Catholics From France

"Anyone who delights in praise destroys it."

"Prepare your mind to live in the company of evil people, with your mind unsullied; to do this is to live like an angel."

"The more noble and powerful a creature is, the more willingly it submits to the truth. Indeed it is powerful and noble precisely because of its submission."

"To want good things even for the wicked is a characteristic of saints."

"Humility is the good and solid foundation of virtues; should it waver, the whole house of virtues collapses."

""Because I love My Father, I do always the things that are pleasing to Him." Thus spoke our holy Master, and every soul who wants to live close to Him must also live this maxim. The divine good pleasure must be its food, its daily bread; it must let itself be immolated by all the Father's wishes in the likeness of His adored Christ. Each incident, each event, each suffering, as well as each joy, is a sacrament which gives God to it; so it no longer makes a distinction between these things; it surmounts them, goes beyond them to rest in its Master, above all things."

""Remain in Me." It is the Word of God who gives this order, expresses this wish. Remain in Me, not for a few moments, a few hours which must pass away, but "remain..." permanently, habitually, Remain in Me, pray in Me, adore in Me, love in Me, suffer in Me, work and act in Me."

"I have found heaven on earth, since heaven is God and God is in my soul. The day I understood that, everything became clear to me, and I would like to share this secret with all those I love so that they, too, might cling to God through everything, so that this prayer of Christ might be fulfilled: "Father, may they be made perfectly one!""

""Abyss calls to abyss." It is there in the very depths that the divine impact takes place, where the abyss of our nothingness encounters the Abyss of mercy, the immensity of the all of God. There we will find the strength to die to ourselves and, losing all vestige of self, we will be changed into love."

"He knew by heart the beautiful plays of Corneille, Racine, and Molière. I heard him say one day to a very famous statesman, who was surprised that he knew so many lines of comedy: "I played less than you, but I know more!""

"A fanfaron plein d'honneur."

"He foresees and provides for everything. He is the first Munitioner and Treasurer of his army. He has obtained the King's leave not to pass things through the channel of the Minister of War, who is an imbecile. He has himself formed a body of six munitioners for the army."

"He wanted very little to be a perfect general. Choosing an extremely advantageous position was one of his great talents."

"Villars was a being into every atom of whose texture vanity and valour entered in equal proportions. Both were serviceable to his country in those dark days. He boasted, he postured, he gesticulated, but at the same time he organized, inspired, and acted. His self-admiration was matched by his patriotism. He was a greathearted braggart. When disasters befell the armies on other fronts he was heard to exclaim, “I can't be everywhere.” His indomitable ardour in facing adversity and the foe was of the highest service to his country."

"The most shameful, humiliating and disastrous of routs."

"Fortify your towns, and above all the Schellenberg, that fort above Donauworth, the importance of which the great Gustavus taught us."

"I am going to drive your enemies so far that they shall not again see the banks of the Scheldt; and by a battle on my arrival, to regain all that has been taken from your majesty."

"I was unable before starting to formulate a plan of campaign because I did not know whether I should find an army there ... In fact I found the troops in a deplorable condition, without clothes, without arms, and without bread."

"Where there are no peasants there are no supplies."

"If God lets us have the grace of losing such a battle again, Your Majesty can count on all of his enemies being destroyed."

"In war everything depends upon being able to deceive the enemy; and having once gained this point, in never allowing him time to recover himself."

"My principal attention was always directed to the study of the younger generals. Such a one I found, by the boldness of his character, fit to lead a column of attack; another, from a disposition naturally cautious, but without being deficient in courage, more perfectly to be relied on for the defence of a country."

"No governor of a place should he permitted to excuse himself for surrendering, on the ground of wishing to preserve the king's troops. Every garrison that displays courage will escape being prisoners of war. For there is no general who, however well assured of carrying a place by assault, will not prefer granting terms of capitulation rather than risk the loss of a thousand men in forcing determined troops to surrender."

"My friends ... if you make the people run away, you will die of hunger."

"Do you want to know where Prince Eugene’s real enemies are? They are in Vienna, while mine are in Versailles."

"What! Is it expected that I, a Marshal of France, should be the first to escalade, when I order you to attack?"

