Bastille Day, 2026 -- July 14, 2026

bbc.com

It was not a happy Bastille Day for the French.

Bastille Day, 2024 -- July 14, 2024

San Francisco Call, 14-July-1897

Happy Bastille Day, everyone. In 1897, the Chutes, an amusement park, celebrated the holiday. "2 P.M. Literary Exercises. Mayor James D Phelan addressed the crowd. "Fireworks and Grand Ball at Night," all for 25 cents. Sounds like a good deal. 

celebratebastilledaysf.org

This year's celebration does not appear to include Literary Exercises. 

Bastille Day, 2023 -- July 14, 2023

San Francisco Call, 12-July-1898

Happy Bastille Day, everyone. 125 years ago in San Francisco, the Chutes, an amusement park, was celebrating the holiday with a benefit for the Red Cross Society. Swiss Henri Maurice Cannon. "The Fattest of the Fat," claimed to weigh 613 pounds. 

A 2023 celebration in San Francisco. 

Bastille Day, 2022 -- July 14, 2022

Philadelphia Times, 14-July-1922

Happy Bastille Day, everyone. Bucket baptism sounds interesting. 

Bastille Day, 2021 -- July 14, 2021

San Francisco Call, 14-July-1896

Happy Bastille Day, everyone. 125 years ago in San Francisco, the Chutes, an amusement park, and Sutro Baths were celebrating the holiday. The vaudeville bill at the Orpheum Theater included Fred McCart's Dog, Money and Baboon Circus.

quoteslove.xyz

"No dictator, no invader, can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand."
- J. Michael Straczynski

Happy Bastille Day, 2020 -- July 14, 2020

Washington Evening Star, 14-July-1920

Happy Bastille Day, everyone.  Uncle Sam deploys the tricolor to recognize the closer relationship between France and the United States.

Happy Bastille Day, 2019 -- July 14, 2019

Memphis News-Scimitar, 14-July-1919

On Bastille Day in 1919, the French and their allies celebrated with a huge victory parade.  

TRIUMPHAL MARCH OF ALLIES

IN PARIS AROUSES CHEERS

PARIS, July 14. (By the Associated Press.) -- The triumphal march of allied and American troops through Paris began at 8 o'clock this morning. The weather was brilliant, being more like October than midsummer.

A thousand wounded soldiers with crutches or in wheel chairs and clad, for the most part, in civilian clothes, led the parade, being preceded by a drum corps.

Guns began firing at minute Intervals as President Poincare placed a wreath at the foot of the Cenotaph at the Arc de Triomphe this morning. The empty casket, placed there in memory of the allied dead, was also decorated by other wreaths, these being placed by Premier Clemenceau, a French soldier, a French sailor, an Alsatian girl, a girl from Lorraine and Col. Edmund Gros. This last wreath was in memory of 72 members of the Lafayette escadrille who lost their lives during the war.

Marshal Joffre, the victor of the first battle of the Marne, passed under the Arc de Triomphe at 8:45 o'clock. He rode alone. Behind him came Marshal Foch, the commander-in-chief of the allied forces during the final campaign of the conflict. A storm of applause arose from the vast throng as the two marshals passed the president's stand and moved down the brilliant avenue.

Gen. Pershing, with a number of American generals, came next in line and was received with equal enthusiasm. Forty American organizations, soldiers and marines, marching with wonderful precision, were greeted by a sea of waving handkerchiefs and flags and with deafening cheers. During the parade this morning the roof of a house on the Boulevard St. Martin collapsed. Eighteen persons were injured.

Washington Evening Star, 14-July-1919

Happy Bastille Day, 2017 -- July 14, 2017

Washington Times, 14-July-1918

Happy Bastille Day, everyone. The US and France march towards victory.

Happy Bastille Day, 2016 -- July 14, 2016

New York Tribune, 14-July-1918

Happy Bastille Day, everyone.  Marianne leads France to victory over the invaders. 

Heureux Jour de Bastille 2015 -- July 14, 2015

New York Tribune, 14-July-1915

Happy Bastille Day, everyone.  This editorial is from the 14-July-1915 New York Tribune.  I guess their stylebook spelled "Bastille" as "Bastile." 

