Letters from Europe:

Bastille Day

Bastille Day is a national holiday in France, the fête nationale as the Fourth of July is to us. In an eerie parallel, they call it the Fourteenth of July instead of Bastille Day as we term that day in the US, similar to what we call our national holiday, the Fourth of July.

We of the US should remember this day as well, but for reasons different than those of the French.

Both the Fourth of July and the Fourteenth of July celebrate revolutions, but it is rarely recalled how different are the paths that the two revolutions traveled.

The American Revolution, while marked by a war between organized armies, was remarkably violence free for a civil war, which it indeed was, with Loyalists to the British Crown present throughout the thirteen colonies that were rebelling against what was admittedly their legally constituted system of government.

There were comparatively few incidents of fratricide within the colonies, despite the true rebellion that was underway.

By contrast, the self-immolation practiced by the French in their revolution as it degenerated from the high ideals expressed in 1789 to the reckless use of the guillotine to eliminate political opponents in 1793 show the path that could have been taken in America but was avoided by a combination of incredible luck and good leadership that almost begs for a belief in divine intervention.

In a symmetry that is common in Physics but rare in human history, the American Revolution was financed by the ancien régime in France, and the cost in no small part helped in prompting the calling of the Estates-General of 1789, which resulted in a self-declared National Assembly, the first step of defiance of absolute monarchy that was the foundation of the French Revolution.

For better or worse, whether we like it or not, the history of modern France and the United States are intertwined in ways that resonate starting in the late 18th century and continue down to the present.

And a clue for those who like to cry about how Christians are discriminated against in the United States now, examine the history of DeChristianization that was an official policy in the French Revolution. I saw some of the results of this policy when I toured the Palais de Papes in Avignon, where priceless artwork was destroyed in the heat of anti-Christian revolutionary fervor.

When was the last time the US Congress passed a law saying that all Christian clergy were subordinate to the US Government?

Yes, cries of oppression that have no foundation, especially when compared with the real persecution present in the world, are a peeve of mine...

Regardless, there are many lessons that we Americans can learn from the divergent paths of the French and American Revolutions, and we forget at our peril the excesses of political passions that we managed to avoid, as evidenced by our own, fratricidal Civil War.

It is not inevitable that history repeats, only if we are willfully blind to the lessons we can draw, which we all too often are.

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