Rosary
The Holy Rosary known as the Dominican Rosary, refers to a form of prayer used in the Catholic Church and to the string of knots or beads used to count the component prayers. When used for the prayer, the word is capitalized, as is customary for other names of prayers, such as "the Lord's Prayer", "the Hail Mary"; the prayers that comprise the Rosary are arranged in sets of ten Hail Marys, called decades. Each decade is followed by one Glory Be. During recitation of each set, thought is given to one of the Mysteries of the Rosary, which recall events in the lives of Jesus and Mary. Five decades are recited per rosary. Other prayers are sometimes added after each decade. Rosary beads are an aid towards saying these prayers in the proper sequence. A standard 15 Mysteries of the Rosary, based on the long-standing custom, was established by Pope Pius V during the 16th century, grouping the mysteries in three sets: the Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, the Glorious Mysteries. During 2002 Pope John Paul II said that it is fitting that a new set of five be added, termed the Luminous Mysteries, bringing the total number of mysteries to 20.
The Glorious mysteries are said on Sunday and Wednesday, the Joyful on Monday and Saturday, the Sorrowful on Tuesday and Friday, the Luminous Mysteries are said on Thursday. Five decades are recited in a session. For more than four centuries, the rosary has been promoted by several popes as part of the veneration of Mary in Roman Catholicism, consisting in meditation on the life of Christ; the rosary represents the Roman Catholic emphasis on "participation in the life of Mary, whose focus was Christ", the Mariological theme "to Christ through Mary." During the 16th century, Pope Pius V associated the rosary with the General Roman Calendar by instituting the Feast of Our Lady of Victory, celebrated on 7 October. Pope Leo XIII, known as "The Rosary Pope," issued twelve encyclicals and five apostolic letters concerning the rosary and added the invocation Queen of the most Holy Rosary to the Litany of Loreto. Pope Pius XII and his successors promoted veneration of the Virgin in Lourdes and Fatima, credited with a new resurgence of the rosary within the Catholic Church.
Pope John XXIII deemed the rosary of such importance that on April 28, 1962, in an apostolic letter he appealed for the recitation of the Rosary in preparation for the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council. Pope John Paul II issued the Apostolic Letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae which emphasized the Christocentric nature of the Rosary as a meditation on the life of Christ, he said: “Through the Rosary the faithful receive abundant grace, as by the hands of the Mother of the Redeemer." On 3 May 2008, Pope Benedict XVI stated that the Rosary was experiencing a new springtime: "It is one of the most eloquent signs of love that the young generation nourish for Jesus and his Mother." To Benedict XVI, the rosary is a meditation on all the important moments of salvation history. The Congregation for Divine Worship's directory of popular piety and the liturgy emphasizes the Christian meditation/meditative aspects of the rosary, states that the Rosary is a contemplative prayer which requires "tranquility of rhythm or a mental lingering which encourages the faithful to meditate on the mysteries of the Lord's life."
The Congregation for Divine Worship points out the role the Rosary can have as a formative component of spiritual life. The theologian Romano Guardini described the Roman Catholic emphasis on the rosary as "participation in the life of Mary, whose focus was Christ." This opinion was expressed earlier by Leo XIII who considered the rosary as way to accompany Mary in her contemplation of Christ. Devotion to the rosary is one of the most notable features of popular Catholic spirituality. Pope John Paul II placed the rosary at the center of Christian spirituality and called it "among the finest and most praiseworthy traditions of Christian contemplation."Catholics believe the Rosary is a remedy against severe trials and the hardships of life, that the Rosary is one of the great weapons given to believers in their battle against every evil. Saints and popes have emphasized the meditative and contemplative elements of the rosary and provided specific teachings for how the rosary should be prayed, for instance the need for "focus, respect and purity of intention" during rosary recitations and contemplations.
From the sixteenth century onwards, rosary recitations involved "picture texts" that assisted meditation. Such imagery continues to be used to depict the mysteries of the rosary. Catholic saints have stressed the importance of contemplation. Scriptural meditations concerning the rosary are based on the Christian tradition of Lectio Divina, as a way of using the Gospel to start a conversation between the person and Christ. Padre Pio, a rosary devotee, said: "Through the study of books one seeks God; the reported messages from these apparitions have influenced the spread of rosary devotion worldwide. In Quamquam pluries Pope Leo XIII related rosary devotions to Saint Joseph and granted indulgences for adding a prayer to St. Joseph to the Rosary during the month of October. Praying the Rosary may be prescribed by priests as a type of penance after confession. (Penance is not intended as a "punishment".
