If one wishes to see where the increasingly tyrannical agenda of WOKE policies is heading, all that’s needed is a review of the Catholic church’s policies in France during the Middle Ages.
A brief review of some of WOKE’s modern achievements: lawfare against a candidate for president of the United States; taking minor children from their home without their parents’ knowledge or consent in order to provide “gender affirming surgery;” adults losing their jobs because they refuse to abide by the WOKE policies in the work place, people prevented from obtaining employment because they are not stereotypical WOKE applicants, service members being involuntarily separated from active duty or denied promotion for refusing the be brainwashed into the WOKE ideology, school children being indoctrinated without their parents’ knowledge or consent … and the list goes on. (see: Standing Up to Goliath by Rebecca Friedrichs; www.ForKidsandCountry.org
During the Middle Ages, Catholic Spain was considered a satellite to France due to royal relationships. The Spanish Inquisition lasted 356 years (1478-1834) and over 150,000 Protestants, Jews and Muslims were “prosecuted.”
Unlike most vehemently anti-Christian French philosophes of the 18th century, Voltaire was a deist. He was particularly incensed at two cases brought on by the Catholic church to the King’s Council: the convictions of Jean Calas and Jean Paul Sirven.
This is where the WOKE movement is headed if left unchecked:
“Calas was a dealer in linen who kept a store on the main street of Toulouse, where he had lived for forty years. For thirty years they had kept a Catholic, Jeanne Vigniere, as governess of their children, even after she had converted one son, Louis to Catholicism. Their oldest son, Marc Antoine, had studied law but when he was prepared to practice he found the profession closed to all but Catholics. He tried to conceal his Protestantism and to secure a certificate of Catholicism; his deceit was discovered, and he faced a choice of abandoning Protestantism or letting years of law study go to waste. He took to brooding, gambling, and drink. He liked to declaim Hamlet’s soliloquy on suicide.
On October 13, 1761, the Calas family gathered in their rooms over the store. After dinner, Marc Antoine went down into the shop. Wondering why he did not return, brother Pierre and a friend descended and found him hanging from a bar that he had placed between two door posts. A doctor pronounced him dead. The father knew that the law then in force required that a suicide be drawn naked through the streets, be pelted by the populace with mud and stones, and then be hanged, and all his property was to be forfeited to the state. The father convinced the rest of the family to report his death as due to natural causes. Meanwhile, the cries of Pierre had brought a crowd outside the shop. An officer arrived, heard the story saw the rope and the mark it had left on the dead man’s neck, and ordered the entire family and the friend locked up in the Hotel de Ville – a sort of minimum security jail. They were locked in separate cells and interrogated. All abandoned the claim of natural death and testified to suicide. The Chief of Police refused to believe them and charged them with murdering Marc Antoine to prevent him becoming a convert to Catholicism. A frenzy of revenge closed the minds of the people.
On November 10, 1761, the municipal court pronounced Jean Calais, his wife, and Pierre guilty, and sentenced them to be hanged; it condemned Lavaysse, the dinner guest, to the galleys, and Jeanne Vigniere to five years imprisonment. The Catholic governess had testified to the innocence of her Protestant employers. The decision was appealed to the Parlement of Toulouse. All the hostile evidence was hearsay. The final decision condemned only the father. No one could explain how a sixty-four year old man, unaided, could have overcome and strangled his mature son. The court ordered Calas tortured in order to obtain a confession. His arms and legs were stretched until they were pulled from their sockets. He repeatedly affirmed his son had committed suicide. Fifteen pints of water were poured down his throat without a confession; fifteen more pints were forced into him swelling his body to twice its normal size; he still maintained his innocence. Then he was taken to a public square before the cathedral; laid upon a cross; an executioner, with eleven blows of an iron bar, broke each of his limbs in two places; the old man, calling upon Jesus Christ, proclaimed his innocence. After two hours of agony, he was strangled. The corpse was bound to a stake and burned (March 10, 1762).
The other prisoners were freed but the property of Calas was confiscated. Voltaire investigated the case and published his epochal Traite’ sur la tolerance (Treatise on Tolerance). He argued that Roman persecution of Christians was immeasurably surpassed by Christian persecution of heretics, who were “hanged, drowned, broken on the wheel, or burned to death for the love of God. He defended the Reformation as a justified revolt against the sale of indulgences by a papacy lately disgraced through the amours of Pope Alexander VI and the murders perpetuated by the Pope’s son Caesar Borgia. He expressed shock at reading a recent attempt to justify the Massacre of St. Bartholemew – very much like the Palestinean apologists of today. He admitted Protestants too had been just as intolerant.
We do not know what share Voltaire’s treatise had in leading to the Edict of Toleration issued by Louis VVI in 1787. In any case, the King’s Council, on March 9, 1765, declared the condemnation of Jean Calas annulled, and pronounced him innocent (posthumously). The King’s prosecutor obtained a grant of thirty thousand livres as compensation to the widow and her children. When Voltaire heard this, he wept with joy.
Meanwhile, March 19,1764, a municipal court at Mazamet, in south-central France, ordered Pierre Paul Sirven and his wife hanged on the charge of murdering their daughter Elisabeth to prevent her from conversion to Catholicism. The judgment decreed that the two surviving daughters must witness the execution of their parents. The ceremony had to be performed in effigy as the family had fled to Geneva, a safe haven for Protestants.
On March 6, 1760, the youngest daughter, Elisabeth disappeared. The parents sought for her in vain. The bishop of Castres summoned them and informed them he had sent the girl to a convent after she had confided to him her desire to become a Catholic. French (Catholic) law, allowed Catholic authorities to remove from the parents, if necessary by force, any child above the age of seven who asked for conversion. In the convent, Elisabeth had delusions, spoke to angels, tore the clothes from her body, and begged to be flogged. The nuns, at a loss for ways to handle her, notified the bishop, who ordered her returned to her parents.
In December 1761, Elisabeth left home and did not return. On January 3 her corpse was found in a well. Of forty-five witnesses called before the local court, all without exception expressed the opinion that the girl had committed suicide or had fallen into the well by accident. The local prosecutor sent notice of the case to the prosecutor general in Toulouse [perhaps a Soros-financed district attorney?] who instructed him to proceed on the assumption that Sirven was guilty. This seemed improbable, for Sirven had been out of town on the night of Elisabeth’s disappearance. His wife was old and weak. One of the daughters was pregnant. It was hardly likely that these women could have pushed the girl into a well without a cry being heard. But on January 20 Trinquier ordered Sirven’s arrest.
Sirven knew that two months previously the same court had condemned Jean Calas on a similar charge and just as dubious evidence. Having no confidence in the courts, he led his wife and daughters, in midwinter, across France and over the Cevennes Mountains to Geneva. Voltaire contributed to the support of the family whose property had also been confiscated. When the authorities dragged their feet in responding to the request for the Calas documents, Voltaire began his attack campaigning throughout Europe for support. Kings of Prussia, Russia, Poland and Denmark sent funds. The court refused Voltaire’s request for a copy of the trial record.
The case went on for nine years. In 1771, the Parlement of Toulouse reversed the verdict of the lower court, pronounced the Sirvens innocent, and restored their property. ‘It took two hours to condemn this man to death, and nine years to render justice to his innocence.’ (Ariel and Will Durant’s Story of Civilization, Vol. IX, pages 730-732)
Current examples continue to accrue against U.S. citizens exercising their civil rights. One shouldn’t assume such things cannot happen here. They said the same thing in 1931 Germany.
