Went to boarding school in Massachusetts, and college at Yale and Harvard. I would’ve gone to the University of Texas for law school but there was one small issue: I was not accepted.

 — Will Ferrell as George W. Bush, You’re Welcome, America

In 1920, just three years after a tiny handful of Bolsheviks captured the all-but-abandoned Winter Palace, the Soviets reenacted the less-than-mythic event in front of 100,000 spectators. Only this time, hundreds of soldiers — as opposed to the original two-dozen — valiantly rushed into the palace under the guidance of theatre director Nikolai Evreinov. Fireworks and canon shots went off at the moment of victory. A few years later, the great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein depicted yet another reenactment of the Winter Palace capture in his 1927 film October: Ten Days That Shook the World, this time for an audience of millions.

The seizure of the French fortress-prison the Bastille Saint-Antoine was similarly propagandized. Just a few months after it was stormed — in which a mere seven prisoners were liberated — a local huckster named Pierre-François Palloy effectively took control of the Bastille’s ruins and began charging admission and selling off the stones as souvenirs before the whole thing was demolished a few months later. In 1840, the towering July Column was inaugurated on the site — now the Place de la Bastille — commemorating the 1830 revolution. 615 victims of the July Revolution were interred beneath the column and later, an additional 200 casualties of the 1848 revolution.