Franz Werfel
Franz Viktor Werfel was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist and poet whose career spanned World War I, the Interwar period, World War II. He is known as the author of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a novel based on events that took place during the Armenian Genocide of 1915, The Song of Bernadette, a novel about the life and visions of the French Catholic saint Bernadette Soubirous, made into a Hollywood film of the same name. Born in Prague, Werfel was the first of three children of a wealthy manufacturer of gloves and leather goods, Rudolf Werfel, his mother, Albine Kussi, was the daughter of a mill owner. His two sisters were Marianne Amalie, his family was Jewish. As a child, Werfel was raised by his Czech Catholic governess, Barbara Šimůnková, who took him to mass in Prague's main cathedral. Like the children of other progressive German-speaking Jews in Prague, Werfel was educated at a Catholic school run by the Piarists, a teaching order that allowed for a rabbi to instruct Jewish students for their Bar Mitzvahs.
This, along with his governess's influence, gave Werfel an early interest in Catholicism, which soon branched out to other faiths, including Theosophy and Islam, such that his fiction, as well as his nonfiction, provides some insight into comparative religion. Werfel began writing at an early age and, by 1911, had published his first book of poems, Der Weltfreund, which can be translated as "the friend to the world" as well as philanthropist and the like. By this time, Werfel had befriended other German Jewish writers who frequented Prague's Café Arco, chief among them Max Brod and Franz Kafka, his poetry was praised by such critics as Karl Kraus, who published Werfel's early poems in Kraus's journal, Die Fackel. In 1912, Werfel moved to Leipzig, where he became an editor for Kurt Wolff's new publishing firm, where Werfel championed and edited Georg Trakl's first book of poetry. While he lived in Germany, Werfel's milieu grew to include Else Lasker-Schüler, Martin Buber, Rainer Maria Rilke, among other German-language writers and intellectuals in the first decades of the twentieth century.
With the outbreak of World War I, Werfel served in the Austro-Hungarian Army on the Russian front as a telephone operator. His duties both exposed him to the vicissitudes of total war as well as provided him with enough of a haven to continue writing Expressionist poems, ambitious plays, letters voluminously, his strange mix of humanism, autobiography, as well as mythology and religiosity developed further during this time. His poems and plays ranged from scenes of ancient Egypt to occult allusions and incorporate a parable from the Bahá'í Faith in the poem "Jesus and the Carrion Path", his bias for Christian subjects, as well as his antipathy for Zionism alienated many of his Jewish friends and readers, including early champions such as Karl Kraus. Others, stood by him, Martin Buber, who published a sequence of poems from Werfel's wartime manuscript, Der Gerichtstag in his monthly journal, Der Jude. and wrote of Werfel in his prefatory remark: Since I was first moved by his poems, I have opened the gates of my invisible garden to him, now he can do nothing for all eternity that would bring me to banish him from it.
Compare, if you will, a real person to an anecdotal one, a late book to an earlier, the one you see to you yourself. In the summer of 1917, Werfel left the frontline for the Military Press Bureau in Vienna, where he joined other notable Austrian writers serving as propagandists, among them Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Franz Blei. Through the latter, Werfel met and fell in love with Alma Mahler, widow of Gustav Mahler, the former lover of the painter Oskar Kokoschka, the wife of the architect Walter Gropius serving in the Imperial German Army on the Western Front. Alma, a composer, had set one of Werfel's poems to music, reciprocated despite Werfel being much younger and having Jewish features that she, being both anti-Semitic and attracted to Jewish men, found distasteful, their love affair culminated in the premature birth of a son, Martin, in August 1918. Martin, given the surname of Gropius, died in May of the following year. Despite attempts to save his marriage to Alma, with whom he had a young daughter, Gropius reluctantly agreed to a divorce in 1920.
