Face-off: The Fourth of July vs. Bastille Day
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to celebrate themselves, barbecues and fireworks happen. Ten days after we have our barbecues and fireworks, France remembers the siege of the Bastille and honors itself in a similar way. Both holidays commemorate violent revolutions and preach resistance to tyranny. And both, beyond the food, the drinks, and the explosions, have played pivotal roles in constructing their nations’ identities.
Thursday, July 4, 1776, was a surprisingly dull day in Philadelphia. The weather, recorded by Thomas Jefferson, was 76 degrees and calm. The Continental Congress quietly approved various resolutions. Among the items they rubber-stamped was the final wording of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. This was an overlooked milestone; Congress had elected to sever ties with England two days before. Most considered that earlier vote to be the historic moment. “The second day of July,” John Adams assured his wife Abigail, “will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America.”
Thirteen Julys later, a much more exciting day passed in Paris. Thousands of hungry citizens and mutinous conscripts launched a revolution that would last two decades and transform all of Europe. The defining event was the fall of the Bastille prison, home to just seven prisoners but also 30,000 pounds of gunpowder. The foreboding fourteenth-century fortress had come to symbolize the secrecy, intransigence, and tyranny of Louis XVI’s absolute monarchy. Its fall marked the first birth pangs of a new order.
Struggling to build new identities, both France and the United States needed founding holidays. But Bastille Day and the Fourth of July took off in very different directions during their nations’ infancies.
The French Revolution quickly tamed the spirit of that wild July in 1789. In the months after the prison’s surrender (and it was just that; the rebels never stormed the fortress), an industry arose to make money from the event. The Bastille’s stones were sold as souvenirs throughout Europe and America; the chains from its notorious dungeons were refashioned as commemorative inkwells. Families paid to tour the prison’s caverns, and the machinery of its printing press was disguised as a monarchic “torture device.”
By the first anniversary of the Bastille’s fall, revolutionary mobs were passé. On July 14, 1790, the republic celebrated the Fête de la Federation, a holiday trumpeting the unity of the nation, not its insurrections. Thousands of provincial French soldiers toured the capital. The day was best described by a French senator a century later, who declared: “Do not forget that after the day of 14 July 1789, there was the day of 14 July 1790. This day cannot be blamed for having shed a drop of blood, for having divided the country.” When contemporary France celebrates July 14, it is really that short-lived victory of federalism that is memorialized.
France pacified the Bastille’s memory, but the Revolution faltered. In 1793 the Declaration of the Rights of Man, that groundbreaking document produced a month after the Bastille’s fall, was stripped of its clause supporting “resistance to oppression.” Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise meant a neutering of revolutionary fervor. Instead of displaying the “torture devices” of the ancien régime, Napoleon marked July 14 with a gigantic plaster elephant that sprayed water from its trunk. With the restoration of the French monarchy, Bastille Day was further weakened, and it was never officially celebrated between 1815 and 1870.
While contrary forces starved France’s July holiday—along with its Revolutionary spirit—the unassuming Fourth gained surprising weight. In the early years of warfare it was quietly marked with a double ration of rum for America’s beleaguered troops, but soon it took on a more political meaning, coming to be celebrated as the essential Revolutionary holiday. It came to represent the whole Revolution, overwhelming such milestones as the Battle of Lexington and the British surrender. Even today Americans are far more familiar with the events of 1776 than with those of 1783.
The Fourth of July’s becoming a truly political holiday was helped along by a series of amazing coincidences. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration penned by one and edited by the other. James Monroe died on Independence Day 1831. In addition to these chance reminders, major political events were timed to the anniversary. New York State, the only original colony that abstained from endorsing independence in July 1776, atoned by abolishing slavery on July 4, 1827.
In nineteenth-century America Independence day was a much more political holiday than today. It of course had barbecues, fireworks, and plenty of hard cider, but it also was marked by fiery political speeches. Fourth of July orations addressed the hot topics of the day. In an increasingly democratized and divided nation, split by conflicts over expansion, enslavement, and employment, the holiday became divided as well. July 1834 saw six separate and highly partisan celebrations in Boston alone.
Independence Day was most torn over the issue of slavery. Abolitionists recited every word of the Declaration at large Northern rallies. Frederick Douglass went further, pointedly asking, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July. . . . To him, your celebration is a sham . . . your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery . . . a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” Memorializing the nation’s independence meant facing its monumental shortcomings.
But not everyone saw it that way. Racist riots occurred in towns in the South and West. Though slaves were given a rare day off, most free blacks spent the holiday inside, hiding or deliberately shunning the empty celebration. Proslavery orators reminded Southern crowds as they marked the proud occasion of declaring independence that the same could be done again. One July 4 speaker in Norfolk, Virginia, simply stated: “It is a question whether the South have at this day any independence to boast of.” In the years before America descended into fratricidal war, both sides tried to claim rights to the nation’s birth certificate.
After the Civil War, Americans felt compelled to ignore the Declaration’s focus on rebellion. The centennial celebrations of 1876 instead stressed a hard-won national consensus, and paid more attention to the Constitution. This reflected a tension as old as the federal government itself—between the insurrectionsist rights of the Declaration and the unifying rules of the Constitution. The two founding texts played off each other, their friction enlivening public debate. The spoilers of the French Revolution had resolved a similar conflict between revolt and stability, dragging down Bastille Day’s heady uprising with the stable union of the Fête de la Federation. Bastille Day made no hard promises in the nineteenth century.
The Declaration of Independence is nothing but hard promises. Its lofty language requires constant striving. When the aging Benjamin Franklin helped to edit 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson’s first draft in 1776, he added the phrase “self-evident” to the discussion of fundamental truths. Yet the proper use of the Declaration has never been evident; it lends itself to many causes and interpretations.
Bastille Day was hijacked first by entrepreneurs and then by those who favored the Revolution’s supposed unity over its original values. This is not to belittle the importance of tearing down the great prison; that historic moment has persisted in French memory through five republics. The Fourth of July, on the other hand, has stayed with us not only as a reminder of past glory but as an ever-present force driving America in the pursuit of happiness.