François Franckowski.

Certain people imagine that the Spirits come only at the appeal made to them. It is an error not shared by those who know Spiritism, for they know that many times they present themselves spontaneously, without being called, which has led us to say that even if the evocation of Spirits were forbidden, one could not prevent them from coming. But, they will say, they come because you practice mediumship and because you call others; if you abstained, they would not come. It is another grave error, and the facts are there to prove how many times the Spirits have manifested themselves by sight, by hearing, or by any other manner whatever, to persons who had never heard of Spiritism. It is not, then, against the mediums that one should issue a writ of interdiction, but against the Spirits, so that they do not communicate, not even with the permission of God.

These spontaneous communications have a much more surprising interest when they emanate from Spirits who are neither expected nor known, and whose identity can be verified later. We cited a notable example in the history of Simon Louvet, recounted in the Review of March 1863. Here is another fact no less instructive, obtained by a medium of our acquaintance.

A Spirit presents itself under the name of François Franckowski and dictates the following:

“The love of God is the sentiment that summarizes all loves, all abnegations. The love of country is a ray of that sublime sentiment. Poor country of mine! unhappy Poland! how many misfortunes have come to fall upon you! how terrible are the crimes of those who deem themselves civilized, and how the unfortunate ones who wish to hinder liberty will be punished! O God! cast a glance upon this wretched country and grant grace to those who, entirely given over to vengeance, do not think that you will punish them on the other side of life. Poland is a blessed land, because it gives rise to great devotions and none of its sons is a coward. God loves those who forget themselves for the good of all. It is in reward for the devotion of the Poles that he will grant the grace and their yoke will be broken. I died a victim of our oppressors, execrated by all of ours. I was young, I was twenty-four years old; my poor mother is dying of grief, for having lost all that she loved in this world: her son. I beseech you, pray for her, that she may forget and forgive my executioner, for without that forgiveness she will be forever separated from me… Poor mother! I saw her again only on the morning of my death, and it was so horrible to feel ourselves separated!… God had pity on me: I do not abandon her since I was able to free myself from the remnant of vitality that bound my Spirit to my body… I come to you because I know that you will pray for her; she who is so good, generally so resigned, and yet so revolted against God since I am no longer there!… It is necessary that she forgive. Pray that this sublime forgiveness of a mother to the executioner of her son may come to end a life so gloriously begun. Farewell! You will pray, will you not?” François Franckowski.

The medium had never heard of such a person and judged that he had perhaps been the object of a mystification, when, some days later, he received various pieces of linen that he had ordered, wrapped in a piece of the Petit Journal of last July 7. He looked through it mechanically and, under the heading of Capital executions, read an article that began thus:

“We find curious details about the execution of a young Pole, a prisoner of the Russians. Franckowsky was a young man of twenty-four years. He still has parents, who had even received leave to visit him in prison. As he had not been caught with arms in hand, he was condemned to the gallows by the council of war. I attended the execution and cannot think without emotion of that terrible event…”

There follows the detailed account of the execution and of the last moments of the victim, who died with the courage of heroism.

To those who deny the manifestations — and their number diminishes each day — to those who attribute the mediumistic communications to the imagination, to the reflection of thought, even unconscious, we ask whence could come to the medium the intuition of the name of Franckowsky, the age of twenty-four years, the mother coming to see the son in prison, of the fact, in a word, of which he was absolutely ignorant and of which he even doubted, and the confirmation of which he came to find in a piece of newspaper that wrapped a parcel? And that the fragment of newspaper should be precisely the one that contains the account? You will say: “Yes, it was chance.” Let it be so, for you, who see in everything nothing but chance; but, and the rest?

To those who claim to forbid the communications under the pretext that they proceed from the devil, or any other, we ask whether there exists anything more beautiful, more noble, more evangelical than the soul of that son who forgives his executioner, who beseeches his mother also to forgive him, who gives that forgiveness as a condition of salvation! And why does he come to this medium, whom he did not know, but to whom, later, he gives an irresistible proof of identity? To ask him to pray, so that his mother may forgive. And you say that this is the language of the demon? Ah! how good it would be if all those who speak in the name of God did so in the same manner! They would touch more hearts than with anathemas and curses. [See the following article: On the prohibition of evoking the dead.]