Two hundred twenty-one years ago today, the Parisian mob stormed the Bastille. This, and the subsequent Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, constituted the third event of the French Revolution. (The first had been the revolt of the nobility, refusing to aid King Louis XVI through the payment of taxes; the second, the formation of the National Assembly and the Tennis Court Oath.) It's hard to find another event in all of history that had such far-reaching consequences, good and (mostly) bad. And yet France is still a most agreeable and civilized country, and–as Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out in an article about the absurd French football squad–a country, despite all its historical traumas, "with a practically unrivalled history of achievement in all the major fields of human endeavor."

Eh bien! Vive la France, malgré les Bleus.