Liberty, equality, fraternity, & pride
By Eris Schack
On July 14th, 1789 at approximately 5:30pm, Bernard-René Jourdan de Launay would exit the front gates of the Bastille de Saint Antione for the last time. A group of local revolutionaries had started as a small crowd in the early afternoon and then grew to even include members of the French guard by 3pm. By 5pm, at least 954 revolutionaries and mutineers had surrounded the Bastille itself, and de Launay was then admitting defeat. Exchanging notes with the mob through the front gate, de Luanay was promised that he and his men would not be harmed upon leaving. By 6pm, de Luanay’s unrecognizable body could be found outside of the Hôtel de Ville tangled in stab wounds, his head carried off some distance away on a bayonet.
One year later at the Champ des Mars, a crowd of over 100 thousand gathered with 14 thousand federalists and the hero of the American Revolution, Marquis de Lafayette, who would lead the national assembly in an oath to the new constitution. During this event, the Fête de la Fédération, the King of France, Louis XVI would set aside his title by accepting the same constitution. Thereafter, becoming a constitutional monarchy, Louis XVI would be beholden to the people of France and not in control of the country itself. This was the start of a new nation and also a celebration of what had happened a year prior at the Bastille. During a speech that same day, Camille Desmoulins pridefully spoke of citizens and soldiers rushing the Bastille and uniting in the promise liberty, equality, and fraternity.
One year after, the French had turned on their king and confined him after Louis had attempted to flee. Three days later on July 17th of 1791, a new mob assembled on the Champ des Mars, calling for the end of the constitutional monarchy and reframing as a republic. Led by Camille Desmoulins, the crowd turned riotous by the afternoon and began pelting stones at soldiers who had assembled in opposition. Still sympathetic to the king who had helped him win the American Revolution, Lafayette would then instruct the soldiers to open fire on the crowd.
Within a year, Layfayette would be exiled. About a year after that, Louis XVI would be arrested and beheaded. Then around a year later, Camille Desmoulins’ head would also find itself landing in the basket beneath a guillotine. ”Liberté, égalité, fraternité” would go on as a lasting motto for the French Republic. Revolutionaries, soldiers, and royals alike found themselves united in the liberty, equality, and brotherhood afforded by exile or execution.
——
179 years, 11 months, and 14 days after Bernard-René Jourdan de Launay had been considering how he may find his way out of the Bastille alive, deputy police inspector Seymour Pine was barricaded in the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street of Greenwich Village, New York. Outside the bar, an angry mob had gathered after an attempted police raid earlier in the morning. About 600 had gathered after trans women, lesbians, and gay men had resisted arrest by inspector Pine. It started when a trans woman threw a bottle at Pine. It escalated when Pine’s officers tried to force a lesbian into a paddy wagon and she yelled "Why don't you guys do something?" It got violent, as the crowd pelted officers with stones and garbage, forcing them back into the bar for safety. As the crowd outside began a broadway style kick-line, singing songs of revolution, inspector Pine and nine other police officers wondered how they would get back out as the Stonewall Inn started to burn. The riots would last several nights.
A year later, June 28th 1970 would be named the Christopher Street Liberation Day and celebrated with a march from outside of the Stonewall Inn to Central Park. The size of this first march is hard to estimate, with numbers between 3 and 20 thousand particpants being recorded.
A year later, similar parades would be held around the world. The first gay couple was legally married in Minnesota. Sodomy laws would be repealed in Colorado and Oregon.
A year later, San Francisco would have the first gay bar to have clear windows.
In 1978, the Rainbow flag is first used as a symbol of gay identity and unity.
In 1984, a pink granite triangle is placed at the site of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Germany, memorializing gay victims of Nazi persecution during the holocaust.
Six years later, the World Health organization would no longer classify homosexuality as a mental illness.
On June 25th 1999, 30 years after the riots, Stonewall would be officially listed on the National Registry of Historic Places.
In 2004 David Carter said in his book on the Stonewall Riots that they were "to the gay movement what the fall of the Bastille is to the unleashing of the French Revolution."
On June 24th 2016, The Stonewall Inn and surrounding area would finally be honored as a National Monument in a ceremony by Barack Obama.
In the following years, pride parades would be sponsored by banks, retailers, and energy conglomerates.
During the month of June in 2019, New York state flys a rainbow pride flag at the state capitol in celebration of Pride month for the first time.
In 2025, the government would remove references to trans people on the plaques outside of the the Stonewall Inn, and the library of Congress would state that the initial Stonewall uprising was “not a riot”.
——
The history of revolutions are littered with ups and downs, ebbs and flows, as well as hot and cold points. As we look at revolutions and fights for personal freedoms and basic human dignities, we must consider how some of these fights are about tearing down established systems while others embark on the far more difficult task of building new systems in their place. What starts as a riot one day must eventually become a liberation, otherwise they just remain as riots to those in the future. The difference being not only breaking the shackles which impede freedoms, but also building new systems which no longer allow for such chains to obstruct. Freedom can won, yet true liberty is a carefully built balance that must be preserved over time.
Without preservation of such a balance, scales have a tendency to tip back against the gains which were hard won. Certain scientific laws like gravity dictate how easy it is to topple, and laborious it is to rebuild. Furthermore, Newton’s third law tells us that each action has an equal opposing action. This translates in many ways to the politics of progress. As it is equally easy for those who oppose progress to crumple new built systems underfoot, if only given the will to do so. Equality itself is a fickle thing, forever sought but rarely achieved, so long as we allow ourselves to unite together in pursuit of mutual betterment there will be others who color that benefit as loss. Especially now memories become shorter, news cycles wear thin, and modern information age allows others to control media and journalism more than ever before. With the smallest of push equality falls into question, monuments crumble, histories are forgotten and it’s very easy to lose who we are and how we got to the place that we are now. It’s easy to lose our personal autonomy, our words, and our very identities with it.
Conceptually, “identity politics” has been an inevitability, as they have been with us for far longer than many care to admit or understand. There will always be a line and people will stand on one side of it or another. The important bit is if we have the freedom of defining those sides by choice or if they are imposed by force. Who we are is defined in many different ways, the importance of those differing features really comes down to how we as people wish to define them. Do we put more importance to the heritage we were born into or the legacy we leave? Do we put more power in the color of our skin or the values that we share? Do we understand each other’s humanity based on our individual DNA or based on some common sense of decency? These are political questions. They are questions of identity. They are also how we define fraternity. The family found in fraternal order seeks similar goals and shares common values. Without these commonalities, these enforced means of mutual respect, the balance of equality and liberty can easily fall into disarray. These bonds serve the most of us best when we don’t define them through identity imposed upon us, but rather identity we all agree is for the greater good. Fraternity is building bonds that outlast the imbalances of the past, that withstand the forces that push back. The pride found in fraternity is what scares those who stand in the way of progress the most.
Pride binds us together in a union of purpose. While it may also be a form of imbalance, pride can stand as the powerful of virtues when used to unite for progress. Some may see pride as regressive when it is used to maintain the systems which oppress those outside of the majority, although this is a lie. For there is a difference between pride and arrogance, that being the intention which binds together those who hold it. When we wield the pride that others have in themselves for personal gain, the intention is hollow, the vain arrogance of the pursuit inevitably becomes visible. Within revolution, the push back of arrogance is inevitable as we build a better world. Yet we should never allow any of that which pushes us back to prevent us from holding the line. We refuse to not celebrate our victories. We refuse to drop our flags. We never drop the promise of the hope we find in pride.
This June and all those after, may we all find pride in liberté, égalité, & fraternité.
