Today is Bastille Day, the anniversary of the storming of the French prison what was a symbol of the monoarchy and the oppression of the people. This happened on July 14, 1789 I am told. I wasn't there but I have read a little about the event and its aftermath. The Writer's Almanac included this comment today:
It was on this day in 1789 that an angry French mob stormed the Bastille prison in Paris, an event that launched the French Revolution. The Bastille was a medieval fortress, built in the 14th century, with eight towers, each 80 feet tall. It was used as a prison and it had a reputation as a place where political prisoners and enemies of the royal family would rot away in miserable dungeons without a proper trial. By 1789, under the reign of Louis XVI, the Bastille didn't have many prisoners and the conditions were relatively comfortable — some wealthy prisoners even brought their own servants. Nonetheless, regular people considered the Bastille a symbol of royal oppression.
In June the National Assembly had formed, a political body representing the common people of France. Rumors flew that King Louis XVI was trying to overthrow the National Assembly. At the same time, Parisians were starving, and the nation was on the brink of economic collapse. A few days before the storming of the Bastille, King Louis XVI abruptly dismissed his Minister of Finance, a man who had wide popular support. Angry citizens took to the streets — there was widespread looting, with food and weapons stolen. They gathered thousands of guns but needed gunpowder and the Bastille was known to contain a large store of ammunition. By midmorning thousands of people had gathered outside the Bastille, demanding gunpowder and the release of prisoners. They soon grew tired of negotiating and attacked. The fighting lasted several hours. Almost 100 attackers were killed and just one guard, but the mob was successful and flooded into the prison. There turned out to be only seven prisoners to liberate: four forgers, two lunatics, and an aristocrat accused of incest. The mob killed the governor of the Bastille and paraded around the city with his head on a pike.
I wrote that Lynn and I are reading "A Distant Mirror" by the historian Barbara Tuchman, who died in 1989. The title refers to Tuchman's idea that today's world has some issues that are similar to what was faced in the 1300 and 1400's in Europe. She goes to some effort in the first 5% of the book to explain that feudalism, fealty to a given man, was still the norm. The state, a government as we know it, did not exist as such. Tuchman comments that the "state was still struggling to be born." Tribalism, personal loyalty to, and animosity against are probably more basic and biological.
"A Tale of Two Cities" (1859) by Charles Dickens tells something of the story of conditions before the French Revolution, with its famous guillotine and the propensity of the time and place to execute members of the nobility. It was no doubt a shocking, horrifying, topsy-turvy time. Imagine if the recent Jan. 6 incident at the US Capitol had included executions of leaders, many thought by some at the time to be God-given.
