Speeches done, time for the party. Bastille Day at the French Embassy in Phnom Penh also means hundreds of guests packed under a blue-white-red marquee, bursts of laughter, food stalls under siege, and glasses clinking late into the evening. A look back, in pictures, at the thoroughly joyful, easygoing mood of an evening built entirely around good cheer.

For his first Bastille Day reception in Cambodia, French Ambassador Olivier Richard chose to look far ahead. Before an audience of ministers, diplomats and members of the French community, he laid out, on Monday evening, the picture of a 2026 unlike any other, one in which “we have the chance to write a new page” in the history of relations between Paris and Phnom Penh.