The photo below was taken in our home in El Pao, circa 1955. At the left, is my uncle, Alfred Barnes; to the right is Mr. John Tuohy, a dear friend to the very end.
I do not remember the two gentlemen in the center.
The painting on the wall was held by my mother to the end of her days. It is one of the constants throughout my entire life. Whenever I think of El Pao, invariably that painting comes to my mind. It is of huts in Lake Maracaibo in the late 1940s or early 1950s.
The late Otto Scott used to say that the primary reason he enjoyed watching older movies was not so much the plot or the acting, although both might have been very good in a given picture. The primary reason was to be reminded of how folks used to behave; how they talked; how they dressed and how they exhibited courteous behaviors.
Mr. Scott’s point was not that folks were necessarily “better” or “purer”; rather that they observed restrictions that are necessary for the proper functioning of a society.
Courteous behavior is like motor oil in a finely tuned machine. If the oil runs out, the machinery will collapse.
As you observe the photo below, which was sent by a family friend to my sister, you will notice that the four gentlemen are dressed in coats and ties simply for a visit to a home in the mining camp in a jungle. You will also notice that they are well groomed. Based on my personal knowledge of my uncle and of Mr. Tuohy, I can tell you that they also carried on lively, knowledgeable, interesting, and — most importantly — respectful conversations.
Again, no one is saying these men were “good” — there is none good but God — or that they had no blemishes or dark spots. That is not the point.
What I am saying is that the courtesy they learned at home and exhibited throughout their lives enabled society to proceed despite rough spots and sharp edges.
As that courtesy and rules of manners have eroded, society also has eroded alongside.
What maintains such courtesy? Well, readers of this blog will know my position: Christianity is what produces such courtesy. Christianity gives us the law of God by which we live, and by which we agree to function.
Last Sunday was the First of Advent. May we all enjoy this season and also ponder its significance.
The fall of the Bastille and its attendant, macabre events (see here) were a sinister foreshadowing of what was to come to Paris and to all of France, not to mention much of the world in the ensuing centuries, including the bloodletting in Spanish America.
The King, Louis XVI, had been awakened long before dawn in Versailles to receive the news of the Bastille. The Assembly had been meeting in Versailles. In the morning, as the deputies listened to themselves give speeches, the King was announced, entered, and spoke, “You have been afraid, well it is I who have confidence … in you.”
He then announced further that the troops would be removed not only from Paris, but from Versailles as well. As if to say, “You see? No need to fear me at all.” The announcement was greeted with thunderous applause and cheers.
Two days later, the king journeyed to Paris to further demonstrate his goodwill. But Maximilian Robespierre, one of history’s most blood-soaked names, in a surviving letter to a friend, wrote, “The present Revolution has produced in a few days greater events than the whole previous history of mankind…”
“A patriotic army of 300,000 men, composed of every class of citizen, accompanied by Gardes Françaises, Suisses, and other soldiers, has captured the Bastille and punished its Governor and the Prévost des Marchands for their treachery. The fear that this army might march to Versailles has decided the Revolution.”
That’s how the more astute revolutionaries saw, interpreted, and described the king’s supine actions.
The crowds had been admonished, upon pain of death, to not dare shout out, “Vive le Roi“. Unsurprisingly, they humbly obeyed.
After touring the city, surrounded by deputies and armed crowds, he returned to Paris.
The following is from Otto Scott’s Robespierre. I quote it as a microcosm of what was to follow throughout the country and, through the next two centuries, many corners of the entire globe, but especially Eurasia and China:
“Five days later … on July 22, 1789, ex-Minister Foullon [whom the newspapers had accused of saying the ‘people could eat hay’; this was never proved or sourced] was … surrounded … a bundle of straw [tied] to his back and … a necklace of nettles and thistles around his head. He was dragged to City Hall….”
“The new Mayor Bailly orated about the law. Lafayette, summoned to the scene, argued that if Foullon was taken in safety to prison instead of being summarily lynched, he could be brought to disclose his ‘confederates’. After several hours of this the fiery crowd seemed placated. But when the old man — he was seventy-four — and his guard emerged from City Hall, a man suddenly jumped forward, caught Foullon by the neck, and three him into the crowd. A cluster closed around [him] immediately. Beating him energetically … [dragged him] across the Place de Greve to the lamp iron at the corner of the rue de la Vannerie. A noose was thrown over him; one man hoisted him up while others pulled on the lower end of the rope. After he was strangled to death his cadaver was lowered, his head cut off and stuck onto a pitchfork. The rest of the body was stripped, mutilated, and carved into pieces. A horrid parade through the streets started.”
