Storming of the Bastille

On the morning of 14 July 1789, thousands of Parisians gathered in front of the Bastille, a medieval fortress on the eastern side of Paris. Most of them were not trying to free prisoners. They wanted gunpowder and ammunition. The day before, the city had armed itself with tens of thousands of muskets taken from another royal building, but muskets are useless without powder, and a large store of powder had been moved into the Bastille for safe keeping.

Representatives of the crowd went inside to negotiate with the governor, the marquis de Launay. While talks dragged on, some attackers climbed onto the roof of a guardhouse and cut the chains of the outer drawbridge. It crashed down, the crowd poured into the outer courtyard, and the defenders opened fire. For several hours the two sides shot at each other. Many attackers were killed, while the defenders, protected by the thick walls, lost almost no one.

The turning point came in the afternoon, when companies of the French Guards, soldiers who were supposed to protect the king but had joined the people, arrived with cannons and aimed them at the main gate. De Launay, who had only a small garrison and little food or water, agreed to surrender. The gate was opened at about half past five, and the crowd took the fortress.

The victory ended in violence. De Launay was dragged through the streets toward the city hall and killed; his head was cut off and carried on a pike. A few of the defenders were also killed, and later that day the head of the city’s chief official, Jacques de Flesselles, who was accused of betraying the people, was paraded as well. These killings shocked some observers even then, and they remain part of the story.

The Bastille was built in the 1370s and 1380s, during the Hundred Years’ War, under King Charles V. It guarded the Porte Saint-Antoine, the eastern gate of Paris. It had eight round towers, about 24 metres high, linked by thick walls and surrounded by a moat. As the city grew around it, it lost its military purpose.

From the seventeenth century, especially under Cardinal Richelieu, the Bastille became a state prison. People were sent there by a lettre de cachet, a sealed letter signed by the king that ordered someone to be imprisoned without a trial. Prisoners included writers accused of attacking the government, religious dissenters, people involved in court scandals and, sometimes, young nobles locked up at their own family’s request. The writer Voltaire was held there twice in his youth, and the mysterious prisoner known as the Man in the Iron Mask died there in 1703.

Life inside was often less terrible than the legend. Historians who have studied the prison’s records show that, by the reign of Louis XVI, the number of prisoners was small, stays were often short, and wealthier prisoners could bring furniture and books. But secrecy was the point: no one outside knew who was inside or why. That secrecy made the Bastille a perfect symbol of arbitrary power. By 1789 the crown had even discussed pulling it down, and when it was stormed it held only seven prisoners.

France in 1789 was in deep trouble. The government was nearly bankrupt, partly because of the huge cost of wars, including its support for the American Revolution. The tax system was unfair: the clergy and much of the nobility paid far less than ordinary people. A bad harvest in 1788 and a harsh winter pushed the price of bread, the main food of the poor, to its highest level in decades.

To find a way out, Louis XVI called the Estates-General, an old assembly of the three “estates” (clergy, nobility and everyone else), which met at Versailles in May 1789 for the first time since 1614. In June the deputies of the Third Estate declared themselves a National Assembly and, on 20 June, swore in the Tennis Court Oath not to separate until France had a constitution.

The king appeared to give way, but at the same time around 20,000 or more royal troops, many of them foreign regiments in French service, were moving into the region of Paris and Versailles. Then, on 11 July, Louis dismissed his popular finance minister, Jacques Necker. When the news reached Paris on 12 July, many people concluded that the king was preparing to dissolve the Assembly by force and crush Paris.

On Sunday 12 July, crowds gathered in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, where speakers such as the young journalist Camille Desmoulins urged Parisians to take up arms. Busts of Necker were carried through the streets. In the Tuileries gardens, royal cavalry under the prince de Lambesc clashed with the crowd, and some French Guards fought against the royal troops. During the night, many of the customs posts in the wall that ringed Paris, hated because they taxed goods coming into the city, were set on fire.

On 13 July the electors of Paris, the men who had chosen the city’s deputies to the Estates-General, formed a permanent committee at the Hôtel de Ville (city hall) and created a citizens’ militia to restore order and defend the city. The monastery of Saint-Lazare was looted for grain. Everyone was searching for weapons.

