(I originally posted this at The American Catholic on July 14, 2012, and I suspected that the history mavens of Almost Chosen People might enjoy reading it.)
The La Marseillaise scene from Casablanca. Today is Bastille Day, the great national holiday in France, the equivalent our Independence Day. In France it is known as La Fête Nationale, the National Celebration, or Le quatorze juillet, the fourteenth of July, rather like Independence Day is often known here as the fourth of July. There the similarities end. Although almost all Americans look back at the American Revolution with pride, many of us dedicated to the great truths embodied in the Declaration of Independence, the French Revolution is looked upon much more ambiguously in France.
Bastille Day recalls an event July 14, 1789 in which the mob of Paris, joined by mutinous French troops, stormed the Bastille, a fortress-prison in Paris which had in the past held political prisoners. The Bastille fell to the mob after a fight in which some ninety-eight attackers and one defender were killed. After the fighting, in an ominous sign of what was to come in the French Revolution, the mob massacred the governor of the prison and seven of the defenders. The Bastille held a grand total of seven inmates at the time of its fall, none of political significance.
So began the Revolution which promised Liberty, Equality and Fraternity in theory and delivered in practice, Tyranny, Wars and Death, with France embarked on a witches’ dance of folly which would end at Waterloo, after almost a quarter of a century of war which would leave Europe drenched in blood. Edmund Burke at the beginning of this madness, in 1790, saw clearly where all this would lead:
Many Frenchmen also saw this, and fought against the Revolution and all its works. The Revolution is a history of civil wars, and barbarous massacres. The Church of course was enemy number one of many of the Revolutionaries, with faithful Catholics undergoing a murderous persecution without parallel up to that point in the history of the Church.
Why would anyone want to celebrate any of this?
One of the wonderful things about History is how it can often transmute events. For more than a hundred years after the Revolution in France, France remained bitterly divided between those who celebrated the Revolution and those who mourned it. This began to change during World War I, when Frenchmen of all shades of political opinion rallied together to defend France and some of the symbols of the Revolution, the Tri-color flag and La Marseillaise, began to take on a patriotic meaning for almost all the French, shorn of their associations with the Revolution. This culminated in 1944 in Paris when General Charles de Gaulle, a believing Catholic, gave a speech in liberated Paris on August 24, 1944:
Why do you wish us to hide the emotion which seizes us all, men and women, who are here, at home, in Paris that stood up to liberate itself and that succeeded in doing this with its own hands?
No! We will not hide this deep and sacred emotion. These are minutes which go beyond each of our poor lives. Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!
Well! Since the enemy which held Paris has capitulated into our hands, France returns to Paris, to her home. She returns bloody, but quite resolute. She returns there enlightened by the immense lesson, but more certain than ever of her duties and of her rights.
I speak of her duties first, and I will sum them all up by saying that for now, it is a matter of the duties of war. The enemy is staggering, but he is not beaten yet. He remains on our soil.
It will not even be enough that we have, with the help of our dear and admirable Allies, chased him from our home for us to consider ourselves satisfied after what has happened. We want to enter his territory as is fitting, as victors.
This is why the French vanguard has entered Paris with guns blazing. This is why the great French army from Italy has landed in the south and is advancing rapidly up the Rhône valley. This is why our brave and dear Forces of the interior will arm themselves with modern weapons. It is for this revenge, this vengeance and justice, that we will keep fighting until the final day, until the day of total and complete victory.
This duty of war, all the men who are here and all those who hear us in France know that it demands national unity. We, who have lived the greatest hours of our History, we have nothing else to wish than to show ourselves, up to the end, worthy of France. Long live France!
He led the crowd in a mass singing of La Marseillaise. This was a significant event in French history. De Gaulle’s parents, both devout Catholics, had not observed Bastille Day and had not sung La Marseillaise, but their son realized that the events of the 20th century had transformed the meaning of those symbols for the people that he led. It is important that we learn from History, but we can also never forget that we live within it, as contemporary events transform how we view the past and look to the future.
Donald R. McClarey
Paul Zummo
This is not history. It is a sequel of factoids bound together by prejudice. It has no structured account, no insight into any social or political condition, no sense of place or evolution. Nobody could imagine, from your account, that the French monarchy was a tyranny within the meaning of the act, that it had deliberately and as a matter of policy deprived not only the populace but also the upper classes of any political maturity, over a matter of centuries, and that by 1789 it was utterly bankrupt and incapable of governing. I would like to offer an alternative reading of French history during this period, to get rid of the Hegelian nonsense about “transformative” factors that somehow alchemically transform barbarism into law and order. It doesn’t. And incidentally, just because the Revolution persecuted the Church, it does not mean that the Church had any friends among its enemies. What the Revolution did was to follow the contemporary fad of Gallicanism and Febronianism – which were dominant everywhere in Europe’s courts – to its logical conclusion; but the same itch to make the Church an arm of the State, and incidentally to suppress monasticism and Jesuits, was in charge in Madrid, in Lisbon and above all in Vienna, where Joseph II – who virtually exautorated the Pope within his dominions – was followed by Leopold II, who, in his previous incarnation as Grand Duke of Tuscany, had attempted to force the local Church into a Jansenist schism (Synod of Pistoia, 1786). Popular Catholicism was hated by the elites everywhere from Lisbon to St.Petersburg, with the possible exception of Prussia, where the atheist Frederick II found the Jesuits useful as schoolteachers.
http://fpb.livejournal.com/517145.html
Glad you enjoyed it Fabio!
