Happy Bastille Day
[center]
[/center][font size="1"]From Wikipedia Commons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eugène_Delacroix_-_La_liberté_guidant_le_peuple.jpg)
(Public Domain)
[/font]
= new reply since forum marked as read
Time to grab my spouse and go storm us a prison! Our little joke all these years...
Cheers, everyone!
Friends in Paris the summer of 1989 during the Bicentennial brought me souvenir Eiffel Tower earrings; the more popular guillotine earrings were sold out. The Mount Vernon Gift Shop sells a couple inexpensive reproductions of the Bastille Key. It makes a nice souvenir, I have one as a key chain. Love all things French and Paris!
VIVE LA FRANCE!
- Article, Mount Vernon, Key to the Bastille, in Collections
http://www.mountvernon.org/research-collections/digital-encyclopedia/article/bastille-key/
The KEY TO THE BASTILLE was a gift from Lafayette to George Washington. It is on display at Washington's home Mount Vernon in the Center Hall Passage. The Key is made of cast iron and weighs 1 lb. 3 oz. In 1789 on July 14, angry rioting citizens stormed the old Bastille prison in Paris, the symbol of royal despotism. The event was the flashpoint of the French Revolution. In 1790 Lafayette sent the Bastille Key from Paris via Thomas Paine in London, and John Rutledge Jr. of S.C. who travelled from London to America and presented it to George Washington. The Bastille Key remains on view at Mount Vernon, George Washington's Virginia home on the Potomac River, approximately 8 miles south of Alexandria, VA and 15 miles south of Washington, D.C.
- KEY TO THE BASTILLE, on display in the Center Hall/Passage of Mount Vernon.
- THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE, Paris, July 14, 1789
- MOUNT VERNON on the Potomac River
- REPRODUCTION BASTILLE KEY, Mount Vernon Gift Shop ($10.95).
MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE (1757-1834) 1779 portrait by Charles Wilson Peale, wearing the uniform of major general of the Continental Army. The young French aristocrat and military officer sailed to the New World at age 19 to aid the American cause. He served in the Continental Army, was wounded at the Battle of Brandywine and commanded troops that blocked British Gen. Cornwallis' forces in 1781 at the Siege of Yorktown, VA, the last major land battle of the Revolution. Lafayette was a close friend of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. After America's Revolution, Lafayette was a key figure in the French Revolution (1789) and the July Revolution of 1830 in France. Lafayette returned to the US in 1824 for a year long Grand Tour with his son Georges Washington Lafayette who had studied at Harvard. Lafayette re- visited Mount Vernon after 40 years where the Bastille Key remained and he viewed the grave of his old friend Gen. Washington.
MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_du_Motier,_Marquis_de_Lafayette