Tea at Trianon: The European Death Wish

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

Sunday, August 9, 2026

The European Death Wish

From The New English Catholic:

There is a particular kind of death a civilisation can choose for itself — not conquest, not plague, but a quiet, voluntary letting go.
Europe is in the grip of it now. You can see it in the birth rate, in the open border, in the bishop who will not speak, in the historian who will not defend. This is not, at root, a crisis of policy. It is a crisis of the soul. And it begins with a simple, uncomfortable fact: there seems to be no capacity left for saving our society, for valuing our society as it is. Instead, it's being overcome by a whole series of different forces and different people.
We were in immense shock when we saw the way in which 60,000 Moroccans invaded Spain. Now, the word invasion is hugely contested. The left hate it because, of course, it is so powerful and so descriptive, and we could find some more sophisticated words — mass incursion.
But the fact is that governments exist in order to defend their people. And the kind of incursion that we’ve been experiencing, both in Spain and above all in the UK, means that there are demographic changes taking place in which the people the government are elected to defend become somebody else’s people. In other words, they’re demographically replaced.
But let’s not slip into what will appear to some people to be non-left-wing rhetoric — Let’s try to avoid the trap of right versus left. (Why should we use a political structure that grew out of which side of the French king you sat on in the 1770s in order to describe our politics?) It;s hard to know what ‘right’ is when there is nothing left to conserve.
Our politics are effectively of what we call the left, which are progressive, revolutionary, utopian: based on the fallacy that human beings are perfectible, and conformity can be enforced when refused.
What is then the non-left? Does non-left just mean everything else? There is no right or far right, as the left-leaning commentators insist, as they create a kind of opposing ‘extremist’ bogeyman fictionally in order to justify their struggle against anybody who questions their progressive values. So: left, utopian left, and non-left.
What is the real diagnosis of where we have been brought to? (Read more.)