A little history about the monument erected in 1908 located in the Square Aspiring Dunn Paris opposite the town hall of the fourteenth district and context rather surprising. Assigned "to guard the people", as can be read on its pedestal, the statue is not the initiative of a committee of free thinkers or Protestants but the repentant Catholic Henri Rochefort, Republican of aristocratic origin ( whose real name is Henri de Rochefort-Luçay), journalist and polemicist politician (member of the Government of National Defence to the fall of the Second Empire) has shown during the Paris Commune, but gradually approached the baker and the extreme right. It was particularly the camp of anti-Dreyfus, a radical change in the person who was both a friend of Victor Hugo.
Why a Catholic nationalist he wished to erect a statue in honor of a man who inspired the free-thinking and condemned for heresy, finally burned in effigy by the clergy?
Remember that it is the Protestants who burned Servetus for real, when he was finally one of them. The image
fratricide was ideal to send a message to the Protestants of Alsace and Lorraine, whom he accused of having supported Germany in 1870 and thus have lost two regions of France. Moreover
radicalism of Servetus who did not abandon his ideas at the risk of allowing one's life could serve as a propaganda message to nationalists who dreamed of
revenge. His sculptor Jean Baffier, original Berry, was also Catholic. He was a man known for his reactionary ideas, see anti-Semitic and was a staunch defender of regionalism. In fact he created in 1888 in the same district of Paris the "Gas Company of the Berry Center and other places." He wrote for the Journal of Cher, Depeche du Berry and even founded his own newspaper in 1886 The Rise of Gaul.
The city of Bourges co
nserver two sketches of study for the monument to Servetus as can be seen in photo-cons. The drawings are exhibited at the Musée du Berry. We find the statue itself, but also a copy of the famous engraving of Christopher Shechem dating from 1607 which was apparently used as a model for the monument. This study represents
Servet right hand along the body and the left heart. Finally Baffier the sculpted hands folded on top of the chest and wearing chains as the second sketch.
A monument that could be controversial but which will retain
was that the presence of man Servetus, the martyr became a symbol of freedom, not the recovery What have sought to make the actors of the intolerance hearts full of hate. To demonstrate Christian Unitarians and free thinkers gather at the monument for several years ... Links:
Sketch No. 1 on the site Gioconda
http://prolib.net/pierre_bailleux/unit/cu060.servet_paris.htm
http://actua.unitariennes.over-blog.com/article-29622675.html
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