Opportunity
 

For a long I don't tour the Nick Beale's section, nd found a lot of interest in ..
but I found also a good occasion to start this thread, I hv to say , it hv nothing to do with the luftwaffe, or really at the margin of the margin, I want to speak about , what Nick call the "Bastille day", i.e. the 14.July , french national day, in fact as on the 14.th july 1789, really nothing happened , some drunk people, armed by the king cousin nd a business man who need the stones of the fortress, enter in the non-defended Bastille , killed some people in, nd "liberated" 3 or 2 "prisonners", more than the liberation , the killing of adm. people gives the trend to the whole revolution, one year later they made the "Fête de la fédération" nd after that nothing or quite nothing, until the 14.July 1880, the first national day, celebrating the "Fête de la fédération" nd not la Bastille, to add that also this celebration is a bit tricky, because as all people know, France is really not a féderation,as it was when the kings were ruling, but a very strong central state.
Rémi

Re: Opportunity
 

Strange story. Not the place to discuss it but

"some drunk people": probably more than one thousand members of just created municipal milice, searching gunpowder supposed to be stored in the castle for the rifles they just took in Les Invalides (so much for "armed by the king cousin and a business man"). By the way most sources of the time describe the members of this militia rather as middle-class.

"non defended": 114 soldiers in garrison, who killed about one hundred attackers

"killed some people in": true, 7 of the 114 were killed, all after surrender. By the way, after killing 100 of an excited crowd, I was excepting a greater massacre.

"liberated 2 or 3 prisonners": 7 actually, names are known

The fall of the Bastille was a very strong symbol for people at the time. More worrying for the king were the events in the Invalides before, where both the Invalides guard and nearby troops at the Champ de Mars (where Eiffel Tower was later raised) refused to engage the crowd invading the place for getting weapons.

On 14 July, more important than the fall of the Bastille was the fact that all king troops retired from the town, and at the end of the day Paris was effectively controlled by its inhabitants. The king never controlled the town again after that.

Re: Opportunity
 

Hé Laurent, tu connais l'Histoire officielle sur tes 10 doigts, il faut dire qu'on a fait longtemps la part belle aux gens de la "Montagne" à l'université, par contre tu mélanges les évènements, ce n'est pas à cette occasion que la troupe a refusé de tirer, et les prisonniers étaient pour la plupart des fils de bonne famille que leur père enfermait, pour les empêcher de mener une vie de débauché, le "peuple" n'a pas vu de symboles ds la révolution, car celle-ci a été faite par et pour ce qu'on appelerait aujourd'hui des libéraux, à l'époque une infime minorité, mais mon premier propos était de rectifier Bastille day!!
Le reste, parce-que les "étrangers" ayant une vision folklorique de l'histoire de France, ça pouvait les amuser
Mais tu as raison, ça n'a pas grand chose à faire ici

Rémi