Last Days of Marie-Antoinette

From All Things Georgian:

We move to her last few days and in a newspaper article referring to her time in the Conciergerie which confirmed that the total number of prisoners in Paris prisons at that time as being  some 2,989. Life, although extremely cramped, was described as being one of mirth and gaiety, guzzling Bordeaux with their dinner which was described as splendid and sumptuous, suppers consisted of ham and salad* – how accurate a reflection of the truth we could not say.

According to the St James’s Chronicle  of November 21, 1793  Marie’s situation was in stark contrast, she was confined to a small cell, half underground and a mere 8 feet by feet –

‘her bed was made of straw, one mattress and an old tattered coverlid, and terrible to tell she was continually and in all situations in the presence of four Gens d’Armes, who never quitted her chamber. Her food was such as given to common prisoners ; her health was visibly declining; her hair became grey;  and the monsters fearing her natural death might deprive them of  their wretched victim hurried her to the scaffold.

Some days before her death she was wearing black and even sleeping in her mournful attire, expecting every instant to be dragged from her bed of woe by executioners. She wished to die in mourning for her unfortunate consort, but the barbarous regicides deprived her even of this last consolation and compelled her to put on a white waistcoat’.

(Read more.)

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Muhammad & Marx

An interesting comparison, although there are those who question whether we worship the same deity as Muslims. The old crusaders saw them as pagans. From Tierney's Real News:

Look closely at how Islam began and how Communism began, and a clear pattern appears. Both took ideas that already existed and worked, then changed them so the founders and their followers could claim ownership and control. The result in both cases has been division.

Both men followed the same logic:

1. Take something that already functions.

2. Declare it incomplete or corrupt.

3. Supply a new, corrected version that puts the founder and his successors at the center.

4. Use that new version to bind followers together while separating them from everyone else.

The result is a system built for authority and control.

Both men also made a claim of exclusive, final authority. Muhammad claimed to be the last prophet, replacing Jesus Christ, and carrying all news laws from Gabriel. Marx claimed to have discovered the scientific laws of history that would end class conflict. Each claim demanded that everything before it be set aside. Nothing shows the pattern better than Muhammad’s use of Gabriel. (Read more.)

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An Aesthetic Call to Arms

 From Letters from the Old World:

Modern discourse understands that beauty and the divine are inextricably linked: as theologian and priest Hars Urs Von Balthasar said, “every experience of beauty, points to infinity”.

Why then do so many not make the connection between this truth and how they choose to dress? Is caring how you look always mere pride or vanity? Many assume so.

Often “it’s what’s on the inside that counts” is interpreted as “it’s only the inside that counts.” A moral truth is thus perverted into license for aesthetic neglect, as though appearance should not matter at all.

But you know this isn’t true. And so does God.

Consider the instructions for His sanctuary as described in Exodus; gold lamp stands decorated with flowers, colorful linen curtains, cherubim designs, leather and wood fixtures, etc.

Likewise, God commanded Aaron to wear sacred garments with “gold, and blue, purple and scarlet yarn, and fine linen” so as to “give him dignity and honor.”

Clearly, presentation matters.

This is not a God who rejects the value of aesthetics, but one who understands and uses them to his own ends. In this way, beauty in appearance can reflect a divine purpose. God wanted his temple to be beautiful because it mattered that it was beautiful.

Today, we’ll show you that dressing well isn’t vanity, but in fact one of the simplest ways you can respect yourself, improve your community, and honor God.

By the end of this article, you’ll understand the theological importance of how you dress, and why you have a sacred duty to dress your best. (Read more.)

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The Dangerous Beauty of Jacques-Louis David

David's "Tennis Court Oath" with a glimpse of lightening striking the Royal Chapel

 David the regicide later glorified Napoleon at his coronation. From The New York Times:

You are young, you brim with ambition, you want to change the world; you are an artist. You’ve been admitted to your field’s most prestigious institute, and won the favor of the top collector in the land. But your country is plagued by social inequality and galloping inflation. Political crises cascade one atop the other. Is art enough, right now? Or should you turn your art into something else — something more engaged, more dogmatic, more like propaganda?

And when the world changes, then how far will you go? Perhaps all the way into the halls of power, where you will adopt a zeal no one foresaw. When your allies execute their foes, you’ll cheer them along. When they get murdered themselves, you’ll glorify them as martyrs. You’ll end up in prison, pleading for brushes and pencils, and re-emerge in a country eager to forget what you’ve done.

