How Did Bastille Day Change America Forever?

How did Bastille Day change America forever?

Vive la France!

Each year, France celebrates its greatest national holiday La Fête Nationale, or “The National Celebration.” It is also called Le Quatorze Juillet, which simply means “The Fourteenth of July,”

It is more commonly known as Bastille Day.

All of France commemorates the storming of the Bastille Saint-Antoine on July 14, 1789, when the people of Paris, furious with an incompetent and corrupt king, marched on a fortress prison in the middle of the city that served as both a royal armory and a prison for political prisoners.

_{Painting is La Liberté Guidant Le Peuple or "Liberty Leading the People" by Eugène Delacroix}

Revolution!

The French crown had been of the greatest supporters of the American revolution -- delighting in seeing England's King George humiliated.

The Marquis de Lafayette was one of the American Revolution's greatest heroes. Cities through the United States are named in his honor. He was sent by the French king to assist the Americans in any way possible.

Without the intervention of the French navy, is doubtful that England's General Cornwallis would have been deprived of supplies and reinforcements ... and forced to surrender to a band of upstarts led by a land surveyor named George Washington.

Upon learning that the Bastille had fallen, King Louis XVI is reported to have asked: "Is this a revolt?"

His advisor La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt answered quietly, "No, Sire, it is a revolution."

The Louisiana Purchase

A decade of political turmoil followed, including the public guillotine executions of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette as well as hundreds of French aristocrats and even the leaders of the uprising.

In the ensuing Reign of Terror, no one was safe from the crowd's lust for blood.

Amid the chaos, an enlisted man in the French army, Napoleon Bonaparte, rose to power. He united France in a series of wars, crowned himself Emperor, conquered much of Europe under the French flag ... and ran up an immense national debt.

To raise cash, he sold to the former U.S. Ambassador to France -- President Thomas Jefferson -- an enormous tract of land stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border.

The price: $15 million.

The "Louisiana Purchase" essentially doubled the size of the young United States.

Independence for Latin America

The French Revolution has often been credited with fanning the revolutionary flames that swept through Latin America at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Spain was severely weakened and unable to hold onto its vast territories that stretched from California to Argentina.

"It thus seems logical that the struggle against Spain was conditioned by the ideas and events that caused the upheaval in France, and that the great liberators of the continent, men like Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin, were inspired by political tremors from across the sea," --The French Revolution and Latin America, July 1989, an essay by Luis E. Aguilar, a professor of history at Georgetown University.

_{Painting; General San Martin Crossing the Andes by Julio Vila y Prades (1873 - 1930)}

The Revolution continues

The revolutionaries of 1789 unleashed passions and ideas that continue their work into our time. Among those ideas are the leveling idea of equality, the divorce revolution, secular liberalism, sexual freedom, state-centered education, and communism. The French Revolution also defined our modern political vocabulary: the labels “liberal,” “radical,” “socialist,” and even “conservative” all derive from that time of ferment (for example, it was books by Edmund Burke and Louis deBonald written in reaction to the French Revolution that first defined modern conservatism).

_{From an essay by Allan C. Carlson, Ph.D., adapted from a lecture presented to the Witherspoon Fellowship of the Family Research Council, Washington, DC, July 20, 2005.}