14 July, the storming of the Bastille prison in 1789 and the start of the French Revolution. A military parade down the Champs-Élysées in the morning, fireworks and the firemen's balls at night.
14 July. The French call it la Fête nationale or simply le quatorze juillet; Bastille Day is an English name for it.
The Phala almanac gives the exact day for your own city; the lunar and solar rules above are what it computes from.
On 14 July 1789 a Paris crowd took the Bastille, a fortress prison holding seven inmates, for the gunpowder inside it. What mattered was not the prisoners but that the king's garrison had lost the city.
The holiday as fixed in 1880 is officially for the Fête de la Fédération of 1790, the first anniversary, rather than for the storming itself — a deliberate choice of the reconciliation over the riot.
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