No this was not meant to be a treatise on the French Revolution, although I stand by my negative assessment of the Revolution as it produced tyrannies far worse and far more formidable that that presided over by the hapless Louis XVI. It was meant to be a look at how symbols change over a time. For a truly great examination of the French Revolution and its causes, I always look to Alexis de Tocqueville’s, The Old Regime and the Revolution, which I still find useful in spite of its age. As for Hegelian nonsense, rubbish! What I did was to examine how historical events can alter how we perceive the past. That is not Hegelianism but simply an observation of a process that is ongoing all the time.
The French Revolution produced every liberal and democratic movement in Europe, It is as simple as that. “Tyrannies… more formidable than… Louis XVI’s?” Unless you mean these words to refer to Ropesbierre’s pathological phenomenon, that lasted a few months and ended in utter ruin, that can only refer to Napoleon. You seem to imagine that Napoleon, who abolished both the Tricouleur (after he made himself Emperor, his troops were given, not national standards, but poles with an imperial eagle on top) and the Marseillaise (already by 1805 it was forbidden by law), shut down the National Assembly, revoked the Constitution, and put an end to elections of any kind, had anything to do with the Revolution; which is not unlike the argument put forth by those who say that, because Hitler went to a “Catholic” junior school and Stalin to an Orthodox seminar, those luminaries were models of Christianity. As for Louis XVI being a kitten, he still had in his hands the legal, or rather illegal, apparatus set up for him by five centuries of tyrannical predecessors: power of life and death over any resident in France without bound of law, “lettres de cachet”, the complete suppression of any autonomy. That is the principle Napoleon followed: in the Napoleonic state, every last civil servant, from the Prefet on down, had to follow the imperial will, with no ifs or buts – the very dream of Louis XIV, Louis XI, Philippe le Beau. You should never forget that the modern French monarchy begins with one of history’s great acts of tyranny and robbery, the suppression of the Templar Order: carried out across the face of France with a bureaucratic efficiency that Napoleon admired and imitated. In other word, Napoleon had nothing to do with the National Assembly and everything to do with his royal predecessors. He imitated the Philips and the Louises. That Louis XVI was too weak to use the tools built for him by generations of previous tyrants, let alone rebuild them in an even more efficient manner as his Corsican successor did,m may have something to do with his personal benevolence, but it had a lot more to do with the final economic collapse of his kingdom, due to the inefficiency built into its tyrannical structure. But whatever weakness might exist, the structure, as long as it existed, was still tyrannical, and still dedicated to the infantilization and disempowerment of every class of the population, including not only the general populace, but the aristocracy and the clergy too. The corruption of the French Church before the revolution was fantastic, almost impossible for a modern Christian to imagine, and that was because it had essentially been taken over by the King for the sake of patronage and political advantage, so that he nominated bishops and abbots – and rarely ever for anything remotely resembling religious merit. Male abbeys were given to female courtiers, and in one infamous case an atheist, Lavardin, was made a bishop. At the same time, the King worked consciously and deliberately to infantilize the nobility. Since he could not make them powerless – they were rich by birth – he intended to make them gutless. The purpose of Versailles, quite clear to contemporaries, was to reduce the nobility to emotional and political dependency on the King, around which all the ridiculous, artificial, overblown ceremonial of the place revolved. The kings had “forgotten” to summon the parliament of the land since 1614, one of the many underhanded ways in which they undermined traditional authority and established law.
When a nation that has for centuries been steamrollered, swindled, denied its rights, oppressed, infantilized, and bamboozled by its own political leadership, discovers that it does not need that leadership, of course the results can be a bit less than orderly. And of course, alas, all kinds of unsavoury characters, from crafty, half-mad lawyers from Arras to starving, balding artillery officers from Corsica, will crawl from the woodwork and try to ride or pervert the movement for their own ends. But that has as much to do with the Revolution as Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr had to with the corresponding American events.
In reality, what happened in 1789 begins with the final collapse of the French monarchy. The call for the Estates General, which the kings had deliberately refused to summon for almost two centuries, was the final admission that the whole tyrannical and aggressive model of political leadership established by the Philippes and the Louises had broken down beyond retrieving. The frowning aspect and present helplessness of the Bastille was typical of the collapse of its ability to use its own powers; this building, designed to overawe the Parisian mob and to be a living reminder of the king’s absolute power to “vanish” any one of them he pleased, may have become disused under the inefficient rule of Louis XVI, but it was still unchanged in purpose and meaning. Its destruction may not have achieved much in the immediate, but it was the notice by the population to the king that they would no longer live with a gun pointed at their heads, It was not merely a symbolic act: it was the destruction of what had been an instrument of tyranny, had only declined into an instrument of feeble and corrupt tyranny, but had never been meant as anything but an instrument of tyranny, and, under a more resolute tyrant, would surely have gone back to fulfilling its functions. Not to destroy it would have sent the same message that the survival of the Lubyanka in Moscow sent in the time of Eltsin.
I have a lot more to say, but let’s see how these few points work out first.
The red revolution ended in Stalin and the French Revolution ended in Napoleon. Amoral, aggressive, and cynical dictatorship is the natural result of bloody and utopian revolt by tradition-hating projectors who think to make mankind anew.
This answers nothing I wrote, and what is more has the analytical depth of a Coca-Cola slogan.