On the morning of 14 July, a huge crowd went to the Hôtel des Invalides, the military hospital, and took somewhere around 30,000 muskets and some cannon. The royal commander in Paris, the baron de Besenval, whose troops were camped nearby on the Champ de Mars, did not intervene; he doubted that his soldiers would obey orders to fire on the people. Having found muskets but no powder, the crowd turned to the Bastille.

At the Bastille, de Launay commanded about 80 invalides (veteran soldiers no longer fit for field service) and some 30 Swiss grenadiers sent as reinforcements. Delegations from the city committee were received during the morning. Accounts differ about exactly who fired first after the drawbridge fell, and the belief that the defenders had deliberately lured the crowd into a trap spread quickly. The arrival of the French Guards, led by men such as Pierre-Augustin Hulin and Jacob Élie, with cannon, decided the outcome. De Launay reportedly threatened to blow up the powder magazine before his men persuaded him to capitulate.

The people who took the Bastille were not a random mob. After the event, the city drew up lists of the “vainqueurs de la Bastille” (the victors of the Bastille), who received honours from the National Assembly. The historian George Rudé analysed these lists in The Crowd in the French Revolution (1959). He found that most were working people from the neighbourhood: skilled artisans and journeymen such as carpenters, cabinet-makers, locksmiths and shoemakers, many from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, a district of furniture workshops right next to the fortress. There were also shopkeepers, some soldiers and a handful of wealthier citizens.

Rudé’s work was important because earlier writers, both hostile and admiring, had described the revolutionary crowd in stereotyped ways, either as criminals and vagrants or as the heroic “People” in the abstract. Social historians instead tried to find out who the participants actually were, what they wanted and why they acted. Their answer pointed to local, practical concerns: the price of bread, fear of the troops and the defence of their neighbourhood, combined with the new political language of the nation and its rights.

Women played a smaller role in the fighting on 14 July than in some later revolutionary days, such as the march on Versailles in October 1789, but they took part in the crowds, carried news, and helped care for the wounded.

Militarily, the Bastille was not important; politically, its fall was decisive. The king realised that he could not rely on his army to retake Paris. On 15 July he came to the National Assembly and announced that the troops would be withdrawn. According to a well-known story, when the duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt told him the news, Louis asked, “Is it a revolt?” and the duke replied, “No, Sire, it is a revolution.” The story comes from later accounts and its exact wording may not be reliable, but it captures how quickly contemporaries understood the change.

Paris now had a new government. The astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly became mayor, and the marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American war, took command of the new National Guard. Necker was recalled. On 17 July the king visited Paris and accepted a cockade in the city’s colours, red and blue; the white of the monarchy was later added to form the tricolour.

The news spread across France. In many towns, similar “municipal revolutions” replaced the old authorities. In the countryside, rumours of aristocratic plots and brigands produced the panic known as the Great Fear, during which peasants attacked manor houses and burned records of feudal dues. To calm the countryside, the Assembly abolished many feudal privileges on the night of 4 August 1789, and on 26 August it adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Some of the king’s brothers and leading courtiers left France, the beginning of the emigration of nobles.

Demolition began almost at once. A building contractor, Pierre-François Palloy, organised the work with hundreds of labourers, and within months the fortress had largely disappeared. Palloy was also a skilled publicist. He had stones carved into small models of the Bastille and sent them to the departments of France, and he sold medals, inkwells and other souvenirs made from its stones and iron. The fortress became portable, a relic of liberty that could be displayed in homes and town halls.

Lafayette sent the main key of the Bastille to George Washington in 1790 as a token of the link between the American and French revolutions; it still hangs at Mount Vernon in Virginia. Pamphlets, prints and plays described skeletons in dungeons and instruments of torture, many of them invented or exaggerated, and older prison memoirs, such as Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet’s Mémoires sur la Bastille (1783) and the stories of the famous escaper Latude, were reprinted and widely read.

On 14 July 1790, the first anniversary, the Fête de la Fédération brought National Guards from all over France to the Champ de Mars in Paris for an oath of unity attended by the king. Nearly a century later, the Third Republic chose 14 July as the national holiday by a law of 1880. The choice was deliberately flexible: republicans could celebrate the storming of 1789, while moderates could think of the peaceful festival of national unity of 1790.

