Jumpin' Jacobins! Why can't the French pick a better day to celebrate? Bastiat's Birthday? The debut of the Third Republic? Easter?
The very good French restaurant next to my office is having happy hour all day. I wish them well and I wish the nation of France well. I am not really a French-basher, although I have strayed into that realm on occasion.
But the sacking of the Bastille provided the Reign of Terror, failed to achieve Republican rule in France, and paved the way for Lenin and Mao.
This website puts a happy face on it:
On July 14, 1789, the storming of the Bastille immediately took on a great historical dimension; it was proof that power no longer resided in the King as God's representative, but in the people, in accordance with the theories developed by their philosophers of the eighteenth century. Within two days the Revolution could not be reversed. For all citizens of France, the storming of the Bastille came to symbolize liberty, democracy in the struggle against oppression.
After the attack on the Tuileries Palace on August 10, 1792, the Republic was proclaimed on 22 September 1792. However, even upon Louis XVI's execution on January 21, 1793, France did not break completely with its monarchic heritage. It rejected the idea of federalism and never applied the egalitarian principles of the 1793 Constitution. Instead, in keeping with the Jacobin spirit, a highly centralized and dictatorial policy was enforced during the Reign of Terror under the authority of the Committee of Public Safety, dominated by Robespierre. Supporters claimed the policy was justified by the aggression of the coalition of European monarchies outside France's borders and by the uprisings within. The coup d'état of 18 Brumaire VIII (November 9, 1799) put an end to the period of instability after Robespierre's assassination.
Bonaparte, one of the Republic's most brilliant generals, became First Consul, then Consul for Life before finally, in 1804, being crowned Napoleon I, "Emperor of the French." The Consulate retained a Republican model of government, but the First Empire restored such monarchical forms as authority vested in the person of the ruler, and it set up a new nobility. [...]
After Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo in 1815 France once again became a monarchy when Louis XVIII was called to the throne; he was succeeded by Charles X and then, after the Revolution of July 1830, Louis-Philippe. The Restoration was followed by the Second Republic (1848-1851) and the Second Empire (1852-1870). In 1875 a republic was proclaimed for the third time; France has been a republic ever since. The Third Republic enshrined in French political tradition the seven-year presidential term, still the rule today.
I don't want to run down the French but --safe to say -- politics is not their gift. I wish them a great holiday but wish they would find a more appropriate event to celebrate (the liberation of Iraq on April 9? KIDDING! KIDDING!)
The Bastille? WTF?
What about Boston Harbor?
Or Bunker Hill?
Or July 4th 1776?!
Those weren't proof the power was with the people?
Right on. If you follow the link, you get to read this tortured explanation:
The French Declaration of 1789 is not simply a copy of the American Declaration of Independence, it takes as a starting point the the reflexions of the philosophy of the Enlightenment and in particular of authors like Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau. Admittedly, the US document had a great influence on the French. But the originality of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was conceived to recognize eternal and universal values. It thus had, after its publication, a great repercussion on the Western thought.
Compared to say "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"
Posted by: jk at July 14, 2004 04:44 PM