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Criminality and family
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A 24-year-old unrepentant Frenchman was arrested for murder on February 24, 1954. Almost sixty years later, he is being considered for canonization.
Jacques Fesch was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France on April 6, 1930. His father was an atheist, distant to his son and unfaithful to his wife, whom he eventually divorced. His parents failed to pay him much attention as he grew up, resulting in Jacques not taking an interest in his schoolwork, or in his high-paying job at the bank after he graduated. He quit his occupation to live the life of a playboy. To the horror of his anti-Semitic parents, in 1951 he married Pierette, a Catholic girl with a Jewish father. The marriage did not last long, though; Jacques continued to see other women, and had an illegitimate son with one of them, whom he abandoned to public care. He and Pierette soon broke up.
Disillusioned with life, Jacques dreamed of starting over. He asked his parents to pay for him to purchase a boat and sail around the South Pacific. They refused. Jacques decided to rob Alexandre Silberstein, a currency exchanger with an office in the Rue Vivenne. He arranged for an appointment to exchange francs into gold bars. While the dealer’s son was downstairs getting the gold, Jacques put a revolver to Mr. Silberstein’s head and demanded money from the register. When he tried to reason with him, Jacques hit him twice with the revolver, stunning him. Jacques then grabbed 300,000 francs and ran, trying to melt in with the crowd.
Mr. Silberstein soon recovered and began shouting that he had been robbed. Jacques fled into a building on Les Grandes Boulevards. A few minutes later, he emerged, attempting unsuccessfully to play the part of an innocent citizen. He ...
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...s and I feel sad, so sad… I will meditate on the agony of Our Lord in the Garden of Olives, but good Jesus, help me… Only five hours to live! In five hours, I shall see Jesus!”
On October 1, 1957, Jacques walked calmly to the guillotine. He asked a priest for the crucifix, which he kissed. His last words before the blade fell were, “Holy Virgin, have pity on me!”
The case for the beatification and canonization of Jacques Fesch is fiercely contested. “Where are we headed, if we start beatifying criminals?” asked one police officer chief. Others believe that Fesch’s beatification would “give a great hope to those who despise themselves, who see themselves as irredeemably lost”. Jacques Fesch is often likened to the Good Thief on Calvary. No one is ever truly lost in God’s eyes, even if they have done grave wrong and their whole society has condemned them.
	His dream soon becomes shattered by three of his enemies, Danglars, Fernand, and Caderousse. As these three people plot against Edmond, he is about to become married to the beautiful Mercedes. On his wedding day, his betrothal feast was interrupted when the police came barging through the door and arrested Edmond Dantes. Dantes was accused of giving a letter to the usurper while the Pharaon stopped on the Isle of Elba and returning a letter from the usurper to the Bonapartist party in Paris. After his arrest, Edmond was interrogated and questioned by the public prosecutor, Monsieur de Villefort. During the interrogation Villefort promised Edmond freedom, but that was before Monsieur de Villefort read the letter from the usurper addressed to Monsieur Noirtier, Villefort’s father. Edmond Dantes was sent to prison.
His punishment for these monstrosities was death by lethal injection. Right before his execution date, Poncelet wrote to Sister Helen Prejean for help and guidance. Believing no one should be killed, she agreed to be Poncelet’s spiritual advisor. As the minutes tick down to his death, Poncelet begins to break down and his lack of remorse dissolves.
...e placed over the heads of the condemned and they were hanged. Joining their other deserters. The thirteen remaining condemned men had four days to sit in the jail's dungeon to think about their deaths that would take place on Monday, February 15th. Chaplain Paris described the scene in a letter that appeared shortly afterward in the North Carolina Presbyterian and the Wilmington Journal:
All of humanity, even the one reading this paper, has had thoughts of doing things that are far from that of a saint, and although most do not act upon these thoughts there are those who have; those who kill out of spite, those who commit unspeakable acts against men, women and children, those who to everyone else are frightening and fearful and thus locked away from
Marie Antoinette’s last words were thought to be polite as she braved her fate in a simple white dress, already having wished her children the best (“The Grand Dauphin”), “Pardon me Sir, I meant not to do it", to the executioner, whose foot she accidentally stepped on before she was executed. Her body was thrown into an unmarked cemetery, rue d'Anjou until exhumed in 1815 and properly reburied (Buzzi).
Later on that day, a delegation was invited into the prison by the Governor of the Bastille, Bernard de Launay. DeLaunay then invited the delegation to lunch with him. When they did not return the mob became angry, fearing that they had been detained. A second delegation was sent forth. These soon came out again with the message that the Governor had adamantly refused to surrender. The delegates also had the information that the cannon were unloaded. This piece of news was all that the mob needed to urge them on. "...But the fury of the crowd continued to increase and their blind wrath did not spare de Launay's escort...Exhausted by his efforts to defend his prisoner...he had to seperate from M. de Launay...Hardly had he sat down when, looking after the procession, he saw the head of M. de Launay stuck on the point of a pike...The people, fearing that their victim might be snatched away from them, hastened to cut his throat on the steps of the Hotel de Ville..."
