Louis Xvi Of France Quotes

Just as negative self-paradigms can put limitations on us, positive self-paradigms can bring out the best in us, as the following story about the son of King Louis XVI of France illustrates: King Louis had been taken from his throne and imprisoned. His young son, the prince, was taken by those who dethroned the king. They thought that inasmuch as the king’s son was heir to the throne, if they could destroy him morally, he would never realize the great and grand destiny that life had bestowed upon him. They took him to a community far away, and there they exposed the lad to every filthy and vile thing that life could offer. They exposed him to foods the richness of which would quickly make him a slave to appetite. They used vile language around him constantly. They exposed him to lewd and lusting women. They exposed him to dishonor and distrust. He was surrounded twenty-four hours a day by everything that could drag the soul of a man as low as one could slip. For over six months he had this treatment—but not once did the young lad buckle under pressure. Finally, after intensive temptation, they questioned him. Why had he not submitted himself to these things— why had he not partaken? These things would provide pleasure, satisfy his lusts, and were desirable; they were all his. The boy said, “I cannot do what you ask for I was born to be a king.

the boldest people afraid to speak of in a whisper, across the water there; for instance, the privilege of filling up blank forms for the consignment of any one to the oblivion of a prison for any length of time;[89] if his wife had implored the king, the queen, the court, the clergy, for any tidings of him, and all quite in vain;—then the history of your father would have been the history of this unfortunate gentleman, the Doctor of Beauvais." [89] the privilege of filling up blank forms: Mr. Lorry refers to a lettre de cachet, literally, "letter of the seal," meaning the king of France's personal seal. A lettre de cachet was an order, approved by the king, that could send anyone in France to prison without trial, for any reason, and for any length of time. They had often been abused in the 17th and early 18th centuries by aristocrats taking advantage of the king's favor to do away with an enemy or an inconvenience. Once a notorious symbol of arbitrary and absolute power in France, by Louis XVI's reign in the 1770s and 1780s they became much harder to acquire.

He was in love with France before he even reached Paris. Jefferson’s work in Europe offered him a new battlefield in the war for American union and national authority that he had begun in the Congress. His sojourn in France is often seen as a revolutionary swoon during which he fell too hard for the foes of monarchy, growing overly attached to—and unhealthily admiring of—the French Revolution and its excesses. Some of his most enduring radical quotations, usually considered on their own with less appreciation of the larger context of Jefferson’s decades-long political, diplomatic, and philosophical careers, date from this era. His relationship to France and to the French, however, should be seen for what it was: a political undertaking in which Jefferson put the interests of America first. He was determined to create a balance of global power in which France would help the United States resist commercial and possible military threats from the British.5 From the ancien régime of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette to the French Revolution to the Age of Napoleon, Jefferson viewed France in the context of how it could help America on the world stage.6 Much of Jefferson’s energy was spent striving to create international respect for the United States and to negotiate commercial treaties to build and expand American commerce and wealth. His mind wandered and roamed and soared, but in his main work—the advancement of America’s security and economic interests—he was focused and clear-headed. Countries earned respect by appearing strong and unified. Jefferson wanted America to be respected. He, therefore, took care to project strength and a sense of unity. The cause of national power required it, and he was as devoted to the marshaling of American power in Paris as he had been in Annapolis. E

The two branches of Freemasonry—the Templars and the Rosicrucians (Sionists)—were to play a major part in the American and French revolutions. In the end, the Priory of Sion would prove itself dominant over the Templars. They seemed to be better entrenched in the European power matrix as well as being better funded. The Templars—Sion’s partners-in-crime, so to speak—were behind the American Revolution and with regard to the French Revolution, both the Templar and Rosicrucian factions combined forces to avenge the death, four centuries earlier, of Jacques de Molay the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, who was burned at the stake by Philip IV of France in 1314. The French Bourbons were related to Philip so Louis XVI’s beheading, in 1792, was meant as penance for de Molay’s death. Chapter 10 - Sion's Army.

there was a dramatic coup d’état against the moderate Girondins at the National Convention. Twenty-nine leading Girondists were arrested on June 2 and many were subsequently guillotined.

