Tea at Trianon: "I Came to the West Because I Wanted the West"

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, March 5, 2026

"I Came to the West Because I Wanted the West"

From The European Conservative:

I am finishing a book titled The Triumph of the Normal. In it, I explain that the word “normal” is not ancient, like “justice” or “virtue.” It is a 19th-century term, born in the age of statistics, modern medicine, and scientific positivism.

The idea was to replace the old Western conception—inherited from the classical world and taken up by Christianity—according to which “is” and “ought” were united. In that tradition, stating that a house is on fire and stating that one should not commit arson are, fundamentally, objective statements about reality and the human good.

With modernity, that unity is broken. “Normal” sought to provide a moral framework without resorting to metaphysics or to Aristotle; it was enough to observe statistical patterns of human behavior to determine what is good for the human being.

However, when ordinary people speak of “a normal life,” they are intuitively recovering older moral categories: being able to practice a religion, form a family, live in community, participate in civic life, and carry out meaningful work. (Read more.)