14 July—Ou, en français, le Quatorze Juillet. Although the French would never but never call it Bastille Day (or even le Jour de la Bastille), we call it that because we’re not French and, being Americans, couldn’t care less about how any foreigners do things and also because it commemorates the storming of the Bastille, a mediæval fortress and the main slammer in Paris, in 1789 by a mob of disaffected citizens, popularly recognized as revolutionary troops.

The storming of the Bastille is commonly considered the start of the French Revolution. It also set a precedent, being the first time in modern history that the fæx populi—the common masses, (fæx being the singular of fæces [or feces in English])—got the ball rolling to create a constitutional system of democratic government.

We gave the French the idea, of course, though they’d never admit it.

The new government started with a constitutional monarchy alongside a National Assembly, which lasted until 1792, when the National Assembly decided to dump the king and create the First Republic. On democratic principles, of course. Being French in every way, that didn’t last too long. Napoleon Bonaparte (né Napoleone Buonaparte, from Corsica, which had been annexed by France) staged a coup in 1804 and crowned himself emperor, Napoleon I, of what is now known as the First Empire.

After Blücher, with the help of Wellington, defeated Napoleon in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the Bourbon monarchy was restored. (Irrelevantly, the Böhm family, which had recently immigrated from Germany to Kentucky, Americanized its name to Beam and began producing the whiskey that became bourbon.)

The Bourbon monarchy held out until 1848, when the Second Republic was declared. That lasted until 1852, when Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Napoleon I’s nephew, who had been president of the Second Republic (and first President of France), founded the Second Empire and proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III. He reigned until 1870 and was quite popular—and not a bad ruler. As well as first French president, he was the last French monarch.

(Napoleon II, by the way, Napoleon I’s son, was born in Paris, lived in Vienna, reigned over the French Empire for only a few weeks in 1815, when he was four years old, and died of tuberculosis at 21.)

The Third Republic took over in 1870, endured until Hitler came along in 1940, and segued into the Fourth Republic in 1946, which was very much like the Third. It featured a pretty weak president, a strong legislature, and—horror of horrors—proportional representation. Sixteen prime ministers served the Fourth until 1958, when a new constitution created the Fifth Republic, with a strong president (and legislature, of course) and a court empowered to rule on the constitutionality of new laws. Can you believe that?

The Fifth French Republic is still in business, with a slick president whose name is the same as a diacritical mark, a horizontal line placed over a vowel to indicate that it’s long.

Whom do Napoleons I and III remind you of? Nappy I crowned himself Emperor. Nappy III proclaimed himself emperor. And (but?) both did some good stuff.

And, when you think about it, what does the storming of the Bastille remind you of? A mob of disaffected rioters, many of them not too bright and not fully aware of what they were doing. They were actually trying to steal gunpowder and weapons in Paris.

What were the fæx populi after on 6 January 2021 when they stormed the United States Capitol? Did they want to preserve the republic or did they want to create a monarchy?