Tea at Trianon: Thought Control in French Schools

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Thought Control in French Schools

From Fr. Rutler at Crisis:

The current Minister of Education, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, is a member of the Socialist Party, and a Moroccan-born “non-practicing Muslim.” Before she backed off for the time being, her predecessor, Luc Ferry, with a typical Gallic disinclination for understatement, or “euphémisme,” called her proposals “scandalous, empty-headed, noxious, and partisan.” Two steps forward, one step back. In 1945, there were 100,000 Muslims in France. There now are nearly seven million. With increasing Muslim immigration and a current Muslim population now approaching 10 percent, possessing a birthrate three to four times that of the rest of the nation, 40 percent of the population could be Islamic within fifteen years. One should expect tension in classrooms where common warnings about the social destructiveness of Islam are found in Bossuet, Chateaubriand, Condorcet, Flaubert, Montaigne, Montesquieu and de Tocqueville. Thus, they are in the cross hairs of the national education establishment.

Voltaire was more wary of Islam than Christianity: “Nothing is more terrible than a people who having nothing to lose, fight with a combination of rapacity and religion.” In religious matters a utilitarian, Napoleon idiosyncratically perceived Islam as a threat only to those who threatened him and declared under the Egyptian sun, if only for propaganda, that Mohammed was “a great man.” He objected to Voltaire having attributed to Mohammed, “whatever trickery can invent that is most atrocious and whatever fanaticism can accomplish that is most horrifying.” In 2005, Voltaire’s play “Mahomet” was revived in Saint-Genis-Pouilly, inciting “street disturbances,” to which the much put upon mayor refused to yield “in the name of France.” For the poet Vigny, the crescent moon was a suitable symbol of Islam, for it was “trompeuse et sans chaleur”—derivative and without heat. (Read more.)