En réponse à John Cowan :


>Well, nothing like the French Revolution has ever happened anywhere in
>the anglophone world.  Its nearest analogues are the American Revolution,
>the English Civil War, and the English Glorious Revolution.  All of these
>(with the partial exception of the Civil War) represent preemptive strikes
>against potential tyranny rather than the unseating of a tyranny actually
>in place.  The fall of the Bastille symbolizes primarily the destruction of
>tyranny through the physical destruction of one of its most hated symbols.

Which is why it is viewed as a happy event even though it went very wrong 
afterwards...

>The fact that Louis XV's rule represented a considerable moderation of
>what comes before it affected the timing of the French Revolution, but not
>its symbolic impact.

Louis the XVI you mean :) . While he was indeed quite moderated compared to 
his predecessors, he was not ready to give up a single bit of his power, 
which is why we got rid of him rather than create a constitutional monarchy 
(the fact that the nobility and the clergy always voted against the 
Tiers-Etat during the Etats Généraux didn't help either :) ).

Hi everyone! If you wondered where I'd gone, it's just that for a few days 
I didn't receive any post from the mailing list. I still followed it 
through the archive, while trying to find out what went wrong (I tried 
mailing the listerv itself, but received no reply either), when suddenly I 
received all the posts written since Monday as one big lump (with the posts 
in complete disorder, and with the replies from the listserv). I still 
don't know what happened but John is looking at it :) .

Anyway, I'm back! :)

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.