225th Anniversary of the Fête de la Fédération

The French national day unites all French citizens — a day on which the Republic is celebrated. The design is a modern sketch of Marianne's profile, an emblem of the French Republic, wearing the Phrygian cap. On the right, the cockade is sketched above the abbreviation RF. The year of issue appears at the centre. On the left, a stanza from the poem "Liberté" by French poet Paul Éluard references the motto of the French Republic. The mint marks are positioned next to this extract. The twelve stars of the European flag appear on the outer ring.

On 14 July 1790, a year after the storming of the Bastille, hundreds of thousands of people from all parts of France gathered on the Champ de Mars in Paris for the Festival of the Federation — the Fête de la Fédération. The event was deliberately conceived as a national ritual of unity: delegates from the National Guards of all the departments, together with King Louis XVI and the National Assembly, swore a civic oath to the new constitution. The festival marked an attempt to symbolically reunite a society torn apart by the Revolution and to anchor sovereignty no longer in the monarch but in the will of the nation. Marianne, the female allegory of the Republic with her Phrygian cap and cockade, became in the following years the central embodiment of precisely these values: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.

The 1790 Festival of the Federation is regarded as the direct precursor of today's French national holiday, celebrated annually on 14 July since 1880. Historians view the event as a decisive step in the consolidation of a modern national consciousness: for the first time, France appeared as a politically united community of citizens rather than a dynastically defined kingdom. The tricolour and the cockade, omnipresent at the festival, became lasting state symbols of the Republic. In 2015, France commemorated the 225th anniversary of this historic moment with a 2-euro commemorative coin.