Editorial
Spirit Eternal
Few incidents have transcended the limits of time, place and people as has the mob storming of Bastille, the medieval fortress in eastern Paris deemed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the epitome of despotism. Compared to the powerful and pervasive connotation it has acquired, the act itself was a fairly insignificant one. The edifice where dissidents and defires were imprisoned by the lettre de cachet or the direct order of the King had only seven inmates when revolutionary zealots took it over on the morning of July 14, 989. In fact, the eboulement would have been delayed, if not forever at the least for the time being, if only the prison governor Bernard Jordan, Marquis de Launay had joined the agitated mass. His non co-operation made sure that it was no other day but July 14 to mark the manumission of man from fellow man. This little dramatic act of the few French proletariats went on to be etched in human consciousness as a day that established the concepts of egalitarianism and equality once for all.
The civilised, democratic imagination feels obligated to French National Day because without the sacred spirit of this day, our dear planet could have very well been a domain of a few despots with common man reduced to the level of mere brutes.
It is to the glory of the day and shame to the man in general that its spirit reigns in relevance today as much as it did two hundred eight years ago. It is all the more applicable to the countries like us that are still caught in the welter of problems in their bids to give democracy a firm footing. It comes to remind us how many more miles we still have to traverse in order to establish the basics of human rights in our society.
Vive le 14 juillet for the freedom from the conceptual confinement of man's treatment of fellow man as a commodity.
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