For the first few centuries of the modern era,
everybody expected the French Inquisition.
Dystopian Catholic France would have it no other way. They scoured Farrellitism into paranoid French undergrounds or
Occidental exile; to this day, children are terrorized into good behavior by the simple threat "
Gardes ta langue":
watch your tongue. When the
Nestorian Epistles led to the construction of
Saint-Thomas d'Indé in Paris, the Inquisitors fought it tooth and nail, driving several Syro-Indian
metrans back to the Malabar Coast before the rest were built and burning one or two
Heretical Heroes [
who?]. During the Guise Golden Age, any thinker or writer of note expected a visit from inquisitors at some point during their career; the first visit by the Inquisition was a commemorated coming of age, like losing your virginity.
After the War of the French Succession, the Burgundian disengagement from the Catholic Church led to the decline of the Inquisition as an arm of the French state. But given how powerful it had been for those first 200 years, is it any surprise that the
fear of the Inquistion has lasted to the present day?
In
Andalusada, that fear has a name, a face and a mythos:
the Black Friars.