Happy Bastille Day to my fellow Francophiles -- but remember the Vendee, and Edmund Burke. Still, right-spirited conservatives celebrate today not the French Revolution, but France herself. I find it impossible to improve upon this:
Le quatorze juillet -- vive la France!
Monday July 14, 2008
Categories: Varia
Filed Under: France
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Vive la Contre-Revolution!
I wasn't much of a Francophile until I began watching the Tour de France (on the Versus channel) this year.
They traveled through (or near) Lourdes today and the view from the helicopters was beautiful. In fact you can fall in love with the countryside and the towns from the road or the air.
So many towns with such gorgeous architecture. My wife and I are talking about going to France as spectators (an impossibility for me just a couple years ago).
I love that moment in Casablanca. The French have one of the best national anthems. I think they are the only anthem that serves at a motif of the country as well. When you hear that opening musical movement, even quietly played by an orchestra, you know France is being referenced and you can start looking for something French. (Face it, The Star Spangled Banner isn't used as a motif to signify America - other songs are. America the Beautiful is one that would work, although I'm not sure if it has been used.)
Yesterday's recessional at Notre Dame des Victoires in San Francisco following the weekly French language Mass was the two anthemns--Star Spangled Banner and then the Marseillaise. Stunning how that latter song composed and sung as priests and nuns and bishops and devout Catholics went to the guillotine rings gloriously to the rafters of this national French church in San Francisco dating to the Gold Rush. As a German American Catholic whose local national church building is filled now by Catholics of other ethnicities, I glady sing the Marseillaise with my compatriots of Charlemagne's empire. Viva la France!
Thanks for posting this! I haven't seen "Casablanca" in a long, long time, and this scene was just so inspiring. I really enjoyed it!
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