{{U}}The taking of the Bastille fortress, a symbol of arbitrary royal authority, was undoubtedly of revolutionary importance, in terms of weakening the monarchy and legitimising{{/U}} {{U}}popular defiance. {{/U}}But other days have a fair claim to historic symbolism too: August 26th 1789, when the Declaration of the Rights of Man was adopted, for instance, or August 10th 1792, when the Tuileries Palace was stormed and the monarchy suspended. Besides, the commemoration of July 14th scarcely began in revolutionary spirit.
At a military fete to mark its first anniversary in 1790, and to celebrate the new constitutional settlement, the Marquis de Lafayette, a French general, swore an oath "to be forever faithful to the Nation, to the Law and to the King". Dismayed, Jean-Paul Marat, a radical journalist and politician, described the proceedings that day as "shameful", adding: "The Revolution, as yet, has been merely a sorrowful dream for the people!"
As Mr. Prendergast recalls, the fall of the Bastille was not quite the stuff of epic myth. Strictly speaking, the prison was not "taken"; the mob surged into its inner courtyard only after the governor, the Marquis de Launay, had offered a surrender. Although the crowd was primarily in search of arms, it found just seven prisoners to be freed. 47．{{U}}"Happenstance, paranoia and random violence" characterised the event, with rumour and counter-rumour fuelling acts of ferocious brutality. {{/U}}Launay himself was dragged out by the mob, his body ripped to shreds and his head hacked off by a cook with a kitchen knife, before being stuck on a pike for public view.
Napoleon Bonaparte abolished the July 14th celebration altogether. It was not resurrected as "Bastille Day" until 1880, nearly a century after the original events. The idea then, proposed by Benjamin Raspail, a deputy, was to create a "national festival", as part of a republican package that also included adopting " La Marseillaise" as the French national anthem. Composed by Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle, a young engineer stationed with the army of the Rhine, it was written in a single night in 1792．In 1880 the deputies argued passionately about which date to pick for the " national festival ". 48． {{U}}Nobody, as Mr Prendergast points out, proposed September 22nd 1792, the actual date of the founding of the first French republic, for fear of legitimising the Terror that it unleashed.{{/U}}
July 14th was thus a political compromise. It merged the revolutionary message of 1789 with that of unity and reconciliation expressed by the anniversary fete of 1790．49．{{U}}Partly to help heal the wounds of defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, Bastille Day was given a military theme which lasts to this day, and wrapped up in nationalist imagery "the union of army and nation under the flag".{{/U}}
Since then, at various moments of crisis in French history, Bastille Day has been invested with differing messages, according to the needs of the time: working-class solidarity and revolutionary promise for the Front Populaire and the government of Leon Blum in 1936; liberation from occupation and the resistance-as-revolution myth in 1945．Today, it is mostly pageantry, with a lingering touch of popular festivity. 50．{{U}}But Mr Prendergast cannot conceal his scorn for what, he considers, has become "an altogether shoddier affair, progressively{{/U}} {{U}}mummified into formal ritual orchestrated by assorted dignitaries" and "media kitsch".{{/U}} For the French these days, he concludes a little too cruelly, it is perhaps above all regarded as "essentially a day off work".