Bastille Day and La Marseillaise

I was thinking yesterday that it's a wonder that La Marseillaise is still the French National Anthem: "To Arms, Citizens", etc. Doesn't quite fit with the current culture of Social Democracy and multiculturalism in Europe. Does any Western country have a fiestier National Anthem? Or a more rousing one? The version from Casa Blanca reminds us that tyranny is a recurring danger.  On the other hand, Bastille Day also reminds us that revolutions don't always turn out as hoped.  

Walter Russell Meade is on a roll. He has a wonderful piece about the Fall of the Bastille.  

Anyway, for your holiday reflections, five takes on the French Revolution : Charles Dickens, Maximilien Robespierre, Albert Camus, the Marquis de Lafayette and your Via Meadia host.

I hope that a significant percentage of high school and college students still knows who Dickens, Robespierre, Camus and Lafayette were.

Maximilien Robespierre:
If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror.

And of course, terror got a little out of hand during the French Revolution and eventually took even Robespierre's life.* I don't know if Meade intended a connection, but he also put up a short post on the Spirit of Marie Antoinette Alive and Well in the Hamptons. Heh.

* A great deal of the terror came as the result of the attempt to "purify" the country with regard to egalitarianism, (which takes "equality" far beyond the American Founders' emphasis on Equality Before the Law) and other principles which animated the revolutionaries.

It's remarkable to me how many 20th Century tyrants from around the world spent time in Paris before embarking on their careers of tyranny. Many of those tyrants also espoused the idea of "purifying" their own countries. Not something you would expect when visiting modern-day France.