Come! Citizens! To the Bastille!! : the great celebration of France—the nation that handed the US its existence

Just as Americans most often call our biggest national holiday the 4th of July (and also know it as Independence Day), so too do the French most often call their biggest national holiday the 14th of July. We Americans know it better as Bastille Day.

In Philadelphia, on July 4th, 1776, the American people declared America’s own birth and our determination “to dissolve the political bands which have connected” us with the British and to set ourselves free from their king, so as “to secure these rights” that we held were self-evident and inalienable: “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. This began the American Revolution (even though the American Revolutionary War had already broken out in the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, when the American patriots had fired “the shot heard round the world”).

In Paris, 13 years and 10 days later—231 years ago today—the French people stormed the Bastille in order to set themselves free from their king, so as to stand up for the principles that came to be the national motto of France: “liberty, equality, fraternity”. This began the French Revolution.

The Bastille was a medieval political prison in the center of Paris, built in the 1300s, that represented the king’s tyrannical rule over the people. Within just a few months of its takeover by the revolutionaries—while the revolution was still underway—they had it torn down. Only a few remnants of this symbol of oppression remained; the bells of the prison clock are on exhibit in a Paris museum, and some of the fortress stones were reused to build what is now called the Concorde Bridge. And one key relic made its way across the ocean to a place from where some of the most seminal causes of the French Revolution had sprouted.

In the final days leading up to America’s Declaration of Independence, a handful of delegates to the Continental Congress gathered to draft its language. These included three leading figures who were central to the revolution that this would start:

known as one of the world’s greatest scientists and inventors (for which he’d been awarded honorary doctorates by Oxford, England’s oldest university, and by the University of St Andrews, Scotland’s oldest), one of the world’s first media tycoons, a leading printer, journalist, writer, humorist, political philosopher, civic activist and founder of many civic organizations (including the University of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia’s first fire department), politician and statesman (later to become the governor of Pennsylvania and the first US postmaster general)—called “the First American” for his early campaigning (first as an author and spokesman in London) for colonial unity, and in that day generally considered the greatest polymath throughout the Western World;

a lawyer, political activist (the foremost and one of the staunchest advocates for declaring independence), writer and political philosopher (later to become the primary author of the Massachusetts Constitution, which along with his earlier Thoughts on Government, influenced the US Constitution itself), and politician and statesman (later to become the second US president);

a planter, lawyer, architect, inventor, surveyor, mathematician, mechanical and horticultural and agricultural scientist, philologist, linguist, philosopher (later to become the founder of the University of Virginia), and politician and statesman (later to become the governor of Virginia, the first US secretary of state, and the third US president).

Jefferson wrote the first draft. After the small group of delegates reviewed this, he wrote and produced a second draft, incorporating many changes that they’d come up with. This was then presented to the full Congress, and with some small revisions, this final version was signed as the Declaration of Independence.

The previous year, a few months after “the shot heard round the world” was fired, the Continental Congress had created a small secret group to try to form alliances with foreign countries and rally support for the American cause; Jefferson was included, and Franklin was its most active member [

*3].

Before the year was out, the King of France—Louis XVI—along with his foreign minister, had given instructions to a French secret agent. This espionage agent was the playwright Pierre Beaumarchais—author of The Marriage of Figaro (on which Mozart’s famous opera is based) and The Barber of Seville—who’d been covertly collecting intel on the British reaction in London to the onset of the war [

*1]. King Louis directed Beaumarchais to create a front organization—Roderigue Hortalez et Compagnie. The explicit purpose of this shell corporation was to clandestinely funnel weaponry, munitions, and financial assistance to the Americans, in anticipation that the war would in fact lead to all-out revolution.

Another French secret agent, Julien Achard de Bonvouloir, arrived in Philadelphia in late 1775. This undercover agent met with Franklin, who convinced him that there wasn’t much chance that the colonies would reconcile with Britain but instead that they were going to fight for independence. Franklin told him to report to the French government that France should form an alliance with America once they declared their independence and that, in the meantime, France should, after all, secretly help the Americans [

*3].

By the spring of 1776—weeks before the Declaration of Independence consummated the inception of the American Revolution—ships and other clandestine military aid from France were flowing to the American cause [

*1]. It’s estimated that in the early battles of the war, 90% of the arms that the Americans fought with were being supplied by France.

Early in the Revolutionary War, it had become obvious to the Continental Congress that it was absolutely necessary for them to get help from France if they were going to have a chance to win their independence.

In September 1776, they sent Franklin as minister to France—essentially the first United States ambassador to any country in the world—in order to try forming an alliance. In Paris, on February 6, 1778, the two countries signed the Treaty of Alliance and the Treaty of Amity and Commerce. This comprised formal recognition of the United States, and France could now openly aid the United States and fight by their side. For this, Britain declared war on France on March 17.

One of the earliest and best-known French supporters of the American cause had been the Marquis de Lafayette. He was a nobleman who grew up in a wealthy military family and was commissioned an officer when he was 13 years old. He made his way to the United States in summer of 1777 and met General Washington in August. He was made a major general in the Continental Army, and in his first battle, was shot in the leg. After recuperating, he was given command of a division in November, with which he defeated a larger force in battle at the end of the month. Lafayette commanded thousands of American troops in battles in 1778. He returned to France the next year and worked with Benjamin Franklin to secure the promise of 6,000 soldiers to be sent to America, commanded by General Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau.

