
For the Soul of France

One consoles oneself for not knowing foreign lands by supposing that one knows one’s own country at least, and one is wrong; for there are always areas of one’s own land that one has not visited, and races of men who are new to one. I experienced this fully then. I felt that I was seeing these Montagnards for the first time, so greatly did their mo
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pride. Your science is beautiful, and necessary, and invincible; but you accomplish little by enlightening the mind if you do not cure the eternal wound of the heart.
Frederick Brown • For the Soul of France
Civilization, life itself, is something learned and invented. Bear this truth well in mind: Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes. After several years of peace men forget it all too easily. They come to believe that culture is innate, that it is identical with nature. But savagery is always lurking two steps away, and it regains a foothold as
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Several months later, in December 1892, the valiant, independent-minded Abbé Frémont noted regretfully in his journal, “Hatred of the Republic and of Jews is today the sustenance of French clergy. Drumont is their preceptor. Above all, don’t tear this choice morsel out of their mouths: if you try, you will immediately be smeared with ink and blacke
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Another paradoxical courtier, Arthur Meyer, saw only white, the color of French royalty. His paper, Le Gaulois, which circulated like a house organ among Paris’s upper crust, offered sufficient proof of his anti-Semitism to earn him forgiveness for having been born Jewish.
Frederick Brown • For the Soul of France
Tu seras plus qu’un roi, tu seras plus qu’un Dieu Car tu seras la France, O Général Revanche!*
Frederick Brown • For the Soul of France
France’s malady is its need to speechify.”
Frederick Brown • For the Soul of France
One witness thought that the scene might have been not much different at the Colosseum in Rome when frenzied spectators climbed the Vestals’ tribune to demand the execution of a gladiator, little realizing that France herself was the doomed combatant.
Frederick Brown • For the Soul of France
The past was, above all, a refuge from the dangerous mobility of people and things. It was stillness, order, containment. “The qualities I love in the past are its sadness, its silence, and most especially its fixity. Everything that moves disconcerts me,” wrote Barrès (who must have reconciled his aversion to movement with his cult of “national en
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