The recent Bezos Matri-Money in Venice reminds me of an episode from the French Revolution. We tend to think of the Fall of the Bastille, July 14, 1789 as the start of that grand historical process. It was pivotal, the most violent defiance of King Louis XVI’s authority to date, but was soon followed by an incident more pertinent today. We are not at a tipping point like that event turned out to be, yet it feels increasingly relevant.

On October 1, 1789 the Flanders Regiment reached Versailles to take over duties of a unit that defected at the Bastille uprising. At the same time, a bad harvest was making bread, staple of most French diets, costlier in Paris.

The King’s bodyguard threw a sumptuous banquet to welcome the Flandriens. As if luxuriant food as commoners faced starvation weren’t insensitive enough, the newcomers also displayed inordinate gestures of loyalty to Louis. The callousness of extravagant dining and obliviousness to broad frustration with a feckless King were dangerously at odds with the mood beyond the royal Court.

News of those antics got soon back to Paris, and as a result, a mass of irate women marched out to Versailles to remonstrate with Louis about the cost of bread. They breached the palace, and coerced the royal family to return to Paris, where they could be more easily controlled, guarded and menaced.

In 2025, there are no Divine-Right Kings on whom national publics can focus frustration. But we have our own focus: behavior like that extravaganza in Venice by those who, like Louis’ courtiers, evidently see themselves as above the concerns of (other) mortals.

It is a fair, if inexact, parallel to reaction to that Flandrien feast that today, beleaguered folk observing modesty’s ‘Dearth in Venice’ resent the ultra-rich absorbing ever more of Global wealth. Often by redirecting it from previously comfortable middle classes.

Even more reckless, today’s plutocrats try various ploys to pull up the socio-economic ladder, to make their privilege and power inassailable. (‘Ploys’ like rendering healthcare less accessible, reducing life expectancies; hence my citation of ‘Fratricide.’)

Was the unseemly profligacy of the wedding of merchant martinet Bezos due to delusion? Arrogance? Both?

Did its guests not realize the resentment their hyper-indulgence causes fellow citizens? Citizens watching as historically unique widespread financial and personal security –- which they consider the bedrock of any ‘just’ society – gets deliberately eroded?

Especially when many of those guests avoid taxes (as the accompanying image suggests) with the same vigor they siphon profit to themselves. Often, using techniques they – the groom first among them – devised or control.

(Sidebar: Is facilitating techno-charged rapacity ‘Evolutionary progress?’ Surely, this is not the highest state of development to which we can aspire!)

Can they actually believe their efforts to revive a Gilded Age – a glittering membrane over a dark reality of struggle for survival for most – will pass unnoticed, and unresisted, by ‘most?’

All this is an insufferable offense against simple fairness, so any popular wrath it ignites should come as no surprise. How can allegedly smart (rich) people be so blinkered they can’t see this is both intolerable, and untenable?

There is a huge difference between most people today, and French commoners in 1789. They were accustomed to hardship, hoping mainly that survival be as little difficult as possible, whereas most of us experienced ‘widespread financial and personal security’ not long ago.

We know life Can be better, and should not accept its being degraded so kleptocrats can outdo each other with grander yachts.

Why should so many give up so much, to pamper so few?

Or is it arrogance? Do members of the ‘élite’ simply not care what the common herd thinks? Or presume it can be reliably manipulated? But today’s ‘herd’ is educated enough to sustain a modern economy, so its members are aware life was not, and need/should not be, constant struggle for survival.

In honor of Bastille (Bez-steal?) Day, the subtitle of this post is a satire on three pillars Republican France has espoused since her tumultuous birth: ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity.’

Ideals that any libertines, egomaniacs or enablers of fratricide who made it onto the Venice guest list likely not just ignore, but consciously mock. Most especially égalité/equality. Their personal ‘ideals’ are obviously irreconcilable with France’s Secular Trinity and its promise of a better human condition.

To return to that women’s march: legendarily as they neared Versailles, palace staff tried to close its gates. But they hadn’t been shut in decades, and were rusted immovably in place. Heedless gentry had just presumed civilization would prevail to sustain (and be exploited by) them. Their presumption that their privilege was indestructible proved false, so when a reckoning came, it left them unable to shield themselves.

It wasn’t barbarians at those gates. It was wives and mothers fed up with being ‘subjects’ of those whose selfishness proved they did not merit their prerogatives.

Those rusted gates may prove a metaphor for glitterati who attended Bezos’ rites, then ignore justified anger from beyond their velvet cords and gated residences. Who assume civilization is there to protect them, even as they (‘Carnivores in Venice?’) prey on most of its members.

If Venice’s spectacle is 2025’s equivalent to the cluelessness of the banquet for the Flandriens, the equivalent to their tin-eared praise for Louis XVI may be our plutocrats’ shameless tax avoidance, a childish mindset that one may limitlessly ‘take,’ but need never ‘give.’

History may see capers like the flaunted opulence in Venice as what led a critical mass of people to conclude the economic structure benefits only a veneer of the powerful.

In another essay, I will speculate on cynical ways plutocracy may be trying to distract us commoners from noticing how we are being despoiled. Like Versailles’ gates, such gambits are liable to eventual failure, when snarled with the accumulated rust of popular rage.

That essay will be titled ‘Bread and Circuits.’