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Post by Deleted on May 6, 2013 0:03:18 GMT
I have been fascinated by the goings-on in France of late. My first indication that same-sex marriage was not going to be just a matter of time was watching the inimitable Frigide Barjot arguing. I have a video here of her at the end of her tether after newscasters specifically question her about the violence at the manif in Paris. This was after 6 hours of peaceful demonstrating and then the police moved in. The videos clearly show the police coming at the protestors, not the other way around. www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOkDL9ev5BsOver a million gathered in Paris and now it has spread to other major cities in France. The law by the way includes marriage and adoption, surrogate mothers for 2 men who marry, sperm donors for 2 women who marry and the point that La Manif is making is that every child deserves a mother and father and that this law is making a mockery of the natural link between child and parents. My French is rusty so if Guillaume wants to pop in and correct me, please do. www.lamanifpourtous.fr/fr/The movement has been building for 6 months and Hollande has refused to engage with the public. They want the law stopped and a referendum on this. I am not sure how it works but apparently the law can still be stopped, perhaps it's a legislature thing?
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Post by Deleted on May 6, 2013 0:13:48 GMT
The interesting thing about the Manif is that it is not the usual union march, this is very much all-across-the-boards. There are clearly some older people but from what I can see the protesters are made of young people and families with babies in tow. They are coming from all over France and then bringing it back to their own cities. Galliawatch has photos of French ex-pats in the Lebanon and America holding up banners. Thousands are marching in regional cities. Gallia has in one of her posts that Marine Le Pen is nowhere to be seen in this. Good, may she keep her nose out, this is not for her to piggy-back on, let the people on the streets speak for themselves. She would blacken the movement, Barjot gets enough abuse for being a Catholic and organising this. There will be a huge demo on the 26th, but there seems to be a bit of a media blackout on this elsewhere. Has anyone else noticed this or am I just too busy of late? It would appear that the typical Frenchie is so furious about this that they are speaking of '68 again. I am watching Euronews here and there is a mention of the lefties marching in Paris but nothing about this. In fairness Le Monde are starting to report on it now. www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2013/05/05/mariage-pour-tous-les-manifestants-ont-deja-l-esprit-ailleurs_3171269_3224.html Note that one commenter states that the Church has stood back for too long, it's time to take action while another woman, aged 26, not a Catholic states that the future may be polygamy, if not incest. Don't laugh at the incest remark, apparently to escape the death duties in the UK, some accountants have spotted that loophole, where a son marrying his dad would save them a pile of cash!
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Post by Deleted on May 6, 2013 0:30:52 GMT
I need to stop talking to myself now but this is interesting. From Gallia I found this post about SSPX priests getting involved, one being arrested. All the videos posted show what is really happening there. A man from Paris, a Catholic gives his account. www.thinkinghousewife.com/wp/2013/04/a-report-from-paris/#more-53679The brother has clearly been attacked by an undercover policier as he is dragged behind the barricades. The media are called out as collaborators and the police as le gaystapo. Couple this with the young people breaking into La Marseillaise as they are pushed down the stairs to the train station and I think of Casablanca. People connecting the government with the Nazis does not bode well. The police are doing serious overtime because of the veilleurs who keep vigil all night and have to be watched. Because those 40 year old mothers from the 7th are known troublemakers don't you know. twitter.com/VeilleursParisThe police are going to become more and more exhausted, that's when tension rises and mistakes are made. This does not appear to be a Catholic thing from the videos. It has been taken up by mams and dads, lots and lots of young people and some older people. Go to youtube, this is a grassroots movement in the making. There is no way there are that many Catholics in a country like France who care this much. Family life is sacrosanct there and it appears that Hollande is out of touch. Keep your eye out for reports in the news on May 26th, it will be interesting to see how long they can keep a lid on it.
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Post by rogerbuck on May 7, 2013 9:03:42 GMT
I need to stop talking to myself now but this is interesting. You are not talking to yourself, Louise. All this is important. I need more time to digest it/look at the links you give. But it is important. It is very striking to me that France, for all its ultra-secular tendencies, remains the birthplace and home to the strongest Catholic traditionalism on the planet. Oddly enough, America is clearly in second place. But here is a thought that I find striking. My study of French, Irish and American history shows a clear chain. French Catholicism was the dominant influence on Irish Catholicism which became in its turn the dominant influence on American Catholicism. Having lived in all countries, a chain is clearly visible to me: France - Ireland - America. But now Ireland is the weak link in the chain. More about this when I've digested your post/links better.
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Post by hibernicus on May 8, 2013 19:29:10 GMT
One reason why this resistance has been strongest in France is that French political culture seems more interested in ideas/principles. (Politicians' behaviour in office is something else.) One element in French Catholicism was that priests and religious were heavily (not exclusively) drawn from the peasantry and used to extremely modest lifestyles - that is what underlay the vast expansion of orders of apostolic life in C19 France (and I think something similar can be said about Ireland - in both cases with good and bad results). Did that dry up with French urbanisation after WWII or had it ended already?
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Post by rogerbuck on May 10, 2013 9:57:38 GMT
The point about French politics and ideas is very interesting indeed.
I have not thought about French urbanisation in this context. I suppose because such vast tracts of France still seem very rural to me, not urbanised at all and because it has long seemed to me that the major culprit here is just how vicious and repressive that Third Republic was, especially from 1879 to 1914.
Quite apart from exiling the Jesuits and all the monastery and school closures, the massive determined attempt to inculcate secular values through propaganda and education during that time seems sufficient cause.
But I am very open to Hibernicus providing me with more subtle, less obvious things that I have not thought of.
The parallels between late 19th century France and early 21st century Ireland are very sobering.
Dublin seems like Paris of that time - pitted against rural Catholic culture.
I may have mentioned this before, but while travelling through the Pyrenees, I met a priest who was responsible for 40 parishes. 40 - I did not mistype that. Needless to say most parishes only had a Mass once every three months ...
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Post by hibernicus on May 11, 2013 21:54:35 GMT
It wasn't simply an urban-rural divide; there were significant areas of rural France (especially in the south-west if I remember correctly) which were anti-clerical. There was also a noticeable tendency for men to be less religious than women (partly because the birth control practice most commonly used was regarded by the church as something forced by men on women, so women got absolution for it and men didn't. The fact that the Napoleonic Code prescribed equal land division among heirs, to prevent the re-emergence of very large aristocratic estates, inadvertently produced an incentive for French peasants to engage in such practices). In the country the peasants tended to see themselves as Catholics even if indifferent or anti-clerical; in the towns there was more of a class divide, with the working class generally secularist, and the middle class divided between Catholics and atheists.
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Post by rogerbuck on May 12, 2013 16:10:51 GMT
I suppose we would have to look at dates here. I would be surprised - although I am not an authority - if your statement were true in 1870. But the situation could be very different in, say, 1920. This of course would be 40 years after the Third Republic got nasty.
But if we look to the Paris Commune in 1871, they briefly found allies in Lyon and I believe Marseilles. But they regarded the rest of the country as an impossible write-off for their cause. A federation of cities was mooted where the cities would separate from the rest of rural France ...
I have done a fair amount of reading of nineteenth century French history and travelled through much of France, remarking the heritage that still exists there. But I acknowledge you are very erudite indeed, Hibernicus, and could well have picked up things about the SW that I have not. Perhaps a cooler, less noticeably fervent French Catholicism did exist in some parts there in the 19th century - although again I would be surprised indeed if rural SW France could be described as anti-clerical in that era.
On a related note, Archbishop Lefebvre's recollections of his life growing up in early 20th Lille reveal how startlingly present an integral Catholic culture still was in urban Lille.
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