The afternoon Paris took up arms — and the Revolution became real
On 14 July 1789 a crowd of Parisians, hunting for gunpowder and fearing a royal crackdown, besieged the medieval fortress-prison on the city’s eastern edge. After four hours it fell. Only seven prisoners were inside, but the message was unmistakable: the king no longer controlled his capital.
About 98 attackers died and 73 were wounded. The garrison lost one man in the fighting; after the surrender the crowd killed the governor and about five of his men.
The Bastille Saint-Antoine was a fourteenth-century fortress with eight round towers some 24 metres high, built to guard the eastern gate of Paris. By the 1780s it was a state prison for people held on a royal lettre de cachet — arrest without trial. Its famous inmates (Voltaire, the Man in the Iron Mask, and the Marquis de Sade, moved elsewhere only ten days before the attack) gave it a reputation far darker than its cells by then deserved. The crown was already considering demolishing it.
On 14 July it held just seven prisoners. But it held 250 barrels of gunpowder, recently moved there for safekeeping, and its cannon looked down on the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the city’s most crowded working district.
The summer of 1789 was tense. Drought and a great hailstorm had ruined the 1788 harvest, and bread in Paris cost almost twice what it had two years before. The Estates-General had turned into a National Assembly that claimed to speak for the nation. And the king had ringed Paris and Versailles with troops — roughly 20,000 men, many from Swiss and German regiments — which Parisians read as preparation for a coup.
On 11 July Louis XVI dismissed Jacques Necker, the popular finance minister. The news reached Paris on Sunday the 12th. At the Palais-Royal the young lawyer Camille Desmoulins jumped onto a table and warned that a massacre of patriots was coming. Crowds burned the customs posts at the city gates and raided gunsmiths, and on Monday the 13th the city’s electors formed a citizens’ militia. What it lacked was powder.
At 14½ sous a loaf, bread alone could take half or more of a labourer’s daily pay.
The morning of the 14th began at the Invalides, where the crowd carried off some 30,000 muskets and several cannon almost without resistance — but no powder. The powder was at the Bastille, and from mid-morning a crowd gathered before it, demanding the powder and the withdrawal of its guns.
The governor, the Marquis de Launay, had 82 invalides — veterans no longer fit for the field — and 32 Swiss grenadiers. He received delegations from the Hôtel de Ville and pulled his cannon back from the embrasures. Around 1:30 pm a few men climbed onto the roof of a shop by the gate, dropped into the courtyard beyond and cut the chains of the drawbridge. Hundreds surged in, and the garrison opened fire.
The turning point came after 3 pm, when detachments of French Guards — a royal regiment stationed in Paris, now in mutiny — arrived with cannon under Pierre-Augustin Hulin and Jacob Élie and trained them on the inner gate. Around 5 pm de Launay passed a note through a gap in the gate: he would blow up the powder unless the garrison were allowed to leave. Élie called out that he accepted, on his word as an officer, and at about 5:30 the inner drawbridge came down.
The promise of safety did not hold. Hulin and Élie tried to escort de Launay to the Hôtel de Ville, but outside it the crowd stabbed him to death, cut off his head and carried it on a pike. Three of his officers and two of the invalides were killed too. That evening Jacques de Flesselles, the provost of the merchants who headed the city government, was shot, accused of deceiving the crowd over arms.
Within days Louis gave way. On 15 July he told the Assembly that the troops would be withdrawn; on the 16th he recalled Necker; on the 17th he came to Paris and accepted the city’s red-and-blue cockade from its new mayor, Jean-Sylvain Bailly. Demolition of the Bastille began almost at once: the contractor Pierre-François Palloy took it down stone by stone and sold the pieces as souvenirs.
“Is it a revolt?” — “No, Sire, it is a revolution.”
Militarily the Bastille was a minor action. Politically it was decisive. It showed that the king could not rely on his army in Paris, it gave the National Assembly an armed city behind it, and it handed the Revolution its first martyrs, its first symbol and its first anniversary, marked in 1790 by the Festival of the Federation. Since 1880 the Fourteenth of July has been France’s national holiday.
