Bastille Daze

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Bastille Daze

 

Posted by Daniel Flynn Bio ↓ on Jul 13th, 2012 Comments ↓

How did “Liberty, equality, fraternity,” Chamfort wondered, become “Be my brother or I’ll kill you”?

The former secretary of the Jacobin Club, who had been among the first to rush inside the Bastille, eventually harbored second thoughts. He embodied a live-free-or-die ethos, so when the Terror began terrifying him he shot himself in the face and stabbed himself in the neck and chest. But he proved

less efficient at killing than his former guillotine-enthusiast comrades. Chamfort’s slow suicide took more than six months. The Revolution’s took more than a decade.

But 223 years after Chamfort stormed the ancient Parisian fortress, France still celebrates the Revolution that executed the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, chased away as great a patriot as Lafayette, and invaded the Netherlands, Switzerland, and scores of other peaceful neighbors.

Saturday is Bastille Day. Enlightened people lament it. They certainly don’t ritualize it.

Ninety-eight revolutionaries and just one guard died in the assault on the Bastille. The liberators proved crueler than the jailers. They beat, stabbed, shot, and decapitated the warden, whose head they displayed through the streets on a pike. Will and Ariel Durant described the Bastille as “a place of genteel confinement for the well-to-do” and “a symbol of despotism.” So when the rabble liberated four forgers, a pair of lunatics, and a pervert from the bulwark on July 14, 1789, they set the symbol-over-substance tone of the Revolution. Wrapped in “reason” and enlightenment,” the benighted Read More http://frontpagemag..../bastille-daze/