Bastille Day

The French holiday commemorating the "storming" of the Bastille is today, July 14, so I figured I'd write about it. It certainly isn't what you think it is...or was.

French peasants in Paris were starving. There had been a food shortage due, in all likelihood, to either delivery problems from the agricultural countryside, or merely a bad harvest. Whatever the reason, the peasants were pissed. Louis XVI, instead of taking steps to alleviate the situation, fortified the Bastille, a tall, stone edifice in the heart of Paris. (It has since been torn down.) Starvation, coupled with a nasty heat wave, made this a combustible situation. However, one overlooked fact put the problem over the top: a number of French peasants raided a wine warehouse, looted the place of its casks, and everyone in Paris got smashed. Combustible indeed.

Anyway, the drunken, hungry Parisians stormed the Bastille, figuring that it was filled with political prisoners and unfairly prosecuted French folk. There were all of six prisoners in the monstrous edifice, two of which were insane or retarded, depending on which version of the story you read. It mattered not. They took the castle, decapitated several heads of guards, stuck them on pikes, and paraded them through the streets. Not exactly Lexington and Concorde.

The rest is history. The French Revolution went from a quasi-republican revolution to a full-blown genocidal movement in the space of three years. Not only did the rebellion wind up as an anti-royalist one, but also an anti-church one. Many catholic clergymen lost their lives, many churches and monasteries destroyed, and a sort of atheistic, amoral state emerged, complete with days, months, and years renamed and rearranged. (The point of this being to eliminate all traces of Christian tradition.) The high water mark of the revolution was obviously "The Great Terror", which Maximillian Robespierre helmed. The Jacobins, which Robespierre led, commenced on killing everyone, even fellow revolutionaries, such as Girondiste Georges Danton. In the end, the revolution wound up decapitating even Robespierre and his fellow Jacobins. (Sidenote: Robespierre, on getting wind that armed men were coming to arrest him, attempted suicide, but failed. He spent the remainder of what was left of his life in agonizing pain, having shot his jaw off.) The end of The Great Terror occurred when The Directory, a triumvirate led by Napoleon, seized power. Napoleon soon assumed complete control of the French republic, crowned himself emperor, got deposed twice, and was inevitably followed by....Louis XVIII, the successor of Louis XVI. And back to a monarchy France went.

Having studied the French Revolution in college (I had an amazing professor, Dr. Karen Halbersleben), the inevitable question that arose towards the end of the class was, "why would they ever celebrate Bastille Day in the first place?" It would be like celebrating the Fourth of July but having lost the Revolutionary War, with the only long-term benefit being that America wound up as a commonwealth like Canada or Australia.

For the record, the French are on their FIFTH republic.