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Dinesh club

Posted: 24 Jun 2020

Taken: 25 Feb 2020

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THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE

THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu1LmTgql5o

buonacoppi, have particularly liked this photo

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
One summer in the early 1740s, on the last day of his life, a young man from Paris became the first modern cartographer to see the mountain called ‘Le Gerbier de Jone.’ This weird volcanic cone juts out of an empty landscape of pastures and ravines, blasted by the freezing wind called the ‘burle.’ Three hundred and fifty miles south of Paris, at a point on the map diametrically opposed to the capital, it stands on the watershed that divides the Atlantic from the Mediterranean. On its western slope, at a wooden trough where animals once came to drink, the river Loire begins its six hundred and forty mile journey, flowing north then west in a wild are through the mudflats of Toraine to the borders of Brittany and the Atlantic Ocean. Thirty miles to the east, the busy river Rhone carried passengers and cargo down to the Mediterranean ports, but it would have taken more than three days to reach it across a sparsely populated chaos of ancient lava-flows and gorges. ~ Page 3

The traveler in question (his name has not survived) belonged to an expedition that was to lay the groundwork for the first complete and reliable map of France. A team of young geometers had been assembled by the astronomer Jacques Cassini, instructed in the new instruments. Cassini’s father had studied the rings of Saturn and measured the size of the solar system. His map of the Moon was more precise than many maps of France, which still contained several uncharged regions. Now, for the first time, France would be revealed in all its detail as if from a greater height above the earth. ~Page 4
4 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
There are important reasons for paying particular attention to France. Not only was France the birthplace of the Enlightenment on the European continent, and so the first country to generate a self-conscious Counter-Enlightenment response, but it also enjoyed unsurpassed intellectual prestige within the wider Catholic world. Religious apologists, theologians, and devout readers throughout Europe and the New World looked to French religious writers for guidance and leadership, in the same way the intellectuals abroad looked to ‘philosophes’ in Paris, the capital of the ‘siecle des lumieres.’ In hindsight, we are not apt to think of the eighteenth century -- and particularly the French eighteenth century -- as a time or place noteworthy for its religious prowess. But although the century produced no Bossuet or Bonaventure -- a fact of which contemporaries themselves wee acutely conscious -- it did produce a startling volume of work across a wide range of genres and styles, whose poverty has been overstated. Given the international currency of the French language, the venerable authority of French religious writing, and the international channels of exchange provided by the Holy Roman Church, France’s reaction to the Enlightenment spread well beyond its borders. ~ Page 10 EXCERPT ~ ENEMIES OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT ~ AUTHOR DARRIN McMOHON
2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.

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