DUCKPOND

On reflection being one day late for the Revolution does not, and would not, have made a difference. True political revolutions are long in the making,with ramifications and implications that extend beyond their symbolic moments. It is enough that they have set the stage, established paradigms for the political actions that have gone before, even when our memory fails us, or our awareness does not serve us.

The slogan of the French Revolution seems to be a case in point. According to the Wikipedia entry:

“Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” was not the central motto at the time of the French Revolution even if it expresses its central principles (Pache, mayor of the commune of Paris, painted the formula “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, ou la mort”on the walls of the commune). It was under the Second Republic) that it took on its final form and only under the Third Republic was the motto made official[3].

Nonetheless, my memory is that among historians there is the belief that the slogan had wide currency at the time of the Revolution. Still, I wonder what significance can be attributed to its replacement by the Vichy Government during the German Occupation of France by “Travail, famille, patrie”. Work, family and fatherland, might come close to the positioning of the Howard Government, or if not exactly those words, it is interesting to speculate what they might be.

James Carrol, writing in The Boston Globe, sets the historical frame:

THE HOLIDAYS of July Fourth and July 14th are linked by the philosophical and chronological affinities between the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. That the grand ideals of the French and American revolutions were only partially realized takes nothing away from their importance as milestones on the march toward a better world. But when civic identity was so massively redefined, in shifting allegiance away from the king toward a more impersonal, but not less demanding “nation,” what became of the virtue of a larger loyalty?

The 18th-century revolutions sought to get free of the chauvinisms of religion, but what happened when assumptions of divine approbation simply moved from crown (the divine right of kings) to country (God bless America)? As religions explicitly adopted their versions of what Karl Marx called the “names, battle slogans, and costumes” of the national movements (for example, among Catholics, the banners and songs of the Legion of Mary), the secular cult of nationalism implicitly wrapped itself in the self-absolutizing claims of religion (“Gott mit uns”).

Was it true that Adolf Hitler described himself as “a nationalist, but not a patriot”? Paul Keatings source was John Lukacs. According to one reviewer:

For Lukacs, the Hitler phenomenon demonstrates that nationalism – not communism, not socialism, not mass consumption – proved to be the “principal political reality of the twentieth century.” Hitler was only “its most extreme representative.” Marxian faith (or hope) that workers had no country weakened before the eagerness of workers to slaughter each other in World War I, and collapsed completely in the face of the Nazi regime. That Communist regimes survived into the late twentieth century testifies either to their ability to harness nationalist energy (Cuba) or to the military support of the Soviet Union (the German Democratic Republic, until 1989). Nationalism, too, meshed with Hitler’s Judeophobia. Jews threatened the German nation, Hitler persistently stressed, and must be eradicated from it. His last testament, dictated a few hours before his death, pleads with Germans not to allow Jews to return to their midst.

Political revolutions have proven to be mixed blessing, especially when seen from what they leave in their wake. Still there is no need to recall the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 to commemorate The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which it turns out was approved by the French National Assembly on 26 August 1789, a day as far as I know without parades and national holiday. Wikipedia addresses its significance.