Good morning, Whitewater.
Monday will be partly sunny, with a one-third chance of scattered showers.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission is listed to meet at 6 PM tonight.
It’s Bastille Day:
The Storming of the Bastille occurred in Paris, France on the morning of 14 July 1789. The medieval fortress and prison in Paris known as the Bastille represented royal authority in the center of Paris. The prison only contained seven inmates at the time of its storming but was a symbol of the abuses of the monarchy: its fall was the flashpoint of the French Revolution.
In France, Le quatorze juillet (14 July) is a public holiday, usually called Bastille Day in English….
On 19 May 1789, Louis XVI convened the Estates-General to hear their grievances. The deputies of the Third Estate representing the common people (the two others were the Catholic Church and nobility) decided to break away and form a National Assembly. On 20 June the deputies of the Third Estate took the Tennis Court Oath, swearing not to separate until a constitution had been established. They were gradually joined by delegates of the other estates; Louis XVI started to recognize their validity on 27 June. The assembly renamed itself the National Constituent Assembly on 9 July, and began to function as a legislature and to draft a constitution.
In the wake of the 11 July dismissal of Jacques Necker, the people of Paris, fearful that they and their representatives would be attacked by the royal military, and seeking to gain ammunition and gunpowder for the general populace, stormed the Bastille, a fortress-prison in Paris which had often held people jailed on the basis of lettres de cachet, arbitrary royal indictments that could not be appealed. Besides holding a large cache of ammunition and gunpowder, the Bastille had been known for holding political prisoners whose writings had displeased the royal government, and was thus a symbol of the absolutism of the monarchy. As it happened, at the time of the siege in July 1789 there were only seven inmates, none of great political significance.
When the crowd—eventually reinforced by mutinous gardes françaises—proved a fair match for the fort’s defenders, Governor de Launay, the commander of the Bastille, capitulated and opened the gates to avoid a mutual massacre. However, possibly because of a misunderstanding, fighting resumed. Ninety-eight attackers and just one defender died in the actual fighting, but in the aftermath, de Launay and seven other defenders were killed, as was the ‘prévôt des marchands’ (roughly, mayor) Jacques de Flesselles.
Shortly after the storming of the Bastille, on 4 August feudalism was abolished and on 26 August, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was proclaimed.
On this day in 1948, Janesville tries the latest:
1948 – Janesville Sprays for Bugs
On this date, intending to create a bug-free environment, Janesville tested a DDT fogging machine that quickly emitted a “smokescreen of insect-killing fog.” City officials hoped to persuade the county to buy the machine for use by all municipalities or to buy it jointly with Beloit. [Source: Janesville Gazette]
Google-a-Day asks a science question:
If the Saffir-Simpson Scale had existed at the time, the storm described in Erik Larson’s 1999 book would have been rated as what?