Viva Bastille Day

Fall of Bastille and French independence
By V. SUNDARAM

This year marks the 216th anniversary of French Revolution. Since the dawn of history, there have been violent upheavals. Kings have been overthrown, Empires have crumbled and new dynasties have arisen. But only from the time of the great French Revolution have there been revolutions that have succeeded not merely in changing the Rulers but in transforming the entire social and political systems. With French Revolution began revolutions in the modern sense and it was not until after it that people knew what revolutions were like. The great achievement of the French Revolution was the declaration of the 'Rights of Man'. Its very title was revolutionary.

Not the rights of the King, not the rights of the upper classes, not historic rights but 'Rights of Man' which were the rights of every ordinary citizen and rested on reason and not tradition.

The French Revolution launched three themes into the world which have continued to haunt it ever since - democracy, nationalism and socialism, which all sprang from the fall of the Bastille on July 14th, 1789.

For every citizen in France, Bastille Day means 'liberty'. It means emancipation from monarchical tyranny and terror. Just as India's independence day is celebrated in New Delhi and in all parts of India on 15th August, 14th July every year is celebrated as the 'Day of Liberty' in France.

Bastille Day every year begins, for all in France, with the solemn military parade up the Champs Elysées in the presence of the French President. It is a national holiday on which each community participates with gusto and enthusiasm bringing in its local dance and fireworks. It was on this historic day in 1789 that the storming of the Bastille took place, thereby heralding the birth of the French Revolution.

It immediately became a symbol of historical dimension and significance. It gave a global message that power no longer resided in the King or in God, but in the people, in accordance with the theories developed by the philosophies of the eighteenth century. It symbolized the end of the morarchy and the beginning of the French Republic.

On May 5th, 1789, the King of France convened the 'Estates General' to hear people's complaints. The Assembly of the Third Estate, representing the citizens of the town, soon broke away and formed the Constituent National Assembly. On June 20th, 1789, the Deputies of the Third Estate took the oath of the Jeu de Paume 'to not separate until the Constitution had been established'.

The Deputies' opposition fully echoed and reflected the then public opinion. The people of Paris rose up en masse and marched to the Bastille, a state prison that symbolised the absolutism, cruelty and arbitrariness of the Ancient Monarchy.

On 14th July Bastille fell to the people. On July 16th, the King recognised the tricolour cockade of the people; the Revolution had succeeded. It might be said that the flag of France began life as an advertising statement: in the early days of the Revolution, militias adopted a two-color rallying cockade of blue and red, the traditional colors of Paris. In July 1789, La Fayette ordered the addition of white, the color of the French royalty, thus giving birth to the 'tricolour' flag.

This tricolour flag was ordered to fly on all Government Buildings by King Louis sXVI three days after the fall of the Bastille. In February 1794, an Act was passed declaring this tricolour flag finalized by La Fayette as the national flag, with the stipulation that the blue should be positioned nearest to the mast.

It is a fact of great historic significance that on 14 July, 1790, a year after the fall of the Bastille, delegates from all parts of the country flocked to Paris to celebrate the 'Fete de la Federation' and proclaim their allegiance to one national community.

This was the first example of a people expressing their right to self-determination, a right the French claimed for them and then offered as a model to all the nations of Europe and the world. This display of national unity was deliberately organised on the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille.

The immediate impact of the French Revolution on England was quite different. In January 1790, Edmund Burke rose in the House of Commons to hurl his first salvos against what he called 'the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, blundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy'. He denounced the Declaration of the Rights Of Man and the Citizen as 'a digest of anarchy'. Fox, another very important Member of the House of Commons, responded discreetly, hoping to avoid a painful confrontation with Edmund Burke. He said 'I have learnt more from this Rt. Hon. friend than from all the men with whom I have ever conversed.

However, I want to emphasise that I am the enemy of all absolute forms of Government, whether an absolute monarchy, an absolute aristrocracy, or an absolute democracy.' Then came Burke's explosive pamphlet, 'Reflections on the Revolutions in France', published in November 1790. He declared that before the French Revolution the French Government had the elements of a Constitution very nearly as good as could be wished. Burke began calling for war against France to stop the contagion of revolution. The verdict of history is that while Burke promoted hysteria, Fox fought for human liberty.

The French Revolution has inspired several great writers in England and other parts of the world to produce works of fiction and non-fiction for over 200 years. Revolutions are acts of hope. That's why they are the terrain of novelists as much as historians. Thomos Carlyle wrote his famous 'The French Revolution' in 1838. It became a classic. Carlyle wrote impressionistic prose of sublime beauty and power.

His book influenced Charles Dickens to write one of his most popular and best-known novels called 'A Tale of Two Cities' in 1859. In his preface to the book, Dickens proiclaimed his passion for truth in historical writing, as well as his admiration for the work of Carlyle, who also had sought to convey the historical truth.

Charles Dickens wrote: 'Whenever any reference (however slight) is made here to the condition of the French people before or during the Revolution, it is truly made, on the faith of the trustworthy witness available and it has been one of my hopes to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time, though no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Thomos Carlyle's wonderful book.' Through careful research into the period in 'A Tale of Two Cities', Charles Dickens accurately described one of the bloodiest events in European history; that is the French Revolution of 1789 and its immediate aftermath, the Reign of Terror (1793-94).

The 200th Anniversary of the fall of the Bastille on 14th July, 1989 coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall, providing irrefutable symbolic evidence that the age of revolution was, at last, over. Radical revolutionism had come to nothing, and even the reformist project of social democracy, which had presented itself as the constructive alternative to revolutionary destruction, suddenly appeared to be historically irrelevant.

A book which caught the attention of the people worldwide on the occasion of the 200th Anniversary of the French Revolution was Simon Schama's Citizens I. This was published in August 1989. According to Schama: 'the French Revolution was worse than wrongheaded; it was de trop: its Rousseauian sentimentality and paranoia, the self-consciously histrionic history-making of its major and minor actors, and its rhetorical ? leave aside real ? overkill made it too deplorably melodramatic for words'. In short, according to him the French Revolution was nothing more than an outbreak of mass hysteria.