Happy birthday to our oldest and greatest ally.
I’ve always loved The Tennis Court Oath.
If you want to read a good book on the French Revolution, Citizens by Simon Schama is excellent.
Finally, always remember, history is full of irony.
For a period of time after its invention, the guillotine was called a louisette. However, it was later named after French physician and Freemason Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin who proposed on 10 October 1789 the use of a device to carry out death penalties in France, as a less painful method of execution or as capital punishment instead of the Breaking wheel to Louis XVI of France. While he did not invent the guillotine, and in fact opposed the death penalty, his name became an eponym for it.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité, copains, and feel free to use this as an open thread while we wait to hear which poor fool has decided to jump Trump on the ticket.
Christopher says
Oldest ally refers to their assistance in the War of Independence, BEFORE the birthday to which you refer. Bastille Day is no doubt significant and rightly celebrated, but it’s a bit hard I think to pin down which date should be referred to as France’s “birthday”. France has been an indentifiable nation-state pretty much since Charles Martel beat back the Muslims at Tours in the eighth century. Bastille Day can’t even claim to be a clean break from absolute monarchy to consistent democratic republic. There were the Napoleonic Empires whose leaders claimed to be royal (bunch of illegitimate upstarts IMO) and even a couple of Bourbon restorations (creating dispute over who the current Pretender is). The monarchy refused to evolve along British lines which was its undoing. The current polity is the Fifth French Republic created after WWII, during which France had been Nazi-occupied and thus creating the only arguable exception I can think of off hand to my previous statement about France being its own nation-state for centuries.
JimC says
I wonder if they decided not to wait because the choice isn’t that exciting.
Christopher says
The cable news channels are following developments surrounding a truck that plowed into a crowd of revelers, killing 30 and injuring 100 at this writing. The reporting is a bit fuzzy, but it does seem that it was a deliberate, possibly terrorist, attack.
jconway says
N/t
JimC says
n/t
AmberPaw says
See http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/bastille-day-crash-live-updates-8424850
Andrei Radulescu-Banu says
Assuming every mass demonstration of this sort has police detail assigned to it… I can’t believe that a truck could be left to plow into the crowd for miles. I think French police has some tough questions to ask regarding its crisis response time.
kbusch says
One of the striking stories Pinker tells in Our Better Angels is how Europe typically punished criminals in the most spectacular, hideous, and painful ways possible. Careful, fastidious attention, for example, used to be paid to keeping the criminal from fainting or going into shock so that the full horror and magnitude of the pain inflicted could be experienced to its fullest. Just take the wheel: The idea was to break all the criminals bones systematically. By comparison, the guillotine was quite benign.
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As we also contemplate the French Revolution and its excesses, we might also remember that it was the remarkable political purity of the Committee for Public Safety under its remarkably virtuous and pure leader that sent so many to the guillotine.