brygenon wrote:
"Parens" seems to translate to "parents", but that might not be correct. I don't speak French. I've heard from a French-speaker that in this context "Parens" can mean relatives, not strictly mother and father.
Blood relatives actually. Someone who would pick up the bill for the child to be fed.
I think the fact that since elsewhere in the paragraph and chapter Vattel uses pères, we should think of this first sentence as an explanatory introduction introducing a principle, rather than a legal point.
At the time, Switzerland (as far as it existed in the minds and hearts of people - Vattel was born and died a Prussian) had as its main export product not clocks, but young men. Who may have come home from the war with a (pregnant) war bride, then leave again (with the wife pregnant a second time) - and never come back. Vattel is saying that the children of such a marriage are indigènes of Switzerlend, since we may presume that the Swiss grandfather or uncle would take over as the guardian of the children (the wife not yet having that right).
As for the meaning of "parents" - at the time Vattel wrote, the use of "parens" (as it was then spelled) with the meaning "father and mother" was considered to be informal French, to be avoided in good writing (it was used in plays of the period).
Interestingly, when I was able to download one, searchable, tome of one livre of Le droit des Gens from the Internet, I searched for the word and found it was used twice. Twice clearly in the meaning of blood relatives. [highlight]Is there a complete, searchable version around somewhere?[/highlight]The point being that the graphic versions are difficult to convert for searching because of the two versions of the letter "s", one of which is almost always interpreted by scanning programs as an "f".
Apart from the obvious fact that a grammatical plural may not always refer to a plural meaning - even the birfers would not think a natural born citizen needs citizen fatherS - Lupin at Doc C also pointed out something that escaped my attention entirely - Vattel switches from Pays (country) to Patrie (Fatherland) and that is not exactly the same thing. In Vattel's time, country-pays tended to refer to the Realm whose ruler could consider you a citizen/subject, but Patrie was the land or area you felt attached to. After the French revolution, this started to be reversed. "J'irai revoir ma Normandie, c'est le pays qui m'a donné le jour" - would be sung by someone who considers France his Patrie, before 1789 things were different, if not downright the opposite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_NormandieThere is a good chance that Vattel himself considered Prussia his Pays, which he was a citizen of, and Switzerland his Patrie, which he was indigenous to. If the Founding Fathers really had problems with double identity and allegiance, they would not have liked the constellation that Vattel witnessed and propagated. While the present Normandie-France relationship is very similar to the Texas-USA one, I think. Except for the little Jersey angle.
Quote:
Vattel did not present "Naturels ou indigènes" as a special class under the law, precisely distinguishing by the dates their parents became citizens. Rather, they are the indigenous natives. They were born here; their parents were born here; their parents parents were born here; and so on for longer than we can trace.
The legal formalism Vattel favored was that a child's condition followed that of the father, but Vattel granted that the local law of land prevails over his suggestion. Here in U.S., our law is that children born in the United States are natural-born citizens (with narrow exceptions: children of foreign ambassadors with diplomatic immunity, or of invading armies). The descendants of colonists are not Native Americans, not indigenous, and thus not what Vattel called "Naturels ou indigènes".
It could be construed as the "Patrie" of the Native Americans being "America", not the United States, which of course, if and when they were taxed, did become their pays. The problem is obvious. Vattel's view of the world is completely different from that of the colonists. Not that the birfers will understand.
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bob - "refuting various points made by Donofrio" = "rudeness indicat[ing] a person who was not sincerely interested in debate." Only those who 
