Bastille Day

I have been fascinated by the 1789 revolution for decades. As you know, it was on July 14, 1789, that a Parisian mob stormed the Bastille, a fortress-like prison in the city. There were only about 6 prisoners incarcerated there at the time, people who had been privately put away by their own relatives who possessed the rank or influence to send the king a lettre de cachet. The city was planning to demolish the Bastille soon in any event. The mob may have believed the prison was a storehouse of armaments, which they were anxious to get, although they did a very competent job of butchery just with knives and clubs, and by hanging people from street lights. À la lanterne! was the rallying cry as they dragged some foppish aristocrat to his or her grisly death. 🤢There is real Grand Guignol atmosphere about the whole thing. Bloodlust.

“In the wild fifth year of the change of things,/ When France was glorious and blood-red, fair/ With dust of battle and deaths of kings,/A queen of men,with helmeted hair..”

…wrote Swinburne, from the safety of England, in his poem Les Noyades (the drownings). By 1794 The Terror had spread to the provinces where sadistic governors bound people together face to face and threw them into the rivers to drown. Y’know, just reg’lar old people, peasants as well as aristocrats and wealthy burghers. As Robespierre proclaimed before he himself lost his head to the “National Razor”, ”Terror is the order of the day”.

i always used to give a summer party on Bastille Day, (4th of July was too socially competitive). And I’d wear a thin red ribnon around my neck, like Parisians did in the revolutionary salons, to indicate that they had a close relative who had gotten the chop on the guillotine. i havent done a Bastille Day party for awhile now. We are once again living in an age of ideological terror and…it’s just too close to home.

Ill tell you about a few books in case youre interested in the period.
Still one of the best: A Tale of Two Cities.
Farewell the Tranquil Mind ((Delderfield). Citizens ( Simon Schama) . A Place of Greater Safety (Hilary Mantel).

If you ever go or return to Paris, read a couple of ’em. itll change the way you see the city.

Happy Bastille Day: lLiberté, Égalité, Fraternité!