storming of the Bastille

storming of the Bastille, iconic conflict of the French Revolution. On July 14, 1789, fears that King Louis XVI was about to arrest France’s newly constituted National Assembly led a crowd of Parisians to successfully besiege the Bastille, an old fortress that had been used since 1659 as a state prison. As a victory by ordinary Parisians over a prominent representation of the king’s coercive power, the event quickly became a symbol of revolutionary struggle. The episode’s anniversary is now a national holiday in France: Bastille Day.

At the time of the assault on the Bastille (formally the Bastille Saint-Antoine), its underground cells loomed large in the French mind as a definitive example of monarchical cruelty. Ironically, the prison’s horrors were wildly exaggerated—not least because for the previous decade former inmates had cashed in on a craze for prison literature by writing fancifully lurid accounts of their confinement there. The truth was that by 1789 the Bastille had become a preferred destination for aristocratic prisoners, because it was possible to obtain privileges there that made the ordeal of incarceration bearable. Moreover, on July 14 the entire structure contained only seven inmates: four common counterfeiters, two mentally ill men, and a count who had been imprisoned at the request of his family. Unable to justify the expensive upkeep for such paltry use, the government planned to demolish the building and replace it with a park.

Guarding this shadow of the past were 82 invalides (veterans no longer capable of serving in the field) who were generally considered by the area’s residents to be friendly goof-offs. The Bastille’s military governor, Bernard-René Jordan de Launay, urgently requested reinforcements, but he was sent only 32 additional men, Swiss soldiers from the Salis-Samade regiment. When uncontrollable protests broke out in the city on July 12, de Launay’s superiors transferred 250 barrels of gunpowder to his custody. Realizing that he had a relative paucity of men to guard this vast supply of ammunition, de Launay drew up the Bastille’s two drawbridges. Two days later, on July 14, his was the only royal force left in central Paris.

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Nine hundred Parisians gathered outside the fortress that morning with the intention of confiscating its gunpowder and cannons. Three delegates from the Hôtel de Ville, the seat of city government, presented the revolutionaries’ demands. De Launay refused to surrender, believing that it would be dishonourable to capitulate without instruction from the palace to do so. However, he did remove the cannons from the walls and even allowed one of the delegates to go up the ramparts to confirm that action. This disarmament might have deescalated the situation had it been announced in time. Half an hour after the delegates left to report this concession, however, two men scaled the Bastille’s outer wall and cut the chains of one of the drawbridges, causing the bridge to descend. The falling bridge crushed a man, but some of the crowd surged across it into the interior yard of the fortress under the misapprehension that de Launay had let them in. Thus, when the panicking soldiers within began shooting, the already suspicious people felt sure that they had been lured inside the inner yard to make them easy targets. Those in the crowd who possessed guns fired back, and the battle began in earnest.

About 3:30 pm, rebellious companies of the French Guard and defecting soldiers joined the crowd in its assault. Two veterans, Second Lieut. Jacob-Job Élie and Pierre-Augustin Hulin, brought organization to the revolutionaries’ haphazard efforts, along with more guns and two cannons, which were soon aimed directly at the Bastille’s gate. Seeing the writing on the wall, de Launay briefly considered one last glorious display of resolve: blowing up all 30,000 pounds of gunpowder and the surrounding area with it. The governor’s subordinates talked him out of this course of action, however, and instead the second drawbridge was lowered. The masses flooded into the fortress, liberated all seven prisoners, seized the gunpowder, and disarmed the troops. It is estimated that 98 attackers and one invalide died in the conflict. Three more invalides and two members of the Swiss Guard were lynched by the victors soon after the battle was over, and de Launay’s three officers were also killed. The governor himself was marched to the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, where his bloodthirsty captors were still deciding how best to execute him when he purposefully provoked them into ending his life then and there, by kicking one of them in the groin. In Versailles, the news of the Bastille’s fall would factor into King Louis XVI’s decision two days later to reinstate his chief minister, Jacques Necker, whom he had sacked for failing to attempt to block the rise of the National Assembly. But the king’s reversal failed to prevent the country from sliding further into full-blown revolution.

Though there were some who wished to turn the Bastille into a museum or a new home for the volunteer militia, the Permanent Committee of Municipal Electors at the Hôtel de Ville swiftly authorized the building’s destruction. One of the contractors hired to carry out the work, Pierre-François Palloy, saw an opportunity to promote the people’s victory by turning the Bastille’s remains into souvenirs: inkwells made from its ironwork, fans from its papers, paperweights from its stones, and small replicas from its bricks. Pieces of stone were also sent to every district in France for display. These schemes and others contributed to the mythologizing of the Bastille’s fall across the country and internationally, but as a result all that remains today of the fortress is an outline and a small portion of the foundation.