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Monday, July 14, 2008

In Memory of the Vendée

IN MEMORY OF the thousands of Catholic peasants, nobility, priests, women, children, and elderly of the Vendée who were slaughtered for resisting the French Revolution.

Saint Mary of the Barrens Roman Catholic Church, in Perryville, Missouri, USA - painting of French martyrs

Long live King Louis XX!

6 comments:

  1. So you love the old Latin Mass and the ancient churches of old Saint Louis. Fine. But last month you transcribed the rebels' rationale on the Confederate Monument in Forest Park and now you wish long life to a pretender to a throne long gone. What's next? Advocating the end of coeducation and univeral suffrage? Thank God, you're a brilliant photographer.

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  2. All you have to do is click 'opinion' on my list of Article Categories, and you can find my views on all sundry topics. I am an advocate of single-sex education: both boys and girls do much better in single-sex schools when there is less distraction.

    So was roughly 600,000 killed an acceptable number of deaths to end slavery? Is the Metric System worth the carnage of the French Revolution? How many folks will have to be killed to bring about universal healthcare? (Ironic thought, isn't it?) Most disturbing, I've heard calls for killing billions of people for the sake of the environment.

    If anything, I prefer peace, and peaceful means for bringing about change. I am quite against war and revolution. But I don't like the status quo.

    Thanks for your compliment about the photos. I really do like spouting out my opinions, but folks would much rather look at the pretty pictures! I've often thought that I just ought to shut up and click. But, there are things that need to be said.

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  3. How many millions of Africans died? Do you think the slavers would have ever freed their slaves without the War? My great-great-grandfather was an abolitionist and Union soldier. He fled Hamburg in the counter-revolutionary year of 1849 and came to Tennessee where he built steamships and smuggled slaves to freedom. Now there is an ancestor to be proud of and model onseself on. As far as the thousands dead, sometimes one does reap what one sows.

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  4. Slavery was another Enlightenment idea, that came about after the Church nearly wiped it out. The U.S. not being a Catholic country, its influence leading up the war was approximately nil, so who knows how long it would have taken to end slavery. But there could have been a better way to end slavery other than civil warfare, which as we see, still divides the U.S. Wasn't the slave trade ended long before the start of the war?

    One thing I've noticed in my travels in the South is the good race relations found there. Black and White folk seem to like each down South. Quite different than what you typically find in the North, where hatred on both sides unfortunately tends to be the norm. Certainly the North's position against slavery in the Civil War was not due to actual love for individual slaves. I always am very distrustful of those who love 'mankind' and not individual men.

    From what I understand, Eastern European women are now held in near-slave conditions in the West, as 'guest sex workers'. That's not good. Some transhumanists even promote the idea of genetically creating a subhuman species specifically for the purpose of creating a race of slaves. Also not good. Put me on the record for objecting to both, as well as slavery in general.

    Slavery could make a comeback in this country. Foreign workers operating under some kinds of visas are under a system quite like the old indentured servitude, which was the forerunner of slavery in the U.S. Others could institute a kind of slavery in the form of compulsory social programs.

    Unfortunately, Enlightenment institutions and parties are usually always at war or revolution, since they are based on the concepts of materialism, competition, a will that transcends morality, and a rejection of Greek realist philosophy. Not to mention a wholesale rejection of Christ's Church and her teachings.

    As for the thought that some "reap what they sow"; it is quite dangerous to believe yourself to be the instrument of God's justice. A person may very well be God's instrument, but that person may receive ultimate judgement and condemnation himself.

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  5. Would you mind providing some information about where this image resides and perhaps some information about its origins? I am currently writing a book about the history of French missionary priests in the antebellum South, and one priest in particular, Simon Brute of the Diocese of Vincennes, lived in Brittany during the French Revolution and sympathized with the Vendean Revolt. There was also a Father Cloriviere of the Diocese of Charleston who served as an officer in the Vendean forces.

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  6. That image is from St. Mary of the Barrens Church in Perryville, Missouri. The religious order that founded the church, the Vincentians, have Parisian roots, and so many French saints are depicted there.

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