Friday was Bastille Day…a couple of notes:

Rick Garnett offers thoughts and links at Mirror of Justice

A 2004 essay from Godspy on "Remembering the Vendee" (don’t know how to do accent marks – sorry) on the popular uprising against the Revolution and the massacre in response to it.

Matthew has two long posts, with vigorous discussions ensuing, at Holy Whapping:

The Church recognizes any type of government that recognizes fundamental human rights; this may be a monarchical one or it may be a republican one; both are of considerable antiquity and can be viewed through a Catholic lens. For that matter, a monarchy, if recognizing ancient legitimate rights of the people (e.g., "the rights of Englishmen" or the Italian communes) and mediatized by the primus inter pares of the feudal spirit, can be very "democratic." It can also be almost dictatorial. It is the feudal monarchies of the Middle Ages where the Church flourished, rather than the newfangled divine right rule that cropped up in the wake of the Reformation. It would be a fascinating study to see if there is any more than a casual link between English Erastianism and the fad for bureacratic centralization that swept Europe in the decades following the 30 Years War.

Conversely, a republic can be very aristocratic, in ways both good and bad (Venice), or even despotic or totalitarian, when the tyranny of the majority takes it out on certain groups of people or are propped up by a morally bankrupt ideology. A republic can even have a king, in the instance of the heroicly quixotic tragedy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Neither monarchy nor democracy guarantee pure unalloyed good. A state Church may guard public morality–or yoked to a government She cannot support, may only serve to give scandal. It is difficult to say, given that in many places where state Churches flourished, as in Spain, Rome groaned at the unconscionable liberties kings and emperors took in their appointment of bishops. Today, we are faced with the bleak wreckage of two experiments–the democratic indifference of an America without a state religion, or the sybaritic ignorance of Europe, where Catholicism was once a revered and often very healthy part of the political fabric. Choose your poison.

This isn’t to say that it has to be that way, in either case.