Bastille Day: What are we Celebrating Exactly

The great Roger Kimball makes a most important point about Bastille Day and the French:

Since I am writing on Bastille Day, I am prompted to wonder why the French—or anyone else, for that matter—celebrate this infamous date. After all, the “storming” of that royal keep in 1789 was the spark that started the conflagration of the French Revolution. Unlike the American Revolution, in which the rule of law and the institutions of civil society survived the change of governments, the French Revolution was one of the signal bad events in world history. It consumed civil society and the centuries-old institutions of civilization. It was an unalloyed triumph of the totalitarian spirit, and in this respect it presaged and inspired that even greater assault on decency and freedom, the Bolshevik Revolution, the opening act of one of the darkest chapters in human history. The butcher’s bill for the French Revolution is many hundreds of thousands. Soviet Communism was responsible for the deaths of tens upon tens of millions and the universal immiseration of the people whose lives it controlled.

France gave Europe twenty-five years of war that ended with a King back on the French throne.

Jacobin bastards.

The Revolution birthed modern politics with the conservative members of the Chamber of Deputies sitting on the right and the radicals sitting on he left.

One prefers the French Revolution or the American and before that the English Glorious Revolution. Our own Thomas Paine write passionately in defense of the French Revolution, the moron, and Jefferson liked it as well, almost sinisterly so. The more sober Adams and Hamilton thought America should remain close to Great Britain. They were right and Jefferson was wrong.

Oldest ally my foot, who doesn't prefer the English temperment to the French? The Glorious Revolution was bloodless, the French, well...