Tea at Trianon: Giving Voice to the Fatherless

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, January 1, 2026

Giving Voice to the Fatherless

From One Peter 5:

Following the regicide of King Louis XVI of France on the 21^st January 1793, and the immense shockwave that rippled through Europe after the murder of His Most Christian Majesty, Pope Pius VI gave a famous address in which he not only argued that Louis had died a Christian martyr, but that monarchy was the “more excellent” form of regime than republican democracy. This was a re-articulation of what had long been taught by churchmen, albeit not magisterially. In his letter on kingship to the King of Cyprus, St Thomas Aquinas wrote that “it is best for a human multitude to be ruled by one person” (De Regno, Chapter III). One of the keys to this perennial teaching on the superiority of monarchy as a form of government might be found in an expression that was dear to the jurists of Ancien Regime France. They would say: “The king is the father of the fathers of the society.” The family, arising from the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, was the model for the political community and so the regime was paternal.

Likewise for Spanish jurist Professor Miguel Ayuso, monarchy as a political form, “is nothing else than the continuation of a society, which consists of families through the continuity of one family, the royal family, symbolising the continuity and vitalisation of each and every one of the families of the realm.”^[1] It is no mere coincidence then, that monarchy’s fortunes are at such a nadir in our age in which the multitude reject the natural realities of the family and patriarchal authority. Coulombe frequently evokes the consequences of the lack of long-term thinking that follows in contemporary supposedly “democratic” regimes: great spiritual alienation, chronic short-termism, and an all-important “spoils system” (amusingly a “trough” in Coulombe’s idiom) by which the rulers of today only rule to accrue and maintain power and enrich themselves. As Ayuso writes, and Coulombe echoes throughout his work, when “the elective principle is the only variable that determines the regime – political life is exhausted in the electoral process, becoming more and more discontinuous.”^[2]

Miguel Ayuso has provocatively said: “Today there are no monarchies.” There is the British monarchy, the Nordic monarchies and the monarchies of the Low Countries, but these are all parliamentary monarchies. This he calls “a contradiction in terms” because monarchy is personal. Personal command means the responsibility of the exercise of power is personal. Today this does not exist because where there are kings, at least in the formerly-Christian world, they are tied by parliamentarianism. This would be analogous to a father no longer exercising power over his wife and children and these subordinates governing the family. In such a scenario paternal authority would have been renounced. Coulombe, however, does not go so far as to claim there are no monarchies and makes an impassioned defence of those, admittedly Liberal institutions that remain. (Read more.)