The French owner/baker of a bakery I used to frequent can keep you company. First admitted monarchist I ever met. I found it fascinating to talk with him. It was almost as though rediscovering the Coelacanth.
Monarchy is great, as long as it exists in your own fantasy, where the king is in full alignment with your personal view of what is right and good, and has a perfect capacity to make it all happen with unanimous acclaim.
We may elect an occasional jerk, but we'll never be stuck with a Charles the Simple, Ethelred the Unready, Hakkim the Mad, Ivan the Terrible, Bloody Mary, Pedro the Cruel, Charles the Bad, or Selim the Sot until Nature or some murderer comes for him.
Exactly. Everyone loves monarchy in the imagination, where they are always the trusted advisor or beloved knight. Rarely do they picture themselves hauling dung under a tax they cannot escape.
Agreed. In Dante's Commedia, one of the divines laments the disorder of the social order in which a man better suited for the church has to be the monarch, and a man who would have been a good king has to do something else, because of the accident of his birth.
Here's the rub, tho: A capable and benevolent king delivers the best possible government. But not all are like that.
But when you DO get one, you get that king (or queen) potentially for decades.
If we allow as most monarchs are average, a few are awful, and a few are great ... and one assumes the awful ones frequently, ahem, have shorter reigns ... doesn't this mean on balance you'll get better government than in a democracy?
Assumes facts not in evidence. A PERFECTLY capable and ABSOLUTELY benevolent king delivers the best possible government. James Otis, an early propagandist for what became the American Revolution, said that only God deserves omnipotence, because only God is omniscient.
Name one capable and benevolent long-lived monarch. Elizabeth II doesn't count, because she had no power to decide anything. She read her annual speech from a document prepared by the government, whether it was Labor or Tory.
At least you didn't try to pass off Edward I in this list. Charlemagne... one can debate whether slaughtering thousands of Saxons was necessary and good, or whether the Lombards were as evil as the Pope said they were, but Charlemagne was about building power, not serving the people. Also his rear guard was ambushed by Basques because he burned their city. Alfred -- what was benevolent about him? He defeated the Danes and oppressed the Brythons. Frederick, also about power, not benevolence. Peter the same. Jan Sobieski, I know he defended his kingdoms from neighbors who ultimately oppressed people of the same ethnicity, which made him an ex post facto patriotic icon, but benevolent? Victoria is greatly over-rated, and nobody who respects the legacy of the Chartists would view her as benevolent. I have a probable distant cousin who was sent to Botany Bay in her reign, and definite ancestors who fled her rule for the more benign climates of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Henry IV? Seriously? Benevolent? He had a quarrel with his cousin the king and took over, then aggrandized himself, and sent his son to suppress Cymric independence under Owain Glyndwr. See... kings are a liability, and the occasional points of light aren't worth the huge price.
Oh, wow - I don't know that was a thing. Seems that will happen about the time that Arthur, Charlemagne and Barbarosa arise from their enchanted sleeps in their respective caves to reclaim throne and altar.
So I don’t get a voice in how we do things? That’s the reason why most Loyalists left, those who supported the Continentals were usually nasty and vindictive to the losing side. Lots of cases of the local governments trying to restore stolen property that never got anywhere because the folks on the ground just hounded the loyalists until they left.
Yet here we are in 2025 with a gigantic Federal Government that is far more tyrannical than any post 1688 British government. George would have killed to have the power of the American Empire.
Really? Brits can be arrested or mean tweets, praying in public, and you have a spineless Parliament looking the other way while foreign barbarians ravage their citizens? The citizens are disarmed and almost helpless while addled activists go on about regulating/banning knives? And the idea that the British state is small and restrained?
Sir, Britain is stuck with Labour for four more years whether they like it or not. But the Conservatives were no good. They ran the government for over a decade and did nothing about barbarians entering their nation. Blame Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak. All scoundrels.
The real issue in 1776 was not George III, though he made a convenient target. It was Parliament refusing to allow the Colonies the traditional liberties of Englishmen, including a say in how they were taxed.
Right. But George III did his bit by declaring a rebellion and ordering a military response. He wasn't a powerless monarch as some of his successors were.
Lazy and disrespectful response, irrespective of the source/subject. It's always more complicated than that, especially when you consider that the winners write the history books.
I give short responses to short exclamations. If someone has something of more substance to say, I'll respond in kind. I am a fan of Kenneth Roberts novels, not excluding Oliver Wiswell. I'm till glad our side won.
I live in the Deep South and married into old money Confederates. I know all about it. Big cross over between the loyalist experience and the Confederates. Not surprisingly, I’m quite confident the Confederates more accurately represented the country fought for in 1775-1783 than the Federalists who went for broke in 1861 with Federal power not in the Constitution.
Some few Confederates moved to Brazil so they could continue on with the Peculiar Institution. Their descendants speak Portuguese now but have their annual Confederacy celebrations.
It was not the position of the Church until fairly late (19th century). The medieval church distrusted kings (some of whom caused it a fair amount of grief) and it was happy to deal with republics like Venice and Florence, and in the East, Novgorod.
Generally, some sort of monarchy/chieftaincy has been the dominant form of government from about 7000BC to about 1918. Even Greek democracy was very limited and women had virtually no rights at all. The Venetian Republic was a republic of aristocrats.
It might be better to say that once persistent wealth existed (which it did not for most of human history) oligarchic governments of various sorts were the norm. In Europe at least, absolute monarchy was not the general rule. Medieval kings were quite constrained in their powers.
Agreed. Republican Rome consisted of leading families vying for power. Sometimes you'd get a Cicero who came from relatively humble beginnings, but he was the exception.
