Bastille Day

Yesterday I went to the Philadelphia French conversation club, like most Saturdays, but this time we heard that there would be Bastille Day celebrations at an historic prison, so we headed over there afterwards.

The star was Marie-Antoinette, who was up on the ramparts yelling abuse at the sans culottes below. The scripted exchange was extremely hammy, consisting mainly of topical banter but when Marie-Antoinette said her famous line, they all started throwing free cakes into the crowd (a brand I had not seen before, which is apparently only available in the Philadelphia area). They had an impressively large guillotine set up in the street, which made short work of a watermelon.


It's a bit ironic that this sort of thing doesn't happen in France. They don't even call it Bastille Day, it's La Fête Nationale or simply le quatorze juillet. They don't do anything historical, instead they have military parades through Paris including tanks and fly-overs. It's funny that the 4th July parade we saw in Washington last weekend had only one or two military bands with only about a dozen armed soldiers. I guess the American armed forces are a bit too busy overseas whereas the French have nothing better to do.