I spent a good part of last night, in between caring for a sick vomiting child, and this morning perusing Twitter and some websites. The scenes and descriptions were alternately exhilarating and nauseating, empowering and confusing, stirring and disconcerting. Perhaps how it was to many citizens of Paris in 1789, or again in the Spring of 1871 during the Paris Commune.

I've always found it interesting that the United States and France both celebrate their independence days, at least in a sense, in July, just nine days apart from each other. Of course, the American and French Revolutions were somewhat different in character. For America it was more a war of national liberation against what had become an imperial master, determined to keep its colonies subservient (the crux of Tom Paine's argument in Common Sense), though there were elements of civil war and social revolution as well. France's revolution, on the contrary, began as a strictly internal affair, an upheaval against a badly outmoded form of government and social system.