Posted on 01/17/2002 8:32:09 AM PST by Goetz_von_Berlichingen
The French American Friendship Foundation is sponsoring its annual Mass to commemorate the life and death of Louis XVI, King of France, at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, January 26. 2002 at St. Ann's Cathedral, 110 East 12th Street in New York City. The Mass will be conducted in Latin.
A program including a buffet reception, lecture and concert will follow the mass from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. at Café Loup, 105 West 13th Street, which is located between 6th and 7th Avenues.
This year we are honored to have as our guest speaker His Royal and Imperial Highness, Archduke Dr. Geza von Habsburg. A descendant of a brother of Marie Antoinette, Archduke von Habsburg is a world-renowned authority on Fabergé, author of several books on princely collections and a regular gueat lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was also the President of Christie's Europe for many years. The title of the lecture and slide presentation, which will be given in English, is "Louis XVI, A Habsburg Viewpoint."
Following the presentation, a chamber ensemble will perform works composed by Mozart, DeBussy, and Beethoven. The freelance ensemble is comprised of distinguished artists who perform with internationally acclaimed orchestras around the world.
Price for the reception and lecture is $60.00 for members per person and $65.00 for non-member per person.
2002 will see the 225th anniversary of the Battle of Saratoga. This action is considered the Turning Point of the American Revolution, because General Burgoyne's surrender testified to the strategic viability of the rebel cause, thus inducing the King of France to form an alliance with the new republic.
While the French army under General Rochambeau was probably the best they were to field until Napoleon, it was the French fleet that cut off Lord Cornwallis' supply, communication, and path of retreat at Yorktown, thus guaranteeing his surrender and the de facto end of the war.
France, of course, was not a democracy at the time, so the final decision to aid the rebels was made by the king, Louis XVI. It is widely held that the expenses incurred in the prosecution of this war led to the financial crisis that ultimately caused the French Revolution and cost the lives of King Louis, his wife, and their children, and which plunged Europe into two decades of almost continual war.
Americans, who think la Marseillaise and the tricolour represent France, tend to forget that it was the royal victim of the revolutionaries who was the best foreign friend of the new American republic.
Please note, while the church is rather large and can accomodate a substantial congregation, the Café Loup is extremely small, so I imagine there will be an upper limit on how many people can attend, so if you really want to hear Seine Kaiserliche und Königliche Hoheit, Erzherzog Geza, you should probably book early.
Mass, by the way, is a Requiem High Mass, complete with catafalque, celebrated according to the Tridentine rite, as is customary every Saturday at St. Ann's
Besides, since when is shivving England a bad thing?
Just something to file for next time you're in the neighborhood.
Americans, who think la Marseillaise and the tricolour represent France, tend to forget that it was the royal victim of the revolutionaries who was the best foreign friend of the new American republic.
Critical point to be made. My second question was answered in your post, which is that the real Rite of the Holy Roman Church will be used. Appropriate.
Otherwise, as was said in the eastern part of the dual monarchy, Eljen a Habsburg kiralysag! Eljen a monarchia! Eljen o fenseg, Otto von Habsburg!
Americans, who think la Marseillaise and the tricolour represent France, tend to forget that it was the royal victim of the revolutionaries who was the best foreign friend of the new American republic.
One of the downsides to living in New Orleans is the continuing pressure to play the Frenchman for the amusement of outlanders. For several years, my late pastor used to allow himself to be drawn into this fakery, countenancing the playing of the Marseillaise as the recessional after Mass on the Sunday preceeding every July 14. For years I suffered this with clenched teeth, but ten or so years ago, having just finished reading Simon Schama's Citizens, I called him up and asked that in light of the thousands of Catholics martyred in the Revolution, he reconsider this practice. It was not played again.
Perhaps the line about "impure blood" was particularly agreeable to them.
At the Mass, several French hymns are usually sung. I believe they are specifically "Royalist." If you wish, I will research further.
Anyone remember this or know the title? I'd like to rent it.
I am puzzled by France's most recent history of appeasement to Nazism and Islam, though. I guess I need to think about this some more.
Just one of the sleazy tricks of that dishonest propaganda-flick-disguised-as-love-story is the shameless theft of the Marseillaise scene, from Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion.
