July 14: The History of France’s National Holiday

Historical Anniversary · France’s National Holiday

In short: the French 14th of July actually commemorates two distinct events: the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and the Festival of the Federation in 1790. The law making it a national holiday wasn’t passed until 1880, under the Third Republic, championed by Léon Gambetta.

By Alejandro Noguera Borel, Director of Museo L’Iber.

Every 14 July, France turns blue, white, and red. A military parade down the Champs-Élysées, an aerobatic flypast, street banquets, and fireworks that last until dawn. Few celebrations carry as much symbolic weight as France’s national holiday. Yet few hide a history as complex and disputed as the simplified story usually told. In fact, two distinct revolutions share this same date.

The Storming of the Bastille: the violent root of France’s national holiday (14 July 1789)

On 12 July 1789, Camille Desmoulins called on Parisians to take up arms. On the morning of the 14th, several thousand rioters first stormed Les Invalides, seizing muskets and cannons. Across town, the Bastille was the state prison that pamphleteers denounced as a symbol of royal arbitrariness. However, it was not stormed by a spontaneously mobilized population. A group of agitators had planned the operation in advance: the episode was orchestrated. Even so, it immediately took on a political meaning and a symbolic weight that overwhelmed its origins.

From the fortress, they freed seven prisoners, presented as victims of absolutism. Specifically, they were four forgers, two men considered insane, and one libertine committed at his own family’s request. The rioters marched governor Launay, who had surrendered, to the Hôtel de Ville. There they killed him along with Jacques de Flesselles, provost of the merchants. Afterwards, they dismembered the bodies and paraded the heads on pikes. Eighty-three attackers died in the assault: the Revolution’s first blood.

Louis XVI’s diary entry for that same day is famous: «14 juillet: rien» (“14 July: nothing”). It is often cited as proof of his indifference. In fact, that “nothing” referred to his hunting log, empty because he had not hunted that day. The king was not immediately aware of what had happened at the Bastille. Hence the exchange —whether genuine or apocryphal— attributed to him once informed: “Is it a revolt?” “No, Sire, it is a Revolution.” Horrified by the account of Launay’s and Flesselles’ deaths, Louis XVI was reinforced in his refusal to shed blood. That disposition would shape his conduct throughout the Revolution.

Is the Bastille the point of no return?

Historians themselves debate whether the Bastille truly marks the point of no return. Three other dates in 1789 compete for that honour. On 20 June, the deputies of the Third Estate gathered at the Jeu de Paume in Versailles. There they swore not to disband until they had given France a Constitution. The institutions of the Ancien Régime had already become obsolete. On 4 August, the customary-law socio-territorial order underpinning that Ancien Régime was dismantled, in what is loosely called «the abolition of privileges». On 5 and 6 October, the crowd brought the royal family to Paris, and the king became a prisoner of the Parisian revolution. These three dates mark, just as much, the end of a world.

Even so, the Bastille concentrated, more than any other episode, the symbolic weight of that transition. It was not, however, the only threshold.

The Festival of the Federation: the other origin of France’s national holiday (14 July 1790)

A year later, and deliberately on the same date, revolutionary France staged the calm counterpoint to that outburst. Around 300,000 delegates from across France, known as the «federates», gathered on the Champ de Mars. All of them were celebrating the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Minister Talleyrand celebrated Mass at the central altar. Lafayette, commanding the National Guard, swore loyalty to the nation, the law, and the king. Louis XVI himself pledged to respect the Constitution amid the crowd’s applause. In its organisers’ intention, it was an act of reconciliation between monarchy and revolution. Its tone was therefore radically different from the violence of the year before.

1880: the law that made 14 July France’s national holiday

To understand why this date was chosen, we must go back to 1871. After the collapse of the Second Empire and the defeat by Prussia, a caretaker regime was installed. A royalist majority, elected by universal suffrage, sustained that regime. It was designed to prepare the restoration of the monarchy. However, that restoration never happened, due to the split between Legitimists and Orléanists. Nor did it happen because of the refusal of the Comte de Chambord, the senior Bourbon claimant. Chambord refused to compromise with the principles born of the Revolution.

