“We might say that before the French demanded a charter from their sovereign, French Catholics had demanded one of their God. It was understood that God must be just, that he had certain obligations toward men, and that certain reciprocal relations had to be established between creature and Creator.”

— Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), pp. 87-88

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "We might say that before the French demanded a charter from their sovereign, French Catholics had demanded one of their…" by Bernard Groethuysen?

Bernard Groethuysen 20

French literary historian, translator and writer 1880–1946

Bernard Groethuysen (1880–1946) French literary historian, translator and writer

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 89

“Along with Foch, the French Premier, Georges Clemenceau had demanded that Germany's Western border be fixed at the Rhine. Clemenceau relented when the Treaty of Guarantee was proposed. However Foch insisted that the French occupation of the Rhineland was crucial to halting future German aggression.”

William L. Shirer book The Collapse of the Third Republic

The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969)

“Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying”

Alan Furst book The Spies of Warsaw

Source: The Spies of Warsaw

“The people did not talk about reciprocal concessions but demanded liberties and guarantees, which brought inevitably in many sectors a crueler war than the French would have waged otherwise.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

People's War, People's Army (1964)

“My mother was French Protestant, and my father was Italian Catholic, and their union was an excess of God, guilt and sauce.”

Mitch Albom For One More Day

Source: For One More Day

“The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Context: The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another. What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity. … It is but the elimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest, applied to religious beliefs; and if we look at history candidly and without prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever in the long run established or proved itself in any other way. Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.