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Posted on 10/07/2011 7:13:12 AM PDT by marshmallow
The fine parish church of St Jacques in Compiègne has a side chapel dedicated to 16 Carmelites martyred in the Revolution
I mentioned earlier this week a second French holy place that might interest readers: Compiègne. The town is only 40 minutes by fast and frequent train from Paris, and what drew me there was the famous chateau, a place beloved of Louis XV, who hunted in the nearby forest, as well as Marie Antoinette; and also a favourite place of resort for members of the Fourth Dynasty to rule France. Napoleon was fond of Compiègne and spent time there, and so did the Empress Marie Louise, some of whose furniture is still in situ. Compiègne was also the scene of the house and shooting parties of Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie, where the great and good of the Second Empire gathered.
The chateau is beautiful and more restrained than Versailles and the park, laid out in the English style, extremely attractive; it was a pity that the museum of the Second Empire was shut, as were the apartments of the Prince Imperial and those of the King of Rome – all because of lack of staff, I was told.
By chance I had time to spend in the pleasant town itself, and was pleased to discover a very fine parish church, St Jacques. The church contains several interesting features: a memorial to Joan of Arc, who was arrested in Compiègne; and altar rails that once surrounded the royal bed in the chateau – the gift of Louis XVIII: having once guarded the bed of Louis XVI, they are relics of a martyr. And at the back of the church there was a side chapel dedicated to the Blessed Carmelite Martyrs of Compiègne.
The 16 Blessed martyrs were victims of the French Revolution, and the first such victims to be beatified. That the revolutionary government of France took such trouble over them is quite incredible. Remember, these were enclosed nuns, so they could have been safely ignored, as they were pretty much unseen. But no, the revolutionaries simply could not leave them alone. First they harassed them, and declared that their vows were not binding (though why secularists should have an opinion, yet alone legislate, on the validity of religious vows is beyond me). Then, when the nuns refused to disperse voluntarily, they confiscated their priory and turned them out on to the street. The nuns went into lodgings, and adopted lay dress, as the law dictated, but continued to live a life of prayer, and continued to worship in the parish church. Finally, they were arrested, imprisoned, taken to Paris, condemned by the revolutionary tribunal, and guillotined. They wore religious dress for their execution. They were among the last victims of the Terror: within a few weeks Robespierre himself had been overthrown and guillotined.
But why on earth did the Revolution consider them worth persecuting? Their martyrdom exposes the supposed secularism of the French Revolution as a mere mask for rabid anti-clericalism. Anti-clericalism has a long track record of hatred for nuns, particularly enclosed nuns. Many were the convents attacked and destroyed in Spain at the start of the Civil War. There too Carmelites were martyred. I wonder why this should be?
The Blessed Martyrs of Compiègne are very well known in France, and are even the subject of an opera by Poulenc, the last scene of which admirably conveys the glory of martyrdom. These Blessed Sisters went to their deaths praying for peace in the Church and peace in the state. Let us hope we will continue have both, and much less of the ugly anti-clericalism that killed them.
“The French, however, had greater anger and arguably greater reason to be angry”
Not very arguable. We revolted largely over taxes, ostensibly raised to fund a war that benefitted mostly us, and we still had the lowest tax burden in the entire civilized world (that is, not counting serfs and slaves). Unless you think principles are a more legitimate cause for anger than substantive policy. But in that case, the principles are the same no matter where you live or what you’re rebelling against, and the French could have fought for them if they were smarter, and did in part.
"The Dechristianisation of France during the French Revolution is a conventional description of the results of a number of separate policies, conducted by various governments of France between the start of the French Revolution in 1789 and the Concordat of 1801, forming the basis of the later and less radical Laïcité movement. The goal of the campaign was the destruction of Catholic religious practice and of the religion itself."
You wrote:
“They were radical atheists.”
False. Most believed in a god of some sort.
” They hated all religions.”
False. They favored Protestants and Jews over Catholics. Protestant churches were rarely if ever closed. Their clergy were rarely if ever persecuted. The rights of Jews were dramatically increased - which was only reasonable - while Catholics saw all of their religious rights disappear.
That's the key.
All cultures have all the types - bad ones have their 'Thomas Jefferson's' in jails as political prisoners - and their 'Hitler's' running the place. Mediocre cultures have shoe salesmen running the country... We have similar distributions of good and evil - what matters is where those groups end up in the culture. Our 'evil' has traditionally been stuck near the bottom - that's changing...
The French chose the leaders of their revolution - well, 'leaders' because they killed off all of them over the course of their revolt. We chose our leaders too - and they lived to ripe old ages...
If Europe has serious financial problems they might default to the 'french' tradition. It appears the Greeks are going down that path. We, in spite of all the liberal wet dreams about insurrection and violence, will deal with our great depression the same way we dealt with the last one.
I'm casually stunned you would defend how the French acted during their 'revolution'. I'm going to assume you don't have an excuse for Stalin...
“The reason we didn’t have guillotines was because ignorant mobs filled with blood lust didn’t run our revolution.”
But that is exactly what I am saying! Our revolution was run by landed, well-read, smart men. The French revolution was run by starving, ignorant, peasants. You and I agree on the reasons that our revolution was better both in the final government that resulted and in the lack of retribution.
But please don’t let you hatred of the French peasantry excuse the French aristocracy. We are all aware of how violent the revolution was, but perhaps you are not aware of hot violent the French aristocracy was prior to the revolution. They killed tens of thousands of peasants before the peasants killed tens of thousands of the aristocracy. (There were other peasant revolts leading up to 1790, and those were put down with as much brutality as the peasants later demonstrated.)
