Alan Rickman as Jacques Roux, “The Preacher” (From BBC’s “Revolutionary Witness”)

(This was one of four monologues written by playwright Peter Barnes for the bicentennial anniversary of the French Revolution. And yes, that is Alan “Severus Snape” Rickman. As a preacher. In a cassock. Emoting. I wonder what would my “enlightened friend” think about this when she sees it?)

Cool Quotes:

“Together we lopped off that top branch of tyranny but the tree still stands and spreads. New branches hide the sun of freedom from the poor, the revolutionary tribunal is one such. I don’t recognize its authority to judge me.”

“…The good and the true had no carriages, no eighteen drummers and three executioners. A Prussian sword in the belly, and English bullet in the chest, and falling face down in the mud was their end. That’s how ordinary people die, meanly, without harps or even drums to play them out.”

“Tomorrow, before the tribunal of mumblers I shall make no attempt to defend myself. That doesn’t mean to say I’ll stay silent–never that. I’ll do what I was born to do–attack! If the verdict of that bunch of rotting fish-heads goes against me, I die like friend Marat, thus struck down by a better hand… my own!

“Living well is so much harder than dying well.”

“I have tried, to help create a people who are skeptical, rational, critical, not easily fooled or impressed; in a word, a free people, ungovernable.”

“…Just for a moment, we stopped being me and mine, you and yours, us and them, and saw ourselves instead as equals in our common humanity. We are of that generation that so transformed the world that future days and nights can never be the same. We poor clumsy men and women turned the world upside down, inside out, round and about.”

“The Revolution isn’t complete, hardly begun. Defend it. Don’t sit back, act! Without action, no life. Without life, no perfection. Without perfection, no eternal peace and freedom. For God is an active power and we do His work in fighting the great battles: light against darkness, love against selfishness, revolution against reaction, life against death.”