"A general has to expose his life as much as he exposes the lives of others."

"When we are determined upon war, we should carry it on vigorously and without trifling."

"When the first shot is fired, no one can calculate what will be the issue of the war. It is, therefore, of vast importance to reflect maturely before we begin it."

"I am going to fight your enemies, I leave you in the midst of my own."

"God protect me from my friends, I can protect myself from my enemies. [Variation: Defend me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies myself]."

"[Your nation] seems immovable, never doing glorious things but by halves, and never disgracing itself."

"This Poulenc recital was extremely interesting, in terms of both the choice of works and the high standard of the performers, all of whom are excellent musicians. With the exception of the sonata (or concerto) for two pianos, all the works were new to me, and so I got to know lots of new things, most of them charming and elegant, if occasionally not without a touch of sentimentality. I don't consider Poulenc a particularly great composer, but I understand the love that the French feel for him and am not far from sharing it with them."

"Do not run or fly away in order to become free. Rather, go deeply into the narrow space given you. There you will find God and all things."

"The hero wears armor, the saint is naked."

"Here below, God is the feeblest and most destitute of beings; his love, unlike that of idols, does not fill the carnal part of the soul."

"Souvent femme varie, Mal habil qui's fie"

"De toutes choses ne m'est demeuré que l'honneur et la vie qui est saulve."

"A good Prince ought to make his passions subservient to the interest of his country, for all things are either good or bad for him as they regard his people; but Francis had been bred up with different sentiments from these, flattery the bane of all princes had poisoned his mind; he instead of regarding the affairs of his country, totally gave himself to pleasure, which was the reason all his military operations met with such frequent delays."

"Summitry was now reaching its premodern heyday, for reasons relevant to our larger story.Although by about 1500 several strong national states had emerged in Europe, they remained greatly dependent on their monarchs. This kind of personalized power is at the heart of summitry. One of the most famous encounters took place on the so-called Field of the Cloth of Gold in June 1520, toward the summit bringing together Henry VIII of England and François I of France. The young English monarch, whose titles still included “King of France,” had resumed the old struggle in 1512. But his advisor Cardinal Thomas Wolsey secured a truce and then arranged a summit to consummate an enduring peace. It took place on the edge of Calais, the last English enclave in France, in a shallow dip known as the Val d’Or. Both sides of the valley were carefully reshaped to ensure that neither party enjoyed a height advantage. A special pavilion was constructed for the meeting and festivities, surrounded by thousands of tents and a three-hundred-foot-square timber castle for the rest of those attending. Henry’s entourage alone numbered more than five thousand, while the French crown needed ten years to pay off its share of the cost."

"At the appointed hour on June 7, 1520, the Feast of Corpus Christi, the two monarchs with their retinues in full battle array appeared on the opposite sides of the valley. There was a moment of tense silence—each side feared an ambush by the other. Then the two kings spurred their horses forward to the appointed place marked by a spear in the ground and embraced. The ice was broken. They dismounted and went into the pavilion arm in arm to talk.Then began nearly two weeks of jousting, feasting and dancing that culminated in a High Mass in the open air. Choirs from England and France accompanied the mass and there was a sermon on the virtues of peace. n both choreography and cost, the Field of the Cloth of Gold resembles contemporary summits. In a further similarity, style was more important than substance: by 1521 the two countries were at war again. In many ways they were natural rivals, whereas Henry was bound—by marriage and interest—to France’s enemy Charles V, king of Spain. Both before and after the Cloth of Gold Henry met Charles for discussions of much greater diplomatic magnitude. And although Wolsey hoped the meeting of the British and French elites might build bridges, this soon proved an illusion. As the Cloth of Gold demonstrated, egos were everything in these summits, with each side alert to any hint of advantage gained summits by the other. Commines was implacably opposed to such meetings for this very reason. It was, he said, impossible “to hinder the train and equipage of the one from being finer and more magnificent than the other, which produces mockery, and nothing touches any person more sensibly than to be laughed at.”"

