{"id":56061,"date":"2013-07-15T11:35:54","date_gmt":"2013-07-15T15:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=56061"},"modified":"2013-07-15T12:47:45","modified_gmt":"2013-07-15T16:47:45","slug":"required-reading-for-bastille-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/07\/15\/required-reading-for-bastille-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Required Reading for Bastille Day"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Claude<\/a>

Claude Monet, Rue Montorgueil, Paris, Festival of 30 June 1878<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

So hangs it, dubious, fateful, in the sultry days of July. It is the passionate printed advice of M. Marat, to abstain, of all things, from violence. Nevertheless the hungry poor are already burning Town Barriers, where Tribute on eatables is levied; getting clamorous for food.
\u2014Thomas Carlyle, History of the French Revolution<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The old saw that \u201can army marches on its belly\u201d was blunted on July 14, 1789, as a half-starved, bibulous mob overran the walls of the Bastille, the Bourbon kings\u2019 infamous political prison-turned-armory. Leaders of the rabble were more excited about hoarding gunpowder and fusils<\/i> than about liberating the prison\u2019s seven remaining, apparently apolitical inmates. Over the next two centuries, La F\u00eate Nationale (or simply \u201cle quatorze Juillet\u201d) has metastasized from a Gallic celebration of freedom to a worldwide excuse for holding a multiday anarchic party, ideally with decent wine and minimal casualties. <\/p>\n

Modern tradition begain in 1880, two years after the June feast that Monet captured in his painting of the Rue Montorgueil (above). For a century, Paris civic leaders have insisted<\/a> that the annual military parade down the Champs d\u2019\u00c9lys\u00e9e is the oldest and most populous of its kind in Europe, a claim the Belgians have yet to dispute. Besides the march itself, denizens of France\u2019s capital can enjoy the Patrouille de France, a grandly choreographed fighter-jet extravaganza and an opportunity for France\u2019s superior air force to show up the Italians\u2019 airborne colors from the Festa della Repubblica, held each June.<\/p>\n

But France\u2019s ministry of culture is also responsible for establishing f\u00eates in such far-flung cities as Budapest, Hungary; Auckland, New Zealand; and Franschhoek, South Africa. Most major American cities offer some version of a Bastille Day tradition. Baltimore and New Orleans boast impressive parades and extravagant outdoor drinking. Citizens of Milwaukee are especially lucky on this score: beginning in 1982, the city has celebrated le quatorze<\/i> for four days straight<\/a>. (American renditions of Bastille Day have a pleasant confusion about them;\u00a0Milwaukee hypes its parade down Kilbourn Avenue by dangling beads before us: \u201c\u2026 Thousands of beads will make all Francophiles in attendance think they\u2019re in Nawlins!\u201d What day is it again?)<\/p>\n

Those less stirred by beer and beads still have books, and we happen to think that the quatorze<\/i> is an important day to catch up on your francophilia. Herewith, our (slightly belated) required reading for Bastille Day:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1. William Wordsworth, The Prelude<\/i>.<\/b><\/p>\n

\n

…it was a reservoir of guilt
And ignorance, filled up from age to age,
That could no longer hold its loathsome charge,
But burst and spread in deluge through the land.
(Book X, 436\u201339)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A proponent of freedom who loathed Robespierre, Wordsworth was also a total deadbeat expat who knocked up his French mistress, got antsy about the reign of terror, and hastened home to the Lake District leaving his French family with a pittance. Now that we\u2019ve gotten the ugly stuff out of the way, know that the Prelude<\/i> is very beautiful, and that book X is rich with considered ambivalence toward revolutionary programs. A delightful poet! A total heel!<\/p>\n

2. A fifteen days\u2019 tour to Paris; \u2026 By an English gentleman of veracity, just returned. To which is added, by another hand, a faithful description of every part of that once dreadful engine of despotism, the Bastille: \u2026 written originally in French, by one who was many years a miserable inhabitant.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

A raucously verbose twofer, in which an anonymous Englishman and a \u201cmiserable\u201d Frenchmen offer two very different accounts of the Revolution\u2019s early days. (Good luck finding this one\u00a0outside of facsimiles and microfiches in university libraries.)<\/p>\n

3. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History<\/i>.<\/b><\/p>\n

Carlyle\u2019s history bubbles over with brilliance. He attends to the suffering of individuals with the baleful earnestness of James Agee, during a period when the very notion of the individual (as in all revolutions) becomes politically perilous:<\/p>\n

