I had intended to make my next posting tomorrow, but then I remembered that today is Bastille Day, and decided that I could not let the occasion pass without comment.

Bastille Day, of course, commemorates the storming of the fortress-prison of that name in Paris in 1789. The event is generally regarded as the start of the French Revolution, and the anniversary of it is a great national holiday in France.

Those outside of France are not always inclined to join in the festivities, however. Back in 1989, on the bicentenary of the storming of the Bastille, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher ruffled Gallic feathers when, on an official visit to Paris, she stoutly declared, "All the French Revolution created was a pile of headless bodies with a dictator standing on top."

Mrs. Thatcher was characteristically blunt. She was also characteristically right – and not merely because the Revolution produced Napoleon.

As historian Simon Schama has pointed out, the French Revolution was as much a step back as a step forward in the annals of human progress. The revolutionaries had read Rousseau. They believed with him that men and women are inherently good, and are corrupted by cicilization. To be happy, then, mortals must return to a simpler, more "natural' way of life.

And the French Revolution did indeed do much to simplify life in France. Schama notes, for example, that before the Revolution, France had been the richest country in Europe. But by 1795, a mere half-dozen years after the storming of the Bastille, the total value of French trade was less than half what it had been before the Revolution began. Ten years later, when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, French trade was worth only 60 percent of its value in 1789.

The Revolution was also anti-scientific. The Royal Academy of Science was abolished, merely because it was "Royal." On top of that, a revolutionary tribunal sent France's top scientist, Antoine Lavoisier, to the guillotine. When Lavoisier pleaded for a brief reprieve to finish an important experiment he was working on, he was curtly informed, "We need no more scientists in France."

Mrs. Thatcher was severely criticized for her undiplomatic assessment of the French Revolution, but she remained unmoved. On leaving Paris, she presented French President Francois Mitterand with a little gift: a nicely bound edition of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.