Washington DC has a deeper French connection than almost any other American city. The city was designed by a Frenchman, its most prominent public square is named for a French general, and the largest French embassy in the United States stands four blocks from the National Cathedral. Every July 14, the capital marks Bastille Day with events that reflect this extraordinary entanglement of French and American history.
Pierre Charles L'Enfant was a French-born military engineer who served under George Washington during the American Revolution and was later commissioned to design the new federal capital. His 1791 plan for Washington DC — with its grand diagonal avenues cutting across a grid, its public squares, and its vistas from the Capitol to the river — was modelled on the Paris he had grown up in.
L'Enfant's plan was so ahead of its time that the city took decades to grow into it. Pennsylvania Avenue, the Mall, and the placement of the White House and Capitol all follow his original design. The city is, in a literal sense, a French idea built on American ground.
L'Enfant was famously difficult to work with and was eventually dismissed before the project was complete. He died in 1825 in poverty, his contribution largely forgotten. In 1909, his remains were reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery, where his grave faces the view he designed: across the Potomac to the city he built.
Lafayette Square, directly north of the White House, is named for Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette — the French aristocrat who came to America at nineteen, fought under Washington, and became one of the most celebrated figures of the Revolutionary War.
Lafayette returned to the United States in 1824 for a triumphal tour that lasted fifteen months and took him to every state. He was the last surviving major general of the Revolution, and his reception everywhere was one of the great public celebrations in American history. In Washington, he was honoured at state dinners and given a gift of land and money by Congress.
The statue of Lafayette in the square, unveiled in 1891, shows him gesturing toward France — as if offering the sword he brought across the Atlantic. Three of the four corners of the square are occupied by statues of other French officers who served in the Revolution: Rochambeau, Kosciuszko, and Steuben.
The Embassy of France in Washington is the largest French diplomatic mission in the United States, housed in a beaux-arts building on Reservoir Road in Georgetown. The French community in the DC metropolitan area — estimated at around 25,000 — is concentrated in the Georgetown, Chevy Chase, and Bethesda areas, many of them embassy staff, international organisation employees, or professionals at the World Bank and IMF.
The Embassy typically hosts a reception or garden party for Bastille Day, open to French nationals and guests of the diplomatic community. The Alliance Française de Washington DC, one of the largest in the country, organises public events in the weeks around July 14 — film screenings, lectures, language events, and a soirée for members and guests.
The French presence in Washington goes far beyond Lafayette Square. The names are everywhere: the Dupont Circle neighbourhood takes its name from Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont, descendant of the French Huguenot emigrant Éleuthère Irénée du Pont who founded the chemical dynasty in Delaware. The Du Pont family itself had come from Rouen in Normandy.
Georgetown's early settlers included French Jesuit missionaries and Huguenot refugees. The Georgetown area of DC retains its French character in its streetscape, its café culture, and its proximity to the Embassy. The Watergate complex — scene of the 1972 break-in — was designed by the Italian architect Luigi Moretti but takes its name from a French-style watergate on the Potomac.
The National Gallery of Art houses one of the finest collections of French Impressionist painting outside France, including major works by Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Cézanne. Its French collection alone would be a cultural destination.
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