Alma refused to marry Werfel for the next nine years. However, more so than with her first two husbands and lovers, lent herself to the development of Werfel's career and influenced it in such a way that he became an accomplished playwright and novelist as well as poet, they married on 6 July 1929. In April 1924, Verdi – Roman der Oper was published by Zsolnay Verlag, establishing Werfel's reputation as a novelist. In 1926, Werfel was awarded the Grillparzer Prize by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, in Berlin, Max Reinhardt performed his play Juarez and Maximilian. By the end of the decade, Werfel had become one of the most important and established writers in German and Austrian literature and had merited one full-length critical biography. A journey in 1930 to the Middle East and encountering starving refugees inspired his novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh which drew world attentio
Bernadette Soubirous
Saint Bernadette Soubirous known as Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, was the firstborn daughter of a miller from Lourdes, in the department of Hautes-Pyrénées in France, came to be venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church. Soubirous has become best known for the Marian apparitions of a "young lady" who asked for a chapel to be built at the nearby cave-grotto at Massabielle where apparitions are said to have occurred between 11 February and 16 July 1858, she would receive recognition when the lady who appeared to her identified herself as the Immaculate Conception. Despite initial skepticism from some Church authorities, Soubirous's claims were declared "worthy of belief" after a canonical investigation, the Marian apparition became known as Our Lady of Lourdes. Since her death, Soubirous's body has remained internally incorrupt, but it is not without blemish; these masks were placed on her face and hands before she was moved to her crystal reliquary in June 1925. The Marian shrine at Lourdes went on to become a major pilgrimage site, attracting over five million pilgrims of all denominations each year.
On 8 December 1933 Pope Pius XI declared Soubirous a saint of the Catholic Church. Her feast-day specified as 18 February—the day her Lady promised to make her happy, not in this life, but in the next— is now observed in most places on the date of her death, 16 April. Marie Bernarde Soubirous was the daughter of François Soubirous, a miller, Louise, a laundress, she was the eldest of nine children—Bernadette, Toinette, Jean-Marie, Jean-Marie, Pierre, a baby named Louise who died soon after her birth. Soubirous was born on 7 January 1844 and baptized at the local parish church, St. Pierre's, on 9 January, her parents' wedding anniversary, her godmother was Bernarde Casterot, her mother's sister, a moderately wealthy widow who owned a tavern. Hard times had fallen on France and the family lived in extreme poverty. Soubirous was a sickly child and due to this only measured 4 ft.7in. Tall, she suffered severe asthma for the rest of her life. Soubirous attended the day school conducted by the Sisters of Charity and Christian Instruction from Nevers.
Contrary to a belief popularized by Hollywood movies, Soubirous learned little French, only studying French in school after age 13 due to being ill and a poor learner. She could read and write little due to her frequent illness, she spoke the language of Occitan, spoken by the local population of the Pyrenees region at that time and to a lesser degree today. By the time of the events at the grotto, the Soubirous family's financial and social status had declined to the point where they lived in a one-room basement used as a jail, called le cachot, "the dungeon", where they were housed for free by her mother's cousin, André Sajoux. On 11 February 1858, Soubirous aged 14, was out gathering firewood with her sister Toinette and a friend near the grotto of Massabielle when she experienced her first vision. While the other girls crossed the little stream in front of the grotto and walked on, Soubirous stayed behind, looking for a place to cross where she wouldn't get her stockings wet, she sat down to take her shoes off in order to cross the water and was lowering her stocking when she heard the sound of rushing wind, but nothing moved.
A wild rose in a natural niche in the grotto, did move. From the niche, or rather the dark alcove behind it, "came a dazzling light, a white figure"; this was the first of 18 visions of what she referred to as aquero, Gascon Occitan for "that". In testimony, she called it "a small young lady", her sister and her friend stated. On 14 February, after Sunday Mass, with her sister Marie and some other girls, returned to the grotto. Soubirous knelt down saying she saw the apparition again and falling into a trance; when one of the girls threw holy water at the niche and another threw a rock from above that shattered on the ground, the apparition disappeared. On her next visit, 18 February, Soubirous said that "the vision" asked her to return to the grotto every day for a fortnight; this period of daily visions came to be known as la Quinzaine sacrée, "holy fortnight." Soubirous' parents her mother, were embarrassed and tried to forbid her to go. The supposed apparition did not identify herself until the seventeenth vision.
