France celebrates virus heroes on redesigned Bastille Day

France is recalibrating Bastille Day’s usual grandiose military parade to celebrate heroes of the coronavirus pandemic instead. Ambulance drivers, supermarket cashiers, postal workers as well as frontline medics who died fighting Covid-19 are all being honoured on the country’s biggest national holiday. This year’s commemorations will also pay homage to former president Charles de Gaulle, eight decades after the historic appeal he made to opponents of France’s Nazi occupiers which gave birth to the French Resistance. But the battle against the virus, which has claimed more than 30,000 lives in France, is expected to be the main focus of the...