Bastille Day, Barbecue Smoke, and the Weight of History

It’s Bastille Day. All across France, sausages sizzle on supermarket grills, fireworks crack like toy guns in the evening sky, and municipal buildings hang tricolores as if they still mean something. The revolution—the real one, with its blood and broken prisons and terrifying hope—has been neutered. That’s the word that comes to mind. Cut its balls clean off. Civil unrest, once sacred and volatile, now turned into a scheduled municipal event with parking restrictions and a bouncy castle.

I did a Google search for Bastille Day—out of curiosity, to see how it’s framed. The first results weren’t historical articles or educational links. They were for the 2016 action thriller Bastille Day. Idris Elba with a gun, a poster full of smoke and urgency. That’s what the phrase now conjures for most people: not revolution, not rights, not liberty—but a Netflix night in. The overthrow of monarchy reduced to a shootout with corrupt intelligence agents. Even the metaphors of unrest have been optioned for screenplays.

And it’s not just France. Look at the British and their Guy Fawkes Night—an annual pantomime of effigy-burning and sparklers, where the historical memory of religious oppression and state violence is reduced to treacle toffee and a light drizzle. Across the developed West, we live in societies that once fought and bled for ideals—liberty, equality, solidarity—and now queue politely at KFC, cheer wrestling on streaming platforms, and click a thumbs-up on a post about Gaza or Sudan or the migrant boat that didn’t make it. That’s it. A like. A performative gesture that passes for moral courage.

Consumerism has done what guillotines could not: digested revolution. Like a phagocyte, it’s engulfed dissent and repackaged it for resale. The uprisings that once threatened kings now decorate tea towels and souvenir mugs. Christianity once did the same—didn’t kill rival religions, just absorbed their myths, their festivals, their gods. Solstice became Christmas. Pagan altars rebranded with saints. It’s not obliteration. It’s assimilation. It’s clever. It's brutal.

And yet. And yet.

Just last night, I watched La Venue de l’Avenir, a French film so delicate, so full of nuance and quiet emotional movement, it left me weeping. Not from sadness exactly, but from recognition. The way it held space for memory, for contradiction, for people trying to love each other across generations of misunderstanding—it could only have been made in a country at peace. A country with healthcare and holidays. A country where time is not always life-or-death.

It made me realise something that complicates my anger. My own long excavation of family history—the myths and secrets, the traumas passed down like heirlooms—would not have been possible without peace. Without therapy, without books, without quiet mornings and a roof over my head. Without the time to think and the safety to feel. I’m interrogating my inheritance because I can afford to.

And for that, I am truly grateful.

But the gratitude does not cancel the guilt. How do I square the circle? How do I justify all this introspection when there are people living without water, without hope, without names on government lists? How do I believe in the value of my work, of art, when children are being buried under rubble?

Here’s the best I can manage: maybe peace is not the enemy. Maybe it’s the reward. Maybe the goal of all that upheaval was precisely this—time, space, tenderness. The ability to make something instead of just surviving. If so, the responsibility now is not to waste it. Not to let comfort become complicity.

So yes, I will go on asking questions. I will write, reflect, unpick the threads of the past. I will try to honour what was won by not turning away from what was lost. I will live in this contradiction, because it’s the only honest place left to stand.

The revolution has not vanished. It’s quieter now. More subtle. Maybe it’s in the stories we tell, and who we dare to become.