\n

Masses indeed: and yet, singular to say, if, with an effort of imagination, thou follow them, over broad France, into their clay hovels, into their garrets and hutches, the masses consist all of units.\u00a0 Every unit of whom has his own heart and sorrows; stands covered there with his own skin, and if you prick him, he will bleed. (Book I)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The palpable pulse in Carlyle\u2019s tome, suitable indeed for such a bloody subject,\u00a0makes the volume a gripper, as do the peculiar circumstances in which Carlyle was forced to compose and then reconstruct his opus. From an uncredited \u201cNote on the Author\u201d in the first Modern Library edition of Carlyle (1934):<\/p>\n

\n

His ghastly experience with the manuscript of The French Revolution<\/i> was in itself enough to embitter his outlook on life.\u00a0 Having finished the first volume of his work, he entrusted the only copy of the manuscript to J.S. Mill for comment and annotation.\u00a0By an accident, it was burned.\u00a0Carlyle thereupon set to work and rewrote the entire history, achieving what he described as a book that came \u2018direct and flamingly from the heart.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There is something maddeningly humorous in this deadpan passage; any student working under deadline, or any professor waiting for an essay to reach his mailbox, can find heartbreaking hilarity in the matter-of-fact \u201cBy an accident, it was burned\u201d\u2014not only because it sounds like so much \u201cdog ate my thesis\u201d but because it\u2019s the sort of thing that actually happens in both scholarship and history.\u00a0In this sense, Carlyle\u2019s final manuscript, the one we read today, was itself an act of resurrection in more ways than one: an historical reclamation, and a neat bit of literary necromancy.<\/p>\n

(N.b.: Never<\/i> lend a book to J.\u2009S. Mill.)<\/p>\n

4. Jeremy D. Popkin, A Short History of the French Revolution<\/i>.<\/b><\/p>\n

Much like Carlyle, but roughly eight times shorter. Recommended for those who distrust large objects and\/or Victorian prose.<\/p>\n

5. Dickens on France<\/i>, edited by John Edmonson (2006).<\/b><\/p>\n

Edmonson describes Dickens\u2019s \u201cearly affection for France and an instinctive affinity with French life and culture.\u201d Dickens visited France over twenty times, six of which were lengthy sojourns. Dickens often joked that he was more French than English, which would explain why Hard Times<\/i> is such a bummer. Dickens on France<\/i> comprises extracts from Little Dorrit<\/i>, Pictures from Italy<\/i>, Somebody\u2019s Luggage<\/i>, Dombey & Son<\/i>, and, of course, A Tale of Two Cities<\/i>, which might seem like promising Bastille Day reading but really we\u2019d prefer if you read it on Idaho Human Rights Day<\/a> (January 21).<\/p>\n

6. H\u00e9lo\u00efse Bocher, D\u00e9molir la Bastille : l\u2019\u00e9dification d\u2019un lieu de m\u00e9moire<\/i>.<\/b><\/p>\n

Bocher, a scholar at the Institut d’Histoire de la R\u00e9volution fran\u00e7aise, tells the fascinating tale of the thousand workers who spent \u201ctwo long years\u201d pulling down the walls and tours of this \u201csymbol of the old r\u00e9gime, of its biased justice and its arbitrary practices.\u201d Once the Bastille was gone, Bocher argues, the ground on which it stood became consecrated to \u201cParisian sociability,\u201d a \u201cplace of memory\u201d on which the New France could forge an identity. Bocher\u2019s volume is also in French, but the paperback is very discreet and fits nicely inside the larger books on this list. D\u00e9molir<\/i>: enjoy without scaring your xenophobe friends!<\/p>\n

7. George Plimpton<\/b>.<\/p>\n

You know who used to throw a kick-ass Bastille Day party? None other than the founding editor of this very magazine. In George Being George<\/i>, an oral history edited by Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., Felix Grucci Jr. recounts the origin of Plimpton\u2019s pyrotechnical enthusiasms:<\/p>\n

\n

Our family came to know George when he used to drive out to the Hamptons during the summers in the early 1960s and stopped off at my father\u2019s fireworks factory in Bellport \u2026 Eventually it grew to the point where George\u2014this was when he lived in Wainscott\u2014would have us to his Bastille Day party, and we brought a little fireworks show, a little one, just a tiny backyard fireworks show \u2026 But over the years it became a mammoth firework show in the potato fields behind his house. So much so that the municipality said to George, \u201cYou can\u2019t do this anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

