Today is Bastille Day. The French don’t call it that, just as most Americans don’t refer to the 4th of July as Independence Day. Instead, in France it’s referred to as “Le Quatorze Juillet” or simply “Le Quatorze”—or “La Fête Naionale.”
Every year, observers speculate that, perhaps, this time a French cyclist will win the day’s stage of the Tour de France. Perhaps not surprisingly, that didn’t happen: Tadej Pogaćar, who has seemed invincible, took the victory and extended his overall lead.
This year, the French national football team played its semifinal World Cup game against Spain. As with the Tour de France stage, many fans and observers thought the day would provide a boost of adrenaline that would propel the Gallic players to victory. That was not to be: the Spanish prevailed 2-0.
In watching that game, I found myself thinking about Frederick Douglass speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” While nobody would argue that the French players, most of whom are highly-paid professionals for some of the world’s best teams and leagues, I had to wonder whether at least some of them —who are products of colonialism—aren’t stirred by the day’s celebratory mood. While France itself may have freed itself from the oppressive ancien regime, its colonial subjects had no more liberty than the people still in bondage in the US when Douglass took the podium.
I do not mean that the French players didn’t give their best effort. Rather, I imagine that it might be as complicated for them to play for a country that exploited their parents and grandparents as it was for Black American soldiers to fight for a country that enslaved their parents and grandparents and denied them the same rights as White soldiers who wore the same uniform.
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