Dear Speech Repository Users,
The 14th of July is the French National Day! Although it is known as Bastille Day in English-speaking countries, in France it is formally known as La Fête Nationale, and commonly as le quatorze juillet. The French National Day is marked with parades, parties, fireworks and singing La Marseillaise, the French national anthem.
Le quatorze juillet commemorates the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789. On this day, more than 200 years ago, revolutionaries stormed the notorious Bastille prison, which had become a symbol of royal oppression in Paris.
Taken from the French word bastide, meaning fortress, Bastille was constructed in the 1300s to defend the eastern wall of Paris during the Hundred Years’ War. It had been used to house political prisoners and had long been a symbol of royal tyranny. Cardinal Richelieu, acting for King Louis XIII, imprisoned enemies of the king with a secret warrant. The prisoners were not given a trial, nor informed of the charges, but simply held in secret. If they were released, they were instructed not to reveal anything they had seen or experienced inside the prison. This was long before the reign of Louis XVI, but the aura of secrecy and terror made it a focus of the Parisian mob’s anger in 1789.
Did you know that:
- there were only seven prisoners in the Bastille on 14 July 1789?
The seven prisoners in the Bastille included four forgers, an Irish “lunatic”, a deviant young aristocrat imprisoned at the behest of his family, and a man who once conspired to kill King Louis XV, all of whom were freed by the rioting mob searching for weapons and gunpowder.
- the popular tricolour flag comes from cockades worn by the revolutionaries?
The Paris militia wore the national colours, blue and red, pinned on a white cockade, thus creating the original tricolour cockade, which later became a part of the National Guard uniform.
- the political labels of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ originated during the French Revolution?
When the French National Assembly met to draft a constitution, the delegates sat according to how much authority they thought the King Louis XVI should get with the new political regime. Those who sat on the right, the conservative supporters, wanted to give the king more powers while those who sat to his left, the anti-royalist revolutionaries, preferred to tightly restrict the king’s restricted powers.
We encourage you to check out our wide collection of French speeches to commemorate this day.
Happy practising!