Storming of the Bastille (1789): The Day That Began a Revolution

The storming of the Bastille took place in Paris on 14 July 1789, when armed crowds attacked and captured the Bastille, a royal fortress and state prison in the east of the city. The insurgents wanted the gunpowder stored inside, but the fall of a building that symbolised royal power became the defining event of the early French Revolution. Its anniversary is today France’s national holiday.

Background

By 1789 the French monarchy was close to bankruptcy, partly because of the cost of wars, including support for the American Revolution. Bad harvests had pushed bread prices to very high levels, and many Parisians struggled to feed their families. To raise taxes, King Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General, an assembly of the clergy, nobility and commoners that had not met since 1614.

The Estates-General opened at Versailles on 5 May 1789. On 17 June the representatives of the commoners, the Third Estate, declared themselves the National Assembly, and on 20 June they swore the Tennis Court Oath, promising not to separate until France had a constitution. At the same time, the King was gathering troops around Paris and Versailles. By early July tens of thousands of soldiers, many of them from foreign regiments in French service, were stationed around the capital, and the Assembly asked in vain for them to be withdrawn.

Paris itself was tense. In late April 1789 a riot against the wallpaper manufacturer Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, wrongly rumoured to want lower wages, had been put down by troops with many deaths. Hungry workers, unemployed craftsmen and the political clubs of the Palais-Royal made the city a powder keg, and rumours of an aristocratic plot to starve or crush it spread quickly.

On 11 July Louis XVI dismissed his popular finance minister, Jacques Necker. When the news reached Paris on 12 July, it was taken as a sign that the King intended to break the Assembly by force. The journalist Camille Desmoulins urged crowds at the Palais-Royal to take up arms, and over the next two days customs posts were burned and shops searched for weapons.

On 13 July the electors of Paris, the men who had chosen the city’s deputies, formed a standing committee at the Hôtel de Ville and began to organise a citizens’ militia. The militia needed weapons and powder, and the search for them led the crowds first to the Invalides and then to the Bastille.

The Bastille

The Bastille had been built in the late fourteenth century to defend the eastern approach to Paris, and later became a prison where people could be held by royal order, without trial. Its eight round towers and walls about 24 metres (80 feet) high dominated the working-class district of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Famous prisoners of earlier times included the writer Voltaire, held there twice, and the mysterious “Man in the Iron Mask”, who died there in 1703.

By 1789 it held few prisoners and there had been talk of demolishing it. On 14 July only seven men were inside. The Marquis de Sade, its best-known recent inmate, had been moved to an asylum at Charenton earlier in the month.

Its governor, Bernard-René Jordan de Launay, commanded a garrison of about 80 invalides, veteran soldiers no longer fit for field service, reinforced by around 30 Swiss soldiers. Large quantities of gunpowder had recently been moved to the fortress for safekeeping.

What happened on 14 July

On the morning of 14 July, a crowd broke into the Hôtel des Invalides and seized around 30,000 muskets, but found little powder. Many then went to the Bastille. Delegates from the Paris electors negotiated with de Launay, who received them but refused to hand over the fortress or its stores.

In the early afternoon, attackers entered the outer courtyard and lowered a drawbridge, and the garrison opened fire. A bitter fight followed. The turning point came when detachments of the Gardes françaises, a royal regiment that had sided with the people, arrived with cannon, led by figures such as Pierre-Augustin Hulin and Jacob Élie.

Facing bombardment and without hope of relief, de Launay surrendered in the late afternoon. He had threatened to blow up the powder store, but his own garrison pressed him to give in. About 98 attackers were killed or died of their wounds, while the defenders lost one man in the fighting. After the surrender, de Launay was seized by the crowd and killed on the way to the Hôtel de Ville, and his head was paraded on a pike. Jacques de Flesselles, head of the city’s merchants, was also killed that day, and several of the garrison’s invalides were killed after the surrender.

By the numbers

Key people

Louis XVI, King of France, hoped to restore order with troops but backed down after the fall of the Bastille rather than risk a bloody assault on Paris.

Jacques Necker, the Genevan banker who served as finance minister, was popular with the public; his dismissal on 11 July set off the rising.

Bernard-René Jordan de Launay was the governor of the Bastille. With few men and no orders to resist at all costs, he chose in the end to surrender, and was killed by the crowd.

Pierre-Augustin Hulin and Jacob Élie led the soldiers and cannon that turned the attack into a siege the garrison could not withstand.

Camille Desmoulins was a young lawyer and journalist whose speech at the Palais-Royal on 12 July helped turn anger into armed action.

Aftermath and legacy

The King withdrew his troops from Paris and recalled Necker. The Marquis de Lafayette was appointed commander of the new citizens’ militia, the National Guard, and the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly became mayor of Paris. On 17 July Louis XVI came to the city and accepted the red and blue cockade of Paris, soon combined with royal white to form the tricolour. Some of the most conservative courtiers drew the opposite conclusion: the King’s younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, left France in the days after the fall of the Bastille, the start of a wave of noble emigration.

Across France, towns followed the example of Paris. In what historians call the municipal revolution, local citizens replaced royal officials with elected committees and formed their own National Guard units, so that royal authority in the provinces collapsed within weeks.

Demolition of the fortress began on 15 July. The building contractor Pierre-François Palloy carved its stones into souvenir models of the Bastille, which were sent around France. Lafayette later gave the main key of the Bastille to George Washington, and it is still kept at Mount Vernon.

In the following weeks, rural unrest known as the Great Fear swept the countryside. On 4 August the Assembly voted to abolish feudal privileges, and on 26 August it adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

A year later, on 14 July 1790, the Festival of the Federation on the Champ de Mars celebrated national unity in front of hundreds of thousands of people. The site of the fortress became the Place de la Bastille, and the July Column that stands there today commemorates a later uprising, the July Revolution of 1830. The modern Opéra Bastille opened on the square in 1989, for the bicentenary of the Revolution.

Myths and facts

Myth: the crowd freed hundreds of political prisoners. Only seven men were held there, none of them political prisoners in the modern sense. The attackers came mainly for gunpowder.

Myth: Louis XVI did not know what was happening and wrote “nothing” in his diary. The King did write “Rien” for 14 July, but the entry was in his hunting journal and meant that he had made no kill. It does not show that he was unaware of events.

Myth: the Bastille was taken in a bloodless rush. The attack lasted several hours, and around a hundred people died on the attackers’ side alone.

Timeline

• 1789, 5 May: The Estates-General opens at Versailles.
• 1789, 17 June: The Third Estate declares itself the National Assembly.
• 1789, 20 June: Deputies swear the Tennis Court Oath.
• 1789, 11 July: Louis XVI dismisses Jacques Necker.
• 1789, 14 July: Crowds seize muskets at the Invalides and capture the Bastille.
• 1789, 15 July: Demolition of the Bastille begins.
• 1789, 17 July: Louis XVI visits Paris and accepts the revolutionary cockade.
• 1789, 26 August: The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is adopted.
• 1790, 14 July: The Festival of the Federation is held in Paris.

Why it matters

The storming of the Bastille showed that the people of Paris could defeat royal authority by force, and it saved the National Assembly from being dissolved. The Bastille became a lasting symbol of the struggle against arbitrary power, in a tradition that some compare with older milestones such as Magna Carta. Since 1880, 14 July has been France’s national holiday, marked by a military parade in Paris.