No Party on Bastille Day? Storm the Gates in Protest!

Is nothing sacred?

What's wrong with spending a wad of cash on history, anyway? Surely if we don't remember the past, we're doomed to repeat it.

Yet the French will this year not get their traditional garden party to commemorate the storming of the Bastille. Sacre bleu! What will they do with all that cake? Who's going to eat it?

Seriously, this is probably a good thing, since the big party last year cost more than 700,000 euros. A full 300,000 of that was on food alone. Now that's a lot of cake! The party was so big and the people were so revelrous that the cleanup cost 80,000 euros.

(Don't worry, though: the usual military parade will take place, with soldiers marching down the Champs-Elysees and fighter jets flying overhead. The cost of putting on that event is much lower by comparison.)

So 700,000 euros is a lot of cash back in the coffers for the French elite — sorry, government. And that's a good thing, right? Surely the French government can find better ways to spend that money than on food and drink and party favors and cleanup. After all, the government has announced that it would have to cut the deficit by 100 billion euros during the next three years. So the few hundred thousand euros that they're saving are just a drop in a bucket that needs to get a bunch of billion euros taken out of it.

But back to the cake. So the party commemorates Bastille Day, which was the day in 1789 that a mob stormed the notorious prison the Bastille and released some prisoners, grabbing a few weapons at the same time. This event is generally regarded as one of the seminal ones in the French Revolution, which was a reaction to, among other things, the attitude by the French aristocracy and monarchy that supposedly included Marie Antoinette's supposedly saying "Let them eat cake."

That story, although apocryphal, has generally turned out to be believed false — more an error in translation than anything else. But no matter what she said or didn't say, she wasn't at all in touch with the reality of the people on the ground, starving through their lives, while her head was in the clouds.

Which brings us back to the present day. Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, took the bold step of canceling this lavish Bastille Day party, and he should be commended for that, not the least because it saves all that money for other things. But a hundred billion euros is a ton of money no matter the currency, and it's going to take more than canceling parties here and there (no matter how lavish) to address those kinds of financial problems. When it comes time to make further cuts, the government might wish it could throw a party &151; a circus to distract the populace from the reality that they lack real money for things like bread (or cake).