For Bastille Day

Bastille Day automatically makes me think of this verse about the storming of the Bastille:

Screaming in language that no one understands
Of the rights that we grabbed with our own bleeding hands
When we wiped out the bosses and stormed through the wall
Of the prison they told us would outlast us all!

It's from a song hailing the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in the Peter Weiss play Marat/Sade.

I first saw the play when my brother Brian played in it in a community theater production in the late '60s, but many of us elderly people know the song "Poor Old Marat" from the Judy Collins album, In My Life.

I couldn't find that on YouTube, so here's a rockier take on it by the False Prophets, from Coca Crystal's fabled NYC cable access show in 1988. (The song starts at about the 1:30 mark, and is commendably accessible.)

Full lyrics bel0w the fold!


Four years after the revolution
And the old king's execution
Four years after I remember how
Those courtiers took their final vow

String up every aristocrat
Out with the priests
Let them live on their fat

Four years after we started fighting
Marat keeps on with his writing
Four years after the Bastille fell
He still recalls the old battle yell

Down with all of the ruling class
Throw all the generals out on their ass

Good old Marat by your side we'll stand or fall
You're the only one that we can trust at all

Four years he fought and he fought unafraid
Sniffing down traitors by traitors betrayed
Marat in the courtroom Marat underground
Sometimes the otter and sometimes the hound

Fighting all the gentry and fighting every priest
The businessman, the bourgeois, the military beast
Marat always ready to stifle every scheme
Of the sons of the ass-licking dying regime

We've got new generals,
Our leaders are new
They sit and they argue
And all that they do
Is sell their own colleagues
And ride upon their backs
And jail them
And break them
And give them all the axe
Screaming in language that no one understands
Of the rights that we grabbed with our own bleeding hands
When we wiped out the bosses and stormed through the wall
Of the prison they told us would outlast us all

Marat we're poor
And the poor stay poor
Marat don't make
Us wait anymore
We want our rights and we don't care how
We want our revolution now

Why do they have the gold
Why do they have the power
Why why why
Do they have the friends at the top
Why do they have the jobs at the top
We've got nothing
Always had nothing
Nothing but holes and millions of them
Living in holes dying in holes
Holes in our bellies and holes in our clothes

Marat we're poor
And the poor stay poor
Marat don't make us wait anymore
Poor old Marat they hunt you down
The bloodhounds are sniffing all over the town
Poor old Marat you work 'til your eyes turn as red as rust

Poor old Marat
We trust in you ...