Aux Armes Citoyens!
By the time the original Marseilles protesters got to Paris they no longer were part of a protest but they had formed an impromptu army easily capable of defeating the forces of the Aristocratic élite. The struggle was bloody and savage but the protesters (now revolutionaries) knew just how to direct their force. In the centre of Paris was a massive keep, a prison for dissenters called the Bastille or "the bastion". This Bastille was the physical stamp of the royal authority over the people of France.
By storming this imposing citadel of rock, the revolutionaries stabbed the state right at its heart. Without a credible prison for its enemies, the Monarchy of France was effectively toothless. What followed the Revolution was called "the terror" and for good reason. As a new state structure was being formed, many skirmishes, reprisals and internecine warfare raged randomly around the state. Aristocrats and their sympathisers were hunted down and executed. A whole class and culture was excised from existence.
This was not a random happening, nor was it the product of Anarchy as many biased historians would have us believe. The founding of the French Republic after the fall of the monarchy was a meticulously planned and ruthlessly realised takeover of power by the educated middle class. The American Revolution and its Declaration of Independence must have served as a rallying call. The long march from Marseilles to Paris afforded those ambitious and reckless enough to overthrow an entire civilisation time to coordinate their plans and ready their forces for action.
When one makes a detailed study of the French people and how they go to war, the statistics reveal that the war machine of this country enjoys the highest victory to battle ratio of any nation in the world - That's ratio so even relatively new countries like the US and Brazil are being counted. They don't go to war on a whim. Napoleon was not a syphilitic troll addicted to victory, rather he was the figurehead of a new world order with a philosophy, a mysticism, a scientific process and an economic model intact.
And they STILL won't defend Paris....
France finally left the Renaissance at the dawn of the 19th Century, skipped the Enlightenment altogether and entered the Industrial Age ahead of everyone else. In this way; France became a world power to equal the United Kingdom, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Napoleon Bonaparte correctly adjudged this Empire as well as the Ottoman Empire to the East as the two power structures most likely to capitulate to a new tactic developed by the Corsican General: Total Mechanised Warfare.Forget the Neo-Classical trappings and the Imperial Pretentions, Napoleon and his Empress Josephine were the world's first style icons in the modern sense of the term. Their every decision was enormously influential, if Josephine allowed herself to be painted reclining barefoot upon a Madame Recamier chaise longue it was because she had researched the classical imagery and consciously sent out a signal to the people of France regarding her distinct lack of royal pretension. She walked barefoot in the sun like ordinary girls. If Napoleon Bonaparte took the imperial crown from the hands of the cardinal of Paris and crowned himself, he did so conscious of the symbolic ending of clerical authority over humanity.
God's anointed ruler over His people, the King, was dead and there would be no more Kings upon French soil. Likewise, the age of superstition and fear of the inquisition ended that moment.
If Beethoven originally composed his Eroica Symphony for Napoleon it was for this act of assertion alone. Man had become God decades ahead of Nietzsche's first birthday and that man was Napoleon Bonaparte. It comes as no surprise to me that the two world leaders named by Nostradamus explicitly as Anti-Christs in his Quatrains are Napoleon Bonaparte of the early 19th Century and Adolph Hitler of the early 20th Century. That's actually physically named by someone who supposedly lived in the 1400's. What to believe, what not to believe?
Unfortunately for us in the 21st Century the third and most powerful antichrist of them all is not named but Nostradamus says he is a blood descendant of Genghis Khan. That would be something to go on, you might think but....
Who's YOUR daddy?
So, back to France and Bastille Day.
When we celebrate this date we remember a time when an entire way of life was ruthlessly cut down and ended. There was no mercy for the aristocrats, their indifference to the suffering of the people was returned to them a thousand fold. Revolution was a spirit of the age, a zeitgeist, if you will. There were no reparations asked or offered, the monarchy had fallen within one lifetime of the incredible reign of "Le Roi Soleil" Louis XIV who commissioned the Louvre and Versailles.
All of what made France a nation of peasants prepared to eat snails and offal was done away with and a world power emerged and damned near took over the entire continent.
Are we back there now? I think 'yes'. I think our current system no longer serves the people. Keep an eye out for charismatic Mongols.
Bons Fêtes!