"When France fought under kings and for kings it was intrepid and great; today when it fights for the people, for freedom, for the triumph of laws of its making; today, when it only takes out its sword at the call of justice, it must only sheath it at the song of victory, let us carry the pride of Spartans and the courage of Brutus as a tribute to the fatherland. Let our weapons be, not the honor that allied itself to crime, as among the nobles, but the love of equality and the hatred of tyrants. He who dies for the liberty of his country, lives eternally in glory. There is no destiny as glorious as that of crushing despotism, that of smashing, pulverizing, and annihilating those illustrious brigands, those decorated cowards who want to master us with so much pride and cruelty."

"Freedom is nothing but a vain phantom when one class of men can starve another with impunity. Equality is nothing but a vain phantom when the rich, through monopoly, exercise the right of life or death over their like. The republic is nothing but a vain phantom when the counter-revolution can operate every day through the price of commodities, which three quarters of all citizens cannot afford without shedding tears."

"For the last four years the rich alone have profited from the advantages of the Revolution. The merchant aristocracy, more terrible than that of the noble and sacerdotal aristocracy, has made a cruel game of invading individual fortunes and the treasury of the republic; we still don’t know what will be the term of their exactions, for the price of merchandise rises in a frightful manner, from morning to evening. Citizen Representatives, it is time that the combat unto death that the egoist carries out against the hardest working class of society come to an end. Pronounce against speculators and monopolists: either they’ll obey your decrees or they won’t. In the first hypothesis you will have saved the fatherland; in the second case you will still have saved the fatherland, for we will have been able to identify and strike the bloodsuckers of the people."

"If corrupted representatives, faithless administrators, prevaricating agents hadn’t been able to form from one pole to the other a chain of conspirators to fool the people, lull them at the edge of the abyss and complete their ruin; if infamous deserters from the public thing, rebellious children, hadn’t been able to pierce the breast of the motherland and halt liberty in its triumphant march; if the scoundrel faction that dominated the three legislatures hadn’t called down on France the plagues of war and famine; if they hadn’t delivered our forts and our patriotic phalanxes to the steel of executioners, the laws of humanity would be recognized everywhere, liberty would have conquered the world, and there wouldn’t exist a single throne on earth."

"The great art of the legislator consists, not in proposing many laws, but in rendering their execution easy; not in reigning over men by terror, but in rendering himself master through wisdom and the mildness of government; not in establishing inquisitorial commissions in order to find the greatest number of guilty, but in principally striking the chief conspirators and being indulgent towards weak and repentant citizens who have gone astray. If a people is in a state of revolution or not, its principles are those of eternal reason, of eternal justice. As Robespierre observed: Tyranny cannot save the state and freedom. When laws are made retroactive, when we multiply without any need violent measures, we announce ourselves to be ignorant or cruel. Fear only engenders slaves; humanity alone makes the conquest of liberty, and only crime should be punished on earth."

"Ah! This movement of force and energy, this love of happiness, this plan of courage amid the insane who surround us attests to the strength of reason, which has imperceptibly advanced across the centuries. So many sublime outbursts of patriotism on the part of the French prove that servitude is an outrage to the dignity of human nature, and that there is no nation on earth that can return them to their former slavery."

"The freedom of commerce is the right to use and to make use of, and not the right to tyrannize and prevent use. Those goods necessary to all should be delivered at a price accessible to all. Pronounce then...the sans-culottes with their pikes will execute your decrees ..."

"Up to the present moment the big merchants who are, by principle criminals and by habit accomplices of kings, have abused the freedom of commerce to oppress the people; they have falsely interpreted that article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man that establishes that it is permitted to do all that is not forbidden by the law. Well then, decree constitutionally that speculation, the sale of minted money, and monopolies are harmful to society. The people, who know their true friends, the people who have suffered for such a long time, will see that you are sorrowed by their lot and that you seriously want to cure their ills. When it will have a clear and precise law in the constitutional act against speculation and monopolies it will see that the cause of the poor is closer to your hearts than that of the rich; it will see that there don’t sit among you bankers, arms merchants and monopolists; finally, it will see that you don’t want the counter-revolution."

"Deputies of the Mountain: No! No! You will not leave your work in a state of imperfection. You will found the bases for public prosperity; you will not consecrate the general and repressive principles of speculation and monopoly; you will not give to your successors the terrible example of the barbarism of powerful men over the weak, of the rich over the poor. You will not end your career in infamy."