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every time you post?:-) I would LOVE to see Egypt - really see it, as you do, by living there for a while. Toursita stuff leaves me cold and frustrated!
The necropoli of Alexandria sound utterly fascinating; there is so much to learn by examining how people deal with their dead. I love wandering around cemeteries, reading epitaphs and thinking about the human desire to prolong the "life" of the dead by building elaborate structures to house them.
A hint as to when the cemetery was established is found in a this article: Textual Relations and Encyclopaedic Order in the Work of Larousse/ ﻋﻼﻗﺎﺕ ﺍﻟﻨﺼﻮﺹ ﻭﺍﻟﻨﻈﺎﻡ ﺍﻟﻣﻮﺳﻮﻋﻲ ﻋﻨﺪ ﻻﺭﻭﺱ Magdi Wahba/ ﻣﺠﺪﻱ ﻭﻫﺒﻪ Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 4, Intertextuality/ التناص: تفاعلية النصوص. (Spring, 1984), pp. 26-41.
"Of course, the man's natural ebullience and optimism had carried him away. He was taking far too much for granted, and the so-called 'clerical' party was still very strong. In fact, it was going from strength to strength. 'Clerical', however, was an epithet largely used by anti-clericals in discussing the Roman question, which loomed so large in the internal politics of France during the 1860's. Deschanel and Victor Hugo had used it as a term of abuse as far back as 1848 and Sainte-Beuve used it with increasing vehemence in his speeches in the Senate after 1866. But the true heyday of the word was to be after the defeat at Sedan. In the 1860's the attack on 'clericalism', as any form of stable 'belief in established order came to be called, coincided with the growth of free-thought, that composite humanist philosophy, which drew its principles from Renan's criticism of religion, Taine's criticism of contemporary philosophy and Littrt's reinterpretation of positivism. It is certainly as a means of propagation of 'free thought' that the Grand Dictionnaire was regarded by Larousse himself. His article on 'Libre pensee' in volume 10 makes the point absolutely clear:
Elle resume une des faces de I'esprit du XIXe sihcle que le Grand Dictionnaire doit recueillir pour I'enseignement des ages futurs ... il faut, a Paris et dans tous les grands centres, Clever un temple a la libre pensee auquel sera annex6 un cimetihre special ....
The 'special cemetery' he explains, was to be for the burial of all those whose consciences did not allow them to agree to being given a final resting place in consecrated ground. A fairly involved form of ceremonial was suggested by him, a sort of funerary procession with all the trappings of religious burial, but with a scrupulous avoidance of all appeals to God. There was something of the latter-day Comtism in this amalgam of liturgy and free-thought. Such cemeteries, moreover, were in fact designed some time after Larousse's death, with the help of a large section of the Masonic movement in France.
In 1875, the year of this death, it was still imperative to be a deist in order to become a Mason. LittrC, together with Jules Ferry, was admitted into the Lodge of the "Clemente AmitiC", affiliated to the Grand Orient de France on 8th. July 1875. Littre made a most interesting initiation address on that occasion, in which he was able to by-pass an explicit admission of atheism, thus putting some distance between himself and the official doctrines of Positivism. The General Assembly of the Grand Orient de France decided to change the article in its constitution about the need for a basic deistic belief to the following text:
"Elle (Freemasonry) a pour principes la IibertC absolue de conscience et la solidarite humaine. Elle n'exclut personne pour ses crovances".
Naturally, this was tantamount to a declaration of independence from British freemasonry and the Supreme Council of Scottish Lodges, which still uphold deism or even theism to this day. After 1877 the Grand Orient joined with free-thinkers in establishing Larousse's cemeteries throughout the French-speaking world. It is a curious fact that such cemeteries still exist even in Cairo and Alexandria, intended for the Freemasons and free-thinkers among the European and Levantine communities, who were joined by the remnants of the Carbonari and the followers of Garibaldi who had sought refuge in Egypt."
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