In 2022 our museums and streaming services deliver daily sales pitches of culture’s “power” and “relevance.” Our discourse boils art down to the dullest political messaging. It all sounds like children’s story hour in the shadow of Jacques-Louis David, the artist-moralist who depicted the French Revolution with lethal purity. In the 1780s, he eradicated the lightness and joy of the Rococo in stern history paintings drawn from classical examples. Then, when the Bastille fell, he channeled that Roman rectitude into images of current events, and right into political life.

 We’re not talking about some creative soul who went to a protest or two. With David we are talking about the greatest artist of his generation, the most influential for the next, who was — in the original sense of the word — a terroriste. Friend and ally of Robespierre throughout the Reign of Terror, David sat in the revolutionary parliament and joined its most fearsome committees. He would both design the new republic and sign the death warrants of counterrevolutionaries real and perceived. (Cancel culture, forsooth.) In 1792, when the king’s fate came before the National Convention, Citizen David proudly cast his vote to send Louis XVI to the guillotine. (Read more.)

David's sketch of Marie-Antoinette on the way to the guillotine

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America’s Long History of Removing Threats

 From Tierney's Real News:

Since the beginning of the Republic, American presidents of both parties have barred, expelled, or fenced off foreigners and foreign powers they judged a danger to the country’s security, sovereignty, or constitutional order.

They did it to anarchists after a president was murdered. They did it to Communists for most of the Cold War. They did it to Iranian visa holders during the hostage crisis. They did it with warships when the Barbary Muslim pirates seized American sailors, and again when the Soviet Communists put missiles in Cuba - ninety miles from Florida.

That record is the premise of this newsletter: a sovereign nation gets to decide who enters and on what terms, and America has used that power against ideological and security threats again and again. Don’t let anyone tell you the idea that America has a right to decide who gets to enter and live here is unthinkable, un-American, or bigoted. That is a lie, it is amnesia and it is a mistake.

I’m going to tell you the history of America removing past threats (including Muslim and Communist threats) in sequential order including the presidential record, two cases where force rather than visas did the job, what immigration looked like before 1965, what changed that year, how Communism was fought in law, how Islam began and grew and became a threat to the West, and what lawful options exist for keeping Sharia out of American law. (Read more.)

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Justice

 I certainly won't be watching. But the popes held public executions for hundreds of years as did most Catholic monarchs, including canonized saints. It was perceived as a matter of safety for innocent people, and thus the duty of the ruler. It would not have occurred to anyone that it was a bad thing to execute a murderous criminal in the town square/marketplace. Only if the person was clearly innocent, like St. Joan of Arc, did people object. The Soviets were big on private executions. People would just disappear. Their loved ones never knew what became of them. Also, private executions can lead to doubt whether the person really died. Interesting take here from a few years ago: 

The Grand Duchy of Tuscany had become the first sovereign state to ban the death penalty in 1786, 10 years before Bugatti took up his ax. It did so under the influence of Italian essayist Cesare Beccaria, whose 1764 anti-death penalty tract “On Crimes and Punishments” is considered a classic.

So strong had Italian aversion to capital punishment become that when an anarchist named Angelo Bresci assassinated King Umberto I in 1900, Italian courts sentenced him to life in prison. It was the first time a man had killed a European king (without toppling his regime) and not been executed.

Yet the Catholic church was never part of this development. The guillotine was busy up to the very last minute of the pope-king’s regime. Its final use came on July 9, 1870, just two months before Italian revolutionaries captured Rome.

What explains this stubbornness? In part, that Catholic standby -- tradition. Christian writers since the fourth century had defended capital punishment.

St. Augustine did so in The City of God. “Since the agent of authority is but a sword in the hand [of God], it is in no way contrary to the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ for the representative of the state’s authority to put criminals to death,” he wrote.

Augustine saw the death penalty as a form of charity. “Inflicting capital punishment … protects those who are undergoing it from the harm they may suffer … through increased sinning, which might continue if their life went on.”

Aquinas followed Augustine in the 13th century in Summa Contra Gentiles. “The civil rulers execute, justly and sinlessly, pestiferous men in order to protect the state,” he wrote.