The site itself became the Place de la Bastille. In its centre stands the July Column, which actually commemorates a different revolution, that of July 1830. Lines of paving stones mark part of the outline of the old fortress, and some foundations were uncovered when the Paris Métro was built. The Opéra Bastille opened nearby in 1989, the bicentenary of the Revolution.

Outside France, the news provoked excitement and alarm in roughly equal measure. In Britain, the Whig politician Charles James Fox wrote that it was the greatest and best event that had ever happened in the world, while Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) warned that the Revolution’s attack on tradition would lead to disorder and tyranny. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) answered Burke, and the debate helped shape modern liberal and conservative thought.

In the German states, writers such as Klopstock at first welcomed the Revolution, and the young philosophers Hegel and Schelling are said to have celebrated it as students in Tübingen. Many of these early supporters became disillusioned during the Terror of 1793–94. In the Americas, the news fed into debates about rights that reached as far as the French colony of Saint-Domingue, where free people of colour and, from 1791, enslaved people claimed the Revolution’s promises for themselves.

For later revolutionaries across the world, from Europe in 1830 and 1848 to anti-colonial movements in the twentieth century, “storming the Bastille” became a common metaphor for overthrowing an unjust order. At the same time, conservative traditions have remembered 14 July mainly for the violence that followed, and the day has never been free of argument.

The events of 14 July are known from an unusually rich body of evidence: the minutes of the Paris electors at the Hôtel de Ville, reports by royal officials and army officers, depositions later made by participants seeking recognition as vainqueurs, the surviving archives of the Bastille itself, newspapers and many memoirs. The Bastille archives, scattered by the crowd, were partly collected and are now largely held at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris. Much of this material was produced after the event and with a purpose: participants wanted rewards, defenders wanted to clear their names, and journalists wanted to shape opinion. Details such as who fired first, whether de Launay intended to fire on the negotiators, and how many people were present therefore remain uncertain.

Jacques Godechot’s La prise de la Bastille (1965) reconstructed the day in detail and placed it within the wider crisis of 1789. Simon Schama’s Citizens (1989), published for the bicentenary, gave a vivid narrative that emphasised the violence of the crowd from the beginning, reflecting a broader turn away from explaining the Revolution mainly through class conflict.

Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, in The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom (English translation 1997), studied the fortress not only as a building but as an image. They showed how, long before 1789, prison memoirs and pamphlets had turned the Bastille into a condensed sign of “despotism”, so that its capture could be read instantly as the fall of despotism itself. After 1789, prints, songs, plays and objects repeated and spread that meaning. In this view, the symbolic power of the event was not an accident but the result of decades of political communication.

Such studies do not mean that the event was unimportant. Rather, they explain why a militarily minor episode became the founding date of modern France. Historians still debate how far the crowd acted spontaneously and how far it was guided by the electors and other organised groups, and how to weigh the event’s meaning as a victory for popular sovereignty against the violence that accompanied it.

For much of the twentieth century, the dominant interpretation, associated with historians such as Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, saw 1789 as a “bourgeois revolution” in which the rising middle class, supported by urban workers and peasants, overthrew a feudal order. In this reading, 14 July was the moment when the popular classes of Paris entered the Revolution and saved the National Assembly from royal repression.

From the 1950s onwards, “revisionist” historians, notably Alfred Cobban and later François Furet, challenged this social interpretation. They argued that the Revolution’s dynamics were better explained by politics, ideology and the new language of popular sovereignty than by clear-cut class interests. For Furet, the revolutionary logic that led to the Terror was present from the start; critics replied that this approach underplayed the real pressures of war, counter-revolution and hunger.

Research since the 1980s on political culture and memory, including Pierre Nora’s collective project Les Lieux de mémoire, has examined how 14 July was reinvented in each period: as a revolutionary festival, suppressed under the Restoration, revived by the Third Republic, turned into a military parade, and reinterpreted at the bicentenary of 1989. Different political families in France still remember it differently, and outside France it is sometimes seen mainly as a celebration of liberty and sometimes as the beginning of revolutionary violence. Presenting these perspectives side by side is itself part of understanding the event.