From Saint-Napoléon to the republican project

In the absence of a king, a conservative Republic took hold. Some called it «the Republic of the dukes» (Mac-Mahon, Broglie…). In 1876, committed republicans won a majority in the Assembly. A year later, in 1877, they forced conservative president Mac-Mahon to submit, accepting the primacy of the legislature over the executive. In 1879 the Senate passed into republican hands and Mac-Mahon resigned. «The Republic of the Jules» then began (Jules Simon, Jules Grévy, Jules Ferry): the Republic of the republicans.

Under the Second Empire, France celebrated the Saint-Napoléon on 15 August, the feast of the Assumption. This was a major Marian feast, reinforced in 1854 by Pope Pius IX’s proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Thus 15 August was France’s national holiday under Napoleon III. On coming to power in 1879, the republicans wanted to establish a national holiday in keeping with their own political project. Their symbolic goal was to republicanise France and loosen the Church’s influence over it.

Gambetta and the 1880 law

Since 1872, the republican party had been organising private commemorations every 14 July. That same year, Léon Gambetta gave a speech in La Ferté-sous-Jouarre. In it, he already extolled the memory of the storming of the Bastille. He declared that the people of Paris had not risen up «to tear down a Bastille of stone, but to destroy the true Bastille: the Middle Ages, despotism, oligarchy, royalty».

The law enacted on 6 July 1880 —known as the Raspail law— declares that «the Republic adopts 14 July as its annual national holiday». In truth, choosing this date simply ratified an earlier practice of the republican party. Indeed, it played on the double meaning of 14 July. On one hand, radicals commemorated the storming of the Bastille, on 14 July 1789. On the other, moderates —wary of revolutionary violence— preferred to recall the Festival of the Federation, on 14 July 1790. This is how France’s national holiday, as we know it today, was formally born.

Consensus did not come immediately. Neither the conservatives, who had only accepted the Republic by default, nor the Catholics were willing to commemorate a revolutionary event. The latter felt wounded by the government’s anticlericalism, which would remain the glue of the republican party until 1914. Until the Great War, 14 July stayed ideologically charged, much like Jules Ferry’s secular school. It was a republican symbol: left-wing, anticlerical, and patriotic in the sense of the volunteers of Year II. Little by little, however, it turned into a popular festival, with its dances and paper lanterns.

A century of parades: from 1919 to today

On 14 July 1919, the victorious French army paraded behind Joffre and Foch, with detachments from every victorious nation. The two Frances were thus reconciled on a 14 July whose meaning was more military and national than political. Politics returned on 14 July 1935, with the political-union parade of the left-wing organisations. This was the prelude to the unified parade of 1936, which linked the Popular Front to the movement of 1789. On 14 July 1945, it once again became a victory parade. These commemorations cemented the military character that still marks France’s national holiday today.

Apart from 1989 and the Bicentennial parade staged by advertising director Jean-Paul Goude, the national holiday has drifted away from its original source. Today it is, above all, a military celebration cherished by the wider public. It is also a popular festival, with its fireworks and its bals des pompiers, the traditional firefighters’ balls. It further remains a small political event for connoisseurs of petites phrases, in the years when the head of state addresses the nation on television. Budget cuts, meanwhile, have buried the Élysée garden party. That hybrid tradition managed to be, at once, republican —any citizen could, in principle, walk its gardens— and almost monarchical, since attending required an invitation «from the Palace». That is how, in a little over a century, France’s national holiday has evolved.

Liberty, equality, fraternity: a French idea’s journey around the world

The Revolution did not just tear down institutions. It also formulated a language of rights that still shapes much of world politics today, far beyond France’s national holiday that commemorates it every year. The National Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen on 26 August 1789. In particular, this declaration proclaimed national sovereignty, equality before the law, and liberty as natural rights of the individual.

The motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, popularised during the Revolution itself, would be fixed as the Republic’s constitutional motto in 1958.

Its influence spread far beyond France’s borders. Throughout the 19th century, it served, directly or indirectly, as a model for numerous European and Latin American constitutions. In Haiti, those same universal principles fuelled the process that culminated in 1804. That year saw the birth of the first free Black republic in the New World. Yet that promise coexisted with a contradiction: France proclaimed the equality of all men while upholding slavery in its colonies. By the 20th century, the 1789 Declaration stood among the direct founding texts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United Nations adopted it in 1948, with the decisive involvement of French jurist René Cassin. Cassin would later receive the 1968 Nobel Peace Prize.

The echo of the revolutionary motto still reaches the politics of other countries today. It appears, for example, in the historic platform of the Danish social democrats («Frihed, lighed og broderskab»). It also features in the preamble of the British Liberal Democrats, who invoke liberty, equality, and community as founding values.

Light and shadow in the revolutionary legacy

This journey should not be idealised. The republican universalism born in 1789 coexisted, from the outset, with colonial, social, and gender contradictions that historians still debate. Moreover, its later spread owed as much to the persuasive power of its ideas as to the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, which carried them, often by force, well beyond France. It is worth remembering this every 14 July, when France’s national holiday is celebrated.

From the Champ de Mars to the Museo L’Iber display cases: the sans-culottes of France’s national holiday

Most of those who stormed the Bastille and later filled the Champ de Mars were not soldiers of a regular army. They were, above all, sans-culottes. The name —literally “without knee-breeches”— refers to a question of dress rather than weapons. The nobility and the upper bourgeoisie wore culottes, tight knee-length breeches. Artisans, small tradesmen, workers, and day-labourers of the Third Estate, by contrast, wore long trousers, more practical for manual work. Other distinctive items completed the look: the carmagnole, a short jacket of Provençal origin; the red Phrygian cap, soon renamed the «cap of liberty»; and the sabots, the characteristic wooden clogs.

The sans-culottes came from the urban working classes hit hardest by the economic and subsistence crisis that had gripped France since 1788. Between 1792 and 1794, they became the driving force pushing the Revolution towards ever more radical positions. As a result, they pressured the Convention, fuelled the Terror, and, through local sections and popular clubs, acted as a power parallel to the official institutions.

In Room 10 of the Museo L’Iber, devoted to the Napoleonic era, display case 92 holds a small marching column of sans-culottes. Indeed, the scene captures that spirit well: a standard-bearer carries the tricolour flag, a drummer sets the pace, and several volunteers march armed with muskets. There is also a cantinière with a barrel at her side, and even a dog with a tricolour cockade around its neck, running between the soldiers’ legs. It is a picturesque touch often found in figures of this kind.

The Compte workshop: three generations of craftsmen

These are 120 mm semi-flat figures, made entirely by Compte, one of Spain’s most established toy-soldier firms, in continuous operation since the 1960s. Notably, its founder, José Luis Gutiérrez Compte, discovered his passion for military miniatures in 1926, at just seven years old. It happened during a sea voyage between Mataró and Seville, as he arranged the formation of some lead soldiers he kept in a box. That early passion, warmly received by those who knew of it, marked the start of a lifetime devoted to collecting. After his death, his son José Gutiérrez Solana took over the workshop in 1969. In 2001, the Madrid City Council and its Chamber of Commerce recognised him as a Traditional Craftsman of Madrid.

This piece was not made by Chauve: the firm merely marketed it. Chauve was the trade name used by the Valencian miniaturist and dealer Vicente Juliá. His output gained international recognition: the specialist British magazine Toy Soldier & Model Figure devoted a feature to him in issue 22, February-March 1999. In post-war Spain, Chauve often acted as a sales channel for craft workshops such as that of the Gutiérrez Compte family. At the time, small toy-soldier makers frequently shared the same commercial network.