French National Day Celebrations

French National Day, July 14, commemorates the 1789 storming of the Bastille and, in its modern form, also draws on the 1790 Fete de la Federation; it became the official national holiday in 1880. The centerpiece is a large military parade along the Champs-Elysees in Paris, while towns nationwide mark the day with fireworks and community fire-station balls, giving the holiday both a formal capital ceremony and an informal, countrywide celebratory character.

French National Day, observed each July 14 and commonly known internationally as Bastille Day, commemorates the storming of the Bastille prison in 1789, an event that became the symbolic opening act of the French Revolution, though the holiday's specific modern form also draws on the Fete de la Federation held exactly one year later, on July 14, 1790, a mass celebration of national unity staged on the Champ de Mars in Paris that some historians consider the more direct ancestor of today's official commemoration.