by Roberto de Mattei
 |
| Marie-Antoinette being taken to her Execution (1793), by William Hamilton (1794) |
Among the many symbolic events of our time, the grotesque spectacle that opened the Paris Olympics on July 26, 2024, cannot simply be dismissed as a show of bad taste or a cultural provocation. It is the latest act of war against Christian Civilization that had one of its historical peaks in the French Revolution.
At the center of the controversy over the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games was a choreography in which French DJ Barbara Butch, known for calling herself “fat, lesbian, queer, Jewish, and proud to be so,” led the stage wearing a crown in the shape of a halo, surrounded by drag queens, transgender model Raya Martigny, and dozens of gender-uncertain dancers, while singer Philippe Katerine burst in almost naked and painted blue and in the guise of Dionysus.
The performance seemed to many to be a blasphemous parody of the Last Supper and sparked outrage and protests from Catholics around the world. The creator of the tableau vivant, Thomas Jolly, who is also an openly “queer” character, claimed to have drawn inspiration not from Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting, but from an unknown seventeenth-century artist, Jan Harmensz van Bijlert, author of a painting, Le Festin des dieux, which depicts a banquet of the gods on Olympus.
Whatever the inspiration, the initiative cannot be traced back to a wacky art director, but expresses a message commissioned from him by the highest French authorities, starting with the head of state. President Emmanuel Macron is the one who, last March 4, declared himself proud that France was the first country in the world to include abortion in its constitutional charter, calling this act a universal message. Macron himself, in his arrogance, unscathed by the recent electoral debacle, wanted to propose to the world a new message of anti-Christian “inclusiveness.” Dionysus is the “hybrid” god of pagan orgies, unbridled sensuality, and the blinding of reason, and the stated intention of the organizers was to replace the sublime mystery of Christianity with the Dionysian bacchanal.
The hatred of Christianity has always needed symbolic depictions, and the French Revolution was fed from the beginning with pagan mythology. There is an obvious continuity between the blasphemous parody of the Last Supper on July 26 and the enthronement of the Goddess Reason on August 10, 1793, in Paris in the guise of the Egyptian goddess Isis.
In this respect, there is also something sacrilegious about the gratuitous and shameful outrage against Queen Marie Antoinette, depicted in the Paris performance on July 26, holding her guillotined head in her hands while singing the revolutionary hymn Ça ira. Macron and his collaborators wanted to vindicate the French Revolution in what is most abject about it: the killing of the Queen of France, an innocent victim, like King Louis XVI, of revolutionary hatred, which in the French sovereigns wanted to strike at the principle of Christ's Social Kingship.
Marie Antoinette, the most slandered, but also most beloved and even revered queen in history, was guilty of no crime other than embodying an aristocratic grace incompatible with revolutionary egalitarianism. Much has been written about her alleged frivolity and little about her piety. Yet the sovereign's religious spirit, which emerges in the last days of her imprisonment, is rooted in an upbringing and worldview antithetical to the revolutionary one. The mock trial before the Jacobin Tribunal on October 14 and 16, 1793, saw her the victim of infamous charges. An image by English painter William Hamilton depicts her in an immaculate white dress as she exits the Conciergerie, surrounded by the “tricoteuses,” who demand new blood from the Revolution. Henry Sanson, son of the executioner of Paris, recounts in his Memoirs that she ascended the steps of the guillotine with surprising majesty, as if they had been those of the grand staircase of Versailles. The same words with which Pope Pius VI, in his allocution Quare lacrymae of June 17, 1793, called Louis XVI a martyr can be applied to Queen Marie Antoinette. In this allocution, Pius VI, exclaimed,
“O France, O France! Called by Our predecessors 'mirror of all Christendom and sure pillar of the Faith,' thou who in the fervor of the Christian Faith and in devotion to the Apostolic See never followed the other nations, but always preceded them! How far you are from Us today, with such a hostile mind toward the true Religion: you have become the most implacable enemy among all the adversaries of the Faith that have ever existed!”
The killing of the two monarchs is the founding act of the French Republic, and the constitutionalization of abortion represents a symbolic continuity in state murder. However, those who would identify France with the blasphemous show that opened the Olympic Games would be wrong. France is not Guillotine Square, but Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle; France is not Robespierre or Macron, but it is Saint Louis and Saint Joan of Arc. So it would be wrong for those who would identify the spectacle of degeneration that Paris offers these months with the Western civilization to which France has given so much. The West is the story of a religious faith, a way of life, an art, a literature, music, and also of great battles in defense of civilization.
The external enemies of the West, who are the heirs of Muhammad in the Arab world and those of Lenin in Russia and China, do not hate the decadence of the West, but the West as such: that West that defeated Islam at Lepanto and Vienna and stopped communism in Warsaw in 1920 and in Spain in the 1930s.
The enemies of the West seek their revenge. For this to happen, for them to succeed in winning the war, they know that the West must cease to be Christian, must return to the ideas and customs of paganism, to fall like a ripe apple, as happened to the Roman Empire. The barbarians did not hate the decadence of Rome, but the power that had subjugated them for centuries.
The invasion of the Eternal City by Alaric's Goths on the night of August 24, 410, was their triumph. St. Jerome in Bethlehem, and St. Augustine in Hippo shed deep tears over this symbolic event. Who weeps today over the threats of the new barbarians to the West? More importantly, who is willing to defend the West in the name of the principles and institutions that made it great in history? Yet the strength of these values, which stems from the Truth of Christ, is indestructible. The future of the world is not under the banner of Dionysius, nor under that of communism or Islam, but under that of the one victorious God, who is Jesus Christ. Faith and reason attest to this.
How and when will it happen? To God, all things are possible in history. Only those who believe in blind historical determinism think that “history is not made with what-ifs.” History is made with what-ifs precisely because of the wealth of possibilities that each present moment contains. That is why our examination of conscience is based on the failures we have committed, but which we did not have to commit. History too, like our lives, could have gone otherwise and may go, from one moment to the next, in a different way. What would have happened if on July 14, 1789, the dragoons of the Prince of Lambesc, contravening the order not to shed blood given to them by Louis XVI, had wiped out the revolutionary rogues marching to the Bastille? The anti-Christian Revolution had no illusions. The dragoons of the Prince of Lambesc are always, sword in hand, around the corner of history.
