Posted on 01/17/2002 8:32:09 AM PST by Goetz_von_Berlichingen
The French American Friendship Foundation is sponsoring its annual Mass to commemorate the life and death of Louis XVI, King of France, at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, January 26. 2002 at St. Ann's Cathedral, 110 East 12th Street in New York City. The Mass will be conducted in Latin.
A program including a buffet reception, lecture and concert will follow the mass from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. at Café Loup, 105 West 13th Street, which is located between 6th and 7th Avenues.
This year we are honored to have as our guest speaker His Royal and Imperial Highness, Archduke Dr. Geza von Habsburg. A descendant of a brother of Marie Antoinette, Archduke von Habsburg is a world-renowned authority on Fabergé, author of several books on princely collections and a regular gueat lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was also the President of Christie's Europe for many years. The title of the lecture and slide presentation, which will be given in English, is "Louis XVI, A Habsburg Viewpoint."
Following the presentation, a chamber ensemble will perform works composed by Mozart, DeBussy, and Beethoven. The freelance ensemble is comprised of distinguished artists who perform with internationally acclaimed orchestras around the world.
Price for the reception and lecture is $60.00 for members per person and $65.00 for non-member per person.
2002 will see the 225th anniversary of the Battle of Saratoga. This action is considered the Turning Point of the American Revolution, because General Burgoyne's surrender testified to the strategic viability of the rebel cause, thus inducing the King of France to form an alliance with the new republic.
While the French army under General Rochambeau was probably the best they were to field until Napoleon, it was the French fleet that cut off Lord Cornwallis' supply, communication, and path of retreat at Yorktown, thus guaranteeing his surrender and the de facto end of the war.
France, of course, was not a democracy at the time, so the final decision to aid the rebels was made by the king, Louis XVI. It is widely held that the expenses incurred in the prosecution of this war led to the financial crisis that ultimately caused the French Revolution and cost the lives of King Louis, his wife, and their children, and which plunged Europe into two decades of almost continual war.
Americans, who think la Marseillaise and the tricolour represent France, tend to forget that it was the royal victim of the revolutionaries who was the best foreign friend of the new American republic.
Please note, while the church is rather large and can accomodate a substantial congregation, the Café Loup is extremely small, so I imagine there will be an upper limit on how many people can attend, so if you really want to hear Seine Kaiserliche und Königliche Hoheit, Erzherzog Geza, you should probably book early.
Mass, by the way, is a Requiem High Mass, complete with catafalque, celebrated according to the Tridentine rite, as is customary every Saturday at St. Ann's
Besides, since when is shivving England a bad thing?
Just something to file for next time you're in the neighborhood.
Americans, who think la Marseillaise and the tricolour represent France, tend to forget that it was the royal victim of the revolutionaries who was the best foreign friend of the new American republic.
Critical point to be made. My second question was answered in your post, which is that the real Rite of the Holy Roman Church will be used. Appropriate.
Otherwise, as was said in the eastern part of the dual monarchy, Eljen a Habsburg kiralysag! Eljen a monarchia! Eljen o fenseg, Otto von Habsburg!
Americans, who think la Marseillaise and the tricolour represent France, tend to forget that it was the royal victim of the revolutionaries who was the best foreign friend of the new American republic.
One of the downsides to living in New Orleans is the continuing pressure to play the Frenchman for the amusement of outlanders. For several years, my late pastor used to allow himself to be drawn into this fakery, countenancing the playing of the Marseillaise as the recessional after Mass on the Sunday preceeding every July 14. For years I suffered this with clenched teeth, but ten or so years ago, having just finished reading Simon Schama's Citizens, I called him up and asked that in light of the thousands of Catholics martyred in the Revolution, he reconsider this practice. It was not played again.
Perhaps the line about "impure blood" was particularly agreeable to them.
At the Mass, several French hymns are usually sung. I believe they are specifically "Royalist." If you wish, I will research further.
Anyone remember this or know the title? I'd like to rent it.
I am puzzled by France's most recent history of appeasement to Nazism and Islam, though. I guess I need to think about this some more.
Just one of the sleazy tricks of that dishonest propaganda-flick-disguised-as-love-story is the shameless theft of the Marseillaise scene, from Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion.
Course if you get a free sample of the Fabergé to give to your girlriend it becomes even a better deal! Unless their talking about the Fabergé "eggs." Which aren't any good for making "egg-salad." You have to use real American eggs laid by real American chickens to get a good egg salad...which along with real American baked beans makes great side dishes for the ribs their gonna serve... but does anyone know what kind of BBQ sauce they're gonna have with the ribs and corn-dogs? ...I don't and my decision to attend will depend primarily on the "sauce"... and how much I have had! :)
their own revolution, which help spread freedom and the idea of droits de homme... I guess I need to think about this some more.
I hope you do. You may discover that above all things, the French Revolution was the precursor to State Terrorism, waged aganst its own citizens, in the service of an ideology, to make them New Men, sundered from the tradition, culture, and history that teach them their identity and guarantee their dignity.
