Tea at Trianon: The Unknown Crusaders of World War II

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 22, 2026

The Unknown Crusaders of World War II

From Catholicism:

For those who have read my recent series for Catholicism.org, The Intelligent American’s Guide to the French Right, the varied nature of the French Right in particular complicated the great question of the day. One thing that is important to remember is just how hated Communism was by the French Right in particular and the European Right in general: they had witnessed since 1918 the murder of the Russian Imperial Family; the horrors of the Russian Civil War; Communist atrocities in Hungary, Slovakia, and Bavaria during short-lived Soviet regimes in those countries; the Communist-inspired war on the Church in Mexico in the 1920s; the atrocities committed by the Communists in Spain during the 1936-39 Civil War there; and the collaboration with the invading Germans by the Communists subsequent to the 1939 Hitler- Stalin pact. It was only with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 that Communists throughout the world suddenly remembered patriotism — and worked to take control of the Resistance Movements — and tried, with some success, to take them over.

As we chronicled in the earlier series, most of the French and European Right regarded the National Socialists as a movement of the left — “Brown-Shirted Bolsheviks.” But defeat at their hands forced the Men of the Right into all sorts of practical considerations. Who were the greater threat to what was left of old Christendom: the Soviets, or the National Socialists? This question divided the European and French Right, and its effect can be seen in the life of Fr. Georges Grasset, whom Gary describes in the following pages as “…the priest I most would have wanted as my spiritual director during my lifetime as a Catholic.” Fr. Grasset’s participation came about due to his devout allegiance to Count Pierre Louis de La Ney du Vair, a deeply anti-Nazi organiser of youth for Vichy France.

In the event, of course, given the vast numbers of Russians and other ex-Soviet citizens who joined the German ranks, had Hitler been sincere about a Paneuropean Crusade against Bolshevism, he would no doubt have won the war. But it was more important to him and the National Socialist leadership to follow out their racial doctrines on the Eastern Front than to defeat the enemy. Thus, to many Russians and Central Europeans, they made Stalin look like a preferable alternative.

In the long run, of course, those of the European Right who chose resistance against the Axis turned out no better than those who chose collaboration. In the new post-1945 Europe created by the Soviet-American Dyarchy, there would be no room for the kind of countries or the kind of Continent envisioned by such people before the War. It was for precisely that kind of Christendom forbidden by the victors of 1945 — which doubtless would equally have been forbidden had the Axis triumphed — that the staff and contributors of Triumph, of whom Gary was a prominent member, struggled. This present time of fog and vagueness could use a little more of Gary’s famous clarity. (Read more.)