In the later Republic there were quite a few nouveaux riches. The term "equites", usually translated "knights" since it's from "equus" was applied to them as a class as they were rich enough to own horses.
Human beings lived for millennia without grand royal courts and exalted sun kings and the sort of libertinism which makes today's morals look almost Victorian. No, that's a late and relatively brief development. Yes, I know, democracy is too.
The natural order of humanity is dog eat dog, survival of the fittest. But this is unsettling and violent so people band together and form societies. Society grows larger and eventually corrupt people come to power. People get upset and revolutions happen. Sometimes the revolutions make things better. But usually they don't and newer monsters rule. And then when society collapses, the natural violent order returns before a new society is formed.
Giuseppe was talking about "a civilized place" where such outrages weren't allowed to occur. Now you want to choose which outrages should be dealt with by mounted men with sabres, and which should not because this statue is worthy of desecration. A principle is a principle. I'm not particularly fond of mounted men with sabres -- in American history that would include Lord Tarleton, aka "Bloody Ban." But Giuseppe is a proud self--proclaimed reactionary (a rather nice one) and I took his statement to its logical conclusion.
Yes, and of course I don't really want those people actually hunted down with swords. But a determined police intervention and swift judgment would make a lot of sense to me.
Often it would. One of the classic incidents during the pointless summer of 2020 was when some drugged, drunken, historically ignorant people with professional degrees tore down a statue of a firmly abolitionist civil war general because it happened to be outside the state capital and they had a fuzzy notion that tearing down statues was the thing to do. Most Robert E. Lee statues were taken down by formal legal process, but I always said, we should keep a few around and add a bronze plaque explaining what God's purpose for Lee really was. If George Brinton McClellan had marched into Richmond in 1862, there would have been no 13th, 14th or 15th amendment. After Lee had kicked butt with the Army of the Potomac for a couple of years, while Grant and Thomas rolled up the west, people were mad enough to actually take the south's slaves away from them.
I remember reading that Lee did not want any statues of him or other Confederate officers after the Civil War ended. That way the nation could help. At one point, I understood why some people would want the statues to come down. But now I'm opposed. In some instances, plaques can be put out but the statues that remain should be left as they are. We should be able to talk about history and both the good and bad. Destroying the statues is not the answer.
You've mentioned the Seven Ages of Paris a couple of times now. I'll have to check it out. I've read Horne's A War of Savage Peace, about the Algerian War, and found the narrative so engaging, a real page turner. Horne is one of those historians -- increasingly rare these days -- who is an absolute pleasure to read.
I read Horne's Seven Ages of Paris about fifteen years ago. I remember it being very good but I have forgotten much about it. He also wrote a fascinating book on the Battle of Verdun many, many years ago. Horne is a fine writer.
Along those lines, I’ve recently been enjoying both Tom Holland’s and Dan Jones‘s histories. As for historical fiction, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy is excellent.
Henry VIII’s reign has always left me queasy. I try to consider history and war from a tragic perspective; judgment attempts result in a haywire moral compass, much of the time. But not so much here.
Hilary Mantel was a good writer. I started reading her in The Spectator when she first came to attention. Fludd and Back to Black are good books. That is they are well written and interesting. I drew a line at her Wolf Hall crap! I use a mild word deliberately. What she wished to do was create an essentially obscene counter narrative in which Thomas Cromwell is a hero and Thomas Moore a villain. Mantell wrote about how trashy and embarrassing being Catholic was.Enough! I’m a Walter Pater- Oscar Wilde sympathizer vis a vis literature but I found this a bit too much for me. Genet is in comparison, wholesome.
Figures! On the other hand, have you read Alice Thomas Ellis?Any familiarity with Muriel Spark? I’ve taken to asking these kind of questions to some of the regulars. Apologies if out of line.
She's not the first to portray More as a villain. On my bookshelf I have a book titled "Statesman and Saint" which is a dual biography of Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas More. The historian who wrote it is quite blatant in preferring the deal-cutting Wolsey to the rigid More. Both of course ran afoul of their master, though the Cardinal died before facing the ax.
Criticism of More is understandable. What I find too much is Mantels apparent juxtaposition of More to Cromwell with Cromwell the “ hero “. Mantel was very agenda driven and her agenda was an ugly one.Time being what it is , I’m not wasting my time on that.
Simon Schama is another one. As mentioned above his book on the French revolution, 'Citizens,' is very good, and I've just reread his 'Landscape and Memory,' which is an all-time favorite historical work of mine, and one book about which I can truly say "I was sad when it ended!"
I was walking on the Rive Droite today, and as I passed in front of the Hotel de Ville, the narrator of Horne's book mentioned an event there. It was a neat moment.
Today I went to the Synagogue in Budapest. I have never been inside, but it was shocking to learn what happened in there during the war and the brutality that Budapest’s Jews suffered. There is a courtyard garden there where over two thousand are buried, in mass graves, only partially identified. It’s truly shocking to realize how people could do this to their own neighbors.
Reminded me of the priests slaughtered in Paris in 1792.
It's getting harder to find a place to celebrate that Mass. The State owns the churches and combination of vandalism, neglect and abandonment has the result that "One religious building is disappearing in France every two weeks."
I envy that our host is making the pilgrimage trek from Paris to Chartres. I'd like to do it someday. And spend a few days at Lourdes helping the sick.
Oh, not to fear, I ain't making that trek. I'm not in shape for it, and I hate camping anyway. But I was there for the start of it -- and WHAT an experience that was! -- and will be there in Chartres on Monday for the end, and the final mass. I tell you, being with all those young pilgrims today was the most hopeful I've felt in forever.
I *wanted* to like oysters. I'd heard forever how fabulous they were! And, when I tried the first one, it was awful.
