Posted on 06/15/2016 4:51:27 PM PDT by mainestategop
Very timely post, being just two days away from the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo. Some hold that Napoleon might have won that battle if only he had another 10,000 troops. But wait, even as he massed his armies against the Allies, he felt obliged to divert somewhere between 10,000-25,000 of his best troops (the Army of the West - Armée de l’Ouest - under General Lamarque) to the Vendée to suppress the populace.
(The Battle of Rocheserviere between the Vendeans and Lamarque took place on 20 June, two days after Napoleons defeat at Waterloo, at the time news had not reached either party.)
Huguenots were arriving in early America long before the French revolution. In 1790, less than 1% of Americans were Catholic.
My Huguenot ancestor was one Pierre David who settled in Manakin Town around 1700 IIRC. He or his son in law was a business partner with one Thomas Jefferson, grandfather of his more famous namesake. They sued each other over some land deal so evidently it wasn’t the smoothest of partnerships.
Amazing! I had never heard of this.
That history got well buried.
They arrived in Florida in the 1500's.
There were Huguenots from the Leiden Church on the Mayflower...
and the 30 families on the New Netherland were Walloons/Huguenots also...
Yes and if the Spanish Catholics had not killed them all the first Thanksgiving Day would have dated from then...
What a ridiculous comment.
Serves them right for trespassing on Spanish land! Jk
It needs to be widely remembered. Thanks for posting this.
You know, I have heard it said that St Bart’s day is one of the reasons for the revolution. They killed some of France’s best and they never recovered from it. Most of these protestants were artisans, thinkers, moral advocates and so on. With them gone, there was nothing to restrain the coming storm.
The solution was one the Democrats would propose. Raise taxes on everyone but the elite. Finally they couldn't take it anymore and they cut off Louis's head.
Napoleon Bonaparte summed up the root causes of the revolution this way and I say it is the best way: The people no longer had anything to eat but the rich.
In today's America, many of the rich elite are liberal. When they raise our taxes they can take it easily by passing the buck. Napoleon's words should serve as warning especially to the golden state leftists.
If you're going to have regime change do it in a godly manner like our founders did. Not every king was removed by violence. Many by non-violence.
Whereas all that was needed for the Holodomor -- genocide by famine -- in the Ukraine, was socialism by Stalin. Millions died.
Well, if King George had been in a palace in Virginia, it might not have gone so godly for him.
That’s true...
Many of the nobility and educated people and much of the middle class and artisans such as the silver smiths like the Reveres, gold smiths and the clock makers who fled to Switzerland were Huguenots..
At least 200,000 Huguenots left Franc for England, Ireland and the Low Countries of Holland, Belgium and Germany ..and from there to America...few went directly west from France because the French king had a blockade of his warships in the Atlantic coasts to stop them...
Even the 80 years between the Edict of Nantes in 1598 and the revocation by Louis XVI did little to stem the tide...
The Huguenots had their own standing army...strong enough to battle the French king’s own soldiers...
They had their own cities like La Rochelle, which Cardinal Richelieu lay siege to and finally took...
By the time the French Revolution started, Louis didn’t have enough Frenchmen left who might be interested in helping him...
and there was that backlash against the Catholic Church for all the years of slaughter, persecution, and misery...soldiers were quartered in the homes of Huguenots by the French king, where the families had to feed, clothe and give a good bed to at least one man who would also help himself to the wives and teenage daughters...the families were never compensated...
Wherever the Huguenots went around the world they greatly influenced the national governments...They were members of the English Parliament, they greatly influenced the writing of our Constitution such as the 4th Amendment, and the Boars in the Transvaal and Orange Free State in South Africa were often descendant from French Protestants who fled into the Netherlands...
If all those hard working loyal French people had not had to flee France for their lives, the French Revolution may not have been so drastically bloodthirsty and so lawless..
What was left was mostly rabble who had little stake in the interests of their own country...an uneducated rabble who enjoyed the Roman Circus atmosphere of the guillotine...
Catholic ping!
Yeah, it was. Too bad some of our Founding Fathers such as Thomas Paine, to some extent Benjamin Franklin, and even Thomas Jefferson actually praised the French Revolution, even AFTER the horrific elements of that revolution came to light. Thank goodness Jefferson was NOT part of the Constitutional drafters when it was rewritten, or he would have ensured America met the exact same fate as France. In fact, according to Liberty The God that Failed, Jefferson actually managed to potentially rival Obama in regards to being a big government ogre.
People mentioned Saint Bartholomew’s Day, but the thing is, that was an accident. We only had bell towers to go by, and due to a very poor sense of communication, what was intended to just be a means to drive out Huguenauts ended up going far more than intended. When the Pope learned the full details of what happened, the same pope who ordered for it in the first place, he was devastated by the immense loss of life.
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