Although the townspeople who believed she was telling the truth assumed she saw the Virgin Mary, Soubirous never claimed it to be Mary using the word aquero. She described the lady as wearing a white veil, a blue girdle and with a yellow rose on each foot – compatible with "a description of any statue of the Virgin in a village church". Soubirous' story caused a sensation with the townspeople, who were divided in their opinions on whether or not she was telling the truth; some demanded she be put in an asylum. The other contents of Soubirous' reported visions were simple and focused on the need for prayer and penance. On 25 February she explained that the vision had told her "to drink of the water of the
The Song of Bernadette (novel)
The Song of Bernadette is a 1941 novel that tells the story of Saint Bernadette Soubirous, from February to July 1858 reported eighteen visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Lourdes, France. The novel was written by Franz Werfel and translated into English by Lewis Lewisohn in 1942, it was popular, spending more than a year on the New York Times Best Seller list and 13 weeks in first place. The novel was adapted into the 1943 film The Song of Bernadette starring Jennifer Jones. Franz Werfel was a German-speaking Jew born in Prague in 1890, he became well known as a playwright. In the 1930s in Vienna, he began writing popular satirical plays lampooning the Nazi regime until the Anschluss, when the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler annexed Austria in 1938. Werfel and his wife Alma fled to Paris until the Germans invaded France in 1940. In his Personal Preface to The Song of Bernadette, Franz Werfel takes up the story: In the last days of June 1940, in flight after the collapse of France, the two of us, my wife and I, had hoped to elude our mortal enemies in time to cross the Spanish frontier to Portugal, but had to flee back to the interior of France on the night German troops occupied the frontier town of Hendaye.
The Pyreenean départements had turned into a phantasmagoria – a camp of chaos. This strange migration of people wandered about on the roads in their thousands obstructing towns and villages: Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Czechs, exiled Germans. There was food enough to still the extreme pangs of hunger. There was no shelter to be had. Anyone who had obtained possession of an upholstered chair for his night's rest was an object of envy. In endless lines, stood the cars of the fugitives, piled high with household gear, with mattresses and beds. There was no petrol to be had. A family settled in Pau told us that Lourdes was the one place where, if luck were kind, one might find a roof. Since Lourdes was but thirty kilometres distant, we were advised to make the attempt and knock on its gates. We followed this advice and found refuge at last in the little town of Lourdes in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Hunted by the Gestapo, the Werfels experienced anxiety for their hosts as well as themselves. A number of families took turns in giving them shelter.
These people told the Werfels the story of Bernadette. Werfel vowed that, if he and his wife escaped, he would put off all tasks and write Bernadette's story into a novel; the story is about "the lady" of her vision. Bernadette’s love for the lady attains “ecstacy” when in her presence at a grotto near Lourdes; the love she feels sustains her throughout the trials and tribulations which she is made to endure by doubters and by public officials who see her as a threat to the established order, based on a secular milieu. The lady guides Bernadette to the discovery of a stream which springs from beneath the ground of the grotto; the curative powers of the water are discovered by various town folk, the word is spread by them. Bernadette does no proselytizing; the lady informs Bernadette of her wishes to have a chapel build on the site of the grotto, to have processions to the site. Bernadette takes no action to have it done, it gets done. Bernadette does not cultivate a following, but people are attracted to her by the love she radiates and by witnessing the ecstatic trance she experiences when she has visions of the lady at the grotto.
Bernadette does no preaching or evangelizing, but her Being of itself converts doubters, the church officials who once doubted her become her protectors and advocates. Although she is dying of cancer, she refuses to seek a cure from the lady, or to drink the curative water, she is canonized several years after her death. The story of Bernadette Soubirous and Our Lady of Lourdes is told by Werfel with many embellishments, such as the chapter in which Bernadette is invited to board at the home of a rich woman who thinks Bernadette's visionary "lady" might be her deceased daughter. In side-stories and back story, the history of the town of Lourdes, the contemporary political situation in France, the responses of believers and detractors are delineated. Werfel describes Bernadette as a religious peasant girl who would have preferred to continue on with an ordinary life, but takes the veil as a nun after she is told that because "Heaven chose her", she must choose Heaven. Bernadette's service as a sacristan, artist-embroiderer, nurse in the convent are depicted, along with her spiritual growth.
