The Reason for the Season

This is how the legend goes: On July 14, 1789, the people of Paris stormed the Bastille prison. From then on, the event was celebrated as a symbol of the transition from the arbitrary regime of the absolute monarchy to the republican rule of law. Such a version of the event is of course no longer seriously believed by anyone in France.

This is how the golden legend goes: on July 14, 1789, the people of Paris stormed the infamous Bastille prison, a place the kings and aristocrats had used to lock up people they did not like without trial, by a simple administrative order known as the lettre de cachet. From then on, the event was celebrated each year as a symbol of the transition from the arbitrary regime of the absolute monarchy to the republican rule of law. Such a version of the event is of course no longer seriously believed by anyone in France. The facts are broadly known. When the news came that king Louis XVI had dismissed the reformist controller of finances Necker, political activists in Paris such as Camille Desmoulins decided to put pressure on both the king and the newly formed National Assembly. A militia was then formed and stormed first the Hotel des Invalides, and then the Bastille prison, in order to equip itself with the weapons stored in both places' arsenals. The Bastille garrison, a few dozen French soldiers and Swiss guards, surrendered after a few hours of negotiations. Despite the guarantees they had received, most of them, including the commander of the place, were lynched by the crowd soon after the place was taken. The commander's head was then paraded on a pique in the streets of Paris, while other guards were eviscerated by the mob. As for the seven prisoners found inside the prison, only one had been sent there by virtue of a lettre de cachet for reasons that remain unclear, four were petty criminals who were jailed elsewhere and two suffered from mental illnesses and were sent to the famous Charenton asylum. From then on, the Parisian militias, soon to be known as the sans-culottes, would play a decisive role in the chain of events which turned the French Revolution from a peaceful, if tense, political process to a bloody, century-long civil war. The storming of the Bastille, far from symbolizing the adoption by France of the rule of law, was the first episode of the permanent outflanking of the reformists by the radicals, making Paris unsafe for most governments until the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871, and causing a general mayhem in Europe until 1815. A month and a half after the Bastille storming, on August 26th 1789, the National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a fundamental text inspired by classical liberalism that is still part of France's constitution in its original form. It took some time for the 1789 declaration to be fully considered as a constitutional text. To make a long story short, only this year, thanks to Sarkozy's constitutional reform, will it be possible for a citizen to have his rights fully protected by the 1789 declaration during a trial. But this text has been broadly recognized as encapsulating the most valuable part of the French Revolution for the best part of the 20th century. Thus, it would have seemed only logical for August 26 to be chosen as France's national day, since the adoption of the 1789 Declaration can be seen as the first foundation of the current French democratic edifice, despite the fact that the French democracy could only start being built after the century-long revolutionary storm had passed. So why do the French prefer to commemorate the storming of an empty prison by a bloodthirsty lynch mob, along with the decapitation and evisceration of a few innocent guards, instead of the adoption of France's most important piece of legislation? This strange situation probably reflects the ambiguity of the revolutionary heritage. As it is well known, the French revolution engendered both the first modern totalitarian state, as France could have been described from 1791 to 1793, when the revolutionary government conducted bloody purges along with a genocide in Vendée, and the contemporary French democracy, to the extent that our current regime effectively proceeds from the Revolution. Historically, it would be more accurate to describe the final adoption of the Republic, which happened between 1871 and 1875, as a compromise between moderate republicans, mostly classical liberals who did not really care whether the nominal head of state was a president or a monarch as long as the democratic character of the regime was secured; and moderate monarchists who likewise attached more importance to the conservative character of the regime than for it to be ruled by a monarch. But that compromise did not suit everyone. From 1789 to 1877, on every occasion they had, the French consistently voted in favor of conservative, ie. monarchist or Bonapartist, parties and rejected the radical, revolutionary ones. But the radical current responsible for the bloody part of the Revolution did not disappear and even managed to dominate the French political scene during the first half of the 20th century, albeit in a much less violent fashion. The Radical party, which explicitly considered itself the descendant of the Jacobins who had run France during the Terror, managed to be back in power around 1900 and to become the 3rd Republic's dominant political actor. Later on, the Socialist party, originally a Marxist movement that considered the Revolution as not radical enough, also made its way to power. At the same time, conservative and classical liberal parties lost many important political battles, while the French republic was progressively shaped in a more statist and socialistic way than its real founders had in mind in 1871-1875. So who won? Is it the revolutionary radicals who still consider the 1791-1793 Terror period as an unfortunate but necessary - and not inglorious - step toward progress, or the classical liberals who supported the 1789 declaration but did not object to a constitutional monarchy? In fact, as Zhou Enlai famously and rightly said when asked what he thought of the French Revolution, it is too early to tell. The French political regime, with all its drawbacks, is closer to the classical democratic principles than to the Jacobins' ideas. But the radical face of the Revolution is not only present through symbols such as Bastille day. "Revolution" is a popular word in the French political vocabulary, while "conservative" and "liberal" (in the classical sense) are almost insults. The 1789 declaration is part of the Constitution, but so are the 1946 social rights declaration, a socialistic list of "rights" such as the right to work, and the 2004 environment charter, the first French constitutional text from which several articles starting with the words: "every man has the duty to ...", which only shows that the people who wrote and adopted this text do not understand what a constitution is. This ambiguity is probably the logical result of the complicated political history of France. The United States' political history may not be simple either, but at least, the American system is based on a single and relatively clear founding event. The American revolution founded at the same time the country itself, its political system and the philosophical principles on which it is based. France, by comparison, was founded somewhere between 476 and 1087, its current political system took about a century to emerge and then kept changing from time to time, while the philosophical principles on which the Republic is based remain foggy at best. Civil wars seem to have stopped, which is progress, but at the cost of a certain level of inconsistency. Bastille Day may not be the best choice for a national commemoration day, but if it could be used as a reminder of the French political schizophrenia, it would not be totally useless.