Bastille Day: "Le jour de gloire est arrivé..."

In a letter to U.S. Foreign Secretary John Jay, Thomas Jefferson offered the following account of the seizure of the Bastille in Paris by a revolutionary mob on July 14, 1789. Jefferson was the U.S. Minister to France at the time.

This was the signal for universal insurrection, & this body of cavalry, to avoid being massacred, retired towards Versailles. The people now armed themselves with such weapons as they could find in armourer shops & privated houses, and with bludgeons, & were roaming all night through all parts of the city without any decided & practicable object. The next day the states press on the King to send away the troops, to permit the Bourgeoise of Paris to arm for the preservation of order in the city, & offer to send a deputation from their body to tranquilize them. He refuses all their propositions. A committee of magistrates & electors of the city are appointed, by their bodies, to take upon them its government. The mob, now openly joined by the French guards, force the prisons of St. Larare, release all the prisoneres, & take a great store of corn, which they carry to the corn market. Here they get some arms, & the French guards begin to to form & train them.

The City committee determine to raise 48,000 Bourgeoise, or rather to restrain their numbers to 48,000, On the 16th they send one of their numbers ( Monsieur de Corny whom we knew in America) to the Hotel des Invalides to ask arms for their Garde Bourgeoise. He was followed by, or he found there, a great mob. The Governor of the Invalids came out & represented the impossibility of his delivering arms without the orders of those from whom he received them. De Corny advised the people then to retire, retired himself, & the people took possession of the arms. It was remarkable that not only the invalids themselves made no opposition, but that a body of 5000 foreign troops, encamped with 400 yards, never stirred. Monsieur De Corny and five others were then sent to ask arms of Monsieur de Launai , Governor of the Bastille. The found a great collection of people already before the place, & they immediately planted a flag of truce, which was answered by a like flag hoisted on the parapet.

The depositition prevailed on the people to fall back a little, advanced themselves to make their demand of the Governor. & in that instant a discharge from the Bastille killed 4 people of those nearest to the deputies. The deputies retired, the people rushed against the place, and almost in an instant were in possession of a fortification, defended by 100 men, of infinite strength, which in other times had stood several regular sieges & had never been taken. How they got in, has as yet been impossible to discover. Those, who pretend to have been of the party tell so many different stories as to destroy the credit of them all. They took all the arms, discharged the prisoners & such of the garrison as were not killed in the first moment of fury, carried the Governor and Lieutenant Governor to the Greve (the place of public execution) cut off their heads, & sent them through the city in triumph to the Palais royal...

I have the honor to be with great esteem & respect, Sir, your most obedient and most humble servant.

Thomas Jefferson

On July 19th, Jefferson added, in another letter to John Jay:

I went yesterday to Versailles to satisfy myself what had passed there; for nothing can be believed but what one sees, or has from an eye witness. They believe there still that 3000 people have fallen victims to the tumults of Paris. Mr. Short & myself have been every day among them in order to be sure of what was passing. We cannot find with certainty that any body has been killed but the three beforementioned, & those who fell in the assault of defence of the Bastille. How many of the garrison were killed no body pretends to have ever heard. Of the assailants accounts vary from 6. to 600. The most general belief is that there fell about 30.

Vive la Révolution!

[Sample page in Jefferson's handwriting.]

GRAPHIC: Prise de la Bastille, by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Hoüel (1789) - Wikimedia Commons

Geaghan: Saturday snippets

A rainy day here in northwestern Oregon has encouraged me to cancel a camping trip. So I've consoled myself with an extended tour of my bloglist. A few topics du jour:

Leapfrogging into absurdity

Matthew Yglesias writes:

The primary leapfrogging sweepstakes seems to have really taken off now that Michigan's moving to January 15. This means that if New Hampshire and Iowa try to maintain the usual spacing, Iowa's going to wind up in 2007. One can only hope this means the Iowa-Newhampshire-ification of American politics has reached some kind of a breaking point and we won't stick with this farcical nominating process in 2012.

Right now the parties effectively control the nominating process, which has produced the growing absurdity of balkanized campaigns that begin in mid-term.

Other countries manage to regulate campaigns more effectively. In (gasp!) France, for example, there's a cap on total spending (€20 million) and matching public financing of 50% for candidates with more than 5% of the vote. Minor parties, whose candidates received less than 5%, get €800,000 (with €150,000 paid in advance). TV advertising is prohibited, but public TV sets aside ample time for candidates to use. An independent agency supervises elections and public financing. A runoff election takes place if no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote.

Such a rational system of regulating elections would be difficult to import into our chaotic process, but it could produce a better overall result—and end the competition for undue influence by individual states in the nominating process.

Escape Hatch for Rove

Digby at Hullabaloo speculates that Karl Rove's resignation may suggest rapid progress in a Hatch Act investigation that began with a complaint filed against Rove by fired U.S. Attorney David Iglesias in April. She writes:

These Hatch act investigations may end up being more potent than anybody realizes. Remember, Watergate started out as a third rate burglary.

The Office of Special Counsel website describes the meager penalties for violations of the Hatch Act, which would seem to have no application to a federal employee who has already resigned from the government:

An employee who violates the Hatch Act shall be removed from their position, and funds appropriated for the position from which removed thereafter may not be used to pay the employee or individual. However, if the Merit Systems Protection Board finds by unanimous vote that the violation does not warrant removal, a penalty of not less than 30 days' suspension without pay shall be imposed by direction of the Board.