I've had similar experiences with avocadoes. I expected I'd adore them and they were like eating green Crisco. Artichokes? Everyone said they were wonderful. They weren't.
Try some not much salt, a little pepper and some garlic powder.If the avocado isn’t ripe don’t bother, a little Sherry vinegar won’t hurt nor will avocado oil or olive oil.
Avocados must be eaten ripe. Some seasoning is generally called for. Artichokes are very difficult. I can’t cook fresh ones well. I prefer frozen which I cook with sage chicken breasts.Oysters: didn’t like them as a kid. In my 20s- this changed.For my money the best are from the Chesapeake, Cape May( NJ),New England and the Pacific Northwest ( Orcas Island in particular). I’ve French oysters (in France). The US has better oysters. France has better mussels.
Wikipedia explains why the song the German officers are singing is particularly harsh to French patrons of Rick's Casablanca club:
"Die Wacht am Rhein" - (The Watch on the Rhine) is a German patriotic anthem. The song's origins are rooted in the historical French–German enmity, and it was particularly popular in Germany during the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II. The original poem was written by Max Schneckenburger during the Rhine crisis of 1840.
Derek wrote a tounge in cheek libertarian analysis which would be that Rick shouldn't have done it. He was mocking libertarians, not actaually faulting Rick.
A libertarian or economic determinist would say that Rick of Casablanca made a foolish decision in having the French musicians to drown out the Germans. The Germans had the money and Rick should have abided their sensibilities regarding the music at Rick's.
More seriously, I've been disappointed in the books on the French Revolution I've read so far. I think I'll order the Christopher Hibbert book right away.
I read somewhere that the French musicians were recent ex-pats, I don't remember the exact story, but, I do remember, she really did cry spontaneously during that scene and it was incredibly emotional for them to film.
It must have been an emotional moment at the time. When "Casablanca" was filmed, the war was going Germany's way. The French involved with the film must have been disconsolate. The war changed almost as soon as "Casablanca" was released.
Love can cause such an emotion. The woman singing in "Casablanca" loved her country and what was being done to it by the Germans. Some actors and actresses become part of the moment in the film. Barbara Stanwyck admitted that she was truly crying when she was in the lifeboat in the Atlantic as her husband and son stayed aboard the Titanic to die. Maybe that's why she was a brilliant actress.
Stanwyck could do it all -- comedy, drama, transitioned to TV in the 60s with Big Valley. For me, her best role was in the noir classic Double Indemnity (1944).
The first is a very readable, if detailed and long, chronological account; the second, a discussion of its causes. Its first two editions are to be preferred because each of them begins with a long review of the historiography of the French Revolution since the 1860s, which is much curtailed in the third edition. Insofar as the book has a slant, it is directed against "class struggle" accounts of the origins of the Revolution, which one can almost say that it sees as an "implosion" rather than an "explosion."
Yes, I read that when it came out for the Revolution's bicentennial. Schama isn't thumping a particular tub. He does occasionally focus on two very different individuals: Talleyrand and Lafayette.
Well, one of his core points is that the Terror was not a perversion of the FR, but the natural culmination of its ideals & methods. That was an especially scorching hot take
The Terror was official government policy. And in fact the various "spontaneous" mob eruptions were often anything what. The September Massacres were planned well in advance.
I thought it was a bit slow in the lead-up, but once he got to the point where it all started to fall together I thought it was fascinating and a great read.
Admit- I was so bored I couldn’t finish it and I’m a finisher. It’s in the same category as Elias Canneti’s Auto de Fe for me. Subsequently I’ve read articles by Schama and seen him on TV and found him utterly insufferable.
As I recall, Victor Hugo wrote about Paris mobs in the 14th century when he began "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." I wonder whether those little urchins disrespecting the statue of Joan of Arc were inspired by anything deeper than the American sailors who climbed on a statue of Jose Marti in Havana to urinate on it? (This was before Batista too power, when Fidel Castro was a rather long-winded law student). Both of course deserved to be roughly pulled down and given a few swift kicks.
In your travels, keep an eye out for any religious imagery of the obscure 3rd century Northern Gallic St. Honoria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorina). She is the patron of one of our goddaughters and we have been unable to find any iconography (or even statuary) or her this side of the pond.
In re: statue desecration. Most historically noteworthy one that comes immediately to mind is the hacking off of the erect phalluses of the statues of Hermes in Peloponnesian War era-Athens precipitated a crisis threatening the career of the general Alcibiades and almost derailing the Sicilian campaign. Others, readers?
I guess it makes sense for Rod, but it is a bit strange for a proud citizen of a revolutionary country (the USA) to hate the French Revolution.
I can understand hating certain parts of it, but the better parts of it carried the spirit shared by American heroes like LaFayette.
Furthermore, the effects of the French Revolution had are so multifarious as to include everything from the most negative (such as the invention of total warfare and the roots of modern totalitarianism) to the most positive (spread of democratic ideals to continental Europe, emancipation of the Jews) to banal/trivial (the metric system). To say that you hate the French Revolution is hence rather inane without further clarification. It's like saying that you hate "Greco-Roman civilization" without clarifying whether you mainly mean slavery and crucifixions or the Latin language and olive oil.
My favorite part of revolutionary metric mania was Decimal Time with its 10-hour clocks "which divided the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds". Problem is that it doesn't match our lived experience of sunrise, sunset and the seasons.
As to the following- It's like saying that you hate "Greco-Roman civilization" without clarifying whether you mainly mean slavery and crucifixions or the Latin language and olive oil- I don’t think so. The French Revolution went off track very quickly. Burke perceived this even before the ugliness became abundantly obvious.
