The most illuminating example of human nature is found in the New Testament when Peter and Jesus Christ talk together and Peter urges his master to believe his devotion to be completely sincere. Thus, Jesus announces to him that the rooster will not have crowed that he will have denied him three times. The first place every man talks about is this: his weakness. Taking into account the limits of each, not always to resolve them, but also to overcome them, obliges to reason from what one is and not from what one believes to be. Any man who does not know his weaknesses, who forgets them, who does not take them into account is above ground, as we are used to saying nowadays. Above-ground meaning that we are nourished by a pasture that is not ours, that we renounce our pasture to find any other pasture than our own, better because it is different. Above ground also means that the comments received could be obtained anywhere else in the world without this posing a problem, these comments being rootless, translatable into any language and exportable as a computer “framework”. The formula "above ground" forbids answering the question "where are you talking about?" » and the first formula likes to taunt the second as identity or « far-right ». By dint of having wanted to dodge this question, we destroyed it. In the future it will no longer be possible to ask where we are talking about, because we will have reached such a level of abstraction and uprooting that this question will no longer even have any meaning.
Author: Emmanuel L. Di Rossetti
Blanc de Saint Bonnet on contemporary France
In 1851, Blanc de Saint Bonnet said:
When men lose sight of moral necessities, God brings forth the light of necessities of another order. If faith is no longer received by the ear, it will be taught to us by hunger. Christianity will constitute modern society where it will be shattered. The economic facts, before long, will expose the truths. Your laws will have recognized everything, consecrated everything and administered everything; human means will all be employed: never more numerous army, never more complete legislation, never more powerful administration; then, having reached the end of the secondary causes, you will come to break against the first cause! It will no longer be the unrecognized doctrine that will be heard, it will no longer be the unheard conscience that will cry out. The facts will speak their loud voice. The truth will leave the heights of the word; it will enter into the bread we eat, into the blood on which we live; the light will be fire. Men will see themselves between truth and death… will they have the mind to choose?
Hannah Arendt on social science functionalism
I do not believe that atheism is a substitute or can fulfill the same function as a religion, any more than I believe that violence can become a substitute for authority. But if we follow the exhortations of the Conservatives, who at the moment have a fairly good chance of being heard, I am quite convinced that we will have no difficulty in producing such substitutes, that we will use violence and claim to have restored authority or that our rediscovery of the functional usefulness of religion will produce an ersatz religion — as if our civilization wasn't cluttered enough with all sorts of pseudo stuff and nonsense stuff.
Show “But times always come back…” – 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment (1991)
Show “But times always come back…” — 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment (1991) by Emmanuel Di Rossetti on Vimeo .
On August 31, 1991, the 2nd Foreign Infantry Regiment celebrated its 150th anniversary during an exceptional cinéscénie, the battle of El Moungar and its return from Operation Daguet, the first Gulf War. 30,000 spectators from Nîmes will attend this event which began during the day with the legionnaires dressed in authentic costumes placed in the conditions and sets of different eras, and which will continue late into the night with the show itself performed by François Gamard, Jérôme le Paulmier and Richard Bohringer 1 in front of the Costières stadium (180 meters from the stage!).
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Pius X at the beatification of Joan of Arc
On December 13, 1908, at the beatification of Joan of Arc, Pius X pronounced these words which remain in the memories:
"You will tell the French that they treasure the wills of Saint-Rémy, Charlemagne and Saint-Louis which are summed up in these words so often repeated by the heroine of Orléans: long live Christ who is king of France ! By this title alone is France great among nations. At this clause, God will protect her and make her free and glorious. On this condition, we will be able to apply to it what in the Holy Books is said of Israel that no one was found who insulted this people except when they distanced themselves from God. »
Paul Bourget on France since 1789
Paul Bourget wrote:
" it's necessary to choose ; or else the people of 1789 were right and the whole ancient edifice must fall; or else they were wrong and it is their work that must be destroyed to restore France. »
Antigone, rebellious and intimate (4/7. Freedom)
Antigone did not come to life at dusk. Antigone is born with dawn. It is at daybreak that Antigone becomes anti , which means facing and not against . At the reflux of the army of Argos, Antigone emerges from the shadows where she could have resided all her life, not to solve the riddle of the sphinx like her father, not to solve the riddle of the stages of the life, but to fill the space between each of them. Oedipus tore off his skin, his nails, his knuckles. Dusk describes an uncertain state in the morning as well as in the evening. Antigone rises with the day, with the dawn, when freedom takes life, and therefore body.
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Bismarck against France and Catholicism
Bismarck wrote to the Comte d'Arnim on November 11, 1871:
We must desire the maintenance of the republic in France for one last reason which is major. Monarchical France was and will always be Catholic. His policy gave him great influence in Europe, in the East and even in the Far East. One way to thwart its influence for the benefit of ours is to lower Catholicism and the papacy which is its head. If we can achieve this goal, France is forever annihilated. The monarchy would hinder us in this attempt. The radical republic will help us. I am undertaking a war against the Catholic Church which will be long and perhaps terrible. I will be accused of persecution. But it is necessary to lower France and establish our religious and diplomatic supremacy as well as our military supremacy.
Turn idea into feeling
Max Jacob to a student:
Meditation is not about having ideas, on the contrary! it consists in having one, in transforming it into feeling, into conviction. A meditation is good when it leads to a YES, pronounced by the whole body, to a cry from the heart: joy or pain! by a tear or a burst of laughter. Just try to meditate on this: God became man. Repeat this within yourself until you come to conviction. It does not matter which images appear, image of Christ or child or young man or crucified. No matter. Repeat on your knees: God became man! For how long ? It depends on your faculties. There are good ten-minute meditations and bad ones that last an hour. In short, collect yourself twice a day at least.
I'm not talking to you about prayer, about contemplation, first because I don't understand much about it, then because I don't want to make you a mystic, but only a man.
Funerals
Funerals are used to point with diabolical precision a dart that comes to burst the abscess of pain to let it flow out gently and smooth like the infusion of a patient, it hydrates those who remain on the edge of the bank of the alive, it brings him the comfort of always being a little with the missing person, but at the same time, it reminds him of his absence… It is difficult not to revel in it and not to hate it at the same time. The loss changes the whole layout of the living because he sees the imprint of the dead everywhere, some rooms are adorned with flowers when they have never been... The dead imposes a prism on the living who sees him in places where the latter has never set foot. The mental image makes it possible to remember and to imagine and frantically intertwines the threads of one with the threads of the other in a mad saraband that intoxicates and hoarse until we are no longer able to differentiate what which is true of what we invent. Time does nothing, or rather knits this confusion. But do we still want to separate memory from imagination?
We don't mourn someone, it's mourning that shapes us, it's the loss of a loved one that shapes us.