Lafayette went back to the United States in 1780, commanding Americans in battles that year and in 1781, including in the decisive Siege of Yorktown in October. In the Battle of the Chesapeake, the French fleet blocked the British fleet and defeated it—this kept it from being able to reinforce the land forces of the British commander, General Cornwallis, at Yorktown. The French and American land forces cut off Cornwallis’s retreat, and on October 19, he had to surrender. There were nearly twice as many French land troops as American land troops in the victory at Yorktown; it was the last major battle of the war.

While the fighting of Washington’s Continental Army throughout the Revolutionary War was necessary to winning, it was the French fleet and French army that really won the war and handed America its independence. So it was appropriate that when representatives of Great Britain and the United States signed the treaty on September 3, 1783, that made peace between the two nations, recognized the existence of the United States, and formally ended the American Revolution, it was done in the French capital and was called the Treaty of Paris.

When Lafayette returned to France, he worked with Thomas Jefferson—who’d succeeded Franklin as the US ambassador to France—to establish trade agreements between the United States and France that aimed to reduce America’s debt to France.

As the 1780s progressed, France sank into a financial crisis—the government was in deep debt. One of the reasons for this was the costs of three big wars it’d fought in over the recent decades—in the War of the Austrian Succession throughout the 1740s, in the Seven Years’ War (often called the French and Indian War in America) in the late 1750s and early ’60s, and in America’s war for independence. Another reason was that the country didn’t have a productive, efficient, or fair taxation system—the rich nobility, for instance, didn’t pay a sufficient amount. One of the further reasons was that France didn’t have a central bank—just this by itself was a huge contributor to the problem.

This financial crisis exacerbated food shortages, and many of the common people experienced actual famine. To try to deal with it, King Louis XVI called together prominent noblemen, church leaders, and government bureaucrats to come up with solutions. One of the famous national leaders whom the king appointed to this assembly, which convened in February 1787, was Lafayette—who made speeches attacking the corruption of priveleged insiders, advocated reform, and called for a “truly national assembly” to represent the whole of France. Instead, the king followed other advice and summoned an Estates General to be elected and to convene in May 1789. Lafayette was voted in as a representative of the nobility in his region.

He spoke out for the Estates General to adopt a more democratic voting process, so as to allow the commoners to have more of a voice. He couldn’t get enough of his own noblemen to agree. But enough of the church representatives went along with his idea that they joined together and, on May 17, declared themselves to be the National Assembly. The noblemen’s representatives and the rest of the church leaders staged a lockout of those in this National Assembly, and they appeared to begin to trample on the rights of the common people. Lafayette, along with the consultation of Thomas Jefferson, wrote a draft of what became the famous “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” and presented it to the National Assembly on July 11.

Three days after that, he was named commander of the national guard of Paris, and later on that same day, the Bastille was stormed. Lafayette was already a citizen in two different nations—both in France and in the United States—and he now had become the hero of two different revolutions. As a gesture from the throngs of Parisians who had taken over this royal fortress, they gave him a symbolic relic from it [

*4]. He soon decided what should be done with this memento, and early the next year, he entrusted it to be delivered by Thomas Paine [

*2]—the American political activist, philosopher, and revolutionary, whose influential pamphlets, including the famous Common Sense, had provided some of the greatest inspiration for the patriots to declare independence from Britain.

The aid that King Louis XVI had given America’s fight for independence was pivotal in making it a success. And the principles—of the rights of all people—that the American Revolution had espoused, the crucial lesson—proving how it was possible to overthrow the rule of a king who the people felt was violating those rights and oppressing them—that the American Revolution had provided, and the debt—which helped to bring about food shortages and to increase the suffering and anger of the people—that Louis XVI had incurred in order to make the American Revolution succeed were all major factors in causing the French Revolution. His actions, which gave the United States its very existence as an independent country, led to his own doom. Within three and a half years of the storming of the Bastille, the new French government, which took over when his monarchy was overthrown, convicted him of high treason, and he was put to death by the guillotine.

More than 30 years later, President James Monroe and the Congress invited Lafayette to visit the US. So in 1824, he again traveled to the country in which he was also a citizen, this time with his son Georges Washington Lafayette. It turned into a 16-month-long tour of not only the original 13 but of all 24 states, and just about every one of them tried to outdo each other in the welcoming celebrations and festivities for this illustrious returning patriot. And when he arrived at Mt. Vernon, he again saw the memento [

*2] that he’d sent so many decades before to George Washington, who had been inaugurated as the first president less than four months before the French people had taken the Bastille. And that key relic that Lafayette had been given by the French revolutionaries who had taken it was, in fact, the main key to the Bastille—its teeth designed in the shape of the royal fleur-de-lis.

When Washington had received it, he’d had it showcased at different government offices and receptions over the years while he was president. At the end of his presidency, he took it home to Mt. Vernon and put it on prominent display there, just as it remains to this day—that symbol, of which Lafayette had said in the letter that accompanied it when he sent it in 1790, “It is a tribute, which I owe as a son to my adoptive father, as an aide-de-camp to my general, as a missionary of liberty to its patriarch.” [

*4]