Quote Originally Posted by Husar View Post
I'm not trying to forbid them to celebrate it, I'm trying to put it into perspective and to understand how much of an impact it actually had. So your point is that they're just desperate to find something to celebrate and went with the first document because some people remembered that it existed a few hundred years later?

What I meant was that the change the revolution brought to France was probably bigger and certainly temporally closer to the actual event than the change the Magna Carta brought to Britain. The Magna Carta seems to have had a far more indirect and delayed effect that resulted from people applying it to very different circumstance than the ones it was meant for long after it was introduced. And apparently it was later on more of an underlying basis for other, similarly important events that also have value of their own and could be reasons for celebration. The French revolution obviously wasn't a perfect event either from a modern point of view, but led to a republic or two relatively fast and as a more direct consequence of the event itself, which dwarfed the chain of events coming after it. Who celebrates what is not really relevant for that analysis, or is it?
One of the historical differences between England and France is that change in England has tended to happen gradually, through agreement and custom, rather than through revolution. It may seem like a minus to historians who like dates and huge changes, but it's been a big plus for the English people. The English state has never been perfect, but then it's never been that bad either, and it's definitely open to change without the need for violent revolution.