Happy Bastille Day

Before the day really ends, I'd like to souhaite a Bonne F?te Nationale to all the Jacobins, Royalists, Girondins, Marquis de Sades, and Reason's own Scaramouche Jean Bart (truly a man "born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad"), as we mark the ultraviolent, wantonly destructive, absolutist, socialist, fascinating, failed revolution that in the long run may or may not (the jury's still out) have helped, in mostly indirect ways, the cause of universal freedom and justice.