Guide to Bastille Day

Reuters

ARC DE MEH: France's national colours trail over the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs Elysees avenue during the annual Bastille Day parade in Paris.

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Henri reaches over the bar and helps himself to ice. It's an unprecedented act of intimacy in a French brasserie; a perk he considers justified as the bar's current owner stayed with him when he first moved to Paris.

The owner was 14 then. He's in his mid-50s now.

"Ca ne me fait rien." It makes for nothing, Henri says. Bastille Day.

By his own admission, this is the opinion of a peasant - a man who spent the first 25 years of his working life flogging onions and figs in the now- legendary food market of Les Halles, before migrating to markets all over Paris.

Yet already the conversation is touching something quintessentially Parisian: The bigger the fuss, the greater the compulsion to pretend to be uninterested. Across the bar's polished brass railing Gasper, a real estate agent, and his wife Aude are lamenting the fact that this year, 2010, le quatorze juillet falls on a Wednesday, vastly limiting the potential for weekend getaways to the country.

A third man with the kind of nasal hair you could plait is upset President Nicolas "Sarko" Sarkozy has cancelled (as a nod to new austerity measures) the traditional Garden Party at the Elysee Palace. He had the feeling, he grins, that this year he was finally going to be invited.

Henri drops more ice into his glass and tells him he's dans la lune - living on the moon - and the two men laugh.

The only person offended by all the apathy on show is Kim, my translator. As a French-Canadian, her school history books communicated a slightly more chest-puffing version of the events of July 14, 1789, when the disgruntled citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille, a notorious prison-fortress that at the time contained just seven prisoners (four forgers, two lunatics and one deviant aristocrat, the Comte de Solages, who may or may not have been concealing large quantities of Vaseline in his cell).

"Storm", it should be remembered, is a word open to interpretation. The French also "storm" their coffee pots every morning.

Still, the seven hours of lengthy negotiations that marked the first sign of open revolt against the King and came to symbolise the Revolution, was itself punctuated by acts of extraordinary violence: 99 people died, 98 of them attackers. Providing one of history's earliest examples of premature emancipation - storming too early - one poor patriot was crushed by the falling drawbridge as its chains were cut free. And, after kicking one of his would-be executioners directly in the croissants, the captured governor of the Bastille, Bernard-Rene de Launay, had his head sawn off and carried through the streets on a pike.

What all this has in common with the going-ons in a cafe like Le Relais de la Tour ("The view of the Tower") is simple: It makes for great theatre.

A penchant for the theatrical lies at the heart of Parisian life. It's why three- quarters of the population here can blow air from their lips in 17 different ways. It's why shrugging and waving your hands are national institutions; why - whether in televised political debate or on the sex-shop stained boardwalks of Pigalle - winning an argument isn't as important as looking like you won.

Tonight, less than 500 metres from here, lasers and fireworks will set the Champ de Mars and the Eiffel Tower ablaze with light, but not before the lazy drone of 50 helicopters has filled the morning air over Paris. Not before battalion after battalion have drummed their way down the Champs Elysees, in a joyous ode to both the Republic and military muscle.

The French Foreign Legion will lead this parade, their mascot a goat. Last year, a detachment from India provided the honorary vanguard, marching past the Louis Vuitton and Virgin Megastores sporting the rolled-up moustaches of the Raj and red and black turbans.

Since the beginning of last century, Bastille Day has been seized upon by socialists and intellectuals as a National Day that could shut out the church in this most Catholic of countries; a rallying point parlayed in the human sacrifices of Austerlitz and Verdun rather than any divine intervention.

In 1919, it was a celebration of victory that placed France at the centre of a prospering Empire. In 1936, feted as "tomorrow's army", heavy tanks ominously damaged the avenue with their caterpillar tracks.

Today, as the jets stream red, white and blue overhead, the national day's meaning is less certain. Much like the diggers of Gallipoli, the esprit of the revolutionary mob lives on only in myth and legend. Live in heavily regulated, bureaucratic France for a week and you discover you can still storm the Bastille - but only after filling out the correct forms in triplicate, which will promptly be lost anyway.What matters is that the show goes on.

Today, centre ville du Paris is once again a Bastille; a fortress. Just one of overwhelming pomp and ceremony. Theatre.

In New Zealand idiom, it is the haka, and then some. It is money literally up in smoke, garden party or not. It is braided uniforms, polished rifles and their beloved tricoleur at the speed of sound. And les Parisiens are put out that it has to happen on a Wednesday.

Around the cafe, talk has reverted to what went wrong in the World Cup. Not the one where they beat us. The other one.

"So," I ask, "It's really just a holiday?"

The crowd takes a moment to dwell on this, their tiny ceramic coffee cups and beer glasses frozen at half-mast, effortlessly and neurotically French all at the same time.

"Not for me," Henri says. "I'm already retired".

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