A side note, Alexander Hamilton had expressed concerns about the nature of the French Revolution to his friend Lafayette, who paid no heed as he hastened back to France. Hamilton’s warning likely rang in his ears a few short years later, when he escaped just ahead of the mob.
Many men and women, including the king and queen, were executed after days, months, and years of imprecations and insults hurled at them, culminating with the same accusations painted on placards and posters as people trudged behind them, shortly before their lynchings.
Words are powerful. And effective. All revolutionaries understand that.
Clarence B. Carson wrote, “What particularly intrigued revolutionary socialists, Karl Marx among them, about the French Revolution was the drastic changes it made in the lives and ways of a people. It demonstrated, at least for them, in embryo form, the potentialities for changing man and men in society by revolution. The relentless thrust to equality especially caught the attention of socialists….
“In sum, society would be completely reconstructed.”
The French Revolution expressed those ideas loudly and made attempts at such. It moved to change the calendar with Year 1 being the first year after the Convention of 1792. But the most virulent attacks were on the church and its priests, nuns, adherents, and property. In Nantes the guillotine could not kill priests quickly enough so the representative-on-mission there, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, conjured up an even more effective way to rid the revolution of clergy, and entire families of men, women, and, children too. “Wolflings grow to be wolves,” he explained.
Boatloads of people were towed to the middle of the Loire and scuttled. Other boatloads were merely emptied into the river and, should any unfortunate attempt to grasp the side of the boat, his or her fingers or hands were slashed or cut off, ensuring drowning. Reports survive of many cases where Carrier ordered men and women stripped, tied together, and thrown into the river. “Republican Marriages” he called them. Modern historians tend to discount this, although they cannot deny the fact of thousands of cruel, inhumane deaths.
Carrier later became yet another fulfillment of Jacques Danton’s exclamation at his execution, “The Revolution, like Saturn, devours her own children!”
But the main objective must be kept in sight at all times: the de-Christianization of France. In this hatred of Christianity, revolutionaries have been consistent throughout the centuries. And this hatred is very knowledgeable, it not only attacks the church and churches, it attacks the home. One of the first acts of Revolutionary France was to make it much easier to dissolve the marriage bonds. It also decriminalized abortion. This was re-criminalized in 1810 with the Napoleonic Code.
As noted before, all this was studied with great interest by Karl Marx. As for Vladimir Lenin, an absolutely pitiless man, he said that he had learned much from the French Revolution, but that the revolutionaries had made one major mistake which he would not make: they had ended the Terror. This he was determined to not do.
The king and the queen were executed by guillotine. Their young son, born in 1785, died in prison ten years later, in 1795, days before physicians were called to perform an autopsy which revealed countless scars reflecting indescribable torture. The people whom the king loved and trusted had repaid him with their own currency.
It pains me to say, yet again, that Venezuela, the land of my birth, had its own birthing pangs in the philosophies and anti-clerical fervors of the French Revolution, however much lip service her revolutionaries paid to the American Declaration of Independence.
Simón Bolivar said, “We need equality to recast, so to speak, into a single whole, the classes of men, political opinions, and public custom,” thereby neatly encapsulating The One while ignoring The Many. His executions of defenseless prisoners of war, his pitiless emptying of Caracas, and his Declaration of War to the Death follow logically from such sentiments.
May Venezuela see better days soon. Meanwhile, may those of us in the USA, learn to push back and not acquiesce so easily as did Louis XVI.
Whenever you hear lofty sounding words and ideals, be sure to check the fruit. That’s always a dead giveaway.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité, sounds marvelous. But the fruit is seen in the original’s last three words: ou la mort.
Joseph-Foullon shortly before strangling and beheading.
Depiction of executions by drownings in Nantes. Jean-Baptiste Carrier is in the center. King Louis XVII, the dauphin in captivity. He died at 10, likely of torture, certainly of neglect. Some believe he was poisoned. Simón Bolivar. His political philosophies were steeped in Rousseau and other French thinkers. Maximillian Robespierre. An absolutely ruthless politician utterly convinced of his own virtue and superiority to other men while proclaiming equality for all. His political thinking was steeped in Rousseau. He too fulfilled Jacques Danton’s cry, “The Revolution, like Saturn, devours her own children!”
“I do not regard the past as dead. On the contrary, I regard the past and the present and even the future as part of an eternal reality. Ours are the same tests and crises that our fathers and forefathers encountered: all I do is remind my contemporaries that Eternity watches us forever.” — Otto Scott
The context of Mr. Scott’s quote was obviously history, and he was a wonderfully lucid writer on the subject. I highly recommend his books on King James I (The King as Fool), Robespierre, and John Brown (The Secret Six). For a sample of his writing, see here.