You really think it was worse than slavery and crucifixions? And yet somehow we can appreciate the Colosseum and Cicero without making Greco-Roman civilization all about its worst elements.
The problem with your analogy is this , you’re comparing a historical event or series of historical events to a civilization. Perhaps you could compare the French Revolution to creation of the Roman Empire or something like that. Logically you can’t compare a historical event event to a practice or institution ( Cruxifications or slavery).
Indeed, you could make the same claim when comparing the French Revolution and the creation of the Roman Empire. After all, Augustus and Caesar were known for their civilizational accomplishments, but also as the people that destroyed an ancient republic. In fact, their legacy is much like that of the French Revolution, with both positive and negative impacts.
The French Revolution, like the Russian Revolution, is in no way comparable to the American revolution. Both the French and Russian revolutions imposed an atheistic state and led directly to the Terror and an obscene amount of bloodletting, above and beyond anything done by the monarchies which were overturned.
But that was only one incident in the horrors of the French Revolution, not just the Terror but the slaughters in the Vendee, etc. I recall being in an Early Modern History seminar and realizing to my horror that I was the only person in the room who thought the French Revolution was a Bad Idea.
The American Revolution was not a "revolution" but a change of government by military means. The French and Russian Revolutions intended and produced a complete transformation of their societies. Only the French version didn't last as long.
And the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre was one incident in the French civil and dynastic wars that accompanied the collapse of the Valois dynasty and the rise of the Bourbons.
The monarchies of the 18th century weren't just modern states with more king and catholicism. To a modern idea, they were incredibly inefficient and underdeveloped. If you had to live in 1770 France for a year, you'd see what I mean.
Personally, I think the French Revolution did have a disastrous phase (following Danton/Robespierre's internal coup and the spiral of violence). But what preceded it had much more in common with the American than the Russian Revolution. It even shared some figures with the American Revolution like LaFayette.
There is no comparison. The French ones are better in every way -- shockingly better. I enjoy Gulf oysters, but only with the usual cocktail sauce (ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, fresh horseradish, Tabasco). French oysters are so flavorful that you don't need or want to put any sauce on them. The difference, I think, is that French oysters grow in cold water, and Gulf oysters grow in warmer water. You can taste the same effect in oysters from Massachusetts, which are also cold-water oysters, and extremely delicious.
People think I’m crazy, but I think the Ancien Regime is the actual natural order of humanity.
The French owner/baker of a bakery I used to frequent can keep you company. First admitted monarchist I ever met. I found it fascinating to talk with him. It was almost as though rediscovering the Coelacanth.
Monarchy is great, as long as it exists in your own fantasy, where the king is in full alignment with your personal view of what is right and good, and has a perfect capacity to make it all happen with unanimous acclaim.
Unless the monarch is, say, George IV. Anyway, I've always thought you're about as likely to get a bad leader in a democratic election as a monarchy.
But at least we're not stuck with the king's idiot son.
Hunter?
Come on, Hunter Biden has no power and never did.
We may elect an occasional jerk, but we'll never be stuck with a Charles the Simple, Ethelred the Unready, Hakkim the Mad, Ivan the Terrible, Bloody Mary, Pedro the Cruel, Charles the Bad, or Selim the Sot until Nature or some murderer comes for him.
Sure -- Hunter was neither in line to become president nor prince regent. Are we all happy now?
Exactly. Everyone loves monarchy in the imagination, where they are always the trusted advisor or beloved knight. Rarely do they picture themselves hauling dung under a tax they cannot escape.
The crown shines brighter from a safe distance.
Agreed. In Dante's Commedia, one of the divines laments the disorder of the social order in which a man better suited for the church has to be the monarch, and a man who would have been a good king has to do something else, because of the accident of his birth.
Here's the rub, tho: A capable and benevolent king delivers the best possible government. But not all are like that.
But when you DO get one, you get that king (or queen) potentially for decades.
If we allow as most monarchs are average, a few are awful, and a few are great ... and one assumes the awful ones frequently, ahem, have shorter reigns ... doesn't this mean on balance you'll get better government than in a democracy?
Assumes facts not in evidence. A PERFECTLY capable and ABSOLUTELY benevolent king delivers the best possible government. James Otis, an early propagandist for what became the American Revolution, said that only God deserves omnipotence, because only God is omniscient.
Name one capable and benevolent long-lived monarch. Elizabeth II doesn't count, because she had no power to decide anything. She read her annual speech from a document prepared by the government, whether it was Labor or Tory.
David. The Five Good Emperors. Charlemagne. Alfred the Great. Frederick the Great. Peter the Great. Jan Sobieski. Victoria. Henry IV.
Off the top of my head.
At least you didn't try to pass off Edward I in this list. Charlemagne... one can debate whether slaughtering thousands of Saxons was necessary and good, or whether the Lombards were as evil as the Pope said they were, but Charlemagne was about building power, not serving the people. Also his rear guard was ambushed by Basques because he burned their city. Alfred -- what was benevolent about him? He defeated the Danes and oppressed the Brythons. Frederick, also about power, not benevolence. Peter the same. Jan Sobieski, I know he defended his kingdoms from neighbors who ultimately oppressed people of the same ethnicity, which made him an ex post facto patriotic icon, but benevolent? Victoria is greatly over-rated, and nobody who respects the legacy of the Chartists would view her as benevolent. I have a probable distant cousin who was sent to Botany Bay in her reign, and definite ancestors who fled her rule for the more benign climates of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Henry IV? Seriously? Benevolent? He had a quarrel with his cousin the king and took over, then aggrandized himself, and sent his son to suppress Cymric independence under Owain Glyndwr. See... kings are a liability, and the occasional points of light aren't worth the huge price.
