1

It commemorates the storming of the Bastille, a prison in Paris where political prisoners were being kept.

That is the mythology, but by the time it was 'stormed', the Bastille was only holding a few common criminals, not political prisoners.  The storming itself was a classic example of duplicity, since the warden opened the gate to the revolutionaries after he had been assured that the matter would be handled peacefully - which lasted until the revolutionaries got in and proceeded to break their word, executing the warden in the process.

Currently they're on their Fourth Republic, intermixed with two bouts of monarchy not counting Napoleon.

Fifth Republic - the Fourth Republic was immediately following WW2 and collapsed due to the Algiers Crisis.  The Fifth Republic was given to France by the uncrowned king Charles De Gaulle.

And then maybe the French will consider nuking ISIS.

Burning out the hornets in the no-go zones might be the first thing that has to be done.  Maybe the French can ask the Stalinist Algerians to do it.

2

Supposedly that was what was happening during the National Emergency since last November.

By the way, Hollande has now announced a 3 month extension of the National Emergency.

It's interesting to speculate about what kind of consequences something like this will have. One distinct possibility is that Marine le Pen will be the next President, and will try to leave the EU.

3 OK, the attacker was killed in the gunfight with police. At least the French got that part right.

4 If this achieved nothing else, at least it got Obama to use the word "terrorist".

Of course, he didn't manage to get himself to say "Muslim terrorist", but you have to start somewhere. It's a first step.

5 As bad as Bastille day is for an excuse for a national holiday, it's not as bad as Guy Fawkes Day, in which the British celebrate a failed coup, whose name sake (Fawkes) who captured, tortured, and only escaped hanging by jumping off the scaffold and breaking his neck.

6 Hollande's name was already mud. For him personally, the silver lining is that this has driven his previous scandal out of the news, that he had a personal hairdresser that travels everywhere with him, paid $132,000 per year. It wasn't a good look for the head of the Socialist party.

7 By the time the mobs finally storm Bastille prison, the only notable prisoner kept there is Marquis De Sade, who was kept there for violating moral code.

8 For as much as we joke about the French Military, I've long held the opinion that France are the one country I would expect to use Nuclear Weapons against an opponent.  Especially as all of their nukes are sub-launched.

As for what is going on in the West, it would be nice if the Nationalists take power without the current Elites trying to destroy their own countries in the process, but that doesn't look to be the way it's going.  Austria's high court just tossed the recent Presidential election because it was pretty clear voter fraud had swung it.  That's not a good sign of things to come.

That's the reason for the "anti-Muslim backlash is what we need to worry about!" story line existing.  No one is actually worried about it.  It's projection of what the people that push the story line would like to do to the "normals".  The "normals" just want the criminals and jihadists removed.  But they're going to push the "normals" into reacting very violently if the Elites don't start taking serious measures.
But those measures won't really be against the Muslims.  It'll be against the Elites.  Keep an eye on stories about politicians being killed.  That's what'll change the entire dynamic.  Once the Elites become understood as the "problem", that's when things will start getting really messy.

I don't even blame the Muslims that much.  Even the barest of understanding of either the history or theology of Islam tells you exactly what it is: a supremacist cult built around conquest & subjugation.  They've been doing this for 1400+ years.  It ain't new.  The West being stupid enough to allow that many into their countries is the new twist.  The only question is how bloody does it play out.  It's not like massive population transfers haven't happened several times, in Europe, in the last century.  It's just going to happen again because the Elites are just that foolish.

9

For as much as we joke about the French Military, I've long held the opinion that France are the one country I would expect to use Nuclear Weapons against an opponent.  Especially as all of their nukes are sub-launched.

The French military do get a rap but that is because their political class has hamstrung and sabotaged them into incompetence.  The soldiers and officers are generally as good as any other (At the same time that most French troops were restricted from combat operations in Afghanistan, there was a French special operations unit that operated with the US Spec Ops, who were willing to go anywhere and do anything they needed, with skill and panache.).  And I agreed that the French would be the most likely to use nuclear weapons if they got pushed too far - unlikely the US, the UK, or even Israel, if terrorists had attacked something really significant, like the Effiel Tower, those terrorists' base camp would be a glowing parking lot the next day.

Most people (Including those who accuse the US of conducting the most military interventions post WW2.) fail to realize that the French military is the most active conducting operations and interventions in the world, simply due to the French habit of intervening in their former empire.  Their intelligence services also has free reign on their operations - with far less notice than the CIA gets.

10

If you look carefully at French military history, what you find is a long history of good men being led by generals and politicians who are idiots. Most of the bad reputation the French have isn't due to their soldiers performing badly, it's because they were being wasted in futile and ill-conceived military operations by incompetent generals and political leaders..

Dien Bien Phu is the classic example of that though it is by no means the only one. The Franco-Prussian War was another. (The history of the Franco-Prussian war makes me weep for the poor men who had to put up with Louis Napoleon's sheer stupidity.)

Since the Napoleonic war, there's only been one case of French troops performing well because of good leadership, and that's the Free French after the Normandy invasion. But they were under the overall strategic command of the British and American. They performed superbly, because the soldiers were not under French overall command. Their officers were French up to the level of division, but above that it was Americans all the way up to Eisenhower.

11

Since the Napoleonic war, there's only been one case of French troops performing well because of good leadership, and that's the Free French after the Normandy invasion. But they were under the overall strategic command of the British and American. They performed superbly, because the soldiers were not under French overall command. Their officers were French up to the level of division, but above that it was Americans all the way up to Eisenhower.

Ferdinand Foch (Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies in 1918.) and Charles Mangin clearly disagree.  French generals were usually no better and no worse than their foreign counterparts, but there was nothing that made French generals supposedly far worse than average, anymore than German generals supposedly far better than average.

Aside from issues of doctrine (Which was hardly unique - even the Germans had that problem.), the biggest issues with the French military was a general distrust of 'colonial' troops and (For WW2.) an air of caution due to the empty classes of the 1930s and subsequently lower manpower potential of the French Army.