Bastille

The regent raged, and meeting the youth in the park one day he said to him, Monsieur Arouet, I will wager that I can show you something that you have never seen before.

What is that? The inside of the Bastille.

Arouet saw it the next day, April 16th, 1717.

While in the Bastille he adopted for some unknown reason the pen name of Voltaire and became a poet in earnest and at length.

Footnote.

Carlyle thought it was an anagram for A-R-O-U-E-T-L-J, Lejeune, the younger, but the name seems to have occurred among the family of Voltaire's mother.

The Romances.

Nevertheless, the regent, not knowing of this chanticleer, sent Voltaire permission in 1729 to return to France.

So this is what has produced, in large measure, this is what has produced the mess we're looking at every day.

As you know, the street has served as a fourth branch of government ever since Bastille days, as a British scholar recently put it, when the executive, the legislature, and the courts all fail, the street is where people can get things done.

Patrick, from what you can tell, are the protests thinking about gaining real power?

I don't know their aspirations that way.

That was a case of what we have taken to call long afterwards people power.

People power is a phrase that arose in the Philippines when this great big movement to depose Marcos, Marcos came in in the late 80s, okay, people power.

The Bastille was a question of people power, and the French tradition reflects this to this day, and I envy it.

As I said in that piece, I feel a little humiliated when I watch the French and their willingness to get off the bloody sofa.

The chaos has been so threatening that President Trump believed the NFL should have postponed the game.

The demonstrations have caused many to cite the French Revolution of 1789, which began when Parisians stormed the Bastille, attacking the medieval prison to seize gunpowder and weapons.

the guillotine claimed the lives of King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, and thousands of ordinary citizens.

Then came the Reign of Terror, during which 20,000 to 40,000 people were executed.

Yes, and also the Europe game coming up, too.

So we have all that going on at the Europe game, which is happening in France right now, while the citizens of France are storming the Bastille.

It's the Steelers with a 16-10 lead over the Saints.

The Saints really should win the game in France, wouldn't you say? That's a good thing.

You talk about football no matter what.

There was civil unrest, riots.

They literally stormed the Bastille.

here in France, and Roger Goodell in the NFL said, nope, we're going there.

Well, it was telegraphed, almost literally, because there were videos on TikTok and also other social media platforms saying, watch for October 17.

We're going to take the Bastille.

And you might pronounce it Bastille.

But they did not take it that day, but they came really close.

And these are the so-called student protesters that I believe, if you take a look at what's really going on, and many sources seem to think this is what's happening, there are infiltrators everywhere.

Added to all this faithful work, she took upon herself the charge of an orphaned child, seven years old, whose mother had been in the number of her friends.

That was the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, thirty years old, in 1789, the year of the fall of the Bastille, the noble life now to be touched in its enthusiasms by the spirit of the revolution, to be caught in the great storm, shattered, and lost among its wrecks.

to burke's attack on the french revolution mary wollstonecraft wrote an answer one of many answers provoked by it that attracted much attention this was followed by her vindication of the rights of women while the air was full of declamation on the rights of men the claims made in this little book were in advance of the opinion of that day but they are claims that have in our day been conceded they are certainly not revolutionary in the opinion of the world that has become a hundred years older since the book was written at this the mary wollstonecraft had moved to rooms in store street bedford square she was fascinated by fuselli the painter and he was a married man she felt herself to be too strongly drawn towards him and she went to Paris at the close of the year 1792 to break the spell.

She felt lonely and sad, and was not the happier for being in a mansion lent to her from which the owner was away, and which she lived surrounded by his servants.

It would be difficult to form an idea of the place if you have never seen one of these rocky coasts.

We were a considerable time entering amongst the islands before we saw about two hundred houses crowded together under a very high rock, still higher appearing above.

Talk not of Bastille's.

To be born here was to be bestilled by nature, shut out from all that opens the understanding or enlarges the heart.