The French National Day has been celebrated on 14 July since 1879, when the Marseillaise was adopted as France’s national anthem as well.

Contrary to widespread notion, the French national day does not commemorate the storming of the Bastille by the people of Paris on 14 July 1789, an event which triggered off the beginning of the French Revolution, but celebrates the adoption of the three colours as the national flag of France for the first time, as well as the symbol of unity of the French nation on 14 July 1790.

A year after the fall of the Bastille, delegates from all parts of the country flocked to Paris to celebrate the Fête de la Federation. This was done to celebrate the reconciliation of the People and the King, on the one hand, and the reconciliation of Paris with the provinces, on the other. An allegiance to a single, common nation was proclaimed during a Mass celebrated on the Champ de Mars at the end of which King Louis XVI accepted the replacement of the white flag with the three lilies with the three-colour one, which had the colour of the King (white) between the colours of the coat of arms of Paris (blue and red).

The ideals proclaimed were: individual freedom and mutual respect; the right of peoples to self-determination and the creation of institutions which would protect the welfare of citizens. Those aspirations, already codified in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 26 August 1789, was the result of the work of Enlightenment philosophers in the 18th century and were heavily influenced by authors like Montesquieu, who laid down the principle of separation of the legislature, executive and judiciary in his The Spirit of the Law of 1748, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who developed theories about political equality and sovereignty of the people in The Social Contract (1762).

Those values, now seen as universal, and considered as the cornerstone of modern democracy, had widespread repercussions and provided a model for the national liberation movements of the 19th century. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 10 December 1948 also owed much to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.