After her death, her body as well as her life are scrutinized for indications that she is a saint, at last she is canonized. The novel is laid out in five sections of ten chapters each, in a deliberate nod to the Catholic Rosary. Unusual for a novel, the entire first part, which describes the events on the day that Bernadette first saw the Virgin Mary, is told in the present tense, as if it were happening at the moment; the rest of the novel is in the past tense. Werfel presents Bernadette as a simple and pious girl from a poor family, regarded as stupid by her teachers and authorities, he depicts her as having inner strength and personal integrity, unshaken by those who challenge her stories of the "Lady of Massabielle" whom she alone can see. Bernedette is not a crusader, but the local people take up the cause of turning the grotto into a spiritual site, although the local authorities resist at first; this drama is played out against the larger canvas of French politics and the contemporary social climate.
Explanatory digressions illustrate what Werfel perc
Mary, mother of Jesus
Mary was a 1st-century BC Galilean Jewish woman of Nazareth, the mother of Jesus, according to the New Testament and the Quran. The gospels of Matthew and Luke in the New Testament and the Quran describe Mary as a virgin; the miraculous conception took place when she was betrothed to Joseph. She accompanied Joseph to Bethlehem; the Gospel of Luke begins its account of Mary's life with the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and announced her divine selection to be the mother of Jesus. According to canonical gospel accounts, Mary was present at the crucifixion and is depicted as a member of the early Christian community in Jerusalem. According to Catholic and Orthodox teachings, at the end of her earthly life her body was raised directly into Heaven. Mary has been venerated since early Christianity, is considered by millions to be the most meritorious saint of the religion, she is claimed to have miraculously appeared to believers many times over the centuries. The Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran churches believe that Mary, as mother of Jesus, is the Mother of God.
There is significant diversity in the Marian beliefs and devotional practices of major Christian traditions. The Catholic Church holds distinctive Marian dogmas, namely her status as the Mother of God, her Immaculate Conception, her perpetual virginity, her Assumption into heaven. Many Protestants minimize Mary's role within Christianity, basing their argument on the relative brevity of biblical references. Mary has a revered position in Islam, where one of the longer chapters of the Quran is devoted to her. Mary's name in the original manuscripts of the New Testament was based on her original Aramaic name מרים, translit. Maryam or Mariam; the English name Mary comes from the Greek Μαρία, a shortened form of Μαριάμ. Both Μαρία and Μαριάμ appear in the New Testament. In Christianity, Mary is referred to as the Virgin Mary, in accordance with the belief that she conceived Jesus miraculously through the Holy Spirit without her husband's involvement. Among her many other names and titles are the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Mary, the Mother of God, the Theotokos, Our Lady, Queen of Heaven, although the title "Queen of Heaven" was a name for a pagan goddess being worshipped during the prophet Jeremiah's lifetime.
Titles in use vary among Anglicans, Catholics, Protestants and other Christians. The three main titles for Mary used by the Orthodox are Theotokos, Aeiparthenos as confirmed in the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, Panagia. Catholics use a wide variety of titles for Mary, these titles have in turn given rise to many artistic depictions. For example, the title Our Lady of Sorrows has inspired such masterpieces as Michelangelo's Pietà; the title Theotokos was recognized at the Council of Ephesus in 431. The direct equivalents of title in Latin are Deipara and Dei Genetrix, although the phrase is more loosely translated into Latin as Mater Dei, with similar patterns for other languages used in the Latin Church. However, this same phrase in Greek, in the abbreviated form ΜΡ ΘΥ, is an indication attached to her image in Byzantine icons; the Council stated that the Church Fathers "did not hesitate to speak of the holy Virgin as the Mother of God". Some Marian titles have a direct scriptural basis.
For instance, the title "Queen Mother" has been given to Mary since she was the mother of Jesus, sometimes referred to as the "King of Kings" due to his ancestral descent from King David. Other titles have arisen from special appeals, or occasions for calling on Mary. To give a few examples, Our Lady of Good Counsel, Our Lady of Navigators, Our Lady Undoer of Knots fit this description. In Islam, she is known as mother of Isa, she is referred to by the honorific title sayyidatuna, meaning "our lady". A related term of endearment is Siddiqah, meaning "she who confirms the truth" and "she who believes sincerely completely". Another title for Mary is Qānitah, which signifies both constant submission to God and absorption in prayer and invocation in Islam, she is called "Tahira", meaning "one, purified" and representing her status as one of two humans in creation to not be touched by Satan at any point. The Gospel of Luke mentions Mary the most identifying her by name twelve times, all of these in the infancy narrative.
