Well, I am reading Carlyle, The French Revolution, again – for the nth time. 

Naturally, I have my favourite passages.  One occurs at the end of volume 1.  A starving populace of Paris, led by the stern women of Les Halles, have marched on Versailles, and got within a room or so of massacring the whole royal family – their main target was the foreign queen.  The family is in truth forced to go to Paris as de facto prisoners by the still hostile mob.  The volume concludes as follows.

Poor Louis has Two other Paris Processions to make: one ludicrous-ignominious like this; the other not ludicrous nor ignominious, but serious, nay sublime.

The next occasion would be when he was brought back to Paris from Varennes – to what we now know would be his inevitable death by guillotine.  That would be his third and last procession.  Decent people do not speak of the unbearable cruelty that the French showed to Marie Antoinette when they beheaded her, to the shrieking adulation of the mob.  (Carlyle is big on ‘shrieking’.)

I have had occasion to refer to this link before.  In one of his early war-time speeches, Churchill referred to the resistance of the Finns to Stalin.

Only Finland – superb, nay, sublime – in the jaws of peril – Finland shows what free men can do.  The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent.  They have exposed, for all the world to see, the military incapacity of the Red Army and of the Red Air Force.  Many illusions about Soviet Russia have been dispelled in these few fierce weeks of fighting in the Arctic Circle.  Everyone can see how Communism rots the soul of a nation; how it makes it abject and hungry in peace, and proves it base and abominable in war.

I do not know, but my guess is that Churchill did not realise that he was citing Carlyle when he extolled the Finns’ resistance to the Russians.  I could believe that he had drunk deeply enough of Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle to have them in his blood.

You might think that is just Romance.  It may well be – but in the name of God, I need something to look up to in this sea of melancholic mediocrity.  For example – ScoMo is off to Israel – most probably at my expense – to show his Pentecostal solidarity with God’s Chosen People, and do what he did best – a photo op – with Boris Johnson – a communion of the two worst prime ministers either nation has known.

And each time I come to look back to what we call the French Revolution, I wonder whether the French ever got over their descent into barbarism.  The Germans have.  Russia has not.  Nor I think has the United States.

Nor, since about a month ago, have we here in Australia come to terms with our past. 

And if I had to choose the closest we have got to the sublime, I would nominate Cathy for that win for all of us in Sydney.

Then we must look at how we thanked her.