Bastille Day is drawing 187x more Wikipedia traffic than normal

What this article is

Bastille Day is the common name given in English-speaking countries to the national day of France, which is celebrated on 14 July each year. It is referred to, both legally and commonly, as le 14 juillet in French, though la fête nationale is also used in the press.

Summary text from the Wikipedia article "Bastille Day", available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article.

Where editors were working

Wikipedia editors made 10 edits to this article on 2026-07-14, concentrated in these sections. This is evidence about the surge, not an explanation of it.

• United States
• 1989: Storming of the Bastille
• 1990: Fête de la Fédération
• History

What changed that day

The article lost 541 characters on balance that day. The largest single addition was 81 characters to History. See everything that changed on 2026-07-14 in Wikipedia's own diff view — that is where the reason for a surge is usually visible, written and sourced by the editors who were following the story.

Rose at the same time

1 other article that this one is connected to surged alongside it. What they have in common is left to you — the pageview record shows that attention moved together, not why.

• 2016 Nice truck attack 2016 Islamist terrorist attack in France

How this was measured

Views are Wikimedia's own pageview counts for en.wikipedia, filtered to agent=user so automated traffic is excluded. The baseline is the median of the previous 60 days, which is used instead of the mean so that an earlier surge cannot flatten a later one. The multiple is the day's views divided by that median.