Re: CHAT: Bastille day

[This is the last post I would like to make on-list.  But all are
welcome to email off-list.]

From:    Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
On Saturday, July 17, 2004, at 01:27 , Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> > From:    John Cowan <jcowan@...>
> > >  The fall of the Bastille symbolizes primarily the destruction of
> > > tyranny through the physical destruction of one of its most hated
> > > symbols.
> > > [...] The fact that Louis XV's rule represented a considerable
> > > moderation of what comes before it affected the timing of the French
> > > Revolution, but not its symbolic impact.
> >
> > But it wasn't really a hated symbol until extremist propagandists
> > for the far Left (a term which of course did not exist until later)
> > invented it.
>
> This is absolute tosh. If you care to look at contemporary accounts, you
> will discover that the fortress of the Bastille _was_, as far as the
> people of Paris were concerned, a hated & feared symbol of tyranny at that
> time! That's why it was stormed - duh!
So, have you yourself studied the contemporary accounts?  I, for
my part, have just finished reading Simon Schama's 948 page account
of the revolution until the Thermidorean Reaction.  Before the
revolution itself, the Bastille had, indeed, held prisoners of
political crimes, but it's hugely simplistic to say that they
stormed it because it was such a symbol:  that begs the question.
What I had mean to say with reference to its symoblism is that it
had not become a "hated symbol" in the way we think of it today, an
all-consuming, one-and-only, embodiment of a kind of social order.
The reality is that it was recognized as an instrument of state
oppression, but that it was turned into such an all-encompassing
symbol of that oppression *after* the Bastille itself had been
stormed, when merchants were selling model-Bastilles for children,
and the Bastille was marked on cups and geegaws. As Schama says,

  No one wanted to be in the Bastille. But once there, life for
  the more priveleged could be made bearable. Alcohol and tobacco
  were allowed, and under Louis XVI card games were introduced for
  anyone sharing a cell as well as a billiard table for the Breton
  gentry who requested one.  Some of their literary inmates even
  thought a spell in the Bastille established their credentials as a
  true foe of despotism.  The Abbe Morelllet, for example, wrote,
  "I saw literary glory illuminate the walls of my prison.  Once
  persecuted I would be better known.... and those six months
  of the Bastille would be an excellent recommendation and
  infallibly make my fortune."
    Morellet's admission suggests that as the reality of the
  Bastille became more of an anachronism, its demonology became
  more and more important in defining opposition to state power.
  If the monarchy was to be depicted (not completely without
  justice) as arbitrary, obsessed with secrecy, and vested with
  capricious powers over the life and death of its citizens,
  the Bastille was the perfect symbol of those vices.  If it had
  not existed, it is safe to say, that it would have had to be
  invented.
    And in some senses it *was* [his emph.] reinvented by a
  succession of writings of prisoners who had indeed suffered
  within its walls, but whose account of the institution
  transcended anything they could have experienced.  So vivid
  and haunting were their accounts that they succeeded in creating
  a stark opposition around which critics of the regime could
  rally.  The Manichaean opposition between incarceration and
  liberty; secrecy and candor; torture and humanity; depersonalization
  and individuality; open-air and shut-in obscurity were all basic
  elements of the Romantic language in which the anti-Bastille
  literature expressed itself.  The critique was so powerful
  that when the fortress was taken, the anticlimactic reality
  of liberating a mere seven prisoners (including two lunatics,
  four forgers, and an aristocratic delinquent who had been
  committed with de Sade) was not allowed to intrude on mythic
  expectations.  As we shall see, revolutionary propaganda remade
  the Bastille's history, in text, image and object to conform
  to the inspirational myth.

I was wrong about some of the details; there were seven, not
eight prisoners, and some of them had committed crimes and
were not insane. And it had served as a symbol of sorts.  But
I stand by claim that it was not a "hated symbol" in the way
we think of it today, as John had claimed. As Schama says, it
has been turned into it by later contemporaries and swallowed
as such by later generations .

> > At the time of the storming of the Bastille, it was
> > effectively serving as an insane asylum, since most of the 8 prisoners
>
> Yep - but nobody had told the ordinary people that. I think you need to
> learn some history.
Um, I have read a considerable amount.  See above.