Have a look at this excerpt from Eugen Weber's first-rate review of Simon Schama's Citizens, published in the NYT:
Because they were reminiscent of aristocratic ways, elegance, manners, wit were denounced as treason. The King was deposed, and a new calendar opened with ''Year One of French Liberty.'' In revolutionary newspeak, liberty, of course, meant its opposite: a police state, in which spying, denunciation, indictment, humiliation and death threatened all. The sententious religion of universal brotherhood gave way to the polemics of paranoia: Rousseau with a hoarse voice, as Mr. Schama puts it. Personal scores became political causes. Nuts came out of the woodwork. Marat was one, but a nuttier enthusiast, the Marquis de Bry, gauging the mood of the hour, offered to found an organization of tyrannicides - 1,200 freedom fighters dedicated to the murder of kings, generals and assorted foes of freedom.
Thus was the joy of living replaced by the joy of seeing others die. Mr. Schama is at his most powerful when denouncing the central truth of the Revolution: its dependence on organized (and disorganized) killing to attain political ends. However virtuous were the principles of the revolutionaries, he reminds us that their power depended on intimidation: the spectacle of death. Violence was no aberration, no unexpected skid off the highway of revolution: it was the Revolution - its motor and, for a while, its end.
In the National Assembly Mirabeau had argued that a few must perish so that the mass of people might be saved. It turned out that more than a few would perish. Politicians who graduated from rhetoric to government found that rhetoric made government impossible. If patriotism was to triumph, politics had to end; liberty had to be suppressed in the name of Liberty; democracy had to be sacrificed so that Democracy should live. Speaking from the ruthless precinct of the Committee of Public Safety, Saint-Just, who is one of Mr. Schama's favorite antiheroes, insisted that the Republic stood for the extermination of everything that opposed it. And absence of enthusiastic support was opposition enough. [Homeland Security, anyone?]
With the likes of Saint-Just and Robespierre (a state scholarship boy, typical of old regime meritocracy), doublespeak was in the saddle. Murderously weepy, sadistically moralistic, fanatically denouncing as fanatics those who did not share their fanaticism, men like Robespierre stood for the will of the people as long as the people's will matched their own visions. Ever offering to die for their beliefs, they got the sour satisfaction of undergoing the martyrdom they professed to seek: murderers murdering murderers before being murdered in their turn, until the last days of July 1794 brought an end to the Terror, though not to continuing terrorism.
This is where Mr. Schama's chronicle of the Revolution ends, before successive regimes - Directory, Consulate, Empire - tried to pick up its pieces. But not before its author presents the bill for access to French citizenship: a quarter-century of warfare, with its fallout of militarism, nationalism and xenophobia; the disaster of the Vendee, where civil war wiped out one-third of the population; the ruin of port cities and textile towns that had been the growth areas of 18th-century France; the losses to French trade, which, by 1815, was only about 60 percent of what it had been in 1789. One could add that, by enforcing and thus discrediting paper money, the Revolution set back its popular acceptance by a century and accentuated national problems of credit and cash flow.
Mr. Schama reacts against intellectual cowardice, against self-delusion, against ascribing greatness to great horrors and painting brutish acts in brilliant colors. Above all, he reacts against violence, against the way violence as means was allowed to become violence as end, against the way politicians, historians and simple-minded nincompoops rationalize violence as pathological, or sanitizing, or necessary, or whatever.
You might want to re-think that. The results of the French Revolution were every bit as noxious as those of the Russian Revolution, but without the technology to kill really LARGE quantities of people, although Robespierre's boys certainly did their level best, with drownings, shootings, and decapitations. The guiding spirit of the Revolution was Rousseau, whose thought is embodied in modern American liberalism.
The reason why the American Revolution yielded a successful result is because it wasn't really a "Revolution" at all. When the smoke cleared, we still had the same ruling class, the same established churches (for a few years, at least), and the same basic rights as Englishmen. This is why most historians now speak of the American War of Independence rather than the American Revolution.
If anything, the real American Revolution started with the expansion of the franchise, the disestablishment of the state churches and the growing hegemony of the central government, culminating in the bloody 1860-65 assertion of federal absolutism -- in other words, the gradual repudiation of the letter and spirit of the Constitution. And it is all done in the same barely concealed elitist spirit of Robespierre "the Incorruptable" with his "Republic of Virtue."
...as well as the ideas of desecrating churches, outlawing God, and chopping off the heads of those who disagree with same. Vive le Roi.
To say nothing of the mass rape of young girls, the slaughter of pregant women, and the torture of anyone suspected of not being quite "revolutionary" enough. Vive le roi!
Your loss. I have French Huguenot ancestors and have listened as a single soprano sang a breathtakingly beautiful hymn in the completely dark Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris before a late night service. It brought tears to my eyes. I did this without thinking of the thousands of Huguenots massacred, burned at the stake, and persecuted by Catholics in the two centuries before the French Revolution.
