Tragedy

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, December 11, 2025

Europe’s Unending Tragedy

From Chronicles:

There are times when Europe succumbs to an urge for self-destruction that defies rational explanation. The Thirty Years’ War provides a particularly tragic example. It went on long after its early instigators and key participants were all dead. Rational actors could have brought it to a close well before it entered its most destructive phase in the 1630s, yet the leaders’ ability to strike a balance between ends and means was lost to audacity, fear, greed, and fanaticism.

That war became infamous for its violence even before the Peace of Westphalia. In subsequent decades, Europe experienced several armed conflicts, but they were limited wars for limited objectives, fought within the balance-of-power system by adversaries of similar temper and mindset.

A new pancontinental carnage played out to the beat of “La Marseillaise” in 1792. Revolutionary levée en masse produced the first million-strong army—turning France into a veritable “nation at arms”—and the first modern-era genocide, in the Vendée. The mayhem took at least 7 million lives before it ended at Waterloo, 13 years later.

The ensuing peace lasted, with some adjustments and five localized wars, until 1914. Thanks to the skill of the four key players at the Congress of Vienna, the long 19th century brought Europe 99 years of unprecedented flourishing across all fields of human endeavor. It was truly the golden age of European civilization, perhaps of all civilization in all times. It ended, abruptly, in a new nightmare.
The “Second Thirty Years’ War” started with the lights going out all over Europe in 1914. It ended in 1945, with the continent in ruins, physically and spiritually. Its subsequent economic recovery was impressive, but the old intellectual and moral vigor was gone. This is especially evident in the low quality of the political class. No European leader of our time comes even close to the stature and vision of Charles De Gaulle or Konrad Adenauer, or even of their early successors. As a result, eight decades after the Red Army marched into Berlin, Europe’s politicians are displaying the same old mix of audacity, fear, greed, and fanaticism. It has the potential to result in a new, truly final, catastrophe. (Read more.)