Tea at Trianon: Napoleon’s Rock, Trump’s Wound, Christ’s Empire of Love

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, December 16, 2025

Napoleon’s Rock, Trump’s Wound, Christ’s Empire of Love

From Amuse on X:

Begin with the Napoleon of power. He was raised Catholic, but he was never devout in the ordinary sense. In his years as general and ruler, he often spoke as a pragmatist. Religion, for him, was a technology of social order, a political instrument, a stabilizer after revolutionary chaos. In a Council of State discussion in March 1806, he brushed aside the doctrine that Christians treat as central, the Incarnation, and redirected attention to the worldly function of belief. His point was blunt: religion ties an idea of equality to heaven and thereby reduces the likelihood that the poor will slaughter the rich. That is not a devotional sentence. It is an administrative sentence.
This is not to say Napoleon was an atheist. He often treated atheism as shallow, and he sometimes gestured toward the stars with the old question, who made all that. But even those gestures, when reported by aides, come to us as the questions of a philosopher-emperor, not of a penitent. He could be brazenly opportunistic. He is reported to have said that he could be Muslim in Egypt and Catholic in France for the good of the people, and that he did not believe in religions, but did believe that the idea of a God is demanded by the cosmos. Even allowing for exaggeration, the outlook is consistent. Religion is a tool, a public necessity, a political ally, a source of moral discipline, and occasionally a piece of theater.
There is a natural objection here. Perhaps this is merely the standard posture of rulers, the public face of a man who privately believed more than he let on. Maybe. But even on that generous reading, what is striking about the Saint Helena material is not merely that Napoleon speaks about God. It is that he speaks about Jesus in particular, and with a kind of ardor, as though the figure of Christ, not merely the idea of providence, has begun to press on him. (Read more.)