Alas, the Image is Wrong
The French celebrate their
revolution on July 14, the day on which residents of Paris stormed and
captured the Bastille. One has the vision of thousands of people storming
the fortress, braving shot and shell as they shout, ``Liberte, egalite,
fraternite!''
History, literature and
perhaps, the movies have stylized what happened on that day in 1789.
To be sure, the storming of the Bastille was not a non-violent event a
la EDSA. Shots were fired and at least a hundred people were killed.
But it isn't true that tens
of thousands of people participated. In June 1790, the government decorated
the people who stormed the Bastille -- and there were only 794 persons
who came forward to claim the title vainqueur de la Bastille [conqueror
of the Bastille].
Historian Jacques Godechot
adds this caution: ``We must doubtless assume the presence of a number
of vagrants, homeless persons and former jailbirds, who would not be anxious
to claim the title of `conqueror' because it might have brought them into
contact with the police...''
In the view of the late
historian George Lefebvre, the fall of the Bastille was the high point
of the third stage of the revolution -- the revolt of the Parisians and
other city-dwellers. Lefebvre maintains that the French Revolution had
four stages, each carried out by a different social class and that it was
dominated by class conflict,
Lefebvre declares that the
French Revolution started with the aristocrats, who, in a desire to uphold
their own pre-eminence, rebelled against the king. Having paralyzed the
king's power, the successful aristocrats paved the way for ``the bourgeois
revolution, then to the popular revolution in the cities, and finally to
the revolution of the peasants -- and found itself buried under the ruins
of the Old Regime.''
The data on the 794 conquerors
of the Bastille, however, suggest that the idea of a class-based revolt
by the Parisians is open to dispute. True, all the 794 were residents of
Paris, but none of them lived farther than two kilometers away from the
fortress, Godechot points out. At least half of them were recent migrants
to Paris. There were even foreigners in the group -- Belgians, Italians,
Germans and even a Dutchman and a Swiss.
Most of us lay people are
not even aware of this dispute among professional historians. For most
of us, the vision of the fall of the Bastille is inspired by Ferdinand
Victor Eugene Delacroix's celebrated painting of the bare-breasted Goddess
of Liberty leading the people into battle.
Alas, even this image is
wrong. Delacroix was not born till ten years after the fall of the Bastille;
he lived during and after the Napoleonic era and his painting represents
the ideals of the revolutionaries of 1830.