No one deconstructs Bastille Day better than Jonah Goldberg, editor at large of National Review Online and the primary pioneer of that website. He has single-handedly spread the "cheese-eating surrender monkey" epithet of the French used by Groundskeeper Willie on The Simpsons into common parlance. And, up until last year, he wrote an annual Bastille Day-bashing column. Here are the highlights, year by year.
From Goldberg's 2002 column:
The Dutch . . . have a saying, "It took no more effort than casting a Frenchman into hell." The Italians: "Attila, the scourge of God; the French, his brothers." The Germans have innumerable phrases about the French . . . "The French write other than they speak, and speak other than they mean," goes one German saying. "The friendship of the French is like their wine — exquisite, but of short duration," goes another. "May the French ulcer love you and the Lord hate you," is an old Arab curse. The Russians noted long ago, "A fighting Frenchman runs away from even a she-goat," though I suspect this sounds better in the Russian.
And the English language is soaked through with anti-French bile. Phrases like "to take French leave" (to depart without permission, or less charitable but more apt: to flee) are less prevalent these days, but that has more to do with the fact that people speak English poorly. Much of our English heritage is derived from our forefathers' eagerness not to seem French. Dr. Johnson, for example, remarked that he'd read that Englishmen preferred their weathervanes in the form of roosters, or cocks, as a subtle jab at the fickle Gauls, who turned whichever way the wind blew — Gaul being a play on Gallus, meaning cock (this, no doubt, will be great news to highbrow limerick writers as Gallus and phallus can now be rhymed).
* * *
Remember, our differences with France — much like our differences with the Arab world — were always visible to those willing to see, even during the Cold War. The French maintained military independence from NATO. They regularly annoyed us in the U.N. and made our foreign policy more difficult, denying us air rights and whining about how our movies were more popular — with Frenchmen — than theirs were. Indeed, if the French had had their way when the Berlin Wall fell, East Germany would have remained a separate, and socialist, country.
But we overlooked all of that for two important reasons. The French didn't matter, and we had better things to do — like win the Cold War over French objections. Both of these things are still true in an absolute sense, obviously.
From his 2001 column:
Now, as we all know, there are many good reasons to hate the cheese-eating surrender monkeys — as groundskeeper Willie and all longtime readers know them. Survey after survey reveals that raccoons bathe more than the average Frenchman. They stuck us with Vietnam and took credit for liberating Paris after they spent most of World War Two chastising the chef for not serving Herr General a Fresh brioche. They made intellectual racism popular — Paul Johnson once wrote, "the French have always been outstandingly gifted [at] taking a German idea and making it fashionable with superb timing." And of course, they are constantly complaining about us, and nobody likes a whiner (See "Europe on the Whine."). In fact, Napoleon once observed, "The French complain about everything and always." But then again he was a Corsican.
Goldberg's 2000 column trashes the French Revolution itself, and includes nasty statistics about French hygiene:
The French Revolution was a disgusting affair of tyrannical ego, greed and power-lust, made all the worse because it took a good idea [freedom, equality, brotherhood] and corrupted it, like making a BMW into a low-rider. Hey, speaking of ruining German innovations, Paul Johnson once observed that "the French have always been outstandingly gifted [at] taking a German idea and making it fashionable with superb timing." Then again, they were probably just following orders.
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Now, since that great triumph of human liberty, the French have changed Republics more times than the average Parisian changes his underwear in a week. Now you might think this is an unfair potshot. Well, here are the results of various studies culled from news accounts, including Le Figaro. I am not making these up:
• 40% of French men, and 25% of women, do not change their underwear daily.
• Fully 50% of the men, and 30% of women, do not use deodorant.
• Average British citizen uses 3 pounds of soap annually. The German uses 2.9 pounds, and the average Frenchman uses 1.3 pounds. This means the average Frenchman uses four or five bars of soap a year. Since this is an average, that means some French use more soap than that, but some use a lot less.
His first column on Bastille Day, in 1999, showed just why the French Revolution was an historical disaster:
Bastille Day is no day for celebration. Mikhail Gorbachev was fond of calling the French and Russian Revolutions the two great revolutions of the twentieth century . . . The French Revolution and the Russian Revolution flowed inexorably from one to the other the way my lifestyle leads inexorably to my belly. After decades of revisionism in the wake of World War II, French historians are only now revisiting the truth of how they initiated the world into utopian slaughter.
* * *
Paul Johnson said of the French Revolution that it was the "classic demonstration of the capacity of words to kill." Robespierre and his merry band of murderers brought on the era of total politicization. No aspect of human life was beyond the touch of politics after the French Revolution. The state was granted a right to destroy institutions and traditions which protected the family and the individual from the violence of the state. Throughout the world, the French Revolution became an inspiration for men and women to rationalize their actions in terms of their purported ends. As Johnson puts it "every would-be plunderer or ambitious bandit now called himself a 'liberator'; murderers killed for freedom, thieves stole for the people."
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, all admired the French Revolution and found within it precedents for their own contributions to world history (though most of them found the American Revolution utterly useless). In the region of western France called the Vendée, a royalist uprising resulted in the sort of cleansing that would have made Slobodan Milosevic proud. Estimates range from the high tens of thousands to over a half million people. Many were killed by means of forced drowning. Barges full of undesirables were floated into the Loire and sunk.
. . . The French Revolution gave us so many things we can despise today, why fight for the victims long since buried or drowned. "False consciousness," "denial," radical egalitarianism, various and sundry movement-builders, blaming inconvenient facts on bad motives, political utopianism, and of course Oliver Stone, Jane Fonda, and Hillary Clinton can all be laid in one way or the other at the feet of Robespierre.
Happy Bastille Day.
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