Filmmaker Daniel Rabourdin spent four years making The Hidden Rebellion. His efforts paid off handsomely. This is a first-rate, powerful work that unmasks the wolf of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity for what it really meant two centuries ago in the French Revolution, plus the film strongly shows how the story is as timely as today’s headlines about rampant political tyranny, political correctness, and religious persecution rise around the globe.
Beautifully made, The Hidden Rebellion focuses on the architects of the French Revolution inflicting a war of extermination in 1793 on the Vendean people, their countrymen in the peaceful Vendee region of rural western France who wanted to retain and practice their Catholic faith. But the fanatical revolutionaries were seizing church properties and stifling religion.
Rabourdin was asked why he made the film:
“I come from almost another universe — where hyper-liberals and socialists and communists have succeed for almost 200 years from the French Revolution,” he said, referring to growing up for over 20 years in France. “Don’t be surprised if only 4 % are practicing Christians in France. So I’m one of the Last of the Mohicans in France! If you are Catholic in France, you are an underground Church — not as terrible as in China.”
He gives these personal examples. When it comes to taking a test to enter college, you “will still fail to enter college if at the end of high school you don’t play the game of hiding your faith. That’s the world I come from.”
“When I came to America I found a weight off my shoulders with not as much cultural pressure. Now I return to France almost once a year and find my mother and sisters in the faith living again under that pressure. It’s even worse today. And that has been lasting for 200 years. You don’t even realize it if you are a tourist.”
“So of course now I see the same oppressions increasing in America. I feel like I am blowing a whistle.”
What are some things that make this film so timely?
Rabourdin explained, “Political correctness is becoming not a negative word. It should be called political and tyrannical correctness.” He said to “look how the cultural powers — most of the education, most of press, most of the artists have redefined and taken away the quality of dignity and replaced it with equality in everything. But there is no absolute equality. There is an absolute equality when it comes to our essential dignity. But there are inequalities that are natural.
“But today if you say that, you are categorized — you have prejudice, you have hate. With the political tyrannical correctness we are in a state of cultural oppression. It was the same for the French Revolution leading to the way of terror four years later. In Paris for example, you could not address people as ‘sir’ or ‘madam’. That made you suspicious. You had to address them as ‘citizen’. So it was extremely oppressive, a tyrannical that is over the words and the thought.
“At an early stage of the tyranny you can be defined as a racist or a criminal, and from there you will have physical violence exerted against you. During that a true crime is being left untreated by the world. Justice becomes ideological.”
What do you hope your film accomplishes?
“I think we have to learn lessons. The lessons are we have to cultivate the more community love amongst ourselves.” He said we have to follow Scriptures refers to John 13:35: This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
“Why? Because part of the problem is that destructive forces of society are become more numerous than the constructive forces. One of the ways to maintain numbers of constructive forces is to do what were supposed to do.” He said one way is to show friendship coming out of church. “When you come out of church and see people alone and single…they should be welcomed at a community lunch. Most people not married eat alone every night. This should not happen.”
Then Rabourdin said people should “value intellectual and political formation [in line with] the social teachings of the Church.” The “forces of destruction are strong on those. So it’s a work of apologetics. St. Paul said we should be ready to testify our faith…The Catechism is amazing for formations.”
He suggested that we should read three apologetic books every year “because we watch 20 movies and plenty have values against our Christian faith.” The books written by the architects of the French Revolution “were the books read by the cultural elite. Today’s elite Hollywood writers and actors are given da Vinci food as intellectual food, and that’s all they know about the Catholic Church. We must build up again respect for creative people and the arts but be always vigilant that creation of what is beautiful fits with the canons of what is Truth.”
http://m.ncregister.com/blog/joseph-pronechen/the-hidden-rebellion-a-film-unmasking-the-wolf-at-the-door
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