Bastille Key

As a French-American, I can't help but notice the occasional tension between France and the United states, notions of nationalism and identity, culture, and language.

So seeing this at Mount Vernon was profoundly cool:

This is a key to the Bastille, a symbol of the French revolution, hanging in entryway of Mount Vernon, where Washington put it when it was given to him by Lafayette.

This doesn't make being part French and part American any less of a riddle to figure out, but it is profoundly comforting to realize that the connection between the two countries I come from is hundreds of years old and fundamental to the very notion of what America and France are. There would have been no American revolution without France. Could there have been a French revolution without the American example? Where would either country be without the other over the intervening years?