The Gospel of Matthew mentions her by name six times, five of these in the infancy narrative and only once outside the infancy narrative. The Gospel of Mark names her once and mentions her as Jesus' mother without naming her in 3:31 and 3:32; the Gospel of John never mentions her by name. Described as Jesus' mother, she makes two appearances, she is first seen at the wedding at Cana. The second reference, listed only in this gospel, has her standing near the cross of Jesus together with Mary Magdalene, Mary of Clopas (or Cleophas
France
France the French Republic, is a country whose territory consists of metropolitan France in Western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The metropolitan area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean, it is bordered by Belgium and Germany to the northeast and Italy to the east, Andorra and Spain to the south. The overseas territories include French Guiana in South America and several islands in the Atlantic and Indian oceans; the country's 18 integral regions span a combined area of 643,801 square kilometres and a total population of 67.3 million. France, a sovereign state, is a unitary semi-presidential republic with its capital in Paris, the country's largest city and main cultural and commercial centre. Other major urban areas include Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Nice. During the Iron Age, what is now metropolitan France was inhabited by a Celtic people. Rome annexed the area in 51 BC, holding it until the arrival of Germanic Franks in 476, who formed the Kingdom of Francia.
The Treaty of Verdun of 843 partitioned Francia into Middle Francia and West Francia. West Francia which became the Kingdom of France in 987 emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages following its victory in the Hundred Years' War. During the Renaissance, French culture flourished and a global colonial empire was established, which by the 20th century would become the second largest in the world; the 16th century was dominated by religious civil wars between Protestants. France became Europe's dominant cultural and military power in the 17th century under Louis XIV. In the late 18th century, the French Revolution overthrew the absolute monarchy, established one of modern history's earliest republics, saw the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which expresses the nation's ideals to this day. In the 19th century, Napoleon established the First French Empire, his subsequent Napoleonic Wars shaped the course of continental Europe. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a tumultuous succession of governments culminating with the establishment of the French Third Republic in 1870.
France was a major participant in World War I, from which it emerged victorious, was one of the Allies in World War II, but came under occupation by the Axis powers in 1940. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and dissolved in the course of the Algerian War; the Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, remains today. Algeria and nearly all the other colonies became independent in the 1960s and retained close economic and military connections with France. France has long been a global centre of art and philosophy, it hosts the world's fourth-largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites and is the leading tourist destination, receiving around 83 million foreign visitors annually. France is a developed country with the world's sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP, tenth-largest by purchasing power parity. In terms of aggregate household wealth, it ranks fourth in the world. France performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, human development.
France is considered a great power in global affairs, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and an official nuclear-weapon state. It is a leading member state of the European Union and the Eurozone, a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, La Francophonie. Applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name "France" comes from the Latin "Francia", or "country of the Franks". Modern France is still named today "Francia" in Italian and Spanish, "Frankreich" in German and "Frankrijk" in Dutch, all of which have more or less the same historical meaning. There are various theories as to the origin of the name Frank. Following the precedents of Edward Gibbon and Jacob Grimm, the name of the Franks has been linked with the word frank in English, it has been suggested that the meaning of "free" was adopted because, after the conquest of Gaul, only Franks were free of taxation.
Another theory is that it is derived from the Proto-Germanic word frankon, which translates as javelin or lance as the throwing axe of the Franks was known as a francisca. However, it has been determined that these weapons were named because of their use by the Franks, not the other way around; the oldest traces of human life in what is now France date from 1.8 million years ago. Over the ensuing millennia, Humans were confronted by a harsh and variable climate, marked by several glacial eras. Early hominids led a nomadic hunter-gatherer life. France has a large number of decorated caves from the upper Palaeolithic era, including one of the most famous and best preserved, Lascaux. At the end of the last glacial period, the climate became milder. After strong demographic and agricultural development between the 4th and 3rd millennia, metallurgy appeared at the end of the 3rd millennium working gold and bronze, iron. France has numerous megalithic sites from the Neolithic period, including the exceptiona
Napoléon, Prince Imperial
Napoléon, Prince Imperial known as Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, was the only child of Emperor Napoleon III and his Empress consort, Eugénie de Montijo. After his father was dethroned in 1870, he relocated with his family to England. On his father's death in January 1873, he was proclaimed by the Bonapartist faction as Napoleon IV, Emperor of the French. In England, he trained as a soldier. Keen to see action, he put pressure on the British to allow him to participate in the Anglo-Zulu War. In 1879, serving with British forces, he was killed in a skirmish with a group of Zulus, his early death sent shockwaves throughout Europe, as he was the last serious dynastic hope for the restoration of the House of Bonaparte to the throne of France. Born in Paris, he was baptised on 14 June 1856, at Notre Dame Cathedral, his godfather was Pope Pius IX. His godmother was Eugène de Beauharnais's daughter, the Queen of Sweden, represented by Grand Duchess Stéphanie of Baden, his education, after a false start under the academic historian Francis Monnier, from 1867, supervised by General Frossard as governor, assisted by Augustin Filon, as tutor.