On Bastile Day.

For many millions of men and women removed from the battle lines of the present conflict the national holiday of France will this year seem the most splendid in French history since the day on which the people of the Old Monarchy appeared at the gates of the Bastile and battered in that breach in the walls of tyranny which has never been closed.

In our own day there has come to France for the third time in her wonderful history the duty to defend civilization against the inroads of destructive barbarism. As she supplied at once the battleground and the resistance in the repulse of the Saracens at Poitiers, of the Huns in the Plain of Chalons, hard by the fields where the World War is still raging, France in last August and September bore the burden of one more assault upon the whole structure of our own culture and civilization.

In the confused and disproportionate bulletin of the early days of the war we, like the English, failed to grasp the magnitude of French effort, the stupendous character of the conflict which was fought along the Marne. To Belgian heroism, to British participation, we assigned importance far beyond the reality, A little shamefacedly, but with full and frank acknowledgment, the British press and public men are now making their amends.

For in that great opening act of the war it was France and France alone that bore the burden. Belgian resistance crumpled in a few brief days. The something less than a hundred thousand British troops who shared in the campaign from the Sambre to the Marne were but a chip on the wave of German invasion. It was France, rising from defeat, from the depression stretching back to Sedan and Gravolotte, who met the whole flood, stemmed it, rolled it back, settled the issue of the war in the opening days, assured to Europe the endurance of that democracy which the French Revolution brought to the Continent, to mankind.

Even at this near date there is small reason to question that in all future time the Battle of the Marne will take its place with that of Marathon in human history. A barbarism that was rolled back In the remoter struggle aimed at the destruction of the Hellenic beginnings, which are the foundation of all we know and reverence and live by. For all who believe in democracy, in liberty, equality, the right of men to live their own lives, of nations and races to follow their own ideals and their own culture, for all who believe in the gospel of "sweetness and light" and repulse the doctrine of "terribleness," and the idea of the "Superman," the theory of a right to rule vested in a chosen race and a superior people, the Battle of the Marne was an authentic sign of deliverance.

And for that we have France to thank. Upon her, unready as democratic states must always be, fell the full fury of more than 2,000,000 men, equipped with all the weapons, provided with all the utensils, furnished with all the requisites that the supreme genius of a nation whose gift for organization and capacity for concentration upon its purpose have never been equaled could supply. To meet this storm France had little more than half as many soldiers; she lacked the equipment, the preparation, the whole armory of warfare possessed by her tremendous foe.

Yet through opening defeat, in the hours when the thunder of German artillery shook the hills of Paris, when French cities were in flame and new hordes of flying peasants and terror-stricken women and children filled all the roads leading from the north, France never trembled, never lost courage, never for a single moment thought to desert the cause for which every Frenchman felt himself fighting, the cause of which his ancestors had fought against the Saracen and the Hun, the fight which France made against Europe for her own gospel of democracy in the days of the Revolution and won, not for herself but for mankind.

And at the Marne the issue of the war was decided. Years may yet pass before Germany is conquered. She may never be beaten to her knees. She may come from the struggle without the loss of a province, as France emerged from the Revolution intact. But German domination of Europe was a dream impossible of realization when Von Kluck and Von Bulow led beaten masses back across the Marne and through the hills of Champagne. The victory of ideas was assured, the triumph, the persistence of the ideas which are American as well us French and British was no longer in doubt when the French troops from Paris to the gates of Nancy leaped forward to the charge and to the advance in the early days of September.

Nearly a year has passed since those terrible days and it is still France who is holding the line. Russia has advanced and retreated. England has still fallen far short of her share in the world struggle. Early hopes of speedy victory have faded. But from Switzerland to Flanders the French line has held all that it won in the Battle of the Marne and added thereto new fields, new hectares of the fatherland, won back at the cost of incredible effort and sacrifice.

