Monday, July 14, 2014

Bastille Day

Bastille Day or, as the comic singers who take it seriously prefer to call it, the Fete de la Federation, is the embarrassing event that exposes the cultural, moral and constitutional bankruptcy of what was once the greatest civilisation in Europe.

When you are reduced to celebrating the murder by the canaille of Paris in 1789 of the French equivalent of the Chelsea Pensioners, you are inadvertently advertising the sinister origins of the dysfunctional state you are trying to prop up with a mythology as grotesque as it is pathetic. The Umpteenth French Republic is the one entity whose absorption by the European Union is not to be regretted.

Pompous parades will today celebrate the event that triggered the French Revolution, that is to say, the most appalling bloodbath anterior to the Russian Revolution. Seven prisoners were released from the Bastille – four counterfeiters, an accomplice to murder and two lunatics - whose return to the community was hardly beneficial. The attack on the prison, reserved for the well-off, was orchestrated by the Marquis de Sade and Camille Desmoulins on behalf of the Nine Sisters masonic lodge.

There followed the September massacres, the marriages republicains in which people of opposite sexes were stripped naked and lashed together in obscene postures before being drowned, mothers forced to watch their children being guillotined and the massacre of 400,000 Catholic royalists – the majority of them women and children – in La Vendee. Sounds like the perfect excuse for a celebratory knees-up.
Read the rest here.
HT: The Young Fogey

2 comments:

rick allen said...

I guess I have to note that any distinctive historical force, including Christianity, can be discredited by repeating the atrocities associated with it. These are facts, but they are hardly the whole story. The Bourbon dynasty was not exactly a model of Christian rule. Legitimacy is important, but it's not enough.

Many crimes have been committed in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity. That doesn't make them bad things in themselves. The worse is almost always the abuse of the best.

J.K. Baltzersen said...

Mr. Allen:

We can remove all the revolutionary violence, and what the French Revolution gave us is still worse than the old regime.

For elaboration on this, please see, e.g., the works of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn.

Blog host:

Thank you for spreading my poster.