> > But that to me is almost beside the point. Celebrating its fall would be
> > tantamount to Russians' celebrating the abdication of Nicholas II who
> > was even more unwilling to relinquish power than Louis XVI.  During
> > Nicholas II's entire reign, approximately 6,000 people were executed
> > for political crimes, which sounds, and is, bad. But then you realize that
> > the Bolsheviks had already far surpassed that number in the first *six
> > months* of their reign,
>
> Completely irrelevant.
No, not irrelevant.  It's relevant because the question at hand was
whether a symbol of a kind of change should be celebrated, even
when the reality is that that symbol represented change to *more* evil
than its predecessor.  The revolutionaries during the years 1793-1794
killed something on the order of a quarter-million people by Schama's
count, far, far more people than had been killed by the prior regime
in the preceding one hundred years.

> > Celebrating such events is, IMHO, to close one's eyes to vast political
> > crimes committed by later regimes and to buy into their propaganda
> > out of political convenience.
>
> I see - ever since 1789, France has been plagued with vast political
> crimes & the ignorant French are the victims of political propaganda.
You're completely misreading what I said.  I spoke of the following
regimes, i.e., the Revolutionary regime from 1792 to 1794, the Directory,
and Napoleon and his wars of world-domination.   *Those* regimes that
followed the Old Regime and were, I was arguing, much, much worse than
the prior one, by creating far far more death and suffering.  Even
those who escaped the death squads of the Terror did not escape the
economic hardship it caused, as France's economy sank by IIRC about
a third between 1789 and 1815, which is on the order of the Great
Depression.

> I suspect it's quite lost on you that it might celebrate the ideal of
> 'liberty, equality & fraternity'. The fact that subsequent regimes did not
> always live up to the ideal does not mean that the ideal should not be
> celebrated.
I think it is you, not I, who should read up on your history.  I was
not belittling the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity -- I
explicitly called the Old Regime a kind of evil, and said that reforms
to abolish absolutism were necessary.  But to summarize the titanic
evils of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic years as not living up to
those ideals shows a rather willful blindness to that history, as if
they were good-hearted people who rather clumsily and unknowingly
started decapitating tens of thousands of people and killing many
more by pogroms and artificial famines. That's simply not the reality:
they weren't idealists, and they weren't uninterested in power, and
they didn't care whom particularly they trod on as long as their
fantasies of supreme power were being realized.

> By the logic of your position, you should not celebrate July 4th either.
On the contrary, the United States has never, ever suffered anything
like the evils perpetrated systematically on a massive scale by those
of the Revolution.  The American Revolution was a revolution in the
revolution in the original sense:  it sought not to create a new,
utopian world populated by men never heretofore seen, but simply to
reestablish the old order that people in the Colonies perceived had
been taken away from them by Britain: the right of self-rule and
local autonomy.  The fact that it expressed these in idealistic
terms is also not analogous, because they already largely had
reflected realities in the colonies:  New Englanders had been
practicing a kind of direct democracy for over a century, and even
the more conservative and aristocratic Southern colonies had
parliamentary institutions for over 150 years (Virginia's House of
Burgesses, e.g.).

The American Revolution was not really analogous to the French
Revolution in most effects; the new order created a much more
stable society, more one based on the rule of law, than came to exist
in France for decades afterwards.  It is true that slavery and
the expropriation of Indian lands occurred under an independent
US, but the same continued in British-controlled neighboring
Canada for 50 or more years after 1776, so it is not altogether
clear that that it was not better than what preceded it.

> > We should not have to choose between
> > two evils. But there were clear practical differences between these two,
> > and if we are going to celebrate anything at all, surely we should
> > celebrate the *lesser* of two evils.
>
> IMO we should never celebrate evil, whether lesser or greater. However, I
> have no problem in celebrating symbols of ideals; they surely cause us to
> reflect on those ideals and measure whether we are still keeping them
> alive.
The issue at hand though is what kind of ideal the Bastille has
become.  The reality of the Bastille was very different, as I showed
above, from that portrayed by the "symbol". Given that the symbol
was used to perpetrate all sorts of horrors on innocents both in
France and elsewhere (during Napoleon's invasions), I simply don't
understand why the ideal is not "symbol of idealism that justifies
totalitarian rule by a tiny oligarchy interested in the perpetuation
of their own power" rather than a "symbol of the overthrow of state
oppression".

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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