ABSTRACT
Festivals are an important and distinctive feature of French cultural life. The national festival, celebrated every year on 14-July, the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille prison by the Parisian crowd in 1789, is a date which is as immediately recognizable to those outside France as it is to those within the borders. The organization, promotion, and subsidizing of French festivals is the responsibility of the ’Ministere de la culture et de la communication’. This ministry has many branches which have remits to deal with a diverse range of French cultural media: architecture, museums, books, cinema, arts plastiques and language are all within the domain of this branch of government. Carnivals, fetes foraines and fetes patronales, festivals which celebrate the patron saint of a town, and frequently revolve around a Catholic mass, tend to have their roots in local history and culture and are attended principally by local residents and tourists.