Of course an investigation of Iglesias' allegations could conceivably turn up something more damaging to Rove than Hatch Act violations. The OSC site also points out that "certain political activities may also be criminal offenses under title 18 of the U.S. Code..."

But I don't see any basis to conclude that the OSC even has jurisdiction to investigate former employees under the Hatch Act. So the Iglesias complaint has been rendered moot. Any offenses under title 18 would probably have to be investigated by a grand jury, and none has yet been convened for that purpose.

Even if Congress amends the Hatch Act (as some have suggested) to stiffen the penalties and/or make violations a criminal offense, Rove still walks. A revised Hatch Act couldn't apply retroactively, since Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution prohibits ex post facto laws.

Then there's the small matter of a presidential pardon, which will be instantly available on request.

The Flat Brain Society

Discredited "Middle East expert" Thomas L. Friedman was back on "Charlie Rose" on Thursday, peddling the paperback version of The World is Flat. Now that Friedman's credibility on Iraq has been reduced down near absolute zero, he's shamelessly repositioning himself as an expert on globalization and the vast corporate profits to be had through environmental awareness. But he puts me in such a rage that I couldn't watch more than the first minute.

Atrios provides a link to a Rose interview with Friedman on May 3, 2003—after five weeks of war in Iraq—in which his guest spouts such gems as:

I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.
...
We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.
...
What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"

You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow?

Well, Suck. On. This.

Okay.

That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. [1] We hit Iraq because we could.

A special niche in hell is reserved for guys like Friedman, who should be forced to spend eternity watching reruns of his many performances as one of the lead pimpmeisters for Bush/Cheney.

And the perfect roommates for Friedman? Christopher Hitchens [2] and Michael Ignatieff [3].

NOTES

[1] The very same Pakistan that has had nuclear weapons since 1998? It's interesting that a realpolitiker like Friedman believes that Pakistan would've politely kept its nukes on the shelf while Bush/Cheney proceeded to overthrow its government.

[2] Hitchens' new book (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything), in which he aggressively defends his atheism, might be interpreted as an attempt to reassure himself that he'll never be held accountable for his support of the criminal conspiracy that led to the war in Iraq. He apparently sees no contradiction between his support for Bush/Cheney and the administration's assaults on the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

[3] Ignatieff made an unconvincing attempt to repent for his role in pimping for the war, including his express support for torture, in a recent column in the The New York Times Magazine (sorry, but for once I refuse to provide a link—look it up if you want to read it). The Toronto Star simply notes in passing that Ignatieff "supported the Iraq war when it suited him and opposes it when it doesn't."

[Note: Portions of the above were cross-posted as comments on the blogs noted.]

PHOTO: IVotronic voting machine, one of many types used in 2007 French elections (Wikipedia Commons)

Update: Papon and the Kouchner law

A story in today's Paris Libération, headlined "One of the rare prisoners freed by the Kouchner law," describes a provision of the French code that authorized the early release of Maurice Papon from prison on humanitarian grounds. As detailed in Geagan's post on the subject, Papon was freed in 2002 after serving just three years of a ten-year sentence for crimes against humanity during World War II. The Kouchner law permits a suspension of the remaining sentence

"...of prisoners for whom it is established that they have developed a life-threatening pathology, or [when] their long-term state of health is incompatible with their maintenance in detention."

In a communiqué on Pabon's death, the French Ligue des droits de l'homme (League of the Rights of Man) notes that Papon is one of the very few aged or infirm prisoners who have benefited from the Kouchner law. On the day that Papon walked out of La Santé prison and celebrated at a fine restaurant, there were 369 septuagenarians, 39 octogenarians and 2 nonagenarians in French prisons. The League condemned "the priority given to an accomplice of the Shoah in the liberation of sick prisoners over other prisoners who have not benefited from the same humanity as the purveyor of Auschwitz." The League contrasted Papon's "golden life" with that of other sick and aging prisoners, including the "calvary" of a 46-year-old political activist who died of lung cancer after her release on humanitarian grounds in 2006:

"How can we forget that one can always live through the terminal phase of cancer in prison, remaining in a cell while weighing only thirty kilograms [66 lbs], falling out of bed each night without getting help, and that there are still old people in prison who don't even know where they are?...

"There is too much inhumanity in the French penal system to get indignant over a measure of clemency granted to an old man, great criminal though he was. But it is intolerable that inequality before the law is so cynically assumed by public authorities."

A final note on Papon. In 1961, when he was chief of the Paris police, from 70 to 200 Algerian demonstrators were killed—typically beaten to death by police—and thrown into the Seine under his orders. The crime wasn't even acknowledged by the French government until 1998. Papon remained chief of police in Paris for a total of nine years (1958-67). He denied complicity in the events of 1961, not surprisingly, and was never prosecuted.

The Papon case demonstrates that it's not enough to have humane laws: they must be implemented fairly and without favoritism. It also shows that certain political and social elites are often exempt from the laws that apply to the rest of us.

NOTES

All materials in quotes are my translations from the French sources noted or linked.

GRAPHIC: Maurice Papon after his release from prison.