Vattel made clear
RC Radio continues in its tradition of interesting and distinguished guests, this time a French attorney who is also an editor of works (in English translation) by Emerich de Vattel! What a powerhouse combination for any discussion of both the language and the context into which Vattel wrote on citizenship.
Readers here will know well our distinguished commenter Lupin. Listen to him on RC Radio.
It was a great show. Here are early articles where Lupin has commented here (oldest first):
- Orly filed something else
- Fake information on passport web site
- The “long form” exists!
- Obama birth poll shows striking regional divide
- Polarik declares Kenyan document a forgery
- Kenyan birth certificate proven fake – no doubt
- Kenyan birth Certificate Poll
- Alexander Hamilton weighs in
- Craig v US appeal denied by Circuit Court
- August must be world “Birther” month.
- Natural born citizen: clarified!
- Donofrio v FactCheck.org
- The “Death Panel” Right
- A question for Mr. Apuzzo
- Marking up Jeff Schwilk
- The tale of two judges (updated)
- Sticks and stones
- Another question for Mario Apuzzo (3)
- Million man mistake
- Question for Mario Apuzzo (4)
Thanks Doc. I was just going to post the link in the open thread. Lupin (Jean-Marc) was a great interview. I think folks will really enjoy it. One small correction. The show runs at 9 PM. The interview is about 90 minutes then I will be live for the remainder of the show.
Oh, that’s why the play link didn’t work 😳
I can’t emphasize enough how Lupin kills the Vattel theory once and for all.
Kills it for everyone but the birthers…not the correct translation for them.
Maybe someday there will be a legal proceeding and Lupin can destroy the birthers on Vattel in testimony via Skype.
I would love that.
I can’t listen tonight so I hope both the interview and call-in session will be available in the morning and I’ll listen while I have my first pot of coffee. 🙂
The link in the article to BlogTalkRadio is working now.
But not the links to the articles where Lupin has contributed.
Lupin you are in Carcassonne?
Talk about ideally located to be a Conspiracy Theory Watcher.
I’m in Chalabre (google) which is about 40 miles south of Carcassonne — and, you’re absolutely correct, right in the middle of Cathars/Da Vinci Code/Rennes-le-Chateau/Bugarach/Secret UFO base/ conspiracy cuckoo land! 🙂
Seriously now, it’s a beautiful area, well worth visiting. There’ll always be a bowl of soupe, a quignon of bread and a glass of blanquette on our table for visiting Obots!
I wish to publicly express my gratitude to RC and our esteemed host Doc C for giving me the opportunity to ramble on about a subject obviously dear to my heart.
The hour we’d allocated to the interview flew by so fast.
As I told RC at the end, I like to discuss subjects pertaining to the French / US legal interface which spill out over great societal concerns, because they allow us to understand each other better. In that light, I hope to do this again in the future, perhaps with more participants.
Amazingly, Sharon Rondeau actually quotes Vattel accurately on The Original Gerbil Report::
“Other historical treatises describe a “natural born Citizen” as one born in the United States to a U.S.-citizen father. Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel, upon whose work the Founders relied heavily, maintained that a child inherited the citizenship of his father.”
http://www.birtherreport.com/2015/05/confirmation-us-senator-ted-cruz.html
Dare I say, “Mission Accomplished”?
The date and page numbers on her letter appear to be correct, too.
So, that brings her down to about 97.2% BS. A new personal best 😉
It speaks to her level of desperation that she considers signing the return receipt on her letter as “acknowledgement”.
One of my girlfriend’s advanced degrees is in Medieval History. She’s always wanted to visit Carcassonne. We this year opted to take a cruise up the Rhine, and will be in France only one day, and nowhere near Carcassonne, nor time to visit if we were, but next year, in 2016, we plan to visit Carcassonne. If if works out, we would love to meet you.
I plan to listen to the interview this morning over coffee. Thank you for taking your time to do it.
