French Revolution

Ten days after July 4^th comes July 14^th – Bastille Day, which for the French serves the same purpose for their revolution as July 4^th does for ours.  Having mentioned the French one briefly in the prior blog, I’ll go into a bit more detail this time.

 Bastille Day.  When we lived in Paris, Bastille Day meant two things:  fancy military parades along the Champs Elysees in the mornings – with Mirages flying by overhead – and more important, firecrackers!!  This was the one day of the year when we could shoot them off without worrying about being hassled by the gendarmes.  We’d go off to somewhere remote, like Bagatelle, and blow off machine guns, larger ones (not M-80s or dynamite, though), and generally make lots of noise and destruction.  Immense fun.

            During the summer of 1989, 7/14/89 marked the Bicentennial.  The insanity was turned up a few notches: the Champs Elysees was a noisy war zone, and they had later night parades which we watched from the US Embassy, which looks out onto Place de la Concorde.  The Marseillaise was repeated ad infinitum.

 The Marseillaise.  The French national anthem.  I like this more than the “Star Spangled Banner”, which is kind of dull.  “KILL ‘EM ALL!!” – somewhat nastier than “bombs bursting in air”.  There are actually several verses, but typically only the first gets played (except on 7/14/89, when we heard them all).  Here it is:

 French

Allons enfants de la patrie

Le jour de gloire est arrive

Contre nous de la tyrannie

L’etendard sanglant est leve

Entendez-vous dans nos campagnes

Mugir ces feroces soldats?

Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras

Egorger vos vils, vos compagnes!

             Aux armes, citoyens

            Formez vos bataillons

            Marchons, marchons

            Qu’un sang impur

            Abreuve nos sillons

 English

Come children of the country

The day of glory has arrived

Against us tyranny’s

Bloody standard is raised

Hear in our fields

The howling of these ferocious soldiers?

They come into your arms

To cut the throats of your sons and comrades

             To arms, citizens

            Form your battalions

            March, march

            Let impure blood

            Water our furrows

 The Guillotine. But wait, that’s not all.  Beyond even the bloody Marseillaise, the guillotine is the coolest legacy of the French Revolution.  What did we have, aside from Nathan Hale  hanged saying, “I regret I have but one life to give for my country”, or Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death”?  The French had this bad-ass death machine, the Revolutionary Cuisinart.   Placed right smack in the middle of the Place de la Concorde, slicing off heads into the basket, eyes blinking for a few seconds.  Too bad now they just have the boring obelisk Napoleon brought back from Egypt.  Bring it back!!

American Revolution

July 4^th again!  Last year I discussed the Grateful Dead.  This time I’ll discuss the American Revolution and other topics in a random fashion.

 When it comes to Cuba, for example, Che Guevara seems to get more credit than Fidel Castro.  At least with our own revolution, America gets it right.  George Washington, the man who led our forces to victory and by far the most important figure in our revolution, gets the top billing he deserves:  our capital city named after him, with an obelisk in his name; the state containing Seattle is named after him; two colleges; the $1 bill; the quarter; and lots more. 

 Viewed in perspective, the American Revolution is remarkable:

1.         A ragtag army managed to defeat, in conventional warfare, the redcoated armies of the world’s largest and most powerful country at the time Great Britain.  A colony defeating its mother country in battle?  Amazing. Granted, we had some help from France, but the French alone could not have done it, and would not have intervened had we not been a winning proposition.

2.         After finishing up the war, the Founding Fathers established a Constitution AND a stable democracy.  As history shows, it’s fairly easy to get rid of a dictator; imposing something close to order and stability afterwards is quite another story (we have some VERY recent history to show us that...).  Let’s compare two other major revolutions:

            A.         French Revolution (1789).  After some lip service to “liberty, equality, fraternity”, they set up a guillotine in what is now Place de la Concorde and began lopping off heads.  Not only the royal family (King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette) but each other’s!  The Terror ended up devouring its own – Danton and Robespierre themselves became victims.  Eventually the French ended up with an emperor, Napoleon, and after some proud victories, with a comeback tour by Napoleon, they wound up with defeat; then Louis Phillippe and  Louis Napoleon (aka Napoleon III).  In other words, they had to wait until 1872 or so to finally get a stable republic.

            B.         Russian Revolution (1917).  The first one, led by Kerensky, only served to depose the Tsar but keep the war going on.  In November the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, took over in St Petersburg; a civil war lasted until 1922; and from 1922 to 1989 the Russians had to endure under a totalitarian dictatorship, induding those particularly nasty years under Stalin.  Like the French, the Bolsheviks couldn’t resist brutally murdering not only the Romanovs but each other. 

 Celebrate July 4^th?  Some argue that the blacks in this country have little reason to celebrate July 4^th, because the American Revolution – and the establishment of democracy thereafter – did not immediately abolish slavery.  This sounds a little harsh.  Never mind that they had to construct an entire democratic government out of thin air, including a Constitution, a Bill of Rights, and set the whole thing up so it would (A) have enough power to do anything and protect itself from anarchy and tyranny, of the minority AND the majority; (B) not be so powerful that we’d wind up with a dictator; and (C) have an amendment system so it could be peacefully changed without a violent, bloody revolution.  Never mind t hat they had to sell this whole package deal to all 13 colonies and satisfy slaveowners down south as well as bankers in Philadelphia, New York and Boston.  Never mind that at that point, America was still an agricultural country which had yet to experience its own Industrial Revolution.  Never mind that even England had to wait until 1833 to abolish slavery.  Never mind that it took us a Civil War from 1861-65 to achieve this goal years later.  Slamming the Founding Fathers for not abolishing slavery in 1787 sounds about as logical as slamming Wilbur and Orville Wright for not launching a jet aircraft and breaking the sound barrier at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903.

 American Wars.  I did some number crunching and came to a remarkable conclusion.   If you add up the days of prolonged hostilities (notwithstanding when a peace treaty formally ended the war) of each of the wars the US has been in, and divide the number of total deaths by that, we end up with not only some idea of how bloody these conflicts were, but you can also divide them into three categories of intensity of conflict:

A.  Low level.  The Revolutionary War (1775-81), War of 1812 (1812-1815), Gulf War (1990-91), and current Iraqi War (2003-2007): 2 deaths per day.

B.  Mid-level.  Mexican War (1846-48), Spanish-American War (1898), Korea (1950-53) and Vietnam (1965-72): a range from 20-33 deaths per day.

C.  High-level.  the big three: WWI (1917-18): 200/day; WWII (1941-45): 300/day; and the biggest by far, the Civil War (1861-65): 427/day.  Civil War casualties (well over 600,000) practically equal all the rest combined, with the next two being WWII (407,316) and WWI (116,708).  

            This should put it in perspective when the “body count” comes back from Iraq.  We aren’t even CLOSE to Vietnam – in total deaths OR intensity.  IF the situation can be stabilized and a strong, non-Islamic sickwad regime emerges, YES it will have been worthwhile.