May the last king be strangled in the bowels of the last priest
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- "Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre,
- au défaut d’un cordon pour étrangler les rois." [1]
English: And his hands would plait the priest's entrails, for want of a rope, to strangle kings.) is a dictum by Denis Diderot found in "Les Éleuthéromanes". A variant translation is "His hands would plait the priest’s guts, if he had no rope, to strangle kings."
It has been translated in English since the end of the 18th century.[2] A common translation is "May the last King be strangled in the bowels of the last Priest."
Meslier
The English Wikiquote page notes: "This derives from the prior statement widely attributed to Jean Meslier: "I would like — and this would be the last and most ardent of my wishes — I would like the last of the kings to be strangled by the guts of the last priest". It is often claimed the passage appears in Meslier's Testament (1725) but it only appears in abstracts of the work written by others. See the Wikipedia article Jean Meslier for details.[3]"
Variant:
- Et des boyaux du dernier prêtre
Serrons le cou du dernier roi.
- (Let us strangle the last king
- with the guts of the last priest.)
The talk page of the Jean Meslier page on Wikipedia has [4]:
