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Portrait of François Rabelais by an unidentified painter. Image credit: Wikipedia The French author François Rabelais gave us the word ‘gargantuan’, from Gargantua, the name of one of the giants whose adventures he describes in four books published between the 1530s and the 1550s. He also gave us the word ‘rabelaisian’, generally taken to describe coarse humour. Illustration by the French artist Gustave Doré (1832-83) for the works of Rabelais (1854). Image credit:  www.gutenberg.org But Rabelais has serious things to say about the big issues of his time, including war and peace. Sometimes they are disguised, but in this extract from one of the books the message is clear. Illustration by the French artist Gustave Doré (1832-83) for the works of Rabelais (1854). Image credit:  www.gutenberg.org   The book published in 1534 and translated into English by Sr Thomas Urquhart as The Very Horrific Life of Great Gargantua deals largely with the Picrocholine war. Garga...

  Portrait of Mr. Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations. UN Photo/JO Dag Hammarskjöld, second Secretary-General of the United Nations, was born into Sweden's political elite. Both his training and his civil service career were in keeping with family traditions. He distinguished himself in languages, literature, philosophy and law before getting a PhD in economics in 1933. He obtained a number of senior appointments in the Ministries of Finance and Foreign Affairs, and in the early postwar years was one of Sweden's leading diplomats. The Nobel Committee lauded Hammarskjöld for having built up an efficient and independent UN Secretariat, and for having taken an independent line towards the great powers. He was also praised for having organized a peacekeeping force in the Middle East after the Suez crisis, and for his commitment to peace during the civil war in the Congo. Hammarskjöld died, under suspicious circumstances, in an airplane crash in Northern ...

19th-century engraving of George Fox, based on a painting of unknown date  Image credit: www.quakersintheworld.org George Fox was an English Dissenter who founded the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers. The Declaration laid out peace as the primary principle of Quakers, condemning war as proceeding from sin: lust, envy and greed. The article below is reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution license from the website Quakers in the World.org Peace and Nonviolence In 1651 George Fox was offered an army commission. His response is widely regarded as the first statement of the Quaker peace testimony: ‘I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars... I told them I was come into the covenant of peace which was before wars and strifes were.’ Written in 1660, Margaret Fell’s [George Fox’s wife] letter to King Charles II lifted the Quaker Peace Testimony beyond a simple refusal to bear arms and turned it into a w...

Continued from  https://peaceatsalemchapelbudleigh.blogspot.com/2022/10/17-field-of-waterloo-le-champ-de.html The Field of Waterloo, exhibited 1818, Joseph Mallord William Turner.  Presented as part of the Turner Bequest 1856. © Tate. Photo: Tate If there is a pacifist note in John Heaviside Clark’s work it is surely echoed in Turner’s painting  The Field of Waterloo  which was exhibited in 1818.   The artist visited the battlefield in 1817. He filled a sketchbook with drawings and notes, and later made studies of soldier’s uniforms in preparation for the painting.   There are some similarities to Clark’s painting: we see an angry sky lit up by lightning, but the focus is on one particular scene where what seems to be a family group are lit up by a torch held by one member. The picture is dominated by a group of grieving women who are searching for their partners among the pile of dead and dying bodies. A distraught woman has collapsed, only just holding on...

By John Heaviside Clark (1771-1863)  Engraved by Matthew Dubourg active 1786-1838. Published 18 January 1817 Over the years I’ve often wondered about this painting. It depicts the place where Napoleon was finally defeated, giving rise to the expression that ‘he met his Waterloo’.   It certainly doesn’t look like the aftermath of a glorious British victory. The artist, known in his lifetime as ‘Waterloo Clark’ because of his numerous sketches of the battlefield, has portrayed the event as a human catastrophe. In a letter of 1815 Wellington lamented the loss of so many gallant friends in the battle. Perhaps he was reflecting on the waste of all human lives in war when he wrote: ‘ Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.’  Clark’s painting portrays the immense scale of devastation on the battlefield. Grim scenes are taking place wherever you look.           Soldiers of different nationalities are cle...