Printed and Manuscript Americana

Lafayette Invites the Paris National Guard to Celebrate the First Bastille Day

Paris, July 1, 1790. Single sheet, 12 1/4 x 8 in. (311 x 203 mm). Printed document in French, signed by the Marquis de Lafayette, inviting the Parisian National Guard to participate in the Fete de la Federation at the Champ de Mars outside Paris on July 14, 1790. Vertical crease along center; scattered spotting; horizontal open tear in top edge; glue and paper residue along bottom recto and verso; residue from paper clip along left side verso.

The hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, invites the Paris National Guard to participate in the Fete de la Federation at the Champ de Mars outside Paris on July 14, 1790, the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, and the precursor to today's Bastille Day celebration.

Reads, in part (translated): "The duties that the confidence of my fellow citizens imposes on me, the care of the sacred trusts for which we are responsible to France, the vigilance that the safety of the Capital demands of us, have too often forced me to sacrifice to these pressing objects of my attention, the accuracy of the correspondence to which you have deigned to invite me...May the Federal Oath, a new pledge of our fidelity to the Nation, to the Law, to the King, be both a lasting guarantee of our liberty and of public order; the end of all factions & the sign of general tranquility..."

On July 15, 1789, the day after the fall of the Bastille, Lafayette was unanimously appointed the commander of the Paris National Guard. It was an armed force under the control of the National Assembly, and was established to maintain order and provide local administration and public services in the city bursting with revolutionary sentiment and violence. Lafayette proposed the name, and created a symbol for the group's members: a blue, white, and red cockade, combining the red and blue colors of Paris and the white of the House of Bourbon---a lasting symbol that is now the tricolor of the French national flag.

This letter invited members of the Paris National Guard to take part in the Fete de la Federation. Fourteen thousand members of the National Guard participated, with each National Guard unit sending two men out of every hundred. They paraded under eighty-three banners by department. During the ceremony, Lafayette led the President of the National Assembly and all the deputies in a solemn oath to the forthcoming first French Constitution.