[jmacusa]

Bastille Day and The French Revolution. A Parisian mob storms a prison, lets out a few criminals and then everybody started losing their heads.

[Verginius Rufus]

The early stages of the French Revolution had relatively few people being murdered--it became much bloodier from about Sept. 1792 onwards. That's when the divergence between how the Federalists and how the Jeffersonian Republicans viewed the events in France started to become very sharp and bitter.

I was once in Carcassone, France, waiting for a train on the evening of July 14 and got to watch a very impressive fireworks display against the backdrop of the medieval fortress.