Author, U: Ensemble of the Decorative Work of the Painter Je

Excerpt from Ensemble of the Decorative Work of the Painter Jean-Julien Lemordant: Catalogue of Paintings, Sketches, Studies and DrawingsThe picture suggests to the mind's eye, and not too fancifully, an imaginative pageant of those great Frenchmen whose combined work has made the contribution of France to the progress of intellectual liberty. There we should see the sage Montaigne, Rabelais the boisterous reformer, Pascal, the educator Rousseau, the Encyclopedists, Voltaire with his terrible laugh ter, the volcanic Mirabeau and the ¿ashing Desmoulins, Lamartine the inter nationalist. The great-souled Pasteur - all luminous with that penetrative intellectual clarity which is the common property of Athens and France. Each of them is French in his search for new truth in his own time. France has most conspicuously of all nations changed with the epoch; in those successive readjustments which we call progress she has almost invariably been in the lead. She was the star of the ages of faith as she is the light of the age of fellowship.In our imagined pageant we should see clearly also the continuity of French life; we should not see these figures disconnected and disparate as they would be in the case of great Germans or even great Englishmen, but they would indicate clearly the continuity and the solidarity of the French people; their sequence is unbroken, their efforts fused into a continuous chain by that instinct for the need of society which is at the root of all French effort. France is the most annealed of the nations. The sustained heroism which has made her the barrier of civilization against successive tides of German aggression is in a real sense the result of her social unification.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.