Action Francaise is still in business.
https://www.actionfrancaise.net/
Oh, wow - I don't know that was a thing. Seems that will happen about the time that Arthur, Charlemagne and Barbarosa arise from their enchanted sleeps in their respective caves to reclaim throne and altar.
Both Proust and Eliot were fans of Maurras. Even Shirer read Action francaise first.
The papacy condemned Action Francaise in 1927 and again in 1939.
You're not crazy, just infatuated and not paying attention.
What a strange thing for an American to say.
My ancestors fought for the King. We don’t approve of the rebellion.
You lost. Get over it.
So I don’t get a voice in how we do things? That’s the reason why most Loyalists left, those who supported the Continentals were usually nasty and vindictive to the losing side. Lots of cases of the local governments trying to restore stolen property that never got anywhere because the folks on the ground just hounded the loyalists until they left.
Yet here we are in 2025 with a gigantic Federal Government that is far more tyrannical than any post 1688 British government. George would have killed to have the power of the American Empire.
True, that.
Really? Brits can be arrested or mean tweets, praying in public, and you have a spineless Parliament looking the other way while foreign barbarians ravage their citizens? The citizens are disarmed and almost helpless while addled activists go on about regulating/banning knives? And the idea that the British state is small and restrained?
Please, stop, my sides.
Sir, Britain is stuck with Labour for four more years whether they like it or not. But the Conservatives were no good. They ran the government for over a decade and did nothing about barbarians entering their nation. Blame Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak. All scoundrels.
Agreed. Things may not be perfect in the U.S. but we're in a better position than Britain and Western Europe in general.
The real issue in 1776 was not George III, though he made a convenient target. It was Parliament refusing to allow the Colonies the traditional liberties of Englishmen, including a say in how they were taxed.
Right. But George III did his bit by declaring a rebellion and ordering a military response. He wasn't a powerless monarch as some of his successors were.
You get an opinion that it shouldn't have happened. I get an opinion too -- my ancestors defeated yours and I like the net results.
Lazy and disrespectful response, irrespective of the source/subject. It's always more complicated than that, especially when you consider that the winners write the history books.
I give short responses to short exclamations. If someone has something of more substance to say, I'll respond in kind. I am a fan of Kenneth Roberts novels, not excluding Oliver Wiswell. I'm till glad our side won.
Descendants of Loyalists consider themselves to be American.
They are if they stayed. One third of the colonial population didn't all leave.
Some went to Canada, most stayed here. The war split my family, and many others. It was a civil war.
My great great grandfather fought in our own civil war -- 11th Tennessee Cavalry, United States Army.
I live in the Deep South and married into old money Confederates. I know all about it. Big cross over between the loyalist experience and the Confederates. Not surprisingly, I’m quite confident the Confederates more accurately represented the country fought for in 1775-1783 than the Federalists who went for broke in 1861 with Federal power not in the Constitution.
Most of the white population of The Bahamas came from the Carolinas. Some of the out islands of The Bahamas are fairly white.
Some few Confederates moved to Brazil so they could continue on with the Peculiar Institution. Their descendants speak Portuguese now but have their annual Confederacy celebrations.
See. I told you.
This is was the position of the church until 1965. Plenty of folks have agreed with me on this.
It was not the position of the Church until fairly late (19th century). The medieval church distrusted kings (some of whom caused it a fair amount of grief) and it was happy to deal with republics like Venice and Florence, and in the East, Novgorod.
I assure you it is not.
The sounds like an article that Crisis Magazine would have published in the last 3 years...
Generally, some sort of monarchy/chieftaincy has been the dominant form of government from about 7000BC to about 1918. Even Greek democracy was very limited and women had virtually no rights at all. The Venetian Republic was a republic of aristocrats.
It might be better to say that once persistent wealth existed (which it did not for most of human history) oligarchic governments of various sorts were the norm. In Europe at least, absolute monarchy was not the general rule. Medieval kings were quite constrained in their powers.
Agreed. Republican Rome consisted of leading families vying for power. Sometimes you'd get a Cicero who came from relatively humble beginnings, but he was the exception.
In the later Republic there were quite a few nouveaux riches. The term "equites", usually translated "knights" since it's from "equus" was applied to them as a class as they were rich enough to own horses.
Which is why I hate 2025
Human beings lived for millennia without grand royal courts and exalted sun kings and the sort of libertinism which makes today's morals look almost Victorian. No, that's a late and relatively brief development. Yes, I know, democracy is too.
The natural order of humanity is dog eat dog, survival of the fittest. But this is unsettling and violent so people band together and form societies. Society grows larger and eventually corrupt people come to power. People get upset and revolutions happen. Sometimes the revolutions make things better. But usually they don't and newer monsters rule. And then when society collapses, the natural violent order returns before a new society is formed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b90ULOJkUr8
Stupid American by Eddie from Ohio
You've got exactly sixty seconds
To tell me what you meant by that
One short minute to apologize
You've got exactly sixty seconds
To tell me what you meant by that
I hear the murder rate is on the rise
I'm in love, but i do not speak the language
I'm in love, but i don't understand
I'm in love, and i do not speak the language
But i try to speak the language of this foreign land
Here i am, stupid american
Here i am
Here i am, stupid american
Here i am
You've got exactly sixty seconds
To take back that stupid question
A baguette doesn't come with a bag
You've got exactly sixty seconds
To take back that stupid question
It's called a baguette, don't you get it-get it
I'm in love, but i do not speak the language
I'm in love, but i don't understand
I'm in love, and i do not speak the language
When i try to speak the language
It comes out sounding like
Here I am, Stupid American
Here I am
Here I am, Stupid American
Here I am
His heart is Italy
His kiss is Paris
His body is Brazilian
My heart is...my heart is
Oklahoma
Oklahoma
You've got exactly sixty seconds
To kiss me like a European
One short minute to show me how
You've got exactly sixty seconds
To love me like a spy
I've seen those foreign films
Do it-do it now
I'm in love, with a man who says "te amo"
I'm in love, he calls me "ma petite chou-chou"
I'm in love, and i try to speak the language
But i can't understand a single word he's saying
Here I am, Stupid American
Here I am
Here I am, Stupid American
Here I am
When Europe was a civilized place, cette racaille rebeu would have been dealt with by mounted police with sabres
So would those who pulled down the statues of Lenin. :)
Lenin, the man on the train, sent to help kick off the Bolshevik destruction of Russia.
