Groenewolf
03-07-2009, 02:19 PM
traditioninaction (Unmasking the Formidable Myth
about Queen Marie Antoinette)
The topic was compassion. The place, a Catholic social journal. The tiresome historical error was repeated in the example the writer used to typify the opposite of compassion: “Marie-Antoinette, born and raised with an aristocrat’s unawareness of the plight of her indigent neighbors, suggested that the people ‘eat cake’ when informed that they had no bread.”
Yet another Catholic scholar entrapped by the revolutionary myths of history. For a long time I have been painfully aware of the pitfalls of the American Catholic history texts, filled with attitudes that blatantly or unconsciously celebrate Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, the Trilogy of the French Revolution condemned by the Church and Popes (1).
Time and time again, American history books, even the “old” Catholic textbooks, make Marie-Antoinette (1755-1793) the scapegoat to justify the horrors and excesses of the French Revolution, which, after all, was only a more radical French version of our own American Revolution that “liberated” the people from the evils of monarchy.
1. For example, Pius VI condemned the “omnifarious liberty and absolute equality” established by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy as “foolish and even monstrous concepts” in his Decretal of March 10, 1791 and his Encyclical Inscrutabile Divinae Sapientiae of December 25, 1775. See also: Pius IX, Encyclical Nostris et nobiscum of Dec. 9, 1949; Leo XIII’s Encyclical Humanum genus against Freemasonry of April 20, 1884; St. Pius X’s Notre charge apostolique of August 25, 1910; Benedict’s XV’s Allocution of July 11, 1920, apud Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Nobility and the Analogous Traditional Elites (Hamilton Press, 1993) Appendix III, pp. 382-89.
Therefore, it follows that the Queen’s greed, frivolous excesses and total disregard for the little people would have fed the flames of the revolt of the people against the monarchy. However, this is not true. There is a sophism hidden in this myth.
[...]
about Queen Marie Antoinette)
The topic was compassion. The place, a Catholic social journal. The tiresome historical error was repeated in the example the writer used to typify the opposite of compassion: “Marie-Antoinette, born and raised with an aristocrat’s unawareness of the plight of her indigent neighbors, suggested that the people ‘eat cake’ when informed that they had no bread.”
Yet another Catholic scholar entrapped by the revolutionary myths of history. For a long time I have been painfully aware of the pitfalls of the American Catholic history texts, filled with attitudes that blatantly or unconsciously celebrate Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, the Trilogy of the French Revolution condemned by the Church and Popes (1).
Time and time again, American history books, even the “old” Catholic textbooks, make Marie-Antoinette (1755-1793) the scapegoat to justify the horrors and excesses of the French Revolution, which, after all, was only a more radical French version of our own American Revolution that “liberated” the people from the evils of monarchy.
1. For example, Pius VI condemned the “omnifarious liberty and absolute equality” established by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy as “foolish and even monstrous concepts” in his Decretal of March 10, 1791 and his Encyclical Inscrutabile Divinae Sapientiae of December 25, 1775. See also: Pius IX, Encyclical Nostris et nobiscum of Dec. 9, 1949; Leo XIII’s Encyclical Humanum genus against Freemasonry of April 20, 1884; St. Pius X’s Notre charge apostolique of August 25, 1910; Benedict’s XV’s Allocution of July 11, 1920, apud Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Nobility and the Analogous Traditional Elites (Hamilton Press, 1993) Appendix III, pp. 382-89.
Therefore, it follows that the Queen’s greed, frivolous excesses and total disregard for the little people would have fed the flames of the revolt of the people against the monarchy. However, this is not true. There is a sophism hidden in this myth.
[...]