Poems of the Week: Bastille Day

I thought we might look at how the poets have treated Bastille Day. This has a rather special significance for me, since I was born on July 14th, and my friends over the years have derived some amusement from this. I, on the other hand, have had occasion to spend several of my birthdays in France, and I have always been impressed by their welcoming me with parades and firework displays! And they say the French are unfriendly to foreigners!

As you all probably know, Bastille Day celebrates a key event in the French Revolution. The Bastille originally had eight towers, 100 feet high, linked by walls of an equal height, and had a moat more than 80 feet wide. The first stones were laid on April 22nd, 1370, on the order of Charles V, as a bastide, or fortification, (Bastille was a later corruption of bastide) against the English. Cardinal Richelieu was the first to use the Bastille as a state prison, in the 17th Century: typically forty prisoners were there. There had been talk of closing down and demolishing the prison in 1784 because of its high cost. By July 14th, 1789, there were only seven prisoners incarcerated there when a mob, representing the Third Estate (the commoners) marched on the Bastille, demanding the release of the prisoners and the large cache of munitions kept there. When the governor, Bernard Jordan, marquis de Launay, refused, the Bastille was stormed in what is now regarded as a key event in the French Revolution, which led to the destruction of the ancien régime, and the introduction of a republican government.

The revolution was regarded by many people in England as a wonderful thing; many Englishmen had been supporters of the earlier American Revolution, and the republican revolution in France was believed to be the beginning of a similar change in Europe.

This is significant from the point of view of English poetry, because it coincided with the appearance of a group of young men who would change English poetry in an important way. These were William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834), and Robert Southey (1774 - 1843).

In 1790, during a summer vacation, Wordsworth took a long walking tour through revolutionary France with a friend, Robert Jones. This was a wonderful time for him, and he and Jones remained friends for the rest of their lives. After his graduation from Cambridge, he returned again to France in November, 1791, with the aim of improving his knowledge of French, He stayed there a year, and was caught up in the passionate enthusiasm that followed the fall of the Bastille becoming an ardent republican sympathizer. He wrote a poem entitled French Revolution, and reprinted it in 1805, with the addition to the title: As it Appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement. It includes the couplet:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

Coleridge was the youngest of ten children of a minister; his father died in 1781, and Col (as he was called) was sent to a charity school for children of the clergy. He went to Cambridge in 1791, but two years later he was in debt, and left to join the army. His brother George got him released, and back to Cambridge, where he met Robert Southey. They were both political radicals and republicans (in England that meant opposed to monarchical forms of government; their political stance could not otherwise have been further from the modern GOP!). They planned a new form of society called Pantisocracy, but I think I will leave all that to our History Editor! Col's first book of poems was published in 1797, and was well received; and Southey introduced him to Wordsworth. That connects us with the first part.

Robert Southey was also born into humble beginnings on August 12, 1774. His father was a linen draper in Bristol, who disliked his trade and eventually went bankrupt. As a result of the family's financial struggles, Southey was sent to live in Bath with his mother's older half-sister, Elizabeth Tyler, at the age of two.

For Southey, life with his Aunt Tyler was both a blessing and a curse. The unmarried Miss Tyler was overbearing and eccentric, but she was financially independent and easily able to raise Southey in the fashionable district of Bath. Moreover, as an avid reader and patron of the theatre, she nurtured young Southey's intellectual development, taking him to stage performances at an early age. Under her influence, Southey began reading Shakespeare and trying to write his own poetry and plays as early as the age of eight.

In 1788, Southey entered the Westminster school, which is where he was one year later when the French Revolution began. Southey was approximately fifteen years old at the time, and like many young people of his day, he passionately sympathized with the high ideals of the French cause.

Southey was dedicated to what we would now call human rights. He got himself expelled from Westminster for writing an article denouncing the practice of 'flogging' (corporal punishment of unruly students). Later in life, he was very active in the anti-slavery movement, and wrote a number of poems on the topic and on the human rights of the slaves (the slave trade was abolished in Britain in 1807).