Why, it would be terrible to resent statutes honoring him. Just terrible.
Giuseppe was talking about "a civilized place" where such outrages weren't allowed to occur. Now you want to choose which outrages should be dealt with by mounted men with sabres, and which should not because this statue is worthy of desecration. A principle is a principle. I'm not particularly fond of mounted men with sabres -- in American history that would include Lord Tarleton, aka "Bloody Ban." But Giuseppe is a proud self--proclaimed reactionary (a rather nice one) and I took his statement to its logical conclusion.
Yes, and of course I don't really want those people actually hunted down with swords. But a determined police intervention and swift judgment would make a lot of sense to me.
Often it would. One of the classic incidents during the pointless summer of 2020 was when some drugged, drunken, historically ignorant people with professional degrees tore down a statue of a firmly abolitionist civil war general because it happened to be outside the state capital and they had a fuzzy notion that tearing down statues was the thing to do. Most Robert E. Lee statues were taken down by formal legal process, but I always said, we should keep a few around and add a bronze plaque explaining what God's purpose for Lee really was. If George Brinton McClellan had marched into Richmond in 1862, there would have been no 13th, 14th or 15th amendment. After Lee had kicked butt with the Army of the Potomac for a couple of years, while Grant and Thomas rolled up the west, people were mad enough to actually take the south's slaves away from them.
I remember reading that Lee did not want any statues of him or other Confederate officers after the Civil War ended. That way the nation could help. At one point, I understood why some people would want the statues to come down. But now I'm opposed. In some instances, plaques can be put out but the statues that remain should be left as they are. We should be able to talk about history and both the good and bad. Destroying the statues is not the answer.
You've mentioned the Seven Ages of Paris a couple of times now. I'll have to check it out. I've read Horne's A War of Savage Peace, about the Algerian War, and found the narrative so engaging, a real page turner. Horne is one of those historians -- increasingly rare these days -- who is an absolute pleasure to read.
I read Horne's Seven Ages of Paris about fifteen years ago. I remember it being very good but I have forgotten much about it. He also wrote a fascinating book on the Battle of Verdun many, many years ago. Horne is a fine writer.
Along those lines, I’ve recently been enjoying both Tom Holland’s and Dan Jones‘s histories. As for historical fiction, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy is excellent.
"As for historical fiction, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy is excellent."
If your taste is for perverse historical fiction. Cf. (if you can):
https://firstthings.com/the-mirrors-and-the-smoke/
https://firstthings.com/the-monsters-servant/
Henry VIII’s reign has always left me queasy. I try to consider history and war from a tragic perspective; judgment attempts result in a haywire moral compass, much of the time. But not so much here.
Hilary Mantel was a good writer. I started reading her in The Spectator when she first came to attention. Fludd and Back to Black are good books. That is they are well written and interesting. I drew a line at her Wolf Hall crap! I use a mild word deliberately. What she wished to do was create an essentially obscene counter narrative in which Thomas Cromwell is a hero and Thomas Moore a villain. Mantell wrote about how trashy and embarrassing being Catholic was.Enough! I’m a Walter Pater- Oscar Wilde sympathizer vis a vis literature but I found this a bit too much for me. Genet is in comparison, wholesome.
Many years ago I read an interview of her in which she named Robespierre as one of the historical figured whom she most admired.
Figures! On the other hand, have you read Alice Thomas Ellis?Any familiarity with Muriel Spark? I’ve taken to asking these kind of questions to some of the regulars. Apologies if out of line.
She's not the first to portray More as a villain. On my bookshelf I have a book titled "Statesman and Saint" which is a dual biography of Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas More. The historian who wrote it is quite blatant in preferring the deal-cutting Wolsey to the rigid More. Both of course ran afoul of their master, though the Cardinal died before facing the ax.
Criticism of More is understandable. What I find too much is Mantels apparent juxtaposition of More to Cromwell with Cromwell the “ hero “. Mantel was very agenda driven and her agenda was an ugly one.Time being what it is , I’m not wasting my time on that.
Simon Schama is another one. As mentioned above his book on the French revolution, 'Citizens,' is very good, and I've just reread his 'Landscape and Memory,' which is an all-time favorite historical work of mine, and one book about which I can truly say "I was sad when it ended!"
I was walking on the Rive Droite today, and as I passed in front of the Hotel de Ville, the narrator of Horne's book mentioned an event there. It was a neat moment.
Today I went to the Synagogue in Budapest. I have never been inside, but it was shocking to learn what happened in there during the war and the brutality that Budapest’s Jews suffered. There is a courtyard garden there where over two thousand are buried, in mass graves, only partially identified. It’s truly shocking to realize how people could do this to their own neighbors.
Reminded me of the priests slaughtered in Paris in 1792.
The historical irony that Hungary is now one of the safest places in Europe for Jews is so bizarre it may be a sign of the Apocalypse.
