Boston's connection to France is written into the city's founding. The French alliance was decisive in the American Revolution — without Rochambeau's troops and the French navy at Yorktown, the war might have ended differently. Every July 14, Boston's Bastille Day celebrations carry that history alongside the wine and pétanque.
The Alliance Française de Boston organises the main Bastille Day events, typically held in the Back Bay near the Copley Square area. The celebrations include French food and wine tastings, cultural events, and a formal reception bringing together the French consulate, Boston's academic community, and the broader Franco-American population of New England.
Boston's universities and hospitals draw significant numbers of French professionals and academics — Harvard, MIT, and the Longwood medical area all have large French communities. Bastille Day in Boston is as much a professional and academic gathering as a cultural celebration.
The French alliance is the part of the American Revolution that American history sometimes underplays. France provided money, ships, troops, and crucially, the military pressure that forced Britain to fight on two fronts. The Marquis de Lafayette — a French general who crossed the Atlantic at his own expense to fight for American independence — is commemorated throughout Boston and the surrounding region.
The Lafayette Hotel in Boston, the Lafayette Square in the city's South End, the Lafayette statue in Congress Square: these mark a debt that the founders acknowledged explicitly. Thomas Jefferson — who lived in Paris for five years as American minister to France — called the French alliance "the most important object of our foreign policy."
The irony that the French monarchy that helped fund the American Revolution was itself overthrown three years later was not lost on contemporaries. Bastille Day, 1789, came thirteen years after July 4, 1776 — and the two revolutions were in constant dialogue.
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