The Cathechism of the Council of Trent, issued in 1566, solidly endorsed capital punishment as an act of “paramount obedience” to the fifth commandment against murder.

Nor was this tradition confined to the Middle Ages. As late as Sept. 14, 1952, Pope Pius XII echoed its logic. “It is reserved to the public power to deprive the condemned of the benefit of life, in expiation of his fault, when already he has dispossessed himself of the right to live,” he said.

The leading abolitionists of the 18th and 19th centuries were Enlightenment-inspired critics of revealed religion. Popes defended their right to send people to death because to do otherwise seemed tantamount to abandoning belief in eternal life.

Catholic scholar James Megivern summed up the tradition this way: “If tempted to waver, one needed only to consult the bedrock authorities from Aquinas to Suarez. Questioning it could seem an act of arrogant temerity. If one did not believe in the death penalty, what other parts of the Christian faith might one also be daring or arrogant enough to doubt or deny?”

All of which makes the shift in thinking under John Paul II astonishing.

In the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, John Paul wrote that the only time executions can be justified is when they are required “to defend society,” and that “as a result of steady improvements … in the penal system such cases are very rare if not practically nonexistent.”

When the new Catechism of the Catholic Church appeared, it did not ban capital punishment, but expressed a strong preference for “bloodless means.” Such strategies, it said, “better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.” (Read more.)

 

From The Enterprise:

Think about what we already accept. The Sixth Amendment guarantees the accused a public trial. In Richmond Newspapers v. Virginia (1980), Chief Justice Warren Burger traced the open courtroom from the English assizes through the colonial courthouse and concluded that “a presumption of openness inheres in the very nature of a criminal trial.” Burger’s reason had nothing to do with whether spectators enjoy trials. A judge who knows he is being watched is less likely to cut corners, a prosecutor under observation is more careful with the truth, and a public that can see justice done is more likely to believe it was done. Every one of those reasons applies with greater force to the moment when the state actually kills a man. The trial decides whether the government may take a life. The execution is the taking. We have arranged things so that the deliberation is open and the act is hidden, which is exactly backward.

For most of American history nobody would have found that arrangement natural. Colonial hangings took place in town squares and courthouse yards, usually with a sermon. Pennsylvania and New York began moving executions inside prison walls in the 1830s, and the other states followed over the next 70 years, with Virginia still hanging men publicly in Richmond until 1907. Britain made the same move in 1868 with the Capital Punishment Amendment Act. What strikes you about the 1866 parliamentary debate that preceded it is that almost nobody in the chamber wanted to abolish hanging. The question was whether the public should see it. Defenders of the old practice argued that publicity was the only guarantee the sentence was carried out, and that it was carried out the same way against a lord as against a laborer. Opponents answered that the crowds at Newgate treated the morning as a holiday. Both sides were right; the opponents won, and the rule they left behind, that the state should inform the public of executions without letting it watch, has governed Anglo-American practice ever since.

The American endpoint came on August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky, when something like 20,000 people turned out to see Rainey Bethea hanged. Kentucky permitted public hanging for rape but required murderers to die inside the penitentiary, so prosecutors charged Bethea with rape alone even though he had confessed to killing his victim. The crowd behaved like the Newgate crowd, with vendors and picnics, and the national press was appalled. Kentucky abolished public hanging in 1938. Since then an American execution has been witnessed by a few dozen designated people, officials, a handful of reporters, relatives of the victim, a representative of the condemned, while the rest of the country reads a wire story the next morning. (Read more.)

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The Code of Chivalry

This picture is a romanticized image of a young squire making his prayer vigil before the Blessed Sacrament, as was the custom before being knighted. There was no set code of chivalry for the medieval period; it changed according to region and century. However, here are some codes which were attributed to the Emperor Charlemagne:

To fear God and maintain His Church.
To serve the liege lord in valor and faith.
To protect the weak and defenseless.
To give succor to widows and orphans.
To refrain from the wanton giving of offense.
To live by honor and for glory.
To despise pecuniary reward.
To fight for the welfare of all.
To obey those placed in authority.
To guard the honor of fellow knights.
To eschew unfairness, meanness and deceit.
To keep faith.
At all times to speak the truth.
To persevere to the end in any enterprise begun.
To respect the honor of women.
Never to refuse a challenge from an equal.
Never to turn the back upon a foe.

