France Reasserts Nuclear Pledge on Bastille Day

France showed off the nation’s military strength in a Bastille Day parade Saturday, and President Francois Mitterrand pledged to keep the nation’s nuclear force independent and strong.

“Defense is part of the imperial obligations of the nation,” Mitterrand told television journalists after military personnel trooped down the Champs Elysees to commemorate the start of the French Revolution.

“I absolutely don’t want to reduce it,” he said, “even more so because there hasn’t been a real reduction in the nuclear potential of the United States or the Soviet Union.”

France refuses to endorse the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s recent change of doctrine making nuclear weapons a “last resort” in any conflict with the Warsaw Pact. French officials have said flexibility is a key to nuclear deterrence.

July 14 marks the fall of the Bastille prison in 1789. The event sparked the revolution that toppled Louis XVI and gave France its first republican government.

The military parade opened daylong festivities that were capped by a music-and-light show.

The parade featured 7,000 soldiers, sailors, firefighters and police officers marching from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde to salute Mitterrand.

Aerobatic jets led off the parade, laying down blue, white and red contrails over the route to match the colors of the huge tricolor fluttering under the Arc de Triomphe.

About 600 tanks and other armored vehicles lined the avenue or paraded noisily along the three-quarter mile route. The vehicles represent about 15% of France’s armored forces.

The loudest applause was reserved for the bearded companies of Foreign Legionnaires, dressed in desert khakis and their trademark white caps.

On Saturday night, flamboyant showman Jean-Michel Jarre lit up western Paris before more than 2 million people in a spectacular music-and-light show.

During his show, the year-old Grande Arche and adjacent skyscrapers in the financial district were bathed in dazzling, swirling colors. They changed in rhythm to Jarre’s symphonic rock music, while searchlights and fireworks formed a canopy overhead.

People packed the banks of the Seine on the capital’s western edge and a two-mile stretch of avenue to the Arc de Triomphe.

The crowd was estimated at 1.5 million before the concert began, but hundreds of thousands more people, from toddlers to nuns, kept filling distant streets as it started. Many were unable to get a direct view, but video screens were set up as well.

The Culture Ministry underwrote the show with $8.18 million to allow Jarre to put it on for free.

“I want a celebration for the people--open and free to everybody,” said Jarre.