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Where Can You Celebrate Bastille Day in the United States and Canada?

On July 14, the French commemorate the Storming of the Bastille in 1789 and the Fête de la Fédération in 1790. This is also when North Americans celebrate Bastille Day, a nationwide event in honor of French culture and gastronomy! The traditional festivities are back with a bang after a year disrupted by the pandemic.
A Bastille Day party in Dallas, 2017. © Bret Redman

The Bastille Prison, besieged by revolutionaries on July 14, 1789, and torn down the following day, has long since vanished. But its spirit lives on in both France and abroad – just look at the more than 170 online and in-person events we have found in the United States and Canada! This year’s line-up includes a concert in Central Park followed by an open-air screening of the French comedy movie My Donkey, My Lover & I, co-organized by the Consulate of France in New York, the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), and the Comité des Associations Françaises et de Langue Française in New York; a cocktail reception with the team at the French-American Chamber of Commerce in Tampa aboard the S.S. American Victory, a WWII cargo ship converted into a floating museum; and a cognac tasting session at the restaurant owned by Alsatian chef Jean Joho on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower… in Las Vegas!

Make sure you don’t miss the performance from the retro, feminist dance troupe Les ReBelles NOLA at the Alliance Française of New Orleans, a “speak-dating” event in French at the Alliance Française in Halifax, a scavenger hunt through the streets of Chicago, a block party in the old French quarter of St. Louis, a screening of the movie Tour de France starring Gérard Depardieu in front of Saint Boniface Cathedral in Winnipeg, an online conference on San Francisco during the 1850s (which will help you understand why the city was once nicknamed “the Paris of the Pacific”), a Francophone jazz concert at a club in Phoenix, or a bal français set to music by Edith Piaf, Mylène Farmer, Francky Vincent, and Doc Gynéco in a New York nightclub.

To round off the festivities, why not visit the Statue of Liberty’s “little sister” in the gardens of the French ambassador’s residence in Washington D.C.? The ten-foot replica loaned by the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris will be inaugurated on Bastille Day at an event attended by the French ambassador Philippe Étienne, the French minister for foreign affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian, and his American counterpart, Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Having arrived in New York by boat on June 30, the miniature copy of the Statue of Liberty will be spending the next ten years in the U.S. capital. More than enough time to appreciate the tenacity of French-American friendship!

Discover our map of French celebrations in the United States and Canada. Red is for online festivities, blue is for those you can attend in person, and hybrid events are marked in white.

You don’t see your event on the map and you would like to add it? Please email us at cthiery@france-amerique.com.