Bastille Day is a French national holiday that marks the storming of the Bastille prison on July 14, 1789, an event that’s touted as the beginning of the French revolution, though revolutionary sentiment had been building for some time.
On that day, angry Parisians stormed the prison – seen as a symbol of a despotic monarchy and oppression of the starving peasantry by the ruling class – and after a bloody battle started by 300 revolutionaries, a growing mob captured the building, released its seven inmates and seized and murdered the governor.
The Bastille was originally a medieval fortress built in the 1370 to defend Paris from England during the 100 Years War. It became a state prison 1417. It was still a prison 372 years later under King Louis XVI, who used it to hold his opponents, many of whom were incarcerated there for years without trial.
The causes of the revolution are many and complex and had been building for about two years, but they can be boiled down simply to money printing to finance wars for holding and expanding empire (including financing the American revolution), burdensome taxation, rising food prices (owing to devalued currency and a reduced food supply because of bad spring, summer and winter weather the previous year), a privileged class that was not subject to the same laws as the hoi polloi, and the rejection by the ruling class of the people’s calls for systemic reform.
In August, the fledgling government National Assembly abolished feudalism and adopted a Declaration of the Rights of Man, a document inspired by the U.S. Constitution. Among its declarations were these:
- Men are born and remain free and equal in rights…
- The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression…
- Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights…
- Property is an inviolable and sacred right (important, because property rights pre-revolution extended only to a privileged few and the church).
But beyond these the Declaration also stated:
- The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body or individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation…
- Law is the expression of the general will…
The result was a doctrine of liberty, equality and fraternity that was a myth, a fiction and a self-evident contradiction. It is impossible to have liberty and equality.
The result of the philosophical error that the state is the embodiment of the “general will,” which is sovereign and unrestrained, as David Boaz writes for CATO, have often been disastrous, and conservatives point to the Reign of Terror in 1793-1794 as the precursor of similar terrors in totalitarian countries from the Soviet Union to Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
That is where the U.S. is headed. The rule of law no longer applies. The law in the U.S. has become the “expression of the general will” as seen in recent Supreme Court rulings and in the absolution of Hillary Clinton for her crimes by the FBI director and the Department of JustUs.
Americans would do well to study to the French revolution for a precursor to where we’re headed.
Additional sources: History.com
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