A novel that deals with the topic of an eternal present with great originality is Descent Into Hell by Charles Williams, one of the “Inklings” (J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and others, including Williams). This is not an easy book to read; it will require effort on the part of the reader but it is most rewarding. In it, one is drawn into a world where to be truly joyful you must learn to carry one another’s burdens. In the case of the protagonist, Pauline, she is very much afraid — terrified — of her other self, her doppelgänger whom she sees sometimes when she goes out. The fear is so great that she dreads to leave the house. Williams handles this very effectively; the reader practically shares in the fear.
A famous playwright, Paul Stanhope, over several pages, finally, gently convinces her to let him “carry your fear for you.” And the effect is electric. Along the way the reader is introduced to other characters, all very believable and, in some cases frightening. One character is a 17th century martyr who is Pauline’s ancestor, who sang in praise to God as the flames enveloped him. Pauline sees him one night, as he struggles in fear. She asks him to let her carry his fear, which he does, thereby enabling him to face his martyrdom with joy.
Williams believed strongly that all people are connected. And he did not limit that relationship to just the present. He believed that love by which the world would know the disciples of Christ was one that lived throughout the ages and that, somehow, your love today has impact to someone who lived before you and will have impact on another who lives after you.
When one pauses to consider that God describes Himself as the “I Am”; He Who lives in an eternal present, one can see that Williams was on to something. We cannot think of life other than chronologically because we live in time and space. However, God, as the Creator of time and space, is certainly not limited by any chronology; in other words, He is outside our world, transcendent while also immanent.
I have not given Williams much more thought than what I’ve noted above, but he came to mind as I was reminded recently of some events from my childhood in El Pao. Some of the people, who were my parents’ friends, were very kind to me and also instructive in their rebukes. They are gone now, and I won’t see them until the Resurrection. Yet, how very real they are to me still! I also thought of two other individuals whom I never met, as they had passed away before my birth. However, I very much sense and am grateful for their influence on my life. This does not begin to touch the full scope of what Williams was getting at, but it does hint at how we affect one another, past, present, and future.
Otto Scott wrote about an “eternal reality” in the context of the writing of history. I suspect he would have appreciated Charles Williams, assuming he had not read him.
Charles Williams (1886 – 1945) Otto Scott (1918 – 2006)
The fall of the Bastille and its attendant, macabre events (see here) were a sinister foreshadowing of what was to come to Paris and to all of France, not to mention much of the world in the ensuing centuries, including the bloodletting in Spanish America.
The King, Louis XVI, had been awakened long before dawn in Versailles to receive the news of the Bastille. The Assembly had been meeting in Versailles. In the morning, as the deputies listened to themselves give speeches, the King was announced, entered, and spoke, “You have been afraid, well it is I who have confidence … in you.”
He then announced further that the troops would be removed not only from Paris, but from Versailles as well. As if to say, “You see? No need to fear me at all.” The announcement was greeted with thunderous applause and cheers.
Two days later, the king journeyed to Paris to further demonstrate his goodwill. But Maximilian Robespierre, one of history’s most blood-soaked names, in a surviving letter to a friend, wrote, “The present Revolution has produced in a few days greater events than the whole previous history of mankind…”
“A patriotic army of 300,000 men, composed of every class of citizen, accompanied by Gardes Françaises, Suisses, and other soldiers, has captured the Bastille and punished its Governor and the Prévost des Marchands for their treachery. The fear that this army might march to Versailles has decided the Revolution.”
That’s how the more astute revolutionaries saw, interpreted, and described the king’s supine actions.
The crowds had been admonished, upon pain of death, to not dare shout out, “Vive le Roi“. Unsurprisingly, they humbly obeyed.
After touring the city, surrounded by deputies and armed crowds, he returned to Paris.
The following is from Otto Scott’s Robespierre. I quote it as a microcosm of what was to follow throughout the country and, through the next two centuries, many corners of the entire globe, but especially Eurasia and China:
“Five days later … on July 22, 1789, ex-Minister Foullon [whom the newspapers had accused of saying the ‘people could eat hay’; this was never proved or sourced] was … surrounded … a bundle of straw [tied] to his back and … a necklace of nettles and thistles around his head. He was dragged to City Hall….”