In a recent Gallup poll conducted in France while riding a horse, two out of three sweaty Frenchman (there were only three people surveyed) stated that my armpits are the greatest thing since Louis XVI. Personally, I don't think they are that great. And I’m not just attempting to be humble when I say that I think it's a more reasonable assertion to compare my armpits as equal or greater than anything in the historical timeline since Louis XVII. But, if the people deem my armpits that important, who am I to argue?

I would have praised you more if you had praised me less.

On January 21, 1793, more grisly events forced a reappraisal of the notion that the French Revolution was a romantic Gallic variant of the American Revolution. Louis XVI—who had aided the American Revolution and whose birthday had long been celebrated by American patriots—was guillotined for plotting against the Revolution. The death of Louis Capet—he had lost his royal title—was drenched in gore: schoolboys cheered, threw their hats aloft, and licked the king’s blood, while one executioner did a thriving business selling snippets of royal hair and clothing. The king’s decapitated head was wedged between his lifeless legs, then stowed in a basket. The remains were buried in an unvarnished box. England reeled from the news, William Pitt the Younger branding it “the foulest and most atrocious act the world has ever seen.” On February 1, France declared war against England, Holland, and Spain, and soon the whole continent was engulfed in fighting, ushering in more than twenty years of combat.

HIS MOST CHRISTIAN MAJESTY, Louis XVI, king of France and Navarre,

On 28 March, the ‘Paris Commune’ was officially declared, ‘in the name of the people,’ in a benign spectacle staged outside the Hôtel de Ville, with red flags flapping in the wind and red sashes worn with pride. That the representatives of the city, whose election had restored to Paris after a long absence the same administrative rights enjoyed by ‘communes’ of villages, towns and cities throughout France, should have chosen to adopt a similar corporate appellation was unsurprising. An already nervous bourgeoisie, however, would have received the news with profound unease, for it had been ‘the Commune’ of Paris that had deposed Louis XVI in 1792, and that had wielded substantial power behind the scenes throughout the Terror, growing every more monstrous in its whims. Nevertheless, for many the ceremony was to be cherished as a rare cause for jubilation.

The Legislative Assembly’s decision in April 1792 to declare war on Austria did even more than religious conflict to radicalize the Revolution. The combination of foreign war and internal conflict turned France into the world’s first police state, committed to the surveillance and repression of all opposition. Pressure for its creation came less from revolutionary leaders than from popular hysteria in Paris, whipped up by conspiracy theories of a secret alliance between enemies abroad and counter-revolutionary traitors at home. Many believed that Louis XVI and the Austrian-born Marie-Antoinette were part of an aristocratic plot to join forces with the invading Austrian army and its Prussian allies

French Rev·o·lu·tion   the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy in France (1789-99). The French Revolution began with the meeting of the legislative assembly (the States General) in May 1789 when the French government was already in crisis; the Bastille was stormed in July of the same year. The revolution became steadily more radical and ruthless with power increasingly in the hands of the Jacobins and Robespierre; Louis XVI's execution in January 1793 was followed by Robespierre's Reign of Terror. The revolution failed to produce a stable form of republican government, and after several different forms of administration, the last, the Directory, was overthrown by Napoleon in 1799.

None of this internecine combat affected the future of Catholicism quite so much as the dramatic, often horrifying events in France. In August 1792 a decree by the new French Legislative Assembly ordered all priests who refused the revolutionary oath to be expelled from the country. The King, Louis XVI, was put to death in January 1793 and in February France declared war on England.

A Lodge inaugurated under the auspices of Rousseau, the fanatic of Geneva, became the center of the revolutionary movement in France, and a Prince of the blood-royal went thither to swear the destruction of the successors of Philippe le Bel on the tomb of Jacques de Molai. The registers of the Order of Templars attest that the Regent, the Duc d'Orleans, was Grand Master of that formidable Secret Society, and that his successors were the Duc de Maine, the Prince of Bourbon-Conde, and the Duc de Cosse-Briassac. The Templars comprotmitted the King; they saved him from the rage of the People, to exasperate that rage and bring on the catastrophe prepared for centuries; it was a scaffold that the vengeance of the Templars demanded. The secret movers of the French Revolution had sworn to overturn the Throne and the Altar upon the Tomb of Jacques de Molai. When Louis XVI. was executed, half the work was done; and thenceforward the Army of the Temple was to direct all its efforts against the Pope.

