Le quatorze juillet and terror
Happy Bastille Day! Alors enfants de la patrie, la jour de gloire est arrivée, and all of that stuff. I hope you’re all wearing red for the occasion and have a chance to nick off from work for a Euro-style long lunch with white wine, complex carbohydrates and deep-fried fat. Let’s also hope that un français can stump up to the occasion in le tour: personally I favour Christophe Moreau to do it pour la nation.
It’s a typically Anglophilic misunderstanding that the fourteenth of July commemorates the storming of the Bastille prison. If I learned nothing else from my high school French—certainly not French—it was that the day actually commemorates the Fête de la Fédération, the first commemoration of the previous Revolutionary event. So Bastille Day is in fact a national celebration of an improvised, thoroughly constructed event, itself a representation through language and performance of the Revolution.
How post-early-modern, eh?
Those of us moderately interested in history also take the opportunity to consider the continuities, a couple of hundred years on. The enemies of society are still waging asymmetrical warfare, a term I’m sure the Jacobins would have quite appreciated. The upright moral clarity of our current day political leaders, stripped to be sure of their aggressive atheism, would be nothing without the power of the State to tyrannically enforce ‘liberty’—a very French Revolutionary practice. Certainly the arguments about civil society in Robespierre’s On the Moral and Political Principles of Domestic Policy, excerpts of which are hosted at the relatively useful teaching site at Fordham ought to inspire anti-terrorist legislators to greater heights:
Society owes protection only to peaceable citizens; the only citizens in the Republic are the republicans. For it, the royalists, the conspirators are only strangers or, rather, enemies. This terrible war waged by liberty against tyranny–is it not indivisible? Are the enemies within not the allies of the enemies without? The assassins who tear our country apart, the intriguers who buy the consciences that hold the people’s mandate; the traitors who sell them; the mercenary pamphleteers hired to dishonor the people’s cause, to kill public virtue, to stir up the fire of civil discord, and to prepare political counterrevolution by moral counterrevolution-are all those men less guilty or less dangerous than the tyrants whom they serve?
There’s only downhill to mass trials and the guillotine after that kind of language, though he’s still got his admirers.
Tallien and the others made sure his image was vilified and this continued until quite recently when historians began to examine the facts again and found the truth. Books such as the “Scarlet Pimpernel” novels have not helped as they continue to portray Maxime as a bloodthirsty tyrant. Really he was a good man; a man with faults but who sought always to do the right thing.
And there’s another sentiment which finds counterparts in today’s language of civil government. Better an incorruptible impartial strongman, and the ‘justice’ of State terror, than anarchy.
Right?
Joel (not verified) wrote:
I really don’t think that the extremes of the French revolution can really be compared to anti-terrorism rhetoric of today.
If the State (whether that be the Australian State, the American State or the British State) wanted to “tyrannically enforce ‘liberty’” Guantanomo Bay wouldn’t exist, enemy combatants in Afghanistan and Iraq would have been executed upon capture without any attempt at process of law. Similarly, we would be executing people in our own nations not for planning terrorist attacks or encouraging terrorist attacks, but merely for being Muslims.
Instead, our States are doing none of these things. Even their greatest failures such as Guantanomo Bay were attempts (however imperfect) to implement a credible process (that would get the result the U.S. wanted every time).
liam wrote:
Quite right, Joel.
We have indeed a better civilisation since the War On Terror isn’t quite as bad as la Terreur.
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