By the late seventies, Plimpton had made peace with various municipal authorities, and the city of New York named him \u201chonorary fire commissioner\u201d (which is like asking Snoop Dogg to helm D.A.R.E.) In 1979, People Magazine<\/i> filed a lively report about Plimpton\u2019s Bastille parties after Plimpton became the first American to win first place at the Monte Carlo International Fireworks Festival:<\/p>\n

\n

At George Plimpton\u2019s Bastille Day fireworks blast in July an errant comet cracker came whizzing out of the fog, dive-bombed guests like Candice Bergen, Norman Mailer and William Paley and sent two celebrants to the hospital emergency room.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In 2007, Times<\/i> book critic Dwight Garner wrote a bubbly tribute<\/a> to Plimpton\u2019s Bastillean antics, urging his readers to visit projectplimton.org<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

\u2026 the best thing about the site, at least on the day before the Fourth of July, is that you can go there, click on a photograph of Plimpton dressed in what looks like a parody of a sea captain\u2019s uniform, and hear the sound of fireworks going boom, boom, boom. Go do it, right now<\/a>. It\u2019s weirdly addictive.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We\u2019ll give you five minutes to get it out of your system.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[une pause caf\u00e9<\/i>]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

8. Anna Letitia Barbauld, \u201cLines to Samuel Rogers in Wales on the Eve of Bastille Day, 1791.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

\n

Think, when woods of brownest shades
Open bright to sunny glades;
Such the gloom, and such the light,
Of Freedom\u2019s noon, and Slavery\u2019s night. (13\u201316)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

9. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad<\/i>.<\/b><\/p>\n

\u201cThat first night on French soil was a stirring one \u2026 The spirit of the country was upon us.\u201d These lines ring hollow, like the Bastille armory emptied of its treasures. Twain\u2019s general misanthropy extends with special vigor to the French, whose sense of humor Twain finds wanting: \u201cI had always thought that Frenchmen were ready to laugh at anything,\u201d he writes, defeated. From this we can deduce that Huckleberry Finn<\/i> did not sell well enough in France to mollify the gentleman from West Hartford.<\/p>\n

10. Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes<\/i>.<\/b><\/p>\n

Il<\/p>\n

faut<\/p>\n

lire les<\/p>\n

Calligr-<\/i><\/p>\n

ammes<\/i> de<\/p>\n

Guillaume<\/p>\n

Apollin-\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 aire, qui<\/p>\n

a \u00e9crit des\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 po\u00e8mes qui<\/p>\n

ont fait des\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 desseins<\/p>\n

(un esp\u00e8ce de\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 lib\u00e9ration\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 typographique)<\/p>\n

[Translation: \u201cYou should read the Calligrammes<\/i> of Guillaume Apollinaire, who wrote poems that painted pictures (a sort of typographical liberation).\u201d Ed. note: we believe the calligramme<\/em> above is meant to represent the Eiffel Tower, though to us it looks like a dying Christmas tree.]<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

Read and celebrate with moderation! As Crane Brinton wrote in Anatomy of a Revolution<\/i>, \u201cthree days is a long time to be angry, or drunk, or both.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ted Scheinman is a doctoral candidate and culture reporter based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His essays, reporting, and criticism have appeared in <\/i>Slate, the<\/i> Oxford American, the <\/i>Los Angeles Review of Books, the <\/i>Village Voice, and elsewhere. Follow him on twitter at @Ted_Scheinman<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So hangs it, dubious, fateful, in the sultry days of July. It is the passionate printed advice of M. Marat, to abstain, of all things, from violence. Nevertheless the hungry poor are already burning Town Barriers, where Tribute on eatables is levied; getting clamorous for food.\u2014Thomas Carlyle, History of the French Revolution The old saw […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":560,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7554],"tags":[11393,2877,1203,865,14,7185,11392,11391,1766,11390,6004,7880],"class_list":["post-56061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-2","tag-anna-letitia-barbauld","tag-bastille-day","tag-charles-dickens","tag-france","tag-george-plimpton","tag-guillaume-apollinaire","tag-heloise-bocher","tag-jeremy-d-popkin","tag-mark-twain","tag-monet","tag-thomas-carlyle","tag-william-wordsworth"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRequired Reading for Bastille Day<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"July 15, 2013 \u2013 So hangs it, dubious, fateful, in the sultry days of July. 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