This Day In History: The storming of the Bastille happened on this day in 1789, a day which is now celebrated as "Quatorze Juillet" (Fourteenth of July in French), or simply Bastille Day. This is an important moment in the French Revolution.
The medieval armory, fortress, and political prison known as the Bastille represented royal authority in the center of Paris. The prison contained seven inmates at the time of its storming, but was seen by the revolutionaries as a symbol of the monarchy's abuse of power; its fall was the starting point of the French Revolution.
But should Bastille Day and the French Revolution be celebrated?
"The popular image of Bastille Day, indeed of the French Revolution itself, is that the liberty-loving French folk in Paris spontaneously rose up against a tyrannical king and his haughty wife, and heroically stormed the symbol of the Old Regime — the prison fortress known as the Bastille — liberating hundreds of political prisoners. This led to an abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a government dedicated to liberty for all the people of France...Nothing could be further from the truth."~Steve Byas
Around half a million people had been imprisoned across France, and 10,000 may have died in prison without trial. Many others were lynched. The symbol of the American Revolution was the Declaration of Independence, the symbol of the French Revolution was the guillotine.
The French Revolution was also very anti-Christian, so much so that they would abandon anything that resembled Christianity, including the calendar. The new “French Calendar” the Revolutionaries used in place of the old Gregorian calendar deliberately left out the Sabbath as well as religious holidays. Year One was 1792, and this calendar had twelve months of 30 days, and each month had 3 ten day weeks. The calendar would be abandoned later on by Napoleon.
Statues were torn down, libraries and manuscripts were burned. "The damage done by the French Revolution to southern French history in particular is incalculable."~Thomas Lecaque
One of the best known figures of the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre, stated, “We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with them…Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.”
"The French Revolution marks a stain in history, notorious for one of the bloodiest periods in modern civilization." [Mallary A. Silva]
It came on the heels of the American Revolution, but unlike the colonies it ultimately (arguably) failed and degenerated into senseless violence and gave the world the guillotine. “...more men and women were slaughtered in a couple of weeks of the terror of the atheistic French Revolution than in a century of the Inquisition.”~Michael Coren
Is it any wonder that future tyrants such as Lenin, Karl Marx, Ho Chi Minh would go on to praise the French Revolution
"All the great political woes of the modern era — Communism, Fascism, and its German bier and swastika variant, Nazism — have their tangled, bitter beginnings in the storming of the Bastille."~John Lewis-Stempel
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