The Marseillaise scene in Casablanca, whatever its source, captures the resistance and spirit of the French people at the time of their subjugation by the Germans. Beautiful moment. Why not think of that the next time you hear the song.
If you could direct me to any anti-Huguenot hymns -- not Catholic hymns hijacked and abused in a violent cause, but marching songs composed specifically to celebrate the murder of Protestants -- and point me to a Catholic church where they're being played, I'd be happy to protest for you. Be sure to get back to me. I'm not holding my breath, though.
What do you think the present Pope was apologizing to the world for a couple of years ago? For starters, I suggest you read The French Wars of Religion, Selected Documents, edited and translated by David Potter...this is a collection of Catholic and Protestant documents. Or read The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629, by Mack P. Holt.
This thread really is one of the best ones yet. Wish I could get to NY but just too much at this time. My great great great great was thrown into prison in Paris for opposing Napoleon and the revolution. My great grandfather was exiled as a result of the 1848 revolution. That's why he brought his family to the USA. They were rebels all and always fought for the right causes. Tis great to have in my history and blood the strength and courage that were theirs.
Have you noticed that some of the most reprehensible regimes in history have the catchiest tunes? Along with la Marseillaise there is the Internationale and the anthem of the recently deceased Soviet Union. And let's not forget Die Fahne hoch. Real toe-tappers, all!
St. Anthony's (St. Anthony of Padua in W. Orange) is useful to remember because three Tridentine Masses are celebrated there on every Holy Day of Obligation.
Your post and your homepage are delightful! St Ann’s is beautiful, but sad to say I am too far removed from Mordor-on-Hudson to attend at this time.
I also fear that the tendency of my family to be first in line to join most any revolution might not sit well with this group.
Be that as it may, God Bless you and yours, and have a wonderful time of it!
Is technological primitivity really such an obstacle to mass murder? If the news reports were close to accurate, some two million people have been murdered in Rwanda by fiends with machetes.
Does the Dauphin who became King Louis XVII ever have requiems said on his behalf? So much goes unresolved; I hear the Vendeans continue to seek official acknowledgement of their own sufferings under the First Republic.
And now I *must* check your homepage since everybody is talking about it!
Good grief, why? Have you quite lost your head?
(Not that I have any objection to driving a convertible during the winter, mind you!)
. . . which, come to think of it, might not be such a bad idea.
I will have to do some research to see if perhaps there is a special commemoration for the heroes of the Gardes Suisses also, faithful to the end.
Carolo augusto, a Deo coronato, magne et pacifico rege francorum, vita et victoria in aeternam!
In my opinion, yes, because it gives leverage to the homicidal maniac. It is true that multitudes have been hacked or beaten to death in the context of tribal warfare, but such an undertaking requires a large number of perpetrators. Technology allows a fraction of a percentage of the population to murder a number of victims that is exponentially larger than the number of executioners.
The Nazis are a good example of this. While the SS is routinely blamed for genocide, the truth is that a small fraction of a couple of divisions of SS were actually responsible, perhaps no more than a couple of regiments. In France, during the Terror, it was the same way. Absent tribal hatred, there was really no great incentive for a large number of Frenchmen to butcher a large number of other Frenchmen using primitive means.
While his claim is certainly nonsense, I remember one interesting tidbit: his son, the Duke of Normandy, worked on the assembly line at Chrysler and his daughter, the Duchess of Aquitaine, was a bank teller. How the mighty are fallen
Technology has allowed a DNA test to be run, and it was determined that the dead child was, in fact, the legitimate king of France.
Actually la Marseillaise was written by a French Royalist. The lyrics were later changed after the French Revolution. I wrote an article about this once and will look it up again.
During the counter-revolution in the Vendée , there was a version called la Marseillaise des Blancs which I assumed was just an example of taking one of the enemy's tunes and setting your own words to it. This was and is such a common practice that the "rights" to the song generally go to the victor (e.g., "Yankee Doodle" was originally a British song; "Brüder im Zechen und Gruben" employed as the theme of the East German NVA was actually a Brownshirt song).
[...]
If anything, the real American Revolution started with the expansion of the franchise, the disestablishment of the state churches and the growing hegemony of the central government, culminating in the bloody 1860-65 assertion of federal absolutism
Very insightful. You should post your comment to Pursuit of Liberty -- American Revolution: a revolution? , if it is technically possible.
In the National Assembly Mirabeau had argued that a few must perish so that the mass of people might be saved. It turned out that more than a few would perish. Politicians who graduated from rhetoric to government found that rhetoric made government impossible. If patriotism was to triumph, politics had to end; liberty had to be suppressed in the name of Liberty; democracy had to be sacrificed so that Democracy should live. Speaking from the ruthless precinct of the Committee of Public Safety, Saint-Just, who is one of Mr. Schama's favorite antiheroes, insisted that the Republic stood for the extermination of everything that opposed it. And absence of enthusiastic support was opposition enough. [Homeland Security, anyone?][Homeland Security, anyone?]
Cute.
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