Madame Vidal, Monsieur de Brantigny, and Madame Delors relate the events of this tragic day.It always strikes me that those who shout most loudly against "tyranny" always aver themselves tyrants in the end, just as Dr. Johnson said that the loudest cries for liberty always come from the drivers of slaves.
Face it, the basis of democracy is hypocrisy; the tyranny we endure now in the States and indeed throughout the West is far worse than when a Christian king was running the show.
Vive le Roi!
In dedication to the Swiss Guards slain during the riot of the sans-culottes:
My thanks to all.
Isn't that "Vive Henri IV?" In the Russian film of "War and Peace," French troops abandoned by Napoleon amidst the ferocious Russian winter start singing this to keep up their morale. Ironic that they should resort to singing a monarchist song, not a revolutionary one.
ReplyDeleteIndeed it is "Vive Henri IV." That scene of "War and Peace" has always given me pause as well. I am reminded of those many French monarchists who died in the Great Fratricide of 1914-1918, and their service to an increasingly anticlerical and republican France which despised everything they believed in. Would it have been any different in the Grande Armée? These men were doing their duty out of honour and for the glory of France.
ReplyDelete"It always strikes me that those who shout most loudly against "tyranny" always aver themselves tyrants in the end" -Truer words were never spoken. Be it Mexico, France, Russia or China, from one end of the world to the other the fall of tradional authority has led to tyranny more arbitrary and blood-soaked than has ever been seen in human history.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, it's one of those newspeak paradoxes that I always relish pointing out to people. Much in the same way that those who hold most to "tolerance" are among the greatest bigots I know, and how "free-thinkers" all tend to think so similarly to one another.
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