Bonne Bastille
Atlanta, GA
July 14, 2020
This has been a tough year for the Ancien Régime, meaning anything that pertained before Memorial Day.
Historic statues have been desecrated, toppled, and destroyed. Names and images of erstwhile heroes are being effaced from buildings, streets, schools, and bases. Names and emblems are falling like autumn leaves from notable sports franchises. I imagine they will soon come off cities, mountains, and states.
Random violence has infested America. Mobs are on the rampage. Innocent motorists, residents, and pedestrians are randomly pulverized. A couple weeks ago, a guillotine was placed in front of Jeff Bezos’s DC home. How long before the tumbrils…or heads…roll?
Happy Bastille Day!
The most consequential and resonant events of modern history began on the streets of Paris and the road Versailles 231 years ago. The stone cast in 1789 splashed in the Seine, soaked all of Europe, and sent ripples every direction. The waves watered St. Petersburg in 1917, wet Shanghai in 1949, and washed over Cambodia in 1975. We hope puddles don’t form on our own sidewalks.
The French Revolution is sometimes considered a transatlantic extension of the American one. No doubt the flame of 1776 helped spark the conflagration of 1789. But the two events were fundamentally different in origin, in execution (so to speak), and in their ramifications.
What we colloquially call the “American Revolution” was not really a revolution at all. It was a parting of the ways. As in the War Between the States, a contested divorce, or a South Chicago mugging, it was a matter of one party wanting to leave and the other not willing to let go.
It was a secession of 13 colonies trying to take their place among the separate powers of the earth. Each of them became an equal to Britain. But, unlike French proletarians, none wanted to govern it.
Nor was there a wholesale destruction of tradition, or an attempt to eradicate the past. They did re-name Kings College and pull down statues of George III, but for the most part American states saw themselves as true inheritors and perpetuators of English liberty.
They saw tracks from the Magna Carta to the English Bill of Rights to the Declaration of Independence. It was the British government that went off the rails. The colonists simply wanted off the train. To them, secession was a revolution not made, but prevented. Betsy Ross, not Madame Defarge, did their knitting.
A true Revolution is different, and far more dangerous. It is a disruption rather than a continuation. An overturning, not a fulfillment. Valid grievances become insane demands. Traditions are scrapped, language is overhauled, and sides are taken…or assigned. It is akin to playing Russian Roulette with a bullet in every chamber. Like a bubble stock market, a revolutionary society takes the stairs up…and the elevator down.
The last month, we’ve felt as if we are on the edge of the shaft, staring into the abyss. La Marseillaise (admittedly, one of the great anthems) is ringing in our ears.
The Marquis de Lafayette connected American independence to the French convulsion. So did Axel von Fersen. A count of Sweden at the Court of Louis XV, he was a (reputedly very) close friend to Marie Antoinette.
Von Fersen left France to join Rochambeau at Newport, Rhode Island and, eventually Washington at Hartford, Connecticut. He helped the royals on their futile flight to Varennes, and years later … in the spirit of his time and ours … died at the hands of a Swedish mob.
Sensing the rising sans culottes of modern American cities, we’ve begun seeking sanctuary in rural American sticks. We started this weekend with visits to Blue Ridge, Blairsville, and Dahlonega in the North Georgia mountains. We’ve also considered Sky Valley, the highest, coolest, and northernmost settlement in the state…as well as a few places in North Carolina and Tennessee.
All are within easy reach of our house, seem somewhat secluded from our ambient lunacy, and are places we’d enjoy regardless. And, with remote work, we could probably spend more time at a mountain home than normal circumstances might allow.
Then again, I’ve known myself long enough to expect nothing will come of this. The last twenty five years, we have mentally “bought” homes in Western Montana, Eastern Washington, Cœur d’Alene, Idaho and Cashiers, North Carolina. We had real estate agents guide us around Lake Toxaway and British Columbia. We even dropped deposits on condominiums in San Francisco and a house in Sonoma.
But nerves always intervened, leaving no second sets of taxes, maintenance costs, rental income, or property appreciation to garnish or grace our accounts. For us, this is not a new lark. But these days, it may be a more serious one. In the current tumult, seclusion seems the best solution.
And that assessment is more valid nationally than locally. We are too many, and too diverse, to be governed from a single city. Separation, not revolution, is the reasonable resolution. As Charles de Gaulle put it, “how can you govern a country with 246 different kinds of cheese?”
Groucho Marx described politics as the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.
In many respects, that could be the epitaph of our age.
JD