“Paris is worth a Mass”.
It's getting harder to find a place to celebrate that Mass. The State owns the churches and combination of vandalism, neglect and abandonment has the result that "One religious building is disappearing in France every two weeks."
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/247514/why-france-is-losing-one-religious-building-every-two-weeks
I envy that our host is making the pilgrimage trek from Paris to Chartres. I'd like to do it someday. And spend a few days at Lourdes helping the sick.
Oh, not to fear, I ain't making that trek. I'm not in shape for it, and I hate camping anyway. But I was there for the start of it -- and WHAT an experience that was! -- and will be there in Chartres on Monday for the end, and the final mass. I tell you, being with all those young pilgrims today was the most hopeful I've felt in forever.
I was never able to eat oysters. The look and texture to me was snot on a sea shell.
I always think of oysters as salted bags of slime served in ashtrays.
You are entitled to your opinion no matter how misguided!
I *wanted* to like oysters. I'd heard forever how fabulous they were! And, when I tried the first one, it was awful.
I've had similar experiences with avocadoes. I expected I'd adore them and they were like eating green Crisco. Artichokes? Everyone said they were wonderful. They weren't.
Not every food is for every person.
Plain avocados no, guacamole yes on occasion.
Same for me.
Try some not much salt, a little pepper and some garlic powder.If the avocado isn’t ripe don’t bother, a little Sherry vinegar won’t hurt nor will avocado oil or olive oil.
Plain avocados I can take or leave, but good guacamole is wonderful.
Avocados must be eaten ripe. Some seasoning is generally called for. Artichokes are very difficult. I can’t cook fresh ones well. I prefer frozen which I cook with sage chicken breasts.Oysters: didn’t like them as a kid. In my 20s- this changed.For my money the best are from the Chesapeake, Cape May( NJ),New England and the Pacific Northwest ( Orcas Island in particular). I’ve French oysters (in France). The US has better oysters. France has better mussels.
This description made me laugh out loud!!😂😂. But I love em!
More for the rest of us!
Yes enjoy. I’ll just drink my share. Haha
Similar to the Charles Bukowski character played by Ben Gazzara in Tales of Ordinary Madness.
I'll do fried or baked oysters.
"...snot on a sea shell."
Cow snot on a sea shell. At least raw oysters. Now, grilled oysters with butter. That's a different story.
I don't like oysters that much but fried oysters are better than steamed in my opinion.
Wikipedia explains why the song the German officers are singing is particularly harsh to French patrons of Rick's Casablanca club:
"Die Wacht am Rhein" - (The Watch on the Rhine) is a German patriotic anthem. The song's origins are rooted in the historical French–German enmity, and it was particularly popular in Germany during the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II. The original poem was written by Max Schneckenburger during the Rhine crisis of 1840.
Rick didn't initiate it -- he nodded when the band leader looked his way for confirmation.
Nowhere did I claim that Rick initiated it.
That appears to be true. Somewhere up the line, someone typed about how Rick really shouldn't have done that, which was still on my mind.
Derek wrote a tounge in cheek libertarian analysis which would be that Rick shouldn't have done it. He was mocking libertarians, not actaually faulting Rick.
Could be. I can't even find the original remark.
I like the song, for the most part. The melody is quite engaging. It also helps, I suppose, that I've been to Koblenz at the Three-corner monument.
A libertarian or economic determinist would say that Rick of Casablanca made a foolish decision in having the French musicians to drown out the Germans. The Germans had the money and Rick should have abided their sensibilities regarding the music at Rick's.
More seriously, I've been disappointed in the books on the French Revolution I've read so far. I think I'll order the Christopher Hibbert book right away.
Does that include Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France"?
I have not read Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France."
You should. And if/when you're in Paris, visit this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapelle_expiatoire
https://www.chapelle-expiatoire-paris.fr/
as I do (or did; I haven't been to Paris since 1984) every time I visit(ed) Paris.
Professor Tighe could provide you a good reading list.
I read somewhere that the French musicians were recent ex-pats, I don't remember the exact story, but, I do remember, she really did cry spontaneously during that scene and it was incredibly emotional for them to film.
Probably my favorite movie!
"What watch?"
Pardon me, but.... "How much watch?"
"Ten watch!"
It must have been an emotional moment at the time. When "Casablanca" was filmed, the war was going Germany's way. The French involved with the film must have been disconsolate. The war changed almost as soon as "Casablanca" was released.
Yes, I think that was mentioned in the article. I wish I could remember where I read it.
Love can cause such an emotion. The woman singing in "Casablanca" loved her country and what was being done to it by the Germans. Some actors and actresses become part of the moment in the film. Barbara Stanwyck admitted that she was truly crying when she was in the lifeboat in the Atlantic as her husband and son stayed aboard the Titanic to die. Maybe that's why she was a brilliant actress.
Stanwyck could do it all -- comedy, drama, transitioned to TV in the 60s with Big Valley. For me, her best role was in the noir classic Double Indemnity (1944).
You might do worse than look at two books by William Doyle:
The Oxford History of the French Revolution (1989)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/318232.The_Oxford_History_of_the_French_Revolution
Origins of the French Revolution (1980, 1988, 1999)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1929437.Origins_of_the_French_Revolution
The first is a very readable, if detailed and long, chronological account; the second, a discussion of its causes. Its first two editions are to be preferred because each of them begins with a long review of the historiography of the French Revolution since the 1860s, which is much curtailed in the third edition. Insofar as the book has a slant, it is directed against "class struggle" accounts of the origins of the Revolution, which one can almost say that it sees as an "implosion" rather than an "explosion."
Check out CITIZENS by Simon Schama. It's far superior (though also much longer) than Hibbert's book.
