Oh.
Today is Bastille Day.
For those of you new to the view of France as the navel of history, Bastille Day is a French national holiday that commemorates a French mob "symbolically" overthrowing its French monarch and having a little fun murdering a few French in the process.
La Bastille was formerly the site of the Bastille St-Antoine a castle which was left standing when the boulevards were levelled in 1670. This stronghold, which was erected in 1371-83 by Kings Charles V and VI, was afterwards used as a state-prison, chiefly for the confinement of persons of rank who had fallen victims to the intrigues of the court or the caprice of the government, and attained a world-wide celebrity in consequence of its destruction on 14 July 1789, at the beginning of the French Revolution.
Almost all accounts take pains to describe the storming of the Bastille as "symbolic"** because at the time of the mob's attack the Bastille was not up to its reputation as a seat of political oppression and torture. (The prison apartments were, contrary to revolutionary incendiaries, well-appointed when not outright luxurious.) The mob liberated the prison's seven sole inmates -- four forgers, two lunatics, and a nobleman (Jean de la Corrége; Jean Bèchade; Bernard Laroche; Jean-Antoine Pujade; DeWhitt; Tavernier; and the Count of Solages [charged with incest]) -- achieving, we are asked to believe, the "symbolic" objective of "symbolically" freeing vast populations of the politically oppressed embarrassingly absent. As it is, the freed prisoners make fitting symbols for the dispositions of the French Revolutionary spirit.
Of course, the mob had not constituted itself "symbolically" nor was it about "symbolical" business. The mob got busy with the practical work of mobbing:
After four hours of fighting, [the prison governor, Bernard-Jordan the Marquis de Launay] capitulated on the promise of his safe conduct. He and some of his officers were taken to the Town Hall and murdered along with [Jacques de] Flesselles, the hated† [royal] Prévôt des Marchands. Their heads were mounted on poles and paraded around.
And here, further reading for French Republicans keen on celebrating the symbolic content of Bastille Day.
Of course, storming the Bastille is very important in France as it inaugurated French mob rule, a form of governance from the streets that continues to this day. It is also instructive for discerning the historical forces that inform French ideas of due process, summary justice, and the exculpating virtue of performing crimes as part of a mob inflamed by fairy tales.
Pave does not celebrate Bastille Day. We remark Bastille Day because we believe it speaks directly to the soulessness of modern France.
* That is today, July 14, 2005, reckoned by the overwrought, inordinately denominated, unnatural and defective French Republican Calendar.
** The official French government source linked above further claims: "The storming of the Bastille, on 14 July 1789, immediately became a symbol of historical dimension; it was proof that power no longer resided in the King or in God, but in the people, in accordance with the theories developed by the Philosophes of the eighteenth century." Proof indeed.
† Hated, it seems, because he did not arm the revolutionaries with suitable dispatch.
PFFT (What is this?): Misplaced historical importance 4 | Moral content 0 | Rayonnement français 0
