Allons!

It’s Quatorze Juillet, the 231^st anniversary of the start of the French Revolution. AKA Bastille Day.

Sadly, the normal celebrations are off—no French waiter champagne races, no champagne-fueled conga lines, probably a lot fewer and smaller champagne-and-fireworks parties.

(I myself shall be cracking a bottle of bubbly and attempting to make Chicken Cordon Rouge for the first time. But I’m socially-distanced.)

So let’s have a clip of Hollywoodized French patriotism. As in, the sequence in Casablanca where Major Strasser and his boys, full of caviar and Veuve Cliquot ’26, have commandeered Sam’s piano and are belting out “Die Wacht am Rhein”, and Victor Laszlo demands that the house band play the French national anthem.

Now, Die Wacht am Rhein is a fine piece, but La Marseilleise is probably the best national anthem on the planet—truly fit for leading armies or parades. For a few moments, there’s this amazing quodlibet going on between the master race and the conquered, but you know who prevails.

Vive la revolution!