Neither Louis nor Marie Antoinette was at ease with the truly important people of their day. When Voltaire, after an exile of twenty-seven years, was allowed to return to France by Louis XVI's order, Marie Antoinette never received him. True, he had too often made France and the French the butt of his satire, and he had chosen freely to live in the court of Frederick the Great. But those near Marie Antoinette believed that her reason for not receiving him was not political. She just didn't know what to say to a man of such giant intellect. When the Grand Duke and Duchess of Russia came to pay a visit, Marie Antoinette was so confused that she left their presence abruptly and went to her room. "It is even harder to face other rulers," she whispered to her lady-in-waiting, "than to face courtiers!" Although Benjamin Franklin was living in Paris through much of their reign, the Queen never chose to see him. She was particularly uneasy with brilliant women. During the eighteenth century women in France were more powerful than in any other time in history. Their influence in worldly affairs was greater than ever before or since. In their salons the finest minds gathered, and there conversation became an art cultivated for its own sake. But Marie Antoinette avoided contact with these intellectuals. She could never in the world have taken part in their conversations. She had never been educated. She had scarcely even read a book, and she knew only too well what such a handicap meant.

Louis XVI--Louis Capet--was led to the guillotine in the Place de la Revolution by Santerre, the brewer. Louis stepped firmly and resolutely up the steps of the scaffold. "Frenchmen," he said, "I die innocent of the crimes which are imputed to me; I forgive the authors of my death, and I pray that my blood may not fall upon France." He was still speaking when Santerre ordered the drums, and their rolling drowned out his voice.

The structure of de Prony’s computing office cannot be easily seen in Smith’s example. His computing staff had two distinct classes of workers. The larger of these was a staff of nearly ninety computers. These workers were quite different from Smith’s pin makers or even from the computers at the British Nautical Almanac and the Connaissance des Temps. Many of de Prony’s computers were former servants or wig dressers, who had lost their jobs when the Revolution rendered the elegant styles of Louis XVI unfashionable or even treasonous.35 They were not trained in mathematics and held no special interest in science. De Prony reported that most of them “had no knowledge of arithmetic beyond the two first rules [of addition and subtraction].”36 They were little different from manual workers and could not discern whether they were computing trigonometric functions, logarithms, or the orbit of Halley’s comet. One labor historian has described them as intellectual machines, “grasping and releasing a single piece of ‘data’ over and over again.”37 The second class of workers prepared instructions for the computation and oversaw the actual calculations. De Prony had no special title for this group of workers, but subsequent computing organizations came to use the term “planning committee” or merely “planners,” as they were the ones who actually planned the calculations. There were eight planners in de Prony’s organization. Most of them were experienced computers who had worked for either the Bureau du Cadastre or the Paris Observatory. A few had made interesting contributions to mathematical theory, but the majority had dealt only with the problems of practical mathematics.38 They took the basic equations for the trigonometric functions and reduced them to the fundamental operations of addition and subtraction. From this reduction, they prepared worksheets for the computers. Unlike Nevil Maskelyne’s worksheets, which gave general equations to the computers, these sheets identified every operation of the calculation and left nothing for the workers to interpret. Each step of the calculation was followed by a blank space for the computers to fill with a number. Each table required hundreds of these sheets, all identical except for a single unique starting value at the top of the page. Once the computers had completed their sheets, they returned their results to the planners. The planners assembled the tables and checked the final values. The task of checking the results was a substantial burden in itself. The group did not double-compute, as that would have obviously doubled the workload. Instead the planners checked the final values by taking differences between adjacent values in order to identify miscalculated numbers. This procedure, known as “differencing,” was an important innovation for human computers. As one observer noted, differencing removed the “necessity of repeating, or even of examining, the whole of the work done by the [computing] section.”39 The entire operation was overseen by a handful of accomplished scientists, who “had little or nothing to do with the actual numerical work.” This group included some of France’s most accomplished mathematicians, such as Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752–1833) and Lazare-Nicolas-Marguerite Carnot (1753–1823).40 These scientists researched the appropriate formulas for the calculations and identified potential problems. Each formula was an approximation, as no trigonometric function can be written as an exact combination of additions and subtractions. The mathematicians analyzed the quality of the approximations and verified that all the formulas produced values adequately close to the true values of the trigonometric functions.