Happy Bastille Day!
We've had Edith Piaf singing "La Marseillaise" since cock-crow here, so it must be Bastille Day! Go behead some aristos and tell 'em "Edith sent ya!"
Link
On 5 May 1789, Louis XVI convened the Estates-General to hear their grievances. The deputies of the Third Estate representing the common people (the two others were clergy and nobility) decided to break away and form a National Assembly. On 20 June the deputies of the Third Estate took the Tennis Court Oath, swearing not to separate until a constitution had been established. They were gradually joined by delegates of the other estates; Louis started to recognize their validity on 27 June. The assembly re-named itself the National Constituent Assembly on 9 July, and began to function as a legislature and to draft a constitution.In the wake of the 11 July dismissal of the royal finance minister Jacques Necker, the people of Paris, fearful that they and their representatives would be attacked by the royal military, and seeking to gain arms for the general populace, stormed the Bastille, a prison which had often held people jailed on the basis of lettre de cachet, arbitrary royal indictments that could not be appealed. Besides holding a large cache of arms, the Bastille had been known for holding political prisoners whose writings had displeased the royal government, and was thus a symbol of the absolutism of the monarchy. As it happened, at the time of the siege in July 1789 there were only seven inmates, none of great political significance.
the latest
latest episodes
It's "la Marseillaise", not "le" ; you're risking decapitation here :)
Thank you for my country !
Vive La Revolution!
Mort aux Tyrans!
Apres le bon exemple de les Americains!
Et (bien sur)...
Vive La France!
Ooh, thanks a bunch!
And yay for things that go boom to celebrate liberty and democracy! Guy Fawkes Day, Bastille Day, Independence Day... It's good for letting go a few firecrackers anyway.
Let's not forget who one of the Bastille's remaining prisoners was! The Marquis de Sade, imprisoned by a lettre from his mother in law for his depravity. (Not that the lettres required any explanation.)
In the histories of the storming of the Bastille and de Sade I've read, the revolutionaries were actually pretty much okay with de Sade remaining in the jail.
"We live in a more enlightened age.
We're all revolutionaries now a days."
Tous mangeons le gâteau!
Nobody really knew what to do vis-a-vis the Marquis...so they more-or-less let him be..the Clergy of France (his natural enemy, so to speak) had other fish frying at the time...he was incarcerated in the Bastille, so the Revolutionaries could not very well claim that he was a Member of the Oppressor Class...and there is little doubt that he was a "kind of" revolutionary (but there was oh so many flavors of such at first)...a little different from Lord Black's current situation in Fla. I guess...but you see my point...de Sade's interests aligned with the upset-the-apple-cart interests of the materially rather than sexually oppressed...but I don't think that the Marquis could be called a socialist (nor indeed could the Revolutionaries - that label is a 19th C term and inappropriate for the Epoch under discussion IMHO)or for that matter any other type of "political" revolutionary except insofar as it allowed him to pursue his (ahem) other "interests"...nor is he anywhere near the best or most interesting or even amusing of the many many artists that great Nation has produced over the Centuries...I agree with Hunter Thompson though that the Marquis forever has a place amongst the Truly Weird.
Link in case pic doesn't work
"Four years after the revolution and the old king's execution
Four years after I remember how those courtiers took their final vow
String up every aristocrat
Out with the priests Let them live on their fat"
"Four years after we started fighting
Marat keeps on with his writing
Four years after the Bastille fell
He still recalls the old battle yell
Down with all of the ruling class
Throw all the generals out on their arse"
I noted that the UK paper "the Independent" cheekily described London as being France's 7th largest city, containing as it does a population of some 300,000 Frenchies. Vive la Revolution. We could do with some of that spirit right now. I'd suggest starting with the shoving of a CCTV camera up Gordon Brown's scottish arse. Sideways.
"All men want to be free
If they don't, never mind
We'll abolish all mankind!"
For the Marquis and his modern influence I recommend the 1965 Peter Cushing film, "The Skull".
Not only Bastille Day, today is my anniversary!
(Cue the obligatory fireworks jokes)
ever read the words?
semper fidelis tyrannosaurus!
@ Padster123: No wonder. And in some parts of France, British nationals are now the most important minority, with their own shops and newspapers.
Vive l'Europe ! ;-)
"Fight ing all the gentry and fighting every priest
Businessman the bourgeois the military beast
Marat always ready to stifle every scheme
of the sons of the arse licking dying regime"
Storm the castle and behead the king.
Sounds like a plan to me. The English should have done the same to theirs long ago. The description of the Bastille sounds an awful lot like Guantanamo to me. All this has happened before and it will all happen again.
Makes devil horns with hands - cranks up the ancient Rush......
I shouldn't underestimate fellow BB commenters: quoting The Assassination and Persecution of Jean-Paul Marat by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade is nearly, but not quite, obscure. It's a fascinating play. We performed it very seriously in high school (I was de Sade), and freaked out parents, but not administrators, who were very cool. My theater teacher was way ahead of his time back in 1986, or behind it, in that it's probably impossible to perform such a play in a high school today. I got whipped on stage!
Anyway...de Sade was chameleonic, and survived for quite a while by becoming revolutionary, anti-revolutionary, counter-revolutionary, until institutionalized at Charenton. He asked his son to burn all his papers, and destroy his history utterly. His son opted not to.
I feel less alone now.
#23, About the time you were being whipped on stage, I wrote for a company that produced three works a year: A classic, a musical, and a contemporary or regional. One year they offered Marat/Sade as the musical. As the inestimable Yogi Berra once said, 'People stayed away in droves.'
What? All this talk about Bastille Day and no mention of Rush?
Come on, where are my fellow prog rockers???
"Bloodstained velvet, dirty lace
Naked fear on every face
See them bow their heads to die
As we would bow as they rode by
And were marching to bastille day la guillotine will claim Her bloody prize
sing, o choirs of cacophony the king has Kneeled,
to let his kingdom rise"
I looked forward to Bastille Day when I lived in Belmont on the Peninsula south of SF. A French-owned hotel in Redwood Shores sponsored a fireworks show that night. I got a pretty good view from my Balcony.
#5 what does guy fawkes day have to do with liberty and democracy?
#28 Why, the same thing liberty & democracy have to do with fireworks, of course...
"...lettre de cachet, arbitrary royal indictments that could not be appealed."
Does indeed sound familiar...
#29 it's totally plausible that fireworks are a symbolic representation of the actual battles that took place in efforts for liberty and independence...
that aside - being raised in the us, celebrations like bastille day seemed distinctly odd: july 4th is the celebration of the efforts of one country to unshackle itself from another country; july 14th is the celebration of the efforts of one country to unshackle itself from itself.
Here's something nuts...
Last Veterans Day the city of Burton, Michigan observed this solemn reminder by staging a pyrotechnics display in a supermarket parking lot. Think of it...honoring the dead and surviving veterans by setting off explosives! I almost hid under the bed with the dog.
Are there other municipalities that stupid?