He entered Oxford in 1792, The intellectual atmosphere proved to be as stifling to Southey as that at Westminster, so he was again forced to pursue his own interests with extra-curricular reading and writing. In order to escape life at Oxford and postpone making a career decision to join the clergy, he took some time off from school in the autumn of 1793. It was at this time that he read William Godwin's Political Justice, which had a profound effect upon him. Godwin's assertion that most social ills were a product of the disparate extremes of poverty and privilege strengthened Southey's commitment to political reform.

Shortly after leaving Oxford, Southey crossed paths with Coleridge, forming a tempestuous friendship which would mold his early life and continue until his later years. Ostensibly, the two men shared many common interests and beliefs, including a love of literature and politics, a frustration with the staid practices of Britain's educational institutions, and a growing disillusionment in the political atmosphere of their country.

In 1794, Southey wrote Wat Tyler, based on the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. No doubt motivated by the fact that he had long fancied Wat Tyler a distant ancestor, the play expressed Southey's Republican ideals against the backdrop of a historical event scarily reminiscent of the French Revolution. Southey's friend and future brother-in-law, Robert Lovell, gave the play to the radical printer, James Ridgeway, who expressed an interest in publishing it. In January 1795, Southey visited Ridgeway at Newgate prison in London, where he had recently been incarcerated, to close the deal. However, the play was not published until many years later, in 1817, when a pirated version appeared, largely to embarrass Southey, who by that time had completely changed his political views, becoming a dedicated monarchist and very conservative. As we mentioned in an earlier article here, he had also been appointed Poet Laureate in 1813. However, once the initial shock had faded, he was pleased to incorporate it into his collected work.

Given the excitement of these three young poets about the French Revolution, the subsequent events proved to be very disillusioning for them. Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety started the Reign of Terror which lasted until shortly before he himself was guillotined on July 28th, 1794. On February 1st, 1793, France declared war on England. More importantly, to our poets, was the suppression of the Swiss cantons by France in 1798. Immediately after this, Coleridge wrote France: An Ode. The rise of Napoleon and the extensive wars presented even greater problems; in 1802 Napoleon was appointed Life Consul. In 1803 England declared war on France. In 1804 Napoleon became Emperor. In 1808 Napoleon invaded Spain; in 1809 he capture Vienna and imprisoned the Pope.

On August 7th, 1807, Wordsworth composed the following poem on the road leading to Ardres, near Calais:

Jones! when from Calais southward you and I
Travell'd on foot together, then this way
Which I am pacing now, was like May
With festivals of new-born Liberty:
A homeless sound of joy was in the sky;
The antiquated earth, as one might say,
Beat like the heart of man: songs, garlands, play,
Banners, and happy faces, far and nigh!
And now, sole register that these things were,
Two solitary greetings have I heard,
"Good morrow, Citizen!" a hollow word,
As if a dead man spake it!  Yet despair
I feel not: happy am I as a bird;
Fair seasons yet will come, and hopes as fair.

"Who then shall dare to say that the Third Estate has not within itself all that is necessary for the formation of a complete nation? It is the strong and robust man who has one arm still shackled. If the privileged order should be abolished, the nation would be nothing less, but something more. Therefore, what is the Third Estate? Everything; but an everything shackled and oppressed. What would it be without the privileged order? Everything, but an everything free and flourishing. Nothing can succeed without it, everything would be infinitely better without the others".

One of the most significant things that the French got out of this exercise, perhaps, is the world's best National Anthem, La Marseillaise. Here is the French text of the opening verse and chorus:

Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L'étendard sanglant est levé
Entendez-vous dans nos campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras. 
Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes!

Aux armes citoyens
Formez vos bataillons
Marchons, marchons
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons

Ye sons of France, awake to glory
Hark, hark, what myriads bid you rise!
Your children, wives and grandsires hoary
Behold their tears and hear their cries!
Shall hateful tyrants mischief breeding
With hireling hosts, a ruffian band
Affright and desolate the land
While peace and liberty lie bleeding?

To arms, to arms, ye brave!
Th'avenging sword unsheathe!
March on! march on!
All hearts resolved
On victory or death.