Bastille Day Reflections

Today is Bastille Day, the French equivalent to our 4th of July, and the crew at In the Agora decided to dedicate the entire day to bashing France. I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing, since there are many things I love about France. But like all nations, France has its absurdities and inconsistencies, not the least of which is the fact that they actually find Jerry Lewis funny. I only find him funny when he's trying to be serious; when he's trying to make me laugh, it is rather like having a root canal. So I reluctantly contributed an essay bashing France for their ridiculous and oppressive law against the wearing of religious clothing in school, and more generally for their distortion of the meaning of secularism.

I believe that criticism is accurate and well deserved, as I do many of the other criticisms aimed at France by the other contributors. But I also don't like to see the side of France that I and other love left out of the equation and I'm happy to see that Jason Kuznicki has written a response that, while agreeing with many of the critiques we offered, highlights the best of France. Jason is a historian with a specialty in French history, so he is ideally suited to the task. And despite the accurate criticisms of the modern French culture, few nations can claim to have contributed so many giants to Western culture: Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, Voltaire, Proust, Montesquieu, Moliere, Balzac, Camus, Pasteur, and so many more.

I pointed out in a comment that I always feel a bit of a pull toward older, more continuous cultures than we have here in America. Not enough to move away to any of them, but enough to be grateful that they exist and that we can explore them and learn from them. America is an incredibly transient culture. The constant influx of immigrants brings us many wonderful things, but continuity is not one of them. We live in a nation that is already engaging in mass nostalgia over the 1990s, and that was a mere 5 years ago (don't believe me? Turn on VH1). We recycle history and turn it into modern pop culture art at an alarming rate. So it makes me feel good that in Paris is a restaurant that has been in business in the same place since before Europeans settled the New World. I am happy that the temporary nature of our culture is balanced by the fact that there are families in France and Italy who treasure bottles of wine and balsamic vinegar that predate both World Wars. I wouldn't want to have the entire world be so homogenous or so traditional; I am still a dynamist at heart. But I think the world needs islands of permanence amid the waters of change, whether it be the cathedrals, both literal and figurative, of France or the Roman ruins, the pyramids of Egypt or the monks of Tibet.

So I'm with Jason on this one. There is much to criticize about France today, just as there is much to criticize about America and any other great nation; but it is Bastille Day, a day that struck a blow, however temporary it turned out, against oppression. So let us raise a glass of wine and celebrate France, flawed though it is. And let us hope that we are judged by our best attributes and not merely our worst.