Legends and curiosities of history (part 2).

 

Prefecture of Arras, France. Photo: Pir6mon, 2011.
Lic. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

A wolf in sheep's clothes. 

By the year 1785, in Arras, a small city, to the north of France, lived a young and unknown lawyer. He was not a particularly appealing person. For sure, he only was another one, destined to become a bureaucrat... just one more, among many! In him, a bourgois air lived, elegantly dressed, with a powdered wig, so much in vogue between the wealthy people. But, at the same time, he was a passionate addict to the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. With his  controversial thoughts, this intellectual molded the ideas of many youngsters of the last third of the eighteenth century. His addiction was such, that even could be said that scratched in the unhealthy. The truth is, that those kind of readings, prepared the soil, for the remarkable events to come, not only in France, but in the rest of the western hemisphere. 

Joan of Arc, The Maid of Orléans

Joan of Arc ca. 1450-1500. Oil paint. National Archives, France {{PD-US}}

There has always been a marked trending to idealize the life of some personages. It often makes of them, true historic legends. For this reason, it becomes a difficult task, to analize their existence and deeds. Reality tends to confuse with fantasy! If we add to all this, a strong magical-religious component and how far away in time they are... any investigation about them, will always have the risk of a lack in objectivity and hence can lead to the wrong conclusions. There is no doubt, this is a major challenge to study the events and characters of the past.

The French and Indian War (part 1).

The Dragon Fountain, Versailles Palace. By Israel Silvestre
1676. Source: Library of the Congress, USA. {{PD-US}}

On a cold day of February, in the Year of the Lord of 1763, there was a meeting near to Paris, at the fancy halls of Versailles. A group of representatives had attended, to sign a treaty for a peace agreement, between the most powerful nations of those days. As outrageous as it may seem in the present, they were sharing out the territories of distant countries... as if were the spoils of war. They saw those lands as their properties, all the legal rights included. A few days later, they signed another treaty. Those agreements meant the end of a great confrontation, considered by many, as the First World War. It was the Seven Years War.