I would love to take you out to lunch when the time comes; we don’t see that many foreign visitors, so it would be a welcome distraction. You may email me through our site:
http://www.blackcoatpress.com/index.html
Can’t I enjoy that 2.8% drop in BS, pleeaaaase? 🙂
I understand that in 1995 Jeb Bush switched from Episcopalian to Roman Catholic, thereby swearing allegiance to the (allegedly communist) pope, head of the sovereign state of Vatican.
Based on the conniptions I see on The Original Gerbil Report (TOGR) about Ted Cruz’s so-called divided loyalties, I can’t wait for the fun to begin. 🙂
Typical crank MO. Just one step away of claming they agree with her because they did not send her a detailed refutation within 21 days (common MO courtesy of our German cranks).
American cranks like to claim that the lack of a libel suit is evidence that a defamatory allegation is true.
Some birfoons also brag that they’ll be able to have a mass hanging of all of Congress because giving them ShurfSkits has “put them on notice”, making them accomplices to The Biggest Fraud in the History of the Universe™ because they haven’t acted on the Irrefutable Evydunce.
For those interested in the deconstruction of reality, Rambo ike continues his accelerating fall into the rabbit hole on Gerbil Report:
http://www.gerbilreport.com/2015/04/explosive-arpaio-admits-awful-accusation.html#idc-container
Fixed.
That matches our gratitude to you for educating us on this subject.
My fluency in French is limited to a smattering of what I learned in high school, but I see that Google Translate says that “natural born citizen” translates to “citoyen de naissance.” Do you concur? Would Vattel have used “citoyen de naissance” if he meant natural born citizen?
I just finished listening to the interview of RC with Lupin. Thank you both for a very informative and entertaining show.
One of the problems with asking that question (which I may say as a newly-minted graduate of the Université de Lupin) is that in Vattels’ philosophy, there are only two classes of citizen: the native citizen or the naturalized citizen. He already told us what words he used for the former class, Naturels ou indigène.
We can ask if “natural born citizen” is a good English correspondent to Naturels ou indigène, but we cannot ask how Vattel would have expressed a concept he did not have. To ask Vattel how he would have translated the English phrase to French must beg the question of what it means in the first place.
Hey, do you know the Argentin avec la voix bandonéante?
That is an absolutely beautiful part of the world. I, however, found Carcassonne to be disappointing, as it is very tourist-y. I much more enjoyed Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, in Albi.
Jacky ? I also spotted him in the port of Amsterdam.
Lupin, great show, knowledge and passion. You mentioned the loss of interest of Americans for French culture in the recent decade. I’ll point to Freedom Fries. A good portion of Americans can still not get over Chirac snubbing them for not joining the coalition into Iraq, and a growing strain of nationalisme, as in France with Le Pen.
Lupin,
merci cent fois – c’était vraiment formidable
although “puzo1” vehemently disagrees
http://www.gerbilreport.com/2015/04/explosive-arpaio-admits-awful-accusation.html#idc-container
i don’t think he followed your suggestion and contacted “a Constitutional Law professor at the Sorbonne or any other French University”
comme d’habitude, he just rambled on
Of course in Mario’s drunken ramblings he thinks he knows French better than an actual french jurist.
Those are good points, Of course, if Vattel did not have a concept of “natural born citizen,” he could not have been expressing an opinion about what is required to be one.
Personally, I’m not much of a Dan Brown fan.
I much prefer Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln and several others who write in a similar vein. They make it much easier to suspend your disbelief without even noticing it. Brown’s books are just potboilers – easy to read, hard to put down, but ultimately unsatisfying.
The term “citoyen de naissance” evolved much later; it wouldn’t have occurred to Vattel to introduce it, since he already used the word Naturels for those kind of Citoyens.
I couldn’t have phrased it better.
Carcassonne is VERY touristy — yet, it’s a “living” city; my advice is to visit it at 10 pm at night when all (most) of the tourists are gone and you’re alone in that wonderful; medieval city. Of course by then the shops are closed too! 🙂
True, but there’s much less “anti-Americanism” now than there was under, say, de Gaulle or during the Viet-Nam war.