Course if you get a free sample of the Fabergé to give to your girlriend it becomes even a better deal! Unless their talking about the Fabergé "eggs." Which aren't any good for making "egg-salad." You have to use real American eggs laid by real American chickens to get a good egg salad...which along with real American baked beans makes great side dishes for the ribs their gonna serve... but does anyone know what kind of BBQ sauce they're gonna have with the ribs and corn-dogs? ...I don't and my decision to attend will depend primarily on the "sauce"... and how much I have had! :)
their own revolution, which help spread freedom and the idea of droits de homme... I guess I need to think about this some more.
I hope you do. You may discover that above all things, the French Revolution was the precursor to State Terrorism, waged aganst its own citizens, in the service of an ideology, to make them New Men, sundered from the tradition, culture, and history that teach them their identity and guarantee their dignity.
Have a look at this excerpt from Eugen Weber's first-rate review of Simon Schama's Citizens, published in the NYT:
Because they were reminiscent of aristocratic ways, elegance, manners, wit were denounced as treason. The King was deposed, and a new calendar opened with ''Year One of French Liberty.'' In revolutionary newspeak, liberty, of course, meant its opposite: a police state, in which spying, denunciation, indictment, humiliation and death threatened all. The sententious religion of universal brotherhood gave way to the polemics of paranoia: Rousseau with a hoarse voice, as Mr. Schama puts it. Personal scores became political causes. Nuts came out of the woodwork. Marat was one, but a nuttier enthusiast, the Marquis de Bry, gauging the mood of the hour, offered to found an organization of tyrannicides - 1,200 freedom fighters dedicated to the murder of kings, generals and assorted foes of freedom.
Thus was the joy of living replaced by the joy of seeing others die. Mr. Schama is at his most powerful when denouncing the central truth of the Revolution: its dependence on organized (and disorganized) killing to attain political ends. However virtuous were the principles of the revolutionaries, he reminds us that their power depended on intimidation: the spectacle of death. Violence was no aberration, no unexpected skid off the highway of revolution: it was the Revolution - its motor and, for a while, its end.
In the National Assembly Mirabeau had argued that a few must perish so that the mass of people might be saved. It turned out that more than a few would perish. Politicians who graduated from rhetoric to government found that rhetoric made government impossible. If patriotism was to triumph, politics had to end; liberty had to be suppressed in the name of Liberty; democracy had to be sacrificed so that Democracy should live. Speaking from the ruthless precinct of the Committee of Public Safety, Saint-Just, who is one of Mr. Schama's favorite antiheroes, insisted that the Republic stood for the extermination of everything that opposed it. And absence of enthusiastic support was opposition enough. [Homeland Security, anyone?]
With the likes of Saint-Just and Robespierre (a state scholarship boy, typical of old regime meritocracy), doublespeak was in the saddle. Murderously weepy, sadistically moralistic, fanatically denouncing as fanatics those who did not share their fanaticism, men like Robespierre stood for the will of the people as long as the people's will matched their own visions. Ever offering to die for their beliefs, they got the sour satisfaction of undergoing the martyrdom they professed to seek: murderers murdering murderers before being murdered in their turn, until the last days of July 1794 brought an end to the Terror, though not to continuing terrorism.
This is where Mr. Schama's chronicle of the Revolution ends, before successive regimes - Directory, Consulate, Empire - tried to pick up its pieces. But not before its author presents the bill for access to French citizenship: a quarter-century of warfare, with its fallout of militarism, nationalism and xenophobia; the disaster of the Vendee, where civil war wiped out one-third of the population; the ruin of port cities and textile towns that had been the growth areas of 18th-century France; the losses to French trade, which, by 1815, was only about 60 percent of what it had been in 1789. One could add that, by enforcing and thus discrediting paper money, the Revolution set back its popular acceptance by a century and accentuated national problems of credit and cash flow.
Mr. Schama reacts against intellectual cowardice, against self-delusion, against ascribing greatness to great horrors and painting brutish acts in brilliant colors. Above all, he reacts against violence, against the way violence as means was allowed to become violence as end, against the way politicians, historians and simple-minded nincompoops rationalize violence as pathological, or sanitizing, or necessary, or whatever.
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