I’m a French Catholic; I’d Rather Eat Costco Baguettes Than Celebrate ‘Bastille Day’

Bastille Day in 2017 corresponds to the actual French Revolution about as much as St. Patrick’s Day corresponds to Catholicism or Guy Fawkes Day to blowing up British Parliament. A holiday whose foundational ethos of bloodshed, cruelty, radical secularization and hatred for religion (specifically Catholicism) has been supplanted by occasions for national pride: military parades, baguettes, Foie gras, fromage, croissants, merlot, and chants of “Vive la France!” as the country throws up its white flag of surrender to Muslim conquest.

Having grown up close to my French heritage, much thanks to my beloved grandparents (may God grant them peace), who hailed from New Caledonia, I’d be pulling a trompe l’oeil on you if I said I didn’t feel a bit of my inner le Tiers État wanting to throw on a beret, pop open a Kronenbourg, slice into an overpriced brie and watch the fireworks over the Champs-Élysées every July 14.

As fate would have it though, I reverted to my Catholicism in 2014, which would then become the fulcrum on which I based my entire worldview, and my French pride would have to take a backseat to my understanding that Bastille Day represents neither the “rights of man” nor the advancement of France’s freedom, as some would regard it, and set the stage for all of Europe to commit the suicide by secularism we see unfolding today.

I know what you’re thinking right now, you bourgeois-minded philosophe: But monarchy sucks, and ‘let them eat cake,’ and medieval torture, and sans-culottes, and covfefe and stuff…

Whatever the reasons or causes that led to the French Revolution, I won’t debate here, rather directing you to a brilliant talk by historian Michael Davies to give you a slightly less slanted picture than what they’ll show you on the BBC. Besides, debating whether anti-Catholic pogroms and the promulgation of a secret police were just unfortunate occurrences in an otherwise noble goal of deposing the French monarchy makes about as much sense as debating if Lenin and Stalin were just unfortunate occurrences of overthrowing the Czar. When the bodies stack up, when families are torn, when souls are corrupted, when allies become enemies, when a nation severs from its foundational principles, when envious hatred becomes violent mobs, who cares?

No question that by 1789 France needed some drastic economic reforms. No question that a perfect storm of geopolitical conflicts, economic bankruptcy, aristocratic decadence,and unfortunate weather resulted in the overthrow of King Louis XVI. We can say all of this for certain, but we can also say for certain that the French Revolution would mark the precursor for the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century.

Think of the French Revolution as the sloppy prequel to the Red Terror or the Great Leap Forward or the Khmer Rouge or Roe v. Wade. All violent social and political revolutions pushed by a minority of secularly-minded intellectuals of immense privilege proclaiming themselves spokesmen for the masses all from the comfort of their luxurious lifestyle. In the case of the French Revolution, this special class was, of course, the bourgeoisie.

With their regular consorting in the Paris salons for discussions about religious superstition and the power of human reason, the bourgeoisie were the limousine liberals of their day. The fattened, effeminate elitist whose lazy rear-end is too busy penning intellectually insipid scribes like “man is born free but everywhere he is in chains” to feed their 19 bastard children. Like Bernie Sanders lecturing how rich people shouldn’t own three houses while he himself owns three houses, the bourgeoisie were hypocrites, and either had no clue or frankly had little care for the consequences of what they advocated for: overthrow of French nobility, subjugation of Christianity, and the confiscation of private property.

Sure, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen signed into law by the National Convention in August 1789 just one month after the storming of the Bastille had various Enlightenment Easter eggs like universal suffrage and “natural rights” sprinkled throughout, but they were mere posturing, a sanitized rhetoric far removed from the depravity that would ensue as la resistance crept on.

As the Welsh historian Gwynne Lewis noted, “From the beginning of the revolution, serious contradictions began to emerge between the rhetoric of life, liberty, equality and fraternity and the reality of a revolution led by a wealthy, propertied elite.” This would explain why the revolution’s figurehead, Maximilien Robespierre, who was to the revolution what Lenin was to Bolshevism, would leap from opposing the death penalty to advocating wholesale genocide.You could say his enlightened reason helped him to “evolve” on the issue.

People typically think of the “Reign of Terror” ushered in by Robespierre and his Jacobin club as an era of grotesque political executions where kangaroo courts would sentence crown loyalists and traitors to death by way of the iconic guillotine as the crowds of Paris celebrated. It was all of this, yes, but it was all of this and much more.

In September 1792, an event known as the September Massacres claimed the lives of 1200 to 1400 people in less than four days when revolutionary mobs stormed the Paris jails and murdered men, women, and children by hacking them to pieces or bashing their skulls in. Of those killed, 233 were Catholic priests that refused the oath demanded of them in the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy,” which placed the Church under state control.

Spurned on by rebellions in the countryside, the revolutionaries by 1793 would jettison the principles laid out in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” with the institution of a secret police that would monitor citizen activity and arrest anyone they deemed unfriendly to the revolution. Informants were stationed everywhere, and people could be carted off to the guillotine for so much as addressing people in the old-fashioned “Monsieur” and “Madame” instead of the state sanctioned “citoyen” (citizen). Even back in 1793, leftists were butchering common terms.

Robespierre and the Jacobins regarded the Catholic Church and Christianity in general as little more than a cloying reminder of France’s monarchical and superstitious past. To fully sever from it, they launched an era of dechristianization that included the state’s confiscation of Church property, the destruction of Christian icons, and instituting of bizarre civic cults, including the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being. All priests and clergymen that did not swear the oath mandated in the “Civil Constitution” were liable to execution on site.

None felt this dechristianization quite so harshly as the peasants in the coastal region of the Vendée, who became subject to what some historians have classified as the first modern genocide, with the current death toll 170,000. For a more extensive treatment on this horrific episode and the barbaric tactics used against these faithful people at the hands of revolutionary France, see Daniel Rabourdin’s docudrama The Hidden Rebellion.

The sons of the revolution always consume the fathers of the revolution, and as irony would have it, Robespierre went to the guillotine courtesy of the very same kangaroo courts he ushered in. Only with Napoleon’s rise in 1804 did Christianity and the Catholic Church receive protections again, but the stain of the revolution lives in France to this very day. For instance, Catholic weddings have not been recognized by the state in over 200 years. To get married in France, couples must first undergo a civil ceremony before a religious ceremony.

Knowing these facts, now you might understand why I as a French Catholic have a rough time shouting “Vive la France” on Bastille Day. This leaves me feeling in a little left out in the celebration of national pride. The Irish have St. Patrick, the Italians have St. Joseph, the Germans have Oktoberfest, the Mexicans have Cinco de Mayo, and the British have Guy Fawkes. What’s a French Catholic who loves his heritage and his faith to do? Simple, invent my own day of national pride that other French Catholics can enjoy as well.

That’s why next year, on May 30, I will be celebrating St. Joan of Arc Day with all my French Catholic roturiers, and you can come join us too. We meet down by the tennis courts.