When: July 14
Bastille Day — July 14th — is France's national day, celebrating the storming of the Bastille prison in 1789 and the beginning of the French Revolution. In France it's called "la Fête Nationale" and marked by military parades, fireworks, and communal feasts. The food culture surrounding it draws from the full depth of French regional cuisine — a tradition that is itself one of France's great contributions to the world.
The storming of the Bastille freed only seven prisoners — but the symbolic power of ordinary people breaching a royal fortress made it the defining moment of the French Revolution.
On July 14, 1789, a crowd of Parisians stormed the Bastille — a medieval fortress that served as a royal prison. They freed seven prisoners: four forgers, two lunatics, and a man imprisoned at his own family's request for dissolute behavior. The event was militarily inconsequential. But the Bastille was a symbol of royal power, and the crowd that took it was ordinary people who had never before taken anything from the king. The French Revolution had its defining image. The connection between the Revolution and French food culture is direct and transformative. Before 1789, the finest cooking in France was private. The great chefs worked in aristocratic households, feeding noble families who would not have considered selling their cooks' labor to the public. When the Revolution displaced those households — through exile, arrest, and the guillotine — the chefs who had staffed them were suddenly unemployed. Many of them opened restaurants. The restaurant as a formal institution had...