On this day, 234 years ago, the people of Paris rose up to take history into their own hands. The memory of the Bastille’s storming, and of similar moments of revolutionary élan — from the “August insurrection” three years later to the assault on the Winter Palace in Petrograd more than a century hence — have bequeathed the Left a series of thrilling tableaux of popular triumph, imprinted in the public mind through representations like the paintings of Jacques-Louis David or the films of Sergei Eisenstein. Those images are a precious legacy — but they can mislead us if we’re not careful.

The danger is especially acute at a moment like the present, when the Left’s political horizon feels like it has receded beyond view and the middle distance is looking bleak. In the United States, just three years ago, an insurgency led by Bernie Sanders raised the hopes of many — especially those too young to have a feel for the strange, syncopated tempo of radical politics — that a political revolution was at hand, one that would infuse public life with an ethos of solidarity and democratic equality. Now the odds are good that in a year’s time we’ll be staring down the barrel of a Joe Biden–Donald Trump rematch.

Comparable political insurgencies have been extinguished even more brutally elsewhere, from the purges and show trials of Keir Starmer’s UK Labour Party to Syriza’s post-capitulation collapse in Greece or the retreat of Podemos in Spain. Everywhere, increasingly, the political moment feels hostile, combining the ennui of a “return to normalcy” with the ambient menace of a Thermidor.