Yes, I read that when it came out for the Revolution's bicentennial. Schama isn't thumping a particular tub. He does occasionally focus on two very different individuals: Talleyrand and Lafayette.
"Schama isn't thumping a particular tub."
Well, one of his core points is that the Terror was not a perversion of the FR, but the natural culmination of its ideals & methods. That was an especially scorching hot take
The Terror was official government policy. And in fact the various "spontaneous" mob eruptions were often anything what. The September Massacres were planned well in advance.
I hated it!
Why?
I found it very boring.
I thought it was a bit slow in the lead-up, but once he got to the point where it all started to fall together I thought it was fascinating and a great read.
Admit- I was so bored I couldn’t finish it and I’m a finisher. It’s in the same category as Elias Canneti’s Auto de Fe for me. Subsequently I’ve read articles by Schama and seen him on TV and found him utterly insufferable.
Simon Schama's 'Citizens' is good, but massive.
It also seemed much more an intellectual history than social, political etc.
Definitely right on this take.
As I recall, Victor Hugo wrote about Paris mobs in the 14th century when he began "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." I wonder whether those little urchins disrespecting the statue of Joan of Arc were inspired by anything deeper than the American sailors who climbed on a statue of Jose Marti in Havana to urinate on it? (This was before Batista too power, when Fidel Castro was a rather long-winded law student). Both of course deserved to be roughly pulled down and given a few swift kicks.
In your travels, keep an eye out for any religious imagery of the obscure 3rd century Northern Gallic St. Honoria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorina). She is the patron of one of our goddaughters and we have been unable to find any iconography (or even statuary) or her this side of the pond.
In re: statue desecration. Most historically noteworthy one that comes immediately to mind is the hacking off of the erect phalluses of the statues of Hermes in Peloponnesian War era-Athens precipitated a crisis threatening the career of the general Alcibiades and almost derailing the Sicilian campaign. Others, readers?
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1684/the-desecration-of-the-statues-of-hermes-415-bce/
I guess it makes sense for Rod, but it is a bit strange for a proud citizen of a revolutionary country (the USA) to hate the French Revolution.
I can understand hating certain parts of it, but the better parts of it carried the spirit shared by American heroes like LaFayette.
Furthermore, the effects of the French Revolution had are so multifarious as to include everything from the most negative (such as the invention of total warfare and the roots of modern totalitarianism) to the most positive (spread of democratic ideals to continental Europe, emancipation of the Jews) to banal/trivial (the metric system). To say that you hate the French Revolution is hence rather inane without further clarification. It's like saying that you hate "Greco-Roman civilization" without clarifying whether you mainly mean slavery and crucifixions or the Latin language and olive oil.
My favorite part of revolutionary metric mania was Decimal Time with its 10-hour clocks "which divided the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds". Problem is that it doesn't match our lived experience of sunrise, sunset and the seasons.
As to the following- It's like saying that you hate "Greco-Roman civilization" without clarifying whether you mainly mean slavery and crucifixions or the Latin language and olive oil- I don’t think so. The French Revolution went off track very quickly. Burke perceived this even before the ugliness became abundantly obvious.
You really think it was worse than slavery and crucifixions? And yet somehow we can appreciate the Colosseum and Cicero without making Greco-Roman civilization all about its worst elements.
The problem with your analogy is this , you’re comparing a historical event or series of historical events to a civilization. Perhaps you could compare the French Revolution to creation of the Roman Empire or something like that. Logically you can’t compare a historical event event to a practice or institution ( Cruxifications or slavery).
Indeed, you could make the same claim when comparing the French Revolution and the creation of the Roman Empire. After all, Augustus and Caesar were known for their civilizational accomplishments, but also as the people that destroyed an ancient republic. In fact, their legacy is much like that of the French Revolution, with both positive and negative impacts.
Not all revolutions are created equal. In
The French Revolution, like the Russian Revolution, is in no way comparable to the American revolution. Both the French and Russian revolutions imposed an atheistic state and led directly to the Terror and an obscene amount of bloodletting, above and beyond anything done by the monarchies which were overturned.
Well, as far as Parisian violence goes the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre far surpasses the Revolution's September Massacre.
But that was only one incident in the horrors of the French Revolution, not just the Terror but the slaughters in the Vendee, etc. I recall being in an Early Modern History seminar and realizing to my horror that I was the only person in the room who thought the French Revolution was a Bad Idea.
The American Revolution was not a "revolution" but a change of government by military means. The French and Russian Revolutions intended and produced a complete transformation of their societies. Only the French version didn't last as long.
And the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre was one incident in the French civil and dynastic wars that accompanied the collapse of the Valois dynasty and the rise of the Bourbons.
The monarchies of the 18th century weren't just modern states with more king and catholicism. To a modern idea, they were incredibly inefficient and underdeveloped. If you had to live in 1770 France for a year, you'd see what I mean.
Personally, I think the French Revolution did have a disastrous phase (following Danton/Robespierre's internal coup and the spiral of violence). But what preceded it had much more in common with the American than the Russian Revolution. It even shared some figures with the American Revolution like LaFayette.
Nice to see St. Joan of Arc looking dignified. She is patron of my parish.
Rod, how do those oysters compare to Gulf/NOLA ones?
There is no comparison. The French ones are better in every way -- shockingly better. I enjoy Gulf oysters, but only with the usual cocktail sauce (ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, fresh horseradish, Tabasco). French oysters are so flavorful that you don't need or want to put any sauce on them. The difference, I think, is that French oysters grow in cold water, and Gulf oysters grow in warmer water. You can taste the same effect in oysters from Massachusetts, which are also cold-water oysters, and extremely delicious.