Tea at Trianon: Dada and Proto-Communism

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

Monday, April 27, 2026

Dada and Proto-Communism

From Hilary White:

The Dada Manifesto gives an idea of the level of intellectual rigor and competence of the founders of the various movements in modern art. It was written in 1916 by the Cabaret Voltaire’s founder, the poet and failed actor, Hugo Ball (1886-1927). The name, Dada, Ball claimed, was chosen at random from a French-German dictionary and meant anything or nothing as the user chose.
“I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m’dada. Dada mhm dada da.”
“It’s a question of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don’t want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people’s inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words for it that are seven yards long…”
Clearly, the content was beside the point.
Ball, who had been raised a devout Catholic, had been a young disciple of Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian revolutionary anarchist, Hegelian and rival of Karl Marx in the International Workingmen’s Association, the movement sometimes called the First International, the umbrella group of radicals, socialists and anarchists that was later to resolve into Soviet Communism.
Like many of the young ideologues of the late 19th and early 20th century, Ball later grew out of his radicalism and reverted to his earlier Catholic Faith living to the end of his short life in obscurity. But the damage was done, and the Dadaist followers he had gathered in Zurich took their “anti-rational” ideology of meaninglessness like a virus into the wide world of culture.
After escaping Zurich and being carried to Berlin and eventually to most of the rest of Western Europe’s cultural centres, Dadaism had served its purpose and fell out of favour. It was replaced with an apparently endless parade of various successive “schools” and “movements,” that students of Fine Arts must now memorize for their exams: Cubism, Modernism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Futurism and all the way to Andy Warhol’s “Pop-Art” soup tins and Tracey Emin’s postmodernist unmade bed. (Read more.)