The holiday the world calls Bastille Day is not what the French typically call it at home. In France the occasion goes by Le 14 Juillet, “The 14th of July,” or simply La Fête Nationale. The Bastille Day label is largely an English-language convention.
The date marks July 14, 1789, when Parisian revolutionaries stormed the Bastille, one of the moments that set the French Revolution in motion.
The symbolic weight of the building vastly outstripped its actual population on the day it was taken. When the gates were breached, only seven prisoners were found inside.
The Bastille had not been designed as a prison in the first place. It began as a medieval military fortress constructed to protect Paris from English forces during the Hundred Years’ War.
Over time it was repurposed, and it eventually became associated with the crown’s power to lock people away without trial through royal instruments called lettres de cachet, warrants that required no legal process and offered the accused no recourse.
Among those who passed through its gates were Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade, names that did nothing to soften the building’s reputation.
Popular imagination pictured the Bastille as a place of dungeons and instruments of torture. The reality for some inmates was considerably less dramatic. Certain wealthy prisoners apparently lived in conditions that would not have embarrassed a modest inn.
The crowd that stormed it on July 14 was not primarily concerned with liberating prisoners. The real objective was the gunpowder and weapons stored inside, supplies the revolutionary movement urgently needed.
Even so, the event immediately took on a larger meaning, becoming a powerful symbol of ordinary people rising up against the concentrated power of monarchy and tyranny.
The Bastille’s physical existence did not outlast the revolution by long. It was pulled apart stone by stone in the months that followed.
Pieces of the demolished fortress circulated across France as souvenirs, and craftsmen carved small replica models from the original stones.
One of the Bastille’s keys traveled considerably further. The Marquis de Lafayette sent it to George Washington, and it remains in the United States to this day.
Despite the storming occurring in 1789, France did not formally establish July 14 as its national holiday until 1880, nearly a century after the event it commemorates.
The centerpiece of modern celebrations is the military parade along the Champs-Elysees in Paris, regarded as one of the oldest and largest military parades on the European continent.
French Air Force jets pass overhead trailing smoke in blue, white, and red to echo the colors of the national flag. The 2018 parade produced an unscripted moment when one aircraft released red smoke in place of blue, briefly painting a badly incorrect version of the French flag across the Parisian sky and becoming an instant subject of mockery online.