When Meursault returns home he decides to take another day off and relax at the beach. On his way out he sees an old man beating his dog and cussing at it ruthlessly. Normally most people would be bothered by the fact of a man beating a small dog, but Muersault watches as if nothing bad were happening. When Meursault is at the beach he meets a girl, named Marie, which he finds very attractive. Meursault and Marie become very close. As the story progresses they begin taking part in sexual activities. Marie tells Muersault that she loves him and asks if he loves her back.
Jean-Paul Sartre was born on June 21, 1905, and lost his father a little over a year later. His mother, Anne-Marie was raised uneducated in an educated family and moved back in with her own father, the teacher Karl Schweitzer, uncle of the famous philosopher and missionary, Albert Schweitzer. She promptly lost control of her infant son. Jean-Paul became the immediate favorite of his g...
"But then he says, 'It ain't so bad if you know.' He says, 'French Revolution-all them fellas that figgered her out got their heads chopped off. Always that way,' he says" (424).
Unfortunately, he died before experiencing Haiti’s separation from France in 1804. However, along the way of success of both revolutions, a toll occurred on the numerous lives lost. The Reign of Terror in France was created as a way to protect the republic from its internal enemies, but instead 16,000 people were guillotined. Many documents were shown to be describing the execution of the Reign of Terror to be gruesome and wrongful such that J.G. Milligen stated, “The process of execution was also a sad and heartrending spectacle”, in The Revolutionary Tribunal. Milligen continued to describe the vivid scene of the execution, but this was only one event and many others have died in the fall of the Bastille and the attack on the royal palace.
During the night of the 15th and the early hours of the 16th, he wrote one last letter to his mother and received the last finances. At 8:00 a.m., he climbed the stairs to the stage for his execution.
In “The Arrest of Arsene Lupin” by Maurice Leblanc, Monsieur d’Andrézy is discovered to be Arsene Lupin. The name he is impersonating had died three years ago, which uncovered his lies. The camera also proves that Monsieur d’Andrézy is truly Arsene Lupin because the pearls and money are found inside the camera. “In the hollow centre of the small object...it was there I had deposited Rozaine’s twenty thousand francs and Lady Jerland’s pearls and diamonds.” The narration did not cheat the reader; personally, it kept me intrigued to find out who is Arsene Lupin. The chronological order the story is told corresponds to its genre. “The Arrest of Arsene Lupin” is based off mystery, and suspense to allow the clues to the solution of the mystery to
Firstly, Camus juxtaposes the stories of Meursault and the Czechoslovakian man to create a presage of the denouement of Meursault. The Czechoslovakian man undergoes major life changes, and this ultimately leads to his demise. He goes to make a better life for himself, and he returns to his village with riches in wealth and in family. Unrecognizable to them, the Czechoslovakian man returns to his mother and sister, and he decides to play a simple joke “of taking a room” and “he had shown off his money” (80). This trick ends when “during the night his mother and sister had beaten him to death…in order to rob him” (80). The Czechoslovakian man’s newfound courage results in obstinacy. Contrastingly, until Meursault commits his crime of murder, his life appears nearly painfully simple. ...
In Miguel de Unamuno’s novella San Manuel Bueno, Martyr, readers learn about the life of Don Manuel, a Catholic priest secretly holding atheist beliefs and doubts in the afterlife. Despite these disbeliefs, Don Manuel works tirelessly to help his community and is regarded as a saint by all who meet him, hence the handle “San Manuel,” which literally translates to “Saint Manuel.” Don Manuel’s struggle and affiliation with sainthood receives further analysis and context from Francisco LaRubia-Prado, who parallels Unamuno’s novella to elements of Greek Tragedy and heroism. Drawing from Unamuno’s background with Ancient Greek playwriting and Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo, LaRubia-Prado argues that Don Manuel should be seen as a representation of Christ and must suffer in silence in order to play the role of the dying, tragic hero that saves the
On the 21st of June 1905, Anne-Marie Schweitzer and Jean-Baptiste Sartre gave birth to their one and only child, Jean Paul Sartre. Anne-Marie was forced to raise Jean-Paul all by herself after Sartre’s father, John-Baptiste, died. Jean Paul Sartre became interested in philosophy after reading the essay “Time and Free Will” by Henri Bergson. In 1929, Sartre met Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir, who later on became a celebrated philosopher, stayed friends with Sartre throughout his entire life and would be the closest thing to a wife Sartre would ever have. In 1939, Sartre was drafted into the French army as a meteorologist. He was captured by German troops in 1940 and spent nine months as a prisoner of war. After World War II, Sartre emerged as a politically engaged activist. He was an outspoken opponent of French rule in Algeria. He also embraced Marxism; a theory based on communism, and visited Cuba, me...