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Le Quatorze Juillet Posted July 14, 2009 @ 8:19 am In Fourteen,Numbers,Twelve | No Comments Le quatorze juillet or “the 14th of July” is France’s national holiday. It commemorates the start of the French Revolution [1] by the storming of the Bastille Prison [2] in 1789 by the people seeking arms and ammunition to defend the newly created legislative assembly, the National Constituent Assembly [3]. |
"[Laurent] Jalabert's victory, the first by a Frenchman on July 14 since he won in 1995, capped a remarkable week for the French. French riders have won three of the first seven stages, a French team won the team time trial and a rider for a French team wears the yellow jersey.
"All 51 French riders in the Tour knew what it meant to win on the Quatorze Juillet, but only Jalabert knows what it means to win on this day twice."
—Samuel Abt, "Winner on Bastille Day Is From the Right Country," The New York Times, July 15, 2001.
"But Britain has no such holidays. This is part of a larger national weakness: we are not good at public ceremonial, as anyone who compares an English town hall wedding with a French one, or an American graduation day with its British counterpart, is likely to admit. If Britain does have an answer to the States' Fourth of July or France's quatorze juillet, it is Guy Fawkes' Day, another of those old quasi-religious, quasi-national holidays, this time marking the day in 1605 that the papist Guy Fawkes was foiled in his attempt to blow up parliament."
—unsigned editorial, "A sober nation Bonfire night is all we have to celebrate," The Guardian (UK), November 3, 2001.
"And what of Bastille Day? Oui or non? For starters, the French don't call it that but Le Quatorze Juillet (14th of July), and our sample of French men and women in Melbourne were lukewarm about it. 'I never really celebrated this specific date,' Reymond says. 'There is more fuss about it here than there is in France.'
"In France it's mainly celebrated in Paris, where there is a military parade, so it has always been avoided by Schober because of its nationalistic, militaristic associations. Brock has vague memories of informal parties in Paris but in Melbourne she's rarely done anything to mark the occasion."
—Patricia Maunder, "Deux amours," The Age (Australia), July 12, 2007.
"L'absence d'interview télévisée du 14-Juillet n'a pas empêché Nicolas Sarkozy d'être omniprésent à l'occasion de la Fête nationale, en personne ou par l'intermédiaire de ses proches."
—Elizabeth Pineau, "Nicolas Sarkozy omniprésent, mais à distance, pour le 14-Juillet," Le Monde, July 14, 2009.
"In New York, they shut down a whole street on the Upper East Side. The French quarters in San Francisco and New Orleans go bananas on 'la (sic) quatorze juillet.' In Philadelphia, they re-enact the storming of the Bastille and have an actress dressed as Marie Antoinette pelt the Parisian militia with pastries. In Milwaukee—Milwaukee!—they have a four-day festival.
"And, in Boston? Here, on Tuesday night, they had a loud party at the Liberty Hotel that was mostly full of...Americans. The Bastille was a jail and the Liberty Hotel used to be a jail. And Liberty is the first of the three pillars of the French Republic: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. So all the symbolism was nice. But, at the end of the day, it was a party in a ritzy hotel, with a DJ and balloons and $11 glasses of wine."
—Kevin Cullen, "More Puritan than Parisian," The Boston Globe, July 16, 2009.
Le 14-juillet, Bastille Day
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URLs in this post:
[1] French Revolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
[2] storming of the Bastille Prison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storming_of_the_Bastille
[3] National Constituent Assembly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Constituent_Assembly
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