I think most French people were “cool” about your invasion of Iraq and the Abu Ghraib torture incidents, perhaps because our record in Algeria is as bad or worse.
What really shocked French people in recent years was the neglect of New Orleans during/after Katrina. That seemed inconceivable.
I have responded accordingly.
Is it me, or are his delusional constructions more and more complicated???
Henry Lincoln lives in the region and I have actually attended several of his talks.
FYI he is also half of the writing team who created the Great Intelligence and the Yeti in Doctor Who.
Rereading my words: “They make it much easier to suspend your disbelief without even noticing it.” I had the flash that would be half the problem for some people who fall too easily for conspiracy theories. They just don’t notice when they have suspended their disbelief – I suppose that would service as a reasonable definition for ‘gullible’.
Some people are well versed in the psychology of the gullible and can effectively disguise the point where the suspension of disbelief occurs. Like the burglar, suspended from the ceiling of a ultra secure vault by wires, picking up the diamond at the exact instant he sets down a bag of sand of the exact weight, thus preventing the alarms detecting the theft, the skillful writer distracts the reader at just the right instant preventing the reader’s bullsh1t detector from going off. If the reader isn’t suspecting it, they are hooked and all the writer has to do is reel ’em in.
Few people would, in honesty, accept Dan Brown’s stuff as history. He’s spinning a yarn and readers expect to have to suspend their disbelief. Baigent, et al, occupy a different ‘niche’. They present as journalists documenting a secret mythology that is only reluctantly coming to light, blending actual documented history with speculation and esoteric local traditions to suggest alternate histories to the reader without ever explicitly asserting them as fact.
I find the books like “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” much more intellectually ‘fun’ than the obvious slapstick of the “Da Vinci Code”. Not necessarily more believable, but definitely more fun. I EXPECT to have to suspend my disbelief, and KNOW when it occurs. I can absolutely imagine that others don’t even notice it happening.
This presents a difficulty for the gullibility sufferer, of course. If his already insufficient bullsh1t meter is subverted by skillful writers, he’ll just never notice that he is being taken for a ride.
It isn’t you. If you read his latest comment literally he is claiming Vattel said the citizenship of the parents is determined by the fathers but the citizenship of children requires both parents to be citizens. Which is it? Parent were once citizens.
I liked you comment that he is writing in Klingon. You nailed it.
Apuzzo has shown up at Gerbil Report.
http://www.gerbilreport.com/2015/04/explosive-arpaio-admits-awful-accusation.html
The thing that boggles the mind is, if he was right, there would have been literally thousands of non-French children born in France in the early 1800s.
He is arguing in the face of both history and reality.
I liked HB,HG enough and Lincoln is a very nice person, but he and his cowriter swiped wholesale from French writer Gerard de Sede
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rard_de_S%C3%A8de
and they got royally conned (pun intended) by that Plantard character, a man with a dubious WWII past who pretended to be descended from the Merovingians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Plantard
I hope I haven’t burst any bubbles? 🙂
First, congratulations and thank you to Reality Check and Lupin for a wonderful and fun interview. Nicely done!
Second, I noticed in Apuzzo’s comment in GR that he said, “That uniform rule provided that a child born in the country to alien parents was an alien…”
Is Apuzzo saying that a child is not an alien unless the child has 2 alien parents?
So how does he square that with his belief about Obama? Obama can neither be a citizen nor an alien?
so nice of him to hand us a hammer to hit him over the head with!
quick doc! revoke his edit rights!
Not at all. Confirms my expectation.
Obama cannot be anything at all, you see. The Denial doesn’t allow it. Cognitive block against affirming anything in regards to Obama.
Indeed, Obama does not even exist.
‘Tis but a figment to be pilloried, a universal scapegoat convenient for all tribal rituals.