Posted on 07/18/2005 7:01:29 PM PDT by CHARLITE
In honor of Bastille Day, I have decided to dedicate this column to that proverbial fly in the world's ointment, France.
I suppose "honor" is the wrong word to use. Bastille Day signified the birth of le republique and the beginning of the end of le ancien regime, which wasn't necessarily a good thing for France or the rest of Europe.
While this commentary is going to seem harsh, I would like to say that I am quite proud of my French heritage. France was the home of my paternal ancestors, though it was a very different place when Jean-Baptiste Baham made his away across the ocean in the 18th century, when the trinity of lilies and not the tricolour of the revolutionary butchers served as the country's banner.
The vaunted French Revolution was not a victory for the people but in fact the first of the Continent's three glaring examples of human depravity on a wide scale that would leave tens of thousands dead and establish a temporary state that would be a forerunner of Hitler's Germany and Lenin's USSR in barbarity and oppression.
The revolution against Louis XVI and his despised Austrian Queen Marie Antoinette was hardly an example of the populace tossing off the yoke of slavery fastened by a heartless tyrant. History records that King Louis was the most enlightened of the Bourbons and he was sincere in his devotion to his subjects.
Furthermore, it has been disproved that Antoinette ever uttered the infamous words, "Let them eat cake" in response to the bread shortages that was a cause of the uprising.
It was Louis XVI who interceded on behalf of the fledgling American republic during the rebellion in the Atlantic colonies. And it was Louis XVI who returned military glory to France after his playboy father Louis XV frittered away most of the country's colonial possessions in North America in the disastrous French and Indian War.
So what did the Revolution bring the French people?
To begin, there was the guillotine; named for a French dentist who thought the contraption was a humane way of executing people...that is when the blade was sharp enough to sever a head on the first drop. The instrument symbolized the terror that overcame the country and was used to kill those who were guilty of possessing royal blood and to suppress critics of France's revolutionary leadership.
There was also the war declared against religion in which churches were seized, graves defiled, and religious executed for refusing to renounce their faith. There was a brief period of time where Notre Dame was "rechristened" the Temple of Reason as part of the Revolution's war against religion.
Antoinette would later be executed after having been condemned in a farcical trial and their young son, the proclaimed Louis XVII who would never actually reign, would endure terrible horrors including sexual abuse, brain washing, and eventually a death sentence via the harsh conditions in which he was kept.
Oh, did I mention their wonderful new calendar, a rejection of the popish Gregorian (and reality in general).
Eventually the chaos in addition to many of the Revolution's most bloodstained hands would go the way of Thermidor, some, most notably the Brothers Robespierre, meeting a fitting end at le guillotine.
Between the downfall of Louis XVI and the presidency of Jacques Chirac (whose leadership makes one long for yet another Bourbon restoration), France has had 5 republics (the First not truly being one, but so named anyway), two empires, two Bourbon kings and a Orleans "citizen" monarch, a dictatorship under Nazi collaborator Henri Petain, occupied by Germans thrice, and a smattering of bloody uprisings in between changes of government over the 19th century.
Republican France's finest moment was during the Third Republic when they stopped the Kaiser's armies from reaching Paris. Regrettably post-World War II France (Fourth and Fifth Republics) were characterized by the government's unreliability as a Western ally in the Cold War and a dubious absence in the War Against Terror.
And so when Louis XVI became one of the Church's first martyrs in the modern Europe, le roi was not the only one who lost his head that day, as madness and death replaced an admittedly antiquated and corrupt, yet benign regime.
October 10th, which marks the victory at the Battle of Tours in 732 when under the leadership of Charles Martel the French heroically saved Western Civilization from extinction, would be a preferable day of national pride and celebration than the anniversary of when a poorly guarded decrepit fortress was stormed by a seething mob, a mere seven prisoners freed, and a nation tumbled into darkness.
July 14th might have been a good day for Jacobins, though it was a terrible day for humanity and Christianity alike.
Mike Bayham is a political consultant in south Louisiana.
BTTT
Bump
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