"AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION:" CHURCHES AND A PARK

"ONE CAN DO ANYTHING WITH BAYONETS EXCEPT SIT DOWN ON THEM," SAYS NAPOLEON III 

So he promotes a faith that teaches the poor "useful resignation to the conditions of society" by...

-- Citation:  Adolphe Thiers in Valence, Thiers

•  Building churches:

Notre-Dame de la Gare in the poverty-stricken 13th (1847-59)

 

 Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle in the industrializing northeast (1858-61)

• Making public schools teach the catechism:

"New law on teaching: it's the teachers who get the cane."

The "Falloux law" (passed a year before Napoleon took power), was named after the arch-conservative Count de Falloux, who had led the opposition to the National Workshops.

• Promoting charity that condescends to recipients and honors sponsors:

Painting in an antique dealer's window

Society women have "their own" poor and give few alms after mass, so as not to compete for "clients."

-- Jean Renoir, My Father

"To be a good benefactress

Ladies, knit everything in the color of goose-droppings

so that at mass on Sundays

You can recognize your poor."

-- Song by Jacques Brel, Youtube
Written in 1960 to mock a mentality that had not changed
(Brel emphasizes the last words when he sings himself).

Results:

• Paris becomes a capital of neo-Gothic architecture.

• Visceral anti-clericalism, as shown by the cancan step "cathedral:"

Performance by Nadège Maruta, cancan historian and choreographer / photo Félix Sinpraseuth

The bloomers were pierced.

Other reasons for hostility

 

• Nuns' low prices for sewing reduce those of seamstresses.
• Registering babies born out of wedlock costs two days' pay (a fourth of working-class couples live in common-law unions). 

# # #

"The Socialist emperor"* does do something for the poor: He gives the poor a superb park in the working-class east.

(The Buttes-Chaumont, in 1867)

* Napoleon III had written The Extinction of Poverty and genuinely wished to help workers... without hampering employers.  

 Internet, source not said

Victor Locuratolo

Those palliatives do not change

working conditions and salaries:

Still trembling from June,

elites foresee another insurrection.

*     *     * 

            

Next,

Open the town to the army