Up from the Guillotine
The storming of the Bastille.

Compiled by Jack Walsh
July 14-15, 2001

n July 14, 1789, a Parisian mob stormed the town's fortress and prison — the Bastille. Celebrated as a national holiday in France, the attack on the Bastille marked the start of lower-class participation in the French Revolution. If the shadow of the guillotine remains the symbol of the revolution's terrible excesses, the fall of the Bastille is remembered as its most shining moment. But memory and time have a way of smoothing out history's rough edges. Will and Ariel Durant, in their history Rousseau and Revolution, describe the bloody events surrounding the taking of the Bastille.

Early on July 14 a crowd of eight thousand men invaded the Hotel des Invalides, and captured 32,000 muskets, some powder, and twelve pieces of artillery. Suddenly someone cried out, "To the Bastille!" Why the Bastille? Not to release its prisoners, who were only seven; and generally, since 1715, it had been used as a place of genteel confinement for the well to do. But this massive fortress, one hundred feet high, with walls thirty feet thick, and surrounded by a moat seventy-five feet wide, had long been a symbol of despotism; it stood in the public mind for a thousand prisons and secret dungeons. Perhaps most important of all, the Bastille was said to contain a great store of arms and ammunition, especially powder, of which the rebels had little. In the fortress was a garrison of eighty-two French soldiers and thirty-two Swiss Guards, under the command of the Marquis de Launay, a man of mild temper but popularly reported to be a monster of cruelty.

About one o'clock in the afternoon eighteen of the rebels climbed the wall of an adjoining structure, leaped into the forecourt of the Bastille, and lowered two drawbridges. Hundreds crossed over the moat; two other drawbridges were lowered; soon the court was filled with an eager and confident crowd. De Launay commanded them to withdraw; they refused; he ordered his soldiers to fire upon them. In four hours of fighting, ninety-eight of the attacker and one of the defenders were killed. De Launay, seeing the multitude always increasing with new arrivals and having no supply of food to stand a siege, bade his soldiers to ceasefire and hoist a white flag.

While many of the victors took what weapons and ammunition they could find, part of the crowd led de Launay toward the Hotel de Ville, apparently intending to have him tried for murder. On the way the more ardent among them knocked him down, beat him to death, and cut off his head. With this bleeding trophy held aloft on a pike, they marched through Paris in a triumphal parade.

That afternoon Louis XVI returned to Versailles from a day's hunting, and entered a note into his diary: "July 14: Nothing." Then the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, arriving from Paris, told him of the successful attack upon the Bastille. "Why," exclaimed the King, "this is a revolt!" "No, Sire," said the Duke, "it is a revolution."