The last scene is amazing. The nuns come out on stage and sing a setting of the "Salve Regina". Offstage there is the sound of a guillotine, and one nun drops to the ground. Each time the guillotine is heard, another nun drops. The chorus is reduced to a quintet, then a quartet, then a trio. Finally only the novice and the mother superior are left standing, with the novice, a high soprano, singing on the far reaches of the treble clef. The guillotine is heard again, and the mother superior drops to the ground. Only the novice remains, and then she drops to the ground.
There is a two bar rest, and the winds finish with 8 quiet bars in G minor before the opera ends on a bass and cello pizzicato. Audiences are too drained to react at the end, and there is generally a long silence before the applause.
Most of the people that were killed by the French Revolutionaries were peasants not aristocrats. (The king did not kill those peasants, the revolutionaries killed them.) Proportionally, the clerics of the Catholic Church suffered the most, but the total number of the clergy in France were relatively small (about 10,000 or so) compared to the slaughter inflicted upon the peasants by the revolutionaries. Heck, that doesn't even get to the purges, when the French Revolutionary leaders started executing, their fellow revolutionary leaders to get rid of their revolutionary rivals.
If the aristocracy was so bad, and the French revolutionaries were so good then why did the French Revolutionaries have to kill hundreds of thousands of French in the Vendée? The truth is that most of the French still respected the king before and during the revolution. That is why he was not killed in 1789. Instead of getting rid of the king in 1789, the French created a constitutional monarchy until 1793. It is not until Louis tried to flee from France that the more radical forces in the National Assembly finally had an excuse to justify killing the king to the people. (There is ample evidence that the king's execution was not for criminal reasons but because of political concerns.) Almost half of the National Assembly wanted Louis to live which doesn't make him sound like too much of tyrant.)
So to recap the French Revolutionary spirit: Mass murder of peasants, purges of fellow members of the national assembly, murder of fellow revolutionaries once power was obtained, show trials with forgone verdicts, attack on the Church and a decade of dechristianization, laws against crosses in public and wearing cassocks, and more. The French Revolution has more in common with the Bolshevik Revolution than it does with the American Revolution. Even the revolutionaries themselves said that they wanted to rule by "reason" and "terror".
By the way, though many of the Founding Father's of the US had been sympathetic to the French Revolution at first, once when they realized what the French revolutionaries were doing even they recoiled from it and condemned it.
well, one of the conspiracy theories is that the French Revolution was led by the Freemasons.
It's not just the French with me.
I've never found a group of mass murderers that I admired. Not Stalin, or Hitler, the French Revolutionaries, Pol Pot, Tutsi killing Hutu and vice/versa, North Korean starvation, Chinese kill-offs, Russian starvations - the whole murder of innocents doesn't work for me. Especially in a country like France - that theoretically was supposedly somewhat modern.
The principles defining our culture caused us to chose the type of men who lead our American revolution.
It was the same in France. They chose their leaders - their leaders chose the way of the mob. Ours didn't.
Liberal democrats in 'Occupy Wall Street are choosing the way of the mob - like the French peasants did. Liberal elites want to rouse the rabble - have violence in the streets - Bill Ayers type blood lust. The Tea Party would never start a fight with police hoping to cause a riot. Liberals did it this week.
The Occupy Wall Street liberals charged the police trying to get them to overreact...they WANTED a riot. Modern day liberals are the philosophical children of the French killer mobs. And yeah, they would do the same here if they could, but our traditions are strong - and we can hold the mob off... Something Europe might not be able to do - thanks to the romanticizing of the French mass murderers.
“I’ve never really understood why the French revolutionaries were so violently anti-Catholic (and, really, anti-Christian in general). “
For the same reason they killed over 7,000 priests in Spain (including twelve bishops) in the Spanish
Civil War (1936-1939). They felt the Church had too much wealth & power, and was basically part of the system that repressed them. In France they won; in Spain they lost (until the generals agreed to democracy again in the 1980s - now they have gay marriage).
They hated Catholicism enough to replace the bishops on the chessboard with jesters. Now they have minarets...
Blame Voltaire and the Philosophes was hated the Church for propogating “superstition.” The French Revolutionaries were fanatics with absolute power, driven to extremes by their ability to do what they pleased. The Cult of Reason illustrates how humans hate those who resists their wills.
Not so simple. The bishops were almost all aristocrats, sons of noble families appointed by the king. The lower clergy were often just as poor as their parishioners. The latter, especially the liberal cures —such as Sieyes, the well-know scribler of constitutions were part of the Third State, which regarded itself as the “real France.” Under the Civil Constitution, which reformed the Church,confiscated its properties and made the clergy in effect civil employees, priests were required to
take an oath of loyalty and adjure any real loyalty to the pope. any priests refused to do this and this caused a split in the clergy. The peasantry was often on the side of the priests who resisted, since they didn’t like the reforms. That was especially true in the Vendee, which experienced a savage religious war orchestrated by the cold-blooded St.Just.After the overthrow of the monarchy and especially after the execution of the king, Catholics were thrown on the side of France’s foreign foes, England and Austria in particular.The irony is that so savage was the religious persecution in France that Protestant in England received priests and nuns as refugees in a country where Catholics had few civil rights.The revulsion against French atheism spread to America, where Francophiles
such as Jefferson and Madison had to trim their sails.
Nice post. It’s more than a little odd that a tru conservative would defend the violent absurdity that was the French Revolution.
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