His English nurse, Miss Shaw, was recommended by Queen Victoria and taught the prince English from an early age. His valet, Xavier Uhlmann, his inseparable friend Louis Conneau figured in his life; the young prince was known by the nickname "Loulou" in his family circle. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, he accompanied his father to the front and first came under fire at Saarbrücken; when the war began to go against the Imperial arms, his father sent him to the border with Belgium. In September, he sent him a message to cross over into Belgium, he travelled from there to England, arriving on 6 September, where he was joined by his parents, the Second Empire having been abolished. The family settled in England at Camden Place in Kent. On his father's death, Bonapartists proclaimed him Napoleon IV. On his 18th birthday, a large crowd gathered to cheer him at Camden Place; the Prince Imperial attended elementary lectures in physics at King's College London. In 1872, he was accepted to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.
He finished seventh in his class of thirty four, came top in riding and fencing. He served for a time with the Royal Artillery at Aldershot. During the 1870s, there was some talk of a marriage between him and Queen Victoria's youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice. Victoria reportedly believed that it would be best for "the peace of Europe" if the prince became Emperor of France; the Prince remained a devout Catholic, he retained hopes that the Bonapartist cause might triumph if the secularising Third Republic failed. He supported the tactics of Eugène Rouher over those of Victor, Prince Napoléon, breaking with Victor in 1876. With the outbreak of the Zulu War in 1879, the Prince Imperial, with the rank of lieutenant, forced the hand of the British military to allow him to take part in the conflict, despite the objections of Rouher and other Bonapartists, he was only allowed to go to Africa by special pleading of his mother, the Empress Eugénie, by intervention of Queen Victoria herself. He went as an observer, attached to the staff of Frederic Thesiger, 2nd Baron Chelmsford, the commander in South Africa, admonished to take care of him.
Louis accompanied Chelmsford on his march into Zululand. Keen to see action, full of enthusiasm, he was warned by Lieutenant Arthur Brigge, a close friend, "not to do anything rash and to avoid running unnecessary risks. I reminded him of the Empress at home and his party in France."Chelmsford, mindful of his duty, attached the Prince to the staff of Colonel Richard Harrison of the Royal Engineers, where it was felt he could be active but safe. Harrison was responsible for the column's transport and for reconnaissance of the forward route on the way to Ulundi, the Zulu capital. While he welcomed the presence of Louis, he was told by Chelmsford that the Prince must be accompanied at all times by a strong escort. Lieutenant Jahleel Brenton Carey, a French speaker and British subject from Guernsey, was given particular charge of Louis; the Prince took part in several reconnaissance missions, though his eagerness for action led him into an early ambush, when he exceeded orders in a party led by Colonel Redvers Buller.
Despite this, on the evening of 31 May 1879, Harrison agreed to allow Louis to scout in a forward party scheduled to leave in the morning, in the mistaken belief that the path ahead was free of Zulu skirmishers. On the morning of 1 June, the troop set out, earlier than intended, without the full escort owing to Louis's impatience. Led by Carey, the scouts rode deeper into Zululand. Without Harrison or Buller present to restrain him, the Prince took command from Carey though the latter had seniority. At noon, the troop was halted at a temporarily deserted kraal while Louis and Carey made some sketches of the terrain, used part of the thatch to make a fire. No lookout was posted; as they were preparing to leave, about 40 Zulus rushed toward them screaming. The Prince's horse dashed off before he could mount, the Prince clinging to a holster on the saddle—after about a hundred yards a strap broke, the Prince fell beneath his horse and his right arm was trampled, he leapt up, drawing his revolver with his left hand, started to run—but the Zulus could run faster.
The Prince pulled the assegai from his wound. As he turned and fired on his pursuers, another assegai, thrown by a Zulu named Zabanga, struck his
