July 14 2022 A Legacy of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity for All Humankind: Bastille Day

We celebrate today a legacy of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity for all humankind, bequeathed to us by the Revolution on this day in 1789 by the storming of the Bastille.

I find it immensely hopeful for the future of humankind that France, a nation where protest is seen as a patriotic act, celebrates as its founding event the seizure of a prison, and one which in part was intended as the jailbreak for the poet laureate of the Revolution, the Marquis de Sade. He had been yelling to the crowd from his cell window that the jailers were executing prisoners; he was unfortunately spirited away to the madhouse at Charenton before he could be liberated, an episode immortalized by Peter Weiss in Marat/Sade. Freed by the Revolution, de Sade became a leader of the radical wing of the Jacobins, until his beautiful elegy for Marat ran afoul of Robespierre’s designs and landed him yet again in prison.

During his time in the Bastille he wrote one of the most brilliant and transgressive interrogations of the origins of evil in unequal power as Church and State, 120 Days of Sodom. Every word of it is still true, and applies to all tyrannies of force and control, totalitarian and authoritarian states of all kinds and to my thinking fascism especially, as interpreted by the great Pasolini in film, as symptoms of the disease of fear, power, and force. Read it together with its companion work, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt.

As Pasolini says in his interview during the filming of ‘Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom’;

“PASOLINI: I simply plan to replace the word “God,” as de Sade uses it, with the word “power.” The sadists are always the powerful ones. These four gentlemen in the story are a banker, a duke, a bishop, and a judge. They represent the constituted might. The analogy is obvious, and I didn’t invent it. I am only adding something of my own and am complicating it by bringing it up to date.

BACHMANN: What is the remaining, continuing significance of de Sade s work?

PASOLINI: The fact that the body becomes merchandise. My film is planned as a sexual metaphor, which symbolizes, in a visionary way, the relationship between exploiter and exploited. In sadism and in power politics human beings become objects. That similarity is the ideological basis of the film.”

For further study of de Sade as a pivotal figure of the Revolution, I refer you to Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, a feminist interpretation which informs all her work, The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade by Rikki Ducornet, and The Marquis de Sade: A Life, by Neil Schaeffer.

My reading list on the French Revolution includes Citizens by Simon Schama, The Days of the French Revolution by Christopher Hibbert, and A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel.

As causal sources of global revolution against the system of aristocratic monarchy and state religion, the American and French Revolutions are a tide of democracy and universal human rights which radically reimagined human social relations, being, meaning, and value, and continue to propagate throughout the world. It found echoes in the Russian Revolution, and as anticolonial struggle in India and nearly everywhere on earth as humankind awakened from its long darkness as tyrannies of masters and slaves.

Today its values and ideals manifest in revolutions and liberation movements throughout the world, in Sri Lanka, Brazil, Hong Kong, Palestine, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, among those places to which I have traveled in solidarity the struggles of their peoples, those whom Franz Fanon called “The Wretched of the Earth”, and whom our Statue of Liberty proclaims the “huddled masses yearning to be free”.

What does Liberty mean for us today?

Memory, history, and identity; a process of becoming human and a ground of struggle between our anchorages and our aspirations, and one in constant motion and a state of change; impermanent, ephemeral, protean, shaped by the dynamism between authenticity and falsification as we wander in a wilderness of mirrors, lies and illusions of authority which seek to capture, distort, and subjugate us, to enslave us and steal our souls.

This is the primary revolution of all humankind; the struggle to create ourselves as autonomous beings, free of authorized identities and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, against the forces of dehumanization and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, divisions of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and the inequalities and injustices of state terror, repression of dissent, institutional violence, force, and control.

To become ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight, of which other forms of revolutionary struggle are echoes and reflections, and they are united in the struggle for ownership and control of our identity as aspects of a common emergence of human being, meaning, and value.

To refuse to submit is the primary human act which confers freedom, for who cannot be controlled is free. In this moment of Resistance to authority and tyranny we become Unconquered, each if us Living Autonomous Zones and agents of Chaos, Liberty, and the reimagination and transformation of humankind.

Let us throw open the gates of our prisons, and be free.

Marat/Sade film