“The new Mayor Bailly orated about the law. Lafayette, summoned to the scene, argued that if Foullon was taken in safety to prison instead of being summarily lynched, he could be brought to disclose his ‘confederates’. After several hours of this the fiery crowd seemed placated. But when the old man — he was seventy-four — and his guard emerged from City Hall, a man suddenly jumped forward, caught Foullon by the neck, and threw him into the crowd. A cluster closed around [him] immediately. Beating him energetically … [dragged him] across the Place de Greve to the lamp iron at the corner of the rue de la Vannerie. A noose was thrown over him; one man hoisted him up while others pulled on the lower end of the rope. After he was strangled to death his cadaver was lowered, his head cut off and stuck onto a pitchfork. The rest of the body was stripped, mutilated, and carved into pieces. A horrid parade through the streets started.”
A side note, Alexander Hamilton had expressed concerns about the nature of the French Revolution to his friend Lafayette, who paid no heed as he hastened back to France. Hamilton’s warning likely rang in his ears a few short years later, when he escaped just ahead of the mob.
Many men and women, including the king and queen, were executed after days, months, and years of imprecations and insults hurled at them, culminating with the same accusations painted on placards and posters as people trudged behind them, shortly before their lynchings.
Words are powerful. And effective. All revolutionaries understand that.
Clarence B. Carson wrote, “What particularly intrigued revolutionary socialists, Karl Marx among them, about the French Revolution was the drastic changes it made in the lives and ways of a people. It demonstrated, at least for them, in embryo form, the potentialities for changing man and men in society by revolution. The relentless thrust to equality especially caught the attention of socialists….
“In sum, society would be completely reconstructed.”
The French Revolution expressed those ideas loudly and made attempts at such. It moved to change the calendar with Year 1 being the first year after the Convention of 1792. But the most virulent attacks were on the church and its priests, nuns, adherents, and property. In Nantes the guillotine could not kill priests quickly enough so the representative-on-mission there, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, conjured up an even more effective way to rid the revolution of clergy, and entire families of men, women, and, children too. “Wolflings grow to be wolves,” he explained.
Boatloads of people were towed to the middle of the Loire and scuttled. Other boatloads were merely emptied into the river and, should any unfortunate attempt to grasp the side of the boat, his or her fingers or hands were slashed or cut off, ensuring drowning. Reports survive of many cases where Carrier ordered men and women stripped, tied together, and thrown into the river. “Republican Marriages” he called them. Modern historians tend to discount this, although they cannot deny the fact of thousands of cruel, inhumane deaths.
Carrier later became yet another fulfillment of Jacques Danton’s exclamation at his execution, “The Revolution, like Saturn, devours her own children!”
But the main objective must be kept in sight at all times: the de-Christianization of France. In this hatred of Christianity, revolutionaries have been consistent throughout the centuries. And this hatred is very knowledgeable, it not only attacks the church and churches, it attacks the home. One of the first acts of Revolutionary France was to make it much easier to dissolve the marriage bonds. It also decriminalized abortion. This was re-criminalized in 1810 with the Napoleonic Code.
As noted before, all this was studied with great interest by Karl Marx. As for Vladimir Lenin, an absolutely pitiless man, he said that he had learned much from the French Revolution, but that the revolutionaries had made one major mistake which he would not make: they had ended the Terror. This he was determined to not do.
The king and the queen were executed by guillotine. Their young son, born in 1785, died in prison ten years later, in 1795, days before physicians were called to perform an autopsy which revealed countless scars reflecting indescribable torture. The people whom the king loved and trusted had repaid him with their own currency.
It pains me to say, yet again, that Venezuela, the land of my birth, had its own birthing pangs in the philosophies and anti-clerical fervors of the French Revolution, however much lip service her revolutionaries paid to the American Declaration of Independence.
Simón Bolivar said, “We need equality to recast, so to speak, into a single whole, the classes of men, political opinions, and public custom,” thereby neatly encapsulating The One while ignoring The Many. His executions of defenseless prisoners of war, his pitiless emptying of Caracas, and his Declaration of War to the Death follow logically from such sentiments.
May Venezuela see better days soon. Meanwhile, may those of us in the USA, learn to push back and not acquiesce so easily as did Louis XVI.
Whenever you hear lofty sounding words and ideals, be sure to check the fruit. That’s always a dead giveaway.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité, sounds marvelous. But the fruit is seen in the original’s last three words: ou la mort.
Joseph-Foullon shortly before strangling and beheading.
Depiction of executions by drownings in Nantes. Jean-Baptiste Carrier is in the center. King Louis XVII, the dauphin in captivity. He died at 10, likely of torture, certainly of neglect. Some believe he was poisoned. Simón Bolivar. His political philosophies were steeped in Rousseau and other French thinkers. Maximillian Robespierre. An absolutely ruthless politician utterly convinced of his own virtue and superiority to other men while proclaiming equality for all. His political thinking was steeped in Rousseau. He too fulfilled Jacques Danton’s cry, “The Revolution, like Saturn, devours her own children!”
