A Bastille Day Post (2023)

Man Ray: Portrait imaginaire de D.A.F. de Sade (1938) 

Oil on canvas with painted wood panel (61.6 × 46.7 cm) 

 

It's grey, wet and windy here in London this 14 juillet - La fête nationale française, or Bastille Day, as it is more commonly known in the English-speaking world where it is sometimes marked, but not particularly celebrated. 

For me, the storming of the Bastille on this date in 1789 - a key event of the French Revolution - primarily interests because that is the state prison where the libertine philosopher Sade wrote his most notorious work, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (1785), having being confined there the previous year for crimes of a sexual and blasphemous nature (despite never having been convicted of such crimes in a court of law).   

 

Famously, Sade wrote the manuscript in a miniscule hand on a long roll of paper that he kept hidden in a cell wall. Unfortunately, he was unable to finish his magnum opus before being transferred - against his will and naked as a worm - to the insane asylum at Charenton. 

 

This was on 4 July 1789; forty-eight hours after he reportedly incited unrest outside the prison by shouting to the crowds gathered there: They are murdering the prisoners! and ten days before the Bastille was stormed by the revolutionary mob looking for stores of gunpowder [1].

 

To his despair, Sade (mistakenly) believed that his manuscript was destroyed during the events of July 14; it had actually been discovered and preserved two days earlier. 

 

After his release from Charenton in 1790, Sade served in the new revolutionary government, although this was probably more from expediency rather than conviction and he was despised by many of his more radical (and bloodthirsty) new cohorts, not merely because of his aristocratic background, but due (ironically) to his modération [2]. 

 

Anyway, may I take this opportunity to wish all French readers - and all Sadeans - Joyeux quatorze juillet!

 

Notes

 

[1] It might be noted that by this date the Bastille was nearly empty, housing only seven prisoners. It was mostly kept open - despite the high financial cost of maintaining a garrisoned medieval fortress - to serve as a symbol of royal power.

 

[2] Readers interested in Sade's role in the French Revolution and the question of his politics might like to listen to a paper by the Michigan State University history professor Ronen Steinberg entitled 'Sex and the Bastille: the Marquis de Sade and the French Revolution' (2016): click here. 

 

 

   

Aux armes et caetera

 Photo of Serge Gainsbourg by Jean-Jacques Bernier (1985)

Allons enfants de la Patrie / Le jour de gloire est arrivé! 

It's Bastille Day - one of the few dates in history genuinely worth celebrating.

I pretty much love all things French: the wine, the women, the food, the literature, the philosophy, the fashion, the music, the arrogance, the joie de vivre and the je ne sais quoi. But most of all I love Serge Gainsbourg who, somewhat ironically, most beautifully and brilliantly embodied the very essence of France and the spirit of 1789.

And perhaps my favourite Gainsbourg story (amongst several possible contenders) concerns his reggaefied version of the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, which so outraged and disgusted the paramilitary forces of the French far-right. It was an obvious provocation, with affinities to both the Jimi Hendrix version of The Star Spangled Banner and the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen and there were calls made for Gainsbourg to be stripped of his citizenship. 

Events came to a head when Gainsbourg went on tour with his Jamaican musicians to promote his new album, Aux Armes Et Caetera (1979). In Strasbourg, an ex-paratrooper presented the mayor with a petition demanding that the show be cancelled and threatening violence if it went ahead. 

Despite this - and in courageous defiance of the forces of reaction and racism - Serge took to the stage, alone, and sang the anthem in its original version, much to the confusion and consternation of those in the crowd who had come to disrupt proceedings, before walking off with a gesture of 'Fuck you!'

Two years afterwards, just to ensure he would have the final word in the affair, Gainsbourg purchased the original manuscript of La Marseillaise by Rouget de Lisle. It almost bankrupted him to do so, he said, but it was a question of honour.

Vive la France! Vive la Revolution! Et vive Gainsbourg!