LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ: Reflections on Bastille Day.

Summary: On Bastille Day, it is appropriate to celebrate a common American/French revolutionary heritage.  Our two revolutions have set a standard for, and made a tour of, the world, establishing revolutionary democracy as the default political ordering of most of the planet.  Yet here in the United States, American rightists, Beltway Bourbons in the worst sense of that phrase, have waged war against the Jeffersonian proclamation that “all men are created equal.”  Yet our American and French Revolutions have a better reputation beyond our borders and outside the French Hexagon than they do in their homelands.  Like the traitors who supported Vichy France and collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, many American rightists would happily destroy America’s middle and working classes, binding then in chains of debt-servitude and grinding them into the dust.  There was a good reason the people of Paris stormed the Bastille, and on this day when France, the Francophone world, and America, celebrate the Revolution, we should remember our commitment to the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and to those hallowed words of the Declaration of Independence that assure us of our fundamental equality.  A toutes les gloires de la France, et vive la Révolution française.

By: Paul S. Marchand

A toutes les gloires de la France. 

On Bastille Day, we celebrate a revolutionary heritage, a common gift of America and France to the world.

224 years ago today, on July 14, 1789, Parisian revolutionary insurgents, moved by a trend of revolutionary events, events themselves engendered by the conduct of the slow-moving train wreck France’s ancien régime Bourbon dynasty had become, stormed the Bastille, a medieval fortress on the right bank of the Seine.

Originally constructed during the 14th century, the Bastille had served as a royal prison since the early part of the 1400s.  By 1789, the aging fortress had become a detested symbol of French royal absolutism.  To this day, the storming of the Bastille has been regarded as one of the turning points of the events which led to the French Revolution --- and to the overthrow of the ancien régime and the Bourbon dynasty.

Today, Bastille Day is France’s official national day, commemorated and celebrated by one of the last -- and only -- significant, all-arms, muscle-flexing military parades in the West.  The Bastille Day parade represents the granddaddy of all of the vulgar, kitschy military extravaganzas regularly played out in such East-Bloc capitals as Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang, but because it celebrates a great revolution of liberty, it gets a pass.

Bastille Day is quintessentially the French Revolutionary day, and we who honor the republican revolutionary tradition which has made democracy the default political ordering of the nations of the world should stop for a moment and remember just how critical the role of the French and American revolutions has been in the progress of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

More than 50 years ago, a journalist at an international conference asked Chinese statesman Zhou Enlai his views on the French Revolution.  Zhou, who had been educated in France, and who had imbibed some of the perfect ancien régime courtesy of French society, to say nothing of the elegant Confucian courtesy of Qing China, urbanely answered the journalist’s inquiry with the suave assurance that it was “too early to tell.”

Half a century later, as we Americans still struggle to think out the implications of our own revolution, we know that for us it is no longer too early to tell.

Our American Revolution, insofar is it has inspired copycat revolutions including the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, and other revolutions around the world, has made a tour of the world and upset ancien régimes on every continent.  Beyond our borders, and outside the Hexagon that is France, our common revolutionary heritage has changed our world beyond all measure.  Outside of the United States, the American Revolution has been an inspiring success

Yet, here at home, the American right often shudders at the implications of what an authentic American revolution might be.  The idea that a revolution might actually demand a commitment to liberty, equality, and fraternity, leaves many American rightists ice cold, and engenders in them a poisonous hatred of the French Republic, its revolutionary heritage, and its revolutionary mission.  In that, the American right resembles nothing so much as the French traitors and collaborators who supported Vichy France and cooperated with the Nazi occupation during World War II.

To listen to American rightists, one would think that the French Revolution was the most awful political development in history.  Hard-right pundit-wretch Ben Shapiro was attacked the French Revolution as having “viciously” “introduced democracy.”  French readers of Shapiro’s fulminations quite rightly wondered how this arrogant young American columnist could have embraced such shameful, anti-French, anti-democratic, neo-Vichy sentiments.

Indeed, the views and conduct of much of the American right are such as to justify characterizing it as I have done in the past: as “Beltway Bourbons.”  Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, who was perhaps the ultimate survivor of the French Revolutionary era, once acidly eviscerated the Bourbons as having “forgotten nothing and learned nothing.”  Certainly, American conservatives seem to fit Talleyrand description perfectly.  They have indeed lost touch with American history and with America’s revolutionary heritage.

The American right’s war against America’s middle class --- against the very people upon whom our national survival depends --- bears a  curious resemblance to the efforts of the French ancien régime to hold onto power during the mid-to late 1780s, and certainly suggests the American right neither accepts nor believes in the Jeffersonian proposition that “all men are created equal.”  For example, by removing food stamps from their recent farm bill, Congressional Republicans have adopted in their fullest and foulest form the mentalities and values of the pre-revolutionary French nobility: what does it matter if the working poor and destitute starve? 

Of the Parisian poor, Marie Antoinette is said apocryphally to have declared “let them eat cake.”  It would be more accurate to remember the similarly inciendary 1862 declaration of Andrew Myrick, sometime Indian agent among the Santee Sioux, who when informed that his charges were starving, dismissed their plight by casually consigning them to starvation, saying “let them eat grass,” or, in the alternative, Myrick declared, they could eat their own shit

Further example: by allowing student loan interest rates to double, and by imposing ferocious and draconian penalties upon those who are not able to muster the wherewithal to repay, Congressional Republicans and the American right have demonstrated their indifference to the danger of creating a permanent debt-bound underclass.  Yet, in France at the end of the 1780s, the permanent debt-bound underclass dared to raise its hand against the nobility and the wealthy and the hierarchy of the church.    

That thudding sound which soon echoed out from Revolutionary Paris to the provinces was the sound of aristocratic heads landing in baskets -- heads which had thought to bind in chains of permanent indebtedness a bourgeoisie upon whose economic prosperity the security of France depended.

It might also be useful to recall that when the Santee Sioux, goaded beyond endurance, finally rose, the first white they killed was Andrew Myrick, whose mouth they stuffed with the grass he had so dismissively told them to eat.


A short, what we have seen in the last generation in this country --- as middle-class wages have stagnated, and as the share of the national economy controlled or possessed by the wealthiest one percent among us has increased to almost obscene degree --- has been a process by which the have-mores have sought to grind the middle-class into permanent poverty.  As George W. Bush so infamously declared at the 2000 Alfred E. Smith Memorial dinner, “"This is an impressive crowd. The haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base".  Since then, the Republican Party has been at the service of the right wing war of the haves and the have-mores against America’s have-nots, against the everyday working stiffs whose ill-compensated labor is the lifeblood of our economy.

On this Bastille Day, we may conclude that the American right have been some Karl Marx’s best disciples.  Buying fully and fearfully into a Marxian class-war analysis, the American right has been waging a nasty, preemptive class war against those who may not be as wealthy as they; the object of this preemptive class war has been nothing less than to undo once and for all Thomas Jefferson’s ringing statement of our national faith that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and to create a permanent class structure in the United States that not only socializes risk and privatizes reward, but which also makes social mobility a thing of the past.

The victory of the Parisians over the defenders of the Bastille goes a long way toward establishing the proposition that the Rights of Man and the Citizen are not to be bought, sold, or bartered away in the interests of the most well-connected and well-off among us.  That is the lesson we ought to remember on Bastille Day. 

Liberté, égalité, fraternité!

A toutes les gloires de la France.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California.  He has a name that would not be out of place in any French phonebook.  The views contained herein are his own, and are not intended as legal advice.