May 5th Through Time: Birthdays, Revolutions & Remarkable Moments

On May fifth, 1789, the doors of the Palace of Versailles swung open for a meeting that hadn't happened in one hundred and seventy-five years. King Louis the Sixteenth, facing a bankrupt kingdom, had summoned the Estates-General. He thought he was solving a financial crisis. What he was actually doing was lighting the fuse on the French Revolution. From our vantage point, looking back, we see this day not as a desperate attempt at reform, but as the moment the old world held its final, glittering party before the guillotine was assembled. It's a spectacular, terrifying, and oh-so-human beginning.

And what a day May fifth is for beginnings and endings. On this same day in 1821, on a miserable little rock in the South Atlantic, Napoleon Bonaparte died. The man who redrew the map of Europe, who made kings and broke empires, ended his days in exile on Saint Helena, arguing with his British captors about firewood. The grandest story in a generation ending in the most pathetic way imaginable. It’s a perfect, almost novelistic, counterpoint. Then, leap forward to 1916. On May fifth, the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire begins, backed by the British. A pivotal moment, certainly. One that would help dismantle a 600-year-old empire.

But looking back now, we see the seeds of so much future conflict being planted in that desert sand, with promises made and lines drawn that we are still living with, and dying over, today. In 1961, the story is one of ascent. On May fifth, Alan Shepard is strapped into a tiny capsule called Freedom 7. He becomes the first American in space. It was only a fifteen-minute flight, a suborbital hop, really. But in the context of the Cold War, it was everything. It was a statement. It was America shouting back at the sky after Yuri Gagarin had claimed it for the Soviets just a few weeks earlier.

And sometimes, history is just… pure poetry. On May fifth, 1973, a chestnut-colored horse named Secretariat runs the Kentucky Derby. And he doesn't just win. He runs each quarter-mile faster than the one before, something that seems physically impossible. He sets a record of one minute, fifty-nine point four seconds that, to this day, has never been broken. It is a moment of such perfect, unadulterated excellence. It’s glorious. It almost makes you believe in magic. The day also gave us new kinds of light. In 1927, Virginia Woolf published To the Lighthouse, a book that rewired the novel, taking us inside the very stream of consciousness of her characters.

A revolution in literature. And on May fifth, 1891, the Music Hall in New York City opened its doors. We know it today as Carnegie Hall. The guest conductor for that first performance? Tchaikovsky himself, all the way from Russia. Imagine being in that room. And of course, there are the births. On May fifth, 1813, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was born, the man who would give us the leap of faith. And five years later, on May fifth, 1818, in Trier, Germany, a baby named Karl Marx was born. A man who would spend his entire life trying to tear down the world the Estates-General had built, and who, in doing so, would become one of the most influential—and controversial—thinkers in human history.

But the event I want to circle back to, the one that truly rhymes with that day in Versailles, happened centuries earlier. On May fifth, 1215, in England, a group of furious, fed-up barons formally renounced their allegiance to King John. It sounds like just another medieval squabble. But it’s not. It’s the spark. It’s the act of defiance that forces a king’s hand and leads, just a few weeks later, to a muddy field at Runnymede and the signing of the Magna Carta. So let’s put these two moments side-by-side. May fifth, 1215, and May fifth, 1789. They are almost six hundred years apart, but they are having the exact same argument.

It is an argument so fundamental that we are still having it right now, in our own parliaments and congresses and courtrooms. The argument is this: Where does power come from? And what are its limits? In 1215, you have King John. A truly terrible king. He was greedy, cruel, and spectacularly incompetent. He lost Normandy, a huge chunk of his French territory. He taxed his barons into the ground to pay for his failed wars. He ignored their traditional rights. So they got together and said: "No more." Their renunciation of fealty was a legal, formal, and profoundly radical act. They weren't just a mob.

They were using the language of the system to break the system. And their goal wasn't to overthrow the king, not at first. Their goal was to bind him. To make him subject to the law. The Magna Carta, the Great Charter, is essentially a contract. It says, "You, the king, are not above the law. You cannot just take our stuff or throw us in jail without due process." It was revolutionary. It’s the ancestor of every constitution, every bill of rights. Now, fast forward to Versailles in 1789. King Louis the Sixteenth isn't a monster like John. He’s just… weak. Indecisive. He’s inherited a system that is fundamentally broken and unfair.

French society was split into three "Estates." The clergy, the nobility, and then… everyone else. The Third Estate. Ninety-seven percent of the population. They had no power, but they paid almost all the taxes. When the Estates-General met, the plan was for each estate to vote as a block. Which meant the clergy and the nobility, the first two estates, could always outvote the third. But the men of the Third Estate who showed up on May fifth had been reading. They’d been reading about the American Revolution. They’d been reading Enlightenment philosophy. And they came to Versailles with an idea that was just as radical as the barons' in 1215.

They said, "We are not just one-third of the conversation. We are the nation." They refused to play by the old rules. They demanded to vote by head, not by order. And when the king and the nobles resisted, they didn't just walk away. They declared themselves the National Assembly. They went to a nearby tennis court and swore an oath not to give up until they had written a constitution. Here's the turn. The barons in 1215 wanted to put a leash on a king. The commoners in 1789 ended up cutting off his head. Why the different outcome? Because the world had changed. The idea of who "the people" were had expanded.

In 1215, it was a small group of powerful nobles fighting for their own rights, which, by happy accident, eventually became everyone's rights. By 1789, the idea of popular sovereignty—that power ultimately rests with the people, ALL the people—was in the air. Looking back from now, what we see so clearly is that both moments were about replacing a system based on divine right or inherited privilege with a system based on rules, on a contract. The Magna Carta was Contract 1.0. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was Contract 2.0. And we’ve been writing new versions ever since.

Every election, every protest, every court case about civil liberties is another edit, another revision to that fundamental document. So when we look at May fifth, we see this extraordinary pattern. It’s a day of challenging the sovereign. Whether that sovereign is a king, an empire, the laws of physics that keep us tied to Earth, or even the literary conventions of the novel. It’s a day for drawing a line. For saying, "This far, and no further." The barons did it. The Third Estate did it. Alan Shepard did it. Even Secretariat, in his own way, did it—he ran against the limits of what a horse was thought to be capable of.

This is what history does. It doesn't repeat itself, but oh, it rhymes. It shows us the same questions, asked again and again in different accents. The question of May fifth is the question of power. Who has it, who deserves it, and what do we do when the answer to those two questions is different? We are still living inside the answers that were forged on this day. We are still arguing in the rooms that King John and King Louis were forced to build. Every generation gets to decide again what rights are fundamental, and what powers are absolute. That negotiation never, ever stops.