And in all this terrible time, when more then a million and a half of Frenchmen have gone to death, foreign prison or the hospital, there has come from the French people not a murmur. There is about the silence of forty million! something more impressive, more terrible than all the thunders of protests that come from other nations. It is as if a whole race had with complete unity of mind recognized that its final hour had come; that the issue joined was one of life or death, and in that realization had gone forth to battle, not boastfully, not animated by overconfidence or unwarranted optimism, but with the complete foreknowledge that only victorious could they, could France, survive.

All this means more to us in America more than we have yet seen, than we shall realize for years to come. Alone of all the nations at war France is a democracy in the full sense in which we are. Her armies are armies ruled by her citizens, officered by her sons without regard to rank in social scheme. Her equality is our equality, her ideals are our ideals. Her revolution and ours have permeated and penetrated the whole structure of our respective national lives. The dreams of world peace, disarmament, arbitration which we have cherished and sought to champion France has hailed and served, her very weakness last August was due to the fact that her statesmen and her citizens, like our own, had listened too willingly to the voice of those who would have them believe possible what Franco longed to see accomplished.

If France had failed the German idea would not necessarily have conquered the world permanently. To believe this is to believe that all that centuries have won can be lost in an hour and that mankind does not advance through all the ages. But it would have meant that all over the world, in America as in Europe, all men of all races would have had to send their sons to the barracks, civilization would temporarily have had to give the soldier first place. We should not have been able to live according to the will of our race, hut according to the necessities imposed from without.

But France did not fail. Rather she won not her fight alone, but our fight. She saved the democracy she had bestowed upon Europe. She held the line of our civilization against the magnificent but destructive barbarism of the German idea. She not only held the line, but she threw the invader back. After the Battle of the Marne the Teutonic dream of world power was as completely shattered as that of Napoleon was destroyed at Leipsic. Had France done no more, had she died in doing it, her service would have been out of proportion to her responsibility. Hut she did more; she is doing more now. Alone of the foes of Germany she is to-day at the height of her task.

Happily on this, Bastile Day, the whole world is beginning to appreciate the magnitude of French service. Indeed, nowhere more frankly than in German ranks does French courage, devotion, efficiency find just appraisal. And in America, for our ancien ally, who gave her sons and her treasure that our Revolution might succeed can there be anything but homage and admiration for the nation which is once more fighting, and fighting for what millions of us believe is the cause of mankind, for liberty, for the ideas and the ideal which we hold are our own quite as much as they are French?

Heureux Jour de Bastille 2014 -- July 14, 2014

Here is the cover of the 27-July-1989 Paris Match, celebrating the bicentennial of Bastille Day.
This year we celebrate the 225th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and the start of the French Revolution. 

Happy Bastille Day #4 -- July 14, 2013

The Chutes was a popular San Francisco amusement park. In 1902 the park was located at 10th Avenue and Fulton Street.  The Chutes celebrated Bastille Day, 1902 with literary exercises, a concert, fireworks and a grand ball.  Mayor Eugene Schmitz, who later resigned in disgrace, gave an oration in English. 

Happy Bastille Day #3 -- July 14, 2012

In honor of Bastille Day, here is my favorite French actor/singer, Maurice Chevalier, with Jeanette MacDonald in a poster for One Hour With You, directed by Ernst Lubitsch. They made several enjoyable movies together. I have always been fond of the Marx Brothers' routine in Monkey Business when they all tried to pose as Maurice Chevalier. I wanted to be Maurice Chevalier when I grew up.

Happy Bastille Day #2 -- July 14, 2011

In honor of Bastille Day, here is my favorite French actor/singer, Maurice Chevalier, with Jeanette MacDonald in Love Me Tonight. They made several enjoyable movies together. I have always been fond of the Marx Brothers' routine in Monkey Business when they all tried to pose as Maurice Chevalier. I wanted to be Maurice Chevalier when I grew up.

Happy Bastille Day #1 -- July 14, 2010

The City of Paris Dry Goods Company, founded by the Verdier family, was a major department store in San Francisco. I was sad when the store closed in 1970 and sadder in 1980, when Neiman Marcus tore down the store, saving the rotunda but moving it to the corner.