Support Blast, a new independent media: https://www.blast-info.fr/soutenir The Empire Never Ended. This is a sentence that appeared in a dream of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. He was in a bookstore looking for old issues of a magazine called: The Empire Never Ended. If he gathered the entire collection, the political and spiritual history of humanity would finally be readable. We could emerge from amnesia, from the "black iron prison". Philip K. Dick knew the symbolic meaning of this title, The Empire Never Ended. He would write it in The Exegesis, this journal written every night from 1974 until his death in 1982: "Rome has always been there, is and will always be there. The Christianity that we see in an exoteric way is in reality Roman, infiltrated by Rome." It is even Rome squared. Caesar two points zero. Since, by infiltrating Christianity, the Empire was going to pass off its enterprise of domination as a spiritual adventure. And its material conquests as battles of Good against Evil. "We judge the tree by its fruits" said Jesus. This word, when we must apply it to the one who claimed to be its legitimate heir, the Church, hurts. If we must judge the History of the Church and that of France, its "eldest daughter", not by what they say about themselves but by what they have done, the tree is not pleasant to see. That is the least we can say. This alliance, formed during the baptism of Clovis at the end of the 5th century, was to culminate in the 13th century in a crime that France and the Church would carry out together: The Albigensian Crusade. The massacre of these heretics who were called "Cathars" and the conquest of the territories of the lords who protected them. If a single event were needed to demonstrate that the Roman Empire, nine centuries after its apparent end, had continued to dominate the world, it would be this one. As Simone Weil said: "One can find in history facts of an atrocity as great, but not greater, except perhaps for a few rare exceptions, than the conquest by the French of the territories located south of the Loire, at the beginning of the 13th century." What follows is History and is not. Not really. Not only. Because such a story overflows its mere historical reality. It is an event of another nature. This story of French knights and Catholic inquisitors exterminating "heretics" located in the South-West is also the story of a parallel world. A strange and familiar world, with a mentality so modern that it seems almost anachronistic to us and a mythology that seems to come from far away, very far away, in time as in space, and which one wonders how it could have coexisted with medieval Christian France. Because with them, near them, the secret Gesture of the Kingless continues imperturbably for us. The Extermination of the Cathars is not only a bloody episode, it is a mysterious story. It carries us, whether we like it or not, to another shore. It is located, like these men who were killed, on the other side of the mirror of History. With the philosophical collaboration of Franc Bardou. Author: Pacôme Thiellement Director: Mathias Enthoven, Ameyes Aït-Oufella Editing: Ameyes Aït-Oufella Sound: Baptiste Veilhan Graphics: Morgane Sabouret, Diane Lataste Production: Hicham Tragha Program Director: Mathias Enthoven Editor-in-Chief: Soumaya Benaïssa Publication Director: Denis Robert Website: https://www.blast-info.fr/ Facebook: / blastofficiel Twitter: / blast_france Instagram: / blastofficiel Mastodon: https://mamot.fr/web/@blast_info Peertube: https://video.blast-info.fr/ Twitch: / blastinfo #Cathars #PacômeThiellement #History