Tea at Trianon: Capital Punishment and the Order of Reason

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

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

Capital Punishment and the Order of Reason

From Imperator:

The Church has always upheld, in continuity with Sacred Scripture and the wisdom of the Greco‑Roman tradition, that capital punishment is just when the sword is wielded by legitimate authority and ordered to the common good.
Echoing this perennial teaching, St Thomas Aquinas teaches in the Summa Theologiae that as minister of divine justice, the civil ruler may licitly take life when a malefactor’s deeds have gravely wounded the order of justice and threaten the community.
He teaches that one who threatens the harmony of the state has, by his own deliberate act, fallen away from the order of reason and thereby forfeited his claim to those goods that exist for the wellbeing of the political community. Such a man may therefore be removed by public authority just as a surgeon amputates a gangrenous limb for the health of the whole body lest it spread corruption throughout the entire organism.
He further affirms that capital punishment is not just retributive but also protective of the common good, since it restores the order of justice and prevents the spread of further evils, whether through recidivism or by the corrupting example given to others.
Aquinas is clear that in committing such acts, the life of the malefactor is forfeit, and their possibility of repentance does not override the community’s right to safety and security, nor the authority of the civil ruler to defend the commonwealth through proportionate punishment. (Read more.)