Just wrapped up your 4th of July festivities? Done celebrating your Independence from those damn Brits? Good! Because you're right on time to celebrate La FĆŖte Nationale, aka Bastille Day. LibertĆ©, EgalitĆ©, FraternitĆ©.
Bastille Day is to France what Cinco de Mayo is to Mexico. An excuse to booze up, under the pretense of cultural openness and diversity!
But first of all, in France, we don't celebrate Bastille Day. We celebrate Le 14 juillet. If you mention Bastille Day to a Frenchman, or even (given nobody speaks English over there) if you say Le jour de la Bastille, people will look at you as if you have ten - royally crowned - heads, (which would make your beheading lengthy and probably against the 35 hour working-week Labor regulation).
Bastille Day is of your own making! You, my American friends, invented it. The name that is! And we should be vastly impressed that you know about La Bastille, because I can find you busloads of French 10th graders who have no clue that July 14th celebrates the storming of La Bastille.
So you still wonder what exactly is being celebrated?
It's a common inaccuracy to believe that the French are celebrating the beheading of their king. Of course, there are many reasons to celebrate beheadings. But Louis XVI was beheaded in January, soon after Christmas, New Year and the celebration of the Magi. In short, the season was already jam-packed with parties. Plus, for marketing reasons, France needed a solid mid-summer celebration.
So instead of celebrating the loss of its head by our king, France decided to celebrate the storming of the Bastille prison. A surprising symbol to commemorate? Insurgency is cool as ice on my side of the pond. You would not give the Battle of Alcatraz a national holiday status, but back then and there, La Prise de la Bastille was groovy and patriotic.
And you have to admit that this guillotine thing is quite a mind-blowing (or neck-cutting) invention. It was invented by a compassionate doctor, the good Doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, to provide a less painful, more humane death. A totally compassionate solution would have included sterilization of the blade between choppings, but Guillotin's invention was a vast improvement from the archaic axe.
Now that I've whetted your appetite for Bastille Day, I'm sure you wonder how you should celebrate?
No blade or axe or riot necessary.
Instead, just relax, listen to La Vie en Rose, enjoy a glass of Pastis, have a hamburger with foie gras, some escargots, stinky cheese for desert, a game of pƩtanque, a pack of Gitanes sans filtre. And you can call it a (Bastille) Day.
For more by Layla Demay, click here
Follow Layla Demay on Twitter: www.twitter.com/laylademay
Napoleon, Lenin, or Stalin, they were each at least as bad as those that they replaced.
Wikipedia seems to agree with you. Mr. Guillotine advocated the use of the beheading machine, which was designed and made by others, according to that source.
I'm going to open a Jade PF '01 and celebrate with la fƩe verte.
I learned long ago that it's not really worth the effort to explain what the holiday is about.
While writing a letter to your congressional representative, about the injustice of 800,000 people per year being incarcerated and having their lives ruined and rights stolen, for the possession of a plant.
It is time for the most American of Bastille Day's.
Four decades and a trillion dollars too late, actually.
Like the French, much of what we think of as history is a fable. However, the true story of America, with its Constitution and Bill of Rights, is plenty remarkable.
What is terrible is how the power structure in this country has been taken over by corporate money. Money is the secret hand that controls government, and the power of money over the government continues to grow. The recent successes of the Republican Party in disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of voters makes it all the easier for money to control the elections, and thus the government.
On that day in 1302, an underequipped army of citizens and farmers from all over Flanders defeated the army of the French king Philippe le Bel. Ever since, that date has been a symbol of the struggle against French imperialism - be it that of Philippe le Bel, Louis XIV, or Napoleon.
French imperialism - mostly cultural - is still alive and well today, with French-speaking Belgians who go and live in the Dutch-speaking part of the country (Flanders) and refuse to learn a word of Dutch.
How would you feel if you lived and worked in a US suburb and a group of people suddenly showed up refusing to learn English but demanding you do everything for them in their own language - from providing them with forms in their language to serving them at the restaurant and the bakery?