Friday, November 13, 2015

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7 comments:

The Anti-Gnostic said...

Nothing will happen, because the solution is marching millions of Muslims out of France at gunpoint, and they are already here in enough numbers and with enough weapons to resist. Liberal Europe is finished. It will be a permanent police state from now on.

11/13/2015 11:08 PM
Stephen said...

What, you post the anthem of the Jacobins? Whose philosophy so allowed for this massacre? Do you think this would have happened under a Bourbon?

11/14/2015 10:18 AM
lannes said...

The French, along with the rest of Western Europe, brought it on themselves.
They made their bed -- or their coffin, as the case may be; now let them lie in it. Thank God for Russia!

11/14/2015 11:30 AM
William Tighe said...


Why should I applaud, or even listen to, some immoral chanteuse singing a song that encapsulates and celebrates events that constituted the overthrow of France as "the eldest daughter of the Church" and enthroned "laicite" in it place?

If this is the "French heritage" that we are rallying to defend, my call would, rather, be "pereat!"

11/15/2015 9:18 AM
rick allen said...

I don't think much of the war of 1812, but that's never put me off "The Star Spangled Banner".

The national anthem is a symbol of France. How closely does it have to be interrogated?

Symbols have various meanings. They are allowed a certain ambiguity. I don't have a problem with that.

It also making watching "Casablanca" so much more fun.

11/15/2015 12:14 PM
William Tighe said...


There is no coherent comparison to be made between the War of 1812 and the French Revolution. The former was a domestically divisive conflict, ineptly waged, and one in which the USA was very lucky indeed to have escaped disaster; and "The Star Spangled Banner," apart from being unsingable, has no objectionable ideological content. The latter was the first, and the bellwether, of subsequent revolutions aimed at overthrowing any Catholic Christian social order, and the Marseillaise, like the Internationale, is freighted with anti-Christian (and, indeed, savagely neopagan) ideas. Were I a Frenchman I would have no truck with "1789 and All That" and, indeed, would take some melancholy consolation in the fact that with the Charlie Hebdo massacre and now the Paris Slaughter it seems to be expiring from, as Karl Marx wrote, mistakenly, of bourgeois capitalism, its own "inner contradictions."

11/15/2015 1:29 PM
rick allen said...

Well, I've never thought there was much ideology in La Marseillaise, other than "Kill the Enemy"--not too terribly different from our national anthem's theme of "Besieged fort still flying our flag."

And sure it's true that the French and American revolutions weren't quite the same (except maybe to Jefferson), but they both share that "Down with the King!" thing. French "laicite" goes too far, from the American perspective, but I'm none too comfortable with the notion of sacred, almost sacramental kingship that the revolution overthrew. Between an extreme separation of Church and State and an extreme fusion I'm much more comfortable with the former.

And it's not like the secular Republic hasn't produced some great Catholics--the Little Flower, Bernanos, Maritain, Gilson, Congar, Girard come to mind. And a few Catholics showed up at Notre Dame tonight to share in prayer for the dead. Like every national ideology, the official French stance hasn't homogenized the citizenry as much as it thinks it has done.

But I am an old Francophile, a sentimentalist in the worst way for the world(s) of Pascal and Hugo and St. Francois de Sales and (more recently) le bon Roi Rene.

11/16/2015 12:41 AM

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