And here is Charlemagne's Exhortation:

Love God Almighty with all your heart and all your powers.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
Give alms to the poor as ye are able.
Entertain strangers.
Visit the sick.
Be merciful to prisoners.
Do ill to no man, nor consent unto such as do, for the receiver is as bad as the thief.
Forgive as ye hope to be forgiven.
Redeem the captive.
Help the oppressed.
Defend the cause of the widow and orphan.
Render righteous judgment.
Do not consent to any wrong.
Persevere not in wrath.
Shun excess in eating and drinking.
Be humble and kind.
Serve your liege lord faithfully.
Do not steal.
Do not perjure yourself, nor let others do so.
Envy, hatred and violence separate men from the Kingdom of God.
Defend the Church and promote her cause.


Did all knights follow such codes? Certainly not, but many did, such as St Louis IX, St Ferdinand of Castile, and Saint Nuno. It was really meant to keep military men from indulging overmuch in pillage and rapine, by encouraging the protection of ladies, the poor, and monastic houses. Some of it must have worked, since both the rich and poor traveled a great deal in the Middle Ages, going to various pilgrimage sites throughout Europe, and even to Jerusalem. The Knights Hospitaller had the duty of caring for sick pilgrims and guarding pilgrims on their way. Were all knights saints? No, there were corrupt people back then just as there are now. But that does not mean the system was all bad. Saints such as Teresa of Avila and Ignatius of Loyola were inspired by the codes of chivalric conduct and tried to apply the ideals to the religious orders which they founded. This is especially evident in St. Teresa's spiritual masterpiece The Interior Castle.

With the rise of industrialization and the fading of the old aristocracy, the Victorians were enthralled with the old Arthurian legends and the days when Knighthood was in flower. Did they over-romanticize? Yes, probably. But many young people were inspired with ideals, which is one of the purposes of great art and literature.

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The Surprising Bipartisan Fight Against the Chinese Communist Party

 From AMAC:

For years, lawmakers in Washington have warned that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is exploiting America’s generosity and openness to weaken the United States from within. Now Congress is moving to address that threat and close some of the most glaring pathways the CCP uses to covertly exert its influence.

A series of bipartisan bills introduced this year by members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party would target Chinese involvement in fentanyl trafficking, connected vehicles, robotics, and biotechnology. Though the threats are different, the principle behind the legislation is the same. Chinese companies should not be allowed to use access to American markets, technology, capital, and infrastructure in ways that endanger Americans or strengthen the CCP.

Taken together, the measures reflect a meaningful shift in Congress’s approach toward China. Rather than simply documenting the threats posed by the CCP, lawmakers are increasingly targeting the specific channels through which Beijing-linked entities can gain leverage over the United States — whether by exploiting weaknesses in the financial system, collecting sensitive data, undercutting American industry, or gaining access to strategically important technology. (Read more.)

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Otto Rahn and the Cathars

The Cathars were anti-Semitic, just like the Nazis., which is why the Nazis were fascinated with them. From War History Online:

 Born in Germany in 1904, Rahn became obsessed with European myths and legends at an early age. He was particularly fascinated with medieval German stories about the Grail, such as Parzival (a romantic poem about a knight), Lohengrin (a story about Parzival’s son), and The Song of the Nibelungs (about a dragon slayer).

As a university student, he also became fascinated with Catharism – a Christian branch in France that was wiped out by the Catholic Church in the 13^th century. He, therefore, visited France to look for clues about the Cathars and the Holy Grail.

Rahn concluded that German Christian traditions preserved many elements from its pre-Christian pagan past. He also believed that the Holy Grail was a real object that the Cathars had once held and that it remained hidden near Château de Montségur where the Cathars made their last stand.

In 1933, he published his theories in the Crusade Towards the Grail, which was well-received in Germany. It also earned him a dangerous fan, because 1933 was also the year that the Nazis took over. That fan was Heinrich Himmler, suddenly one of the most powerful men in Germany and the one whom Hitler tasked with exterminating the Jews and other minorities. Himmler, like many high-ranking Nazi officials, was also obsessed with Germanic myths and legends. To justify their ideals of German racial superiority, the Nazis looked to the country’s pre-Christian era. They wanted to reinvent their history and make it look greater than conventional history would have it. (Read more.)

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