France and the Republic: A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces During the 'Centennial' Year 1889Hurlbert, William Henry
History
France and the Republic: A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces During the 'Centennial' Year 1889
Hurlbert, William Henry
France -- Description and travel; France -- Politics and government -- 1870-1940; Republicanism -- France
hunting-coat and breeches. But the Protestant Dean of St. Patrick's
thought the execution for felony of another Protestant dean a capital
theme for a merry ballad; and at the end of the eighteenth century
Arthur Young painted the English rural clergy in very dark colours. The
curates, the rectors, the monks of France as a body, showed under the
old regime the same qualities of devout faith and Christian sympathy
with the people with which they met and baffled their persecutors after
the crash of the monarchy. The three representatives of the clergy who
first struck hands with the Third Estate on June 13, 1789, were curates
sent to Paris by a province more intensely Catholic than Artois. They
were Poitevin priests from the region which we now know as La Vendee,
and which only four years afterwards rose in arms to defend its altars
and its homes against the intolerable despotism of the 'patriots' of
Paris.
When Turgot was put in charge of that work of fiscal reform which might
have spared France the horrors and the disasters of the Revolution, had
Louis XVI. been capable of standing even by Turgot to the end, he
carried on an extensive correspondence with curates in Artois as well as
in the other provinces of France, as the best means of educating the
people to an intelligent appreciation of his purposes and of his plans.
Condorcet, who treated the brutal murderers of the Duc de la
Rochefoucauld with a complaisance which entitles him to the confidence
of the most advanced anti-clerical philosophers of our own day, bears
witness to the good intentions of Turgot's correspondents. He says, in
his memoir of Turgot, printed at Philadelphia seven years before the
Revolution of '89, that 'the curates, accustomed to preach sound morals,
to appease the quarrels of the people, and to encourage peace and
concord, were in a better position than any other men in France to
prepare the minds of the people for the good work it was the intents of
the ministers to do.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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