Coming soon: our Annual Bastille Day Quiz! (and happy first July 4th, Post-Trump!!)

Coming soon: our 12^th annual Bastille Day Quiz on July 14, 2021. This year’s theme is la farfouille de l’histoire, or Historical Grab-bag: important revolutionary echoes from lit, art, music, contemporary mini-series, and food. Our promise to you: it will be tough, eclectic, and fun, as always. The answers will follow on July 15.

To keep your hopes for brotherhood and justice going until then, enjoy these two iconic images:

1. Top: La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People) by Eugène Delacroix (1830; Louvre Museum, Paris, France), commemorating the revolution of July 26-29, 1830. Also known as the July Revolution (Révolution de Juillet), or Les Trois Glorieuses (Three Glorious [Days]), it led to the overthrow of King Charles X, the French Bourbon monarch–brother of ill-fated King Louis XVI. To many observers, this was a relief as King Charles X was a despicable leader, and his return to the throne after the death of his brothers Louis XVI (1793) and Louis XVIII (1824), was a terrible disappointment, a return to the worst repression and corruption of the Bourbon regime. These three days led to the ascent of his more liberal cousin Louis Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, who himself, after 18 precarious years on the throne, would be overthrown in 1848.

2. Bottom: “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” (The People United Will Never Be Defeated) cover of the seventh vinyl release, by Quilapayún, a folk music group originally from Valparaiso, Chile (1975). The song was initially composed as an anthem for the popular unity government, reflecting the spirit behind the mass mobilization of working-class people who in 1970 had elected Salvador Allende for the socialist transformation of Chile.

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  Liberty Leading the People. 1830. Oil on canvas, 260 x 325 cm.

P.S. Happy First 4th of July Post-Trump!!!

May he remain forever irrelevant, silenced and impotent.

and may we never forget…

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