Today is Bastille Day — except in France. Spend long here, and you’ll quickly find that this national day of celebration is instead known simply as Le Quatorze Juillet. There are plenty of explanations, but probably the most convincing is that the storming of the Bastille, one of the foundational moments of the French Revolution, was also a bloody riot. The day ended with the prison’s director having his head sliced off with a pocket knife, the gory trophy paraded through the streets by jubilant Parisians. The unspoken implication, especially among the politer strains of French society, is that explicitly celebrating such violence would be improper, even if it remains central to the French Republic’s self-image.
These days, of course, the truth is more prosaic. Rowdy “bals populaires” can still be found, full of drinking and dancing, the most famous being the bal des pompiers held at the firefighters’ barracks at Port-Royal until 4am (not a good night for your house to catch fire). Usually, though, the arrival of 14 July simply marks the beginning of high summer. Rather than “Vive la France”, you’re more likely to hear “Vous partez quand?” (“When are you leaving?”) in Paris shops and offices. It’s a reference to the grandes vacances that will soon sweep France, reducing all activity in business and politics to the absolute minimum.
And though the march-pasts and fly-overs will still dominate the capital today, this demonstration of confident state power has increasingly faced an anarchic counterpoint. Over the last couple of years, the night of 14 July has seen running battles between the police and youths in the banlieues, with fireworks designed to celebrate the French nation instead aimed at the so-called “forces of order”, as well as schools, libraries and other Republican symbols. These battles took on a frightening intensity in June 2023, after a 17-year-old was shot at a traffic stop in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Back then, there was some talk of banning the 14 July festivities entirely. That didn’t happen, but this summer, too, there are nightly skirmishes in the cité (council estate) not far from where I live, muffled howls echoing off the graffitied concrete walls.
This is nothing new. Between order and disorder, indifference and activism, 14 July has long been contested territory. The bickering first began in 1879, when a semi-official public festival was held in France to commemorate that epic day 90 years before. The event proved so popular that the Third Republic decided to turn it into an official celebration. Yet then, as now, the problems started with that nastiness at the Bastille, with conservatives instead preferring a commemoration of the more peaceful Fête de la Fédération. Falling on 14 July 1790, it was a suitably wholesome celebration of Republican virtue, and safely free of lynching too.
In the end, of course, the conservatives lost the debate. From 1880, the anniversary of the Bastille’s fall has been a national holiday. And, in a sense, the violence it recalls is appropriate, given the festival was partly encouraged to promote national unity after the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War. Yet, as the yearly chatter around grandes vacances implies, the French have often been unsure about what 14 July is really commemorating and why. Is it about the institution of the Republic? The French nation more generally? Or is it simply about bloody insurrection, one that famously freed only a handful of prisoners? Notably, there has always been a small but vocal fringe Royalist faction that believes the French Revolution was a mistake and that “Bastille Day” is simply the grubby glorification of proletarian violence.
Interestingly, though, this is not the position of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, which has always proudly embraced 14 July — albeit with rising warnings of anti-Republican “barbarism” in the banlieues. And no wonder: the most shocking recent example of anti-French violence came on 14 July 2016, when a Tunisian terrorist ploughed a 19-tonne cargo truck into the holiday crowds at Nice, killing 86 people.
Recent criticism of the holiday has come from the Left. Some have argued that the displays of military might are crassly jingoistic in an age of European unity, even as invitations to Algeria and Morocco cause a degree of post-colonial angst. These controversies have been compounded by absurd exhortations by well-meaning Leftist for Muslims to “pray for France” — on a day, let’s not forget, that commemorates the refounding of France as a strictly secular state.
There has always been an ambivalence in France’s Muslim Community — the largest in Europe — towards Le Quatorze. Hardliners insist that Islam forbids celebrating festivals belonging to non-Muslims, or “miscreants”. There have also been well-intended gestures from moderates such as the Union des Mosquées de France (UMF) who regularly appeal to Muslims to join in with “the spirit of fraternity” in the interests of national unity. The truth is however, that most Muslims of varying shades of piety think that Le Quatorze Juillet has nothing to do with them.
“There has always been an ambivalence in France’s Muslim Community.”
Most significantly, today’s celebrations have come under attack from Left-wing historians, with Patrick Boucheron, a medieval historian at the Collège de France, leading the charge. Boucheron is not only an academic but a media figure in France, regularly appearing on television to expound against French exceptionalism, the idea of the “Great Nation” with a duty to show the world how to live.
Instead, Boucheron argues that French history is merely a component part of what he calls “global history” — the complicated matrix of geography, geopolitics, and colonialism which have together shaped the present. His opponents accuse him of being “anti-French”, using dubious Anglo-American ideas to rewrite French history in favour of diversity. This was a talking point during the opening ceremony of last year’s Olympic Games in Paris, partly scripted by Boucheron, and which depicted the French Revolution, and especially Marie Antoinette, in an irreverent way (the unfortunate queen was shown holding her head in hands, singing a revolutionary anthem). There was also, most provocatively, no mention of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. “The Revolution was violence,” said Boucheron in his defence. “We have to show how it was. We should not exalt it.”
It’s clear, then, that 14 July has lately morphed not just into a debate about history, or even the legacy of the past on the present. Rather, it has become a proxy for a far broader dispute — about what France is. For their part, Boucheron’s enemies accuse him of being part of a globalised intellectual élite, one which loathes France and its people. Typical here is Loris Chavanette, a specialist of the Revolution. In the pages of Marianne, a Leftist publication sceptical of liberal handwringing, Chavanette argued that Boucheron and his friends helped prod France towards “cultural and moral decadence”. Ignorance of 14 July, he added, “is the symptom of the fracturing of our national bonds”.
Yet for all their diffidence towards the holiday, and even if their own historical knowledge is blurred and unsure, most ordinary French people would probably side with Chavanette and not Boucheron. Though attitudes towards the 14 July are indeed a clear marker of how “fractured” France is these days, whether they think they are celebrating the patrie or the Republic most people still need to feel, even in some vague way, French. At the same time, a recent IFOP poll found that some 63% of French people, although in favour of Le Quatorze Juillet, were unsure of the meaning of the term Republic these days.
And besides, whatever the controversies that surround it, the fact is that the storming of the Bastille is not merely one of the most important moments in the story of France — it’s also a key moment in world history. It’s a totem, still alive in many political cultures across the world, not just Marxist but socialist and liberal too. Despite the apparent cultivated indifference of the French, it is also impossible to imagine France without Le Quatorze Juillet, a sentiment endorsed not only by the French at home but also homesick French expatriates who celebrate it in South Kensington, and other international French enclaves, as fervently as they do in Paris. Just whatever you do, don’t call it “Bastille Day”.
