LÃ©on Gautier
Excerpt from book: CHAPTER 3. THE CODE OF CHIVALRYâ€”THE 4TH, 5TH & 6TH COMMANDMENTS. "Thou shalt love the country in which thou wast horn." It ia not surely in this dogmatic form that our old poets promulgated the noble precept to the ears & to the hearts of their popular auditory. They were bettor inspired, & have put on their pages Frenchmen who loved France! France beloved eight hundred years ago! That is a fact which astonishes some minds now-a-days, & nine Frenchmen out of ten, in fact, persuade themselves that their France has only been beloved a hundred years. We remember having read a certain "Speech" delivered at a distribution of prizes countenanced by the Directory, in which we find word for word this candid paradoxâ€”"Dear children, you have only had a country during the last five or six years I" If we may believe the defenders of this naive system, there was in France, before 1789, neither government, unity nor industry; art, intelligence, nor life! Before the 14th of July, which is the exact date of the birth of France, nothing existed! since then, everything! We are the only nation in the whole world which thus despises its past, & takes a real pleasure in dating itself only from yesterday. Our powerful neighbours, the Germans & the English, persist in tracing their origins as far back as possible, & love them with ardent affection. Those are traditional nations, & possess in their traditions the best elements of their unity, & their strength. Nevertheless they are very far from possessing. annals at all comparable to onr history, & no country ever deserved to be loved so greatly as does ours! This is contrary to M. Re'nan, who has protested agninst such a system in one of his later speeches at the French Academy
History,Cultural,France
Chivalry