Bastille Day on the Upper East Side

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today, and on Fridays through the summer, we’ll focus on things to do in New York over the weekend.

Credit…Xinhua/Michael Nagle, via Alamy

You’ll probably hear the phrase “vive le 14 juillet” — French for “long live the 14th of July” — on a four-block stretch of Madison Avenue on Sunday afternoon.

On the 14th of July in 1789, a Parisian mob stormed the Bastille, a prison that had come to symbolize everything that was wrong under the Bourbons’ despotic monarchy. That first victory against the “ancien régime” has long been celebrated as Bastille Day.

“We always refer to Bastille Day as ‘la prise de la Bastille,” or “the taking of the Bastille,” said Tatyana Franck, the president of L’Alliance New York, which is organizing the Bastille Day street fair on Sunday. “This is ‘la prise de Madison,’ a celebration of the values that France holds dear” — including “liberté, égalité, fraternité.”

For Francophiles and Francophones in New York and elsewhere, this Bastille Day is especially meaningful. Not only is 2024 the 235th anniversary of the uprising at the prison; it is the 200th anniversary of the Marquis de Lafayette’s return visit to the United States (he arrived in August 1824). Franck, a former Alpine skier and former director of the Picasso archives in Paris and Geneva, mentioned the longstanding friendship between France and the United States that was underscored during the recent D-Day commemoration.

And the world will be watching, as the Olympics get underway in Paris in a couple of weeks.

Franck said there would be a nod to the Olympics with soccer and games organized by Asphalt Green, a Manhattan nonprofit that provides sports and fitness programs, along with fencing demonstrations. And there will be places to play pétanque, or boules, which Franck acknowledged is not an Olympic sport but is very French. (The game is somewhat similar to bocce.)