Have you heard of the writer Chateaubriand?

[Julie4]

I consider him to be the greatest French writer. But it seems that he is one of the least known French writers lol.

He was a diplomat, and met many personalities of his time. If you haven't had a chance to read his major work, read it, it's called Memory from beyond the grave

"The room where my mother gave birth overlooks a deserted part of the city walls, and through the windows of this room, one can see a sea that stretches as far as the eye can see, breaking against the reefs. I was almost dead when I came into the world. The roaring of the waves, stirred up by a squall announcing the autumn equinox, prevented my cries from being heard: these details have often been recounted to me; their sadness has never faded from my memory. There is not a day when, dreaming of what I have been, I do not see in thought the rock on which I was born, the room where my mother inflicted life upon me, the storm whose noise lulled my first sleep, the unfortunate brother who gave me a name that I have almost always carried in misfortune. Heaven seemed to gather these various circumstances to place in my cradle an image of my destinies."

"One of the first pleasures I tasted was to struggle against the storms, to frolic with the waves that retreated before me, or chased after me on the shore. Another amusement was to build, with the sand of the beach, monuments that my companions called ovens. Since that time, I have often seen castles built for eternity crumble faster than my sand palaces."

[RavVid]

I hadn't but the excerpt is interesting and somehow familiar as though I had read it before.

[Julie4]

"For those who set themselves this goal of rigorous, absolute equality, the most consistent conclude that to establish and maintain it, they must resort to force, to despotism, to dictatorship, in one form or another.

Proponents of absolute equality are first compelled to attack natural inequalities, to mitigate them, to destroy them if possible. Unable to affect the primary conditions of organization and development, their work begins the moment a man is born, the moment a child emerges from its mother's womb. The State then takes over: it becomes the absolute master of the spiritual being as well as the organic being. Intelligence and consciousness, everything depends on it, everything is subjected to it. No more family, no more paternity, no more marriage from then on; a male, a female, offspring that the State manipulates, doing with them what it wants, morally, physically, a universal servitude so profound that nothing escapes it, that it penetrates to the very soul.

[Julie4]

As for material things, equality cannot be established in any way durable by mere division. If it concerns the land alone, one can conceive that it might be divided into as many portions as there are individuals; but as the number of individuals varies perpetually, this primitive division would also have to be changed perpetually. With individual property abolished, the only rightful possessor is the State. This mode of possession, if voluntary, is that of the monk bound by his vows to poverty as well as obedience; if not voluntary, it is that of the slave, where nothing modifies the rigor of his condition. All the bonds of humanity, sympathetic relations, mutual devotion, the exchange of services, the free gift of oneself, everything that makes life charming and grand, all, all has disappeared, disappeared without return.

The means proposed so far to solve the problem of the people's future lead to the negation of all the indispensable conditions of existence, destroy, either directly or implicitly, duty, right, family, and would produce, if they could be applied to society, instead of the freedom in which all real progress is summed up, a servitude to which history, however far back one goes in the past, offers nothing comparable."

Chateaubriand

[RavVid]

Chillingly so we find ourselves today. Was he thinking of the French Revolution? I see marxist feminism in what he wrote but he died in the year of the Communist Manifesto.

[DrPepper12]

I know Marat, Lafayette and Richeleu but not him. Sorry!

[Julie4]

Then you'll have to read his work lol

[Staximus]

Never heard of him. He sure sounds like a Debbie Downer, though haha

[purplepoppy]

I thought that was a cut of meat l.

[eagle1951]

no I have Not