The Fortress That Fell in a Day

The Bastille had loomed over eastern Paris for four centuries. Built as a medieval fortress, it had become the French monarchy's most feared prison — a stone symbol of a king's power to lock away anyone he pleased. By the summer of 1789, that king, Louis XVI, was in deep trouble. France was broke, bread prices were soaring, and three days earlier the king had dismissed Jacques Necker, the one minister the people trusted. Paris was a city holding its breath.

The crowd didn't march on the Bastille for its prisoners. They went for its gunpowder. Thousands of muskets had already been seized from the Hôtel des Invalides, and the fortress held the powder to fire them — 250 barrels had been moved there just two days before. At dawn on July 14, a great crowd gathered around the fortress, armed with muskets, swords, and makeshift weapons. The governor, Bernard-René de Launay, fearing an attack, had brought his men inside and raised the drawbridges.

What followed was four hours of brutal fighting. De Launay's garrison held the attackers back at first, but as more and more Parisians converged on the fortress, the governor's position became hopeless. De Launay raised a white flag and surrendered. The crowd seized the fortress's gunpowder and cannons. But there was no mercy for the governor: on his way to be tried by a revolutionary council, he was pulled away by the mob and murdered. Several members of the garrison were killed as well. After four hours of fighting and nearly 100 deaths, the Bastille had fallen.

And then came the surprise that made the Bastille a symbol rather than a triumph: inside the mighty fortress, the victors found only seven prisoners. Whatever the Bastille had once been, it was no longer a dungeon full of the king's victims. It was a symbol — of arbitrary power, of a regime that ruled by fear — and symbols, it turned out, were more powerful than soldiers. Within days, the fortress was being torn down stone by stone.

The fall of the Bastille became the flashpoint of the French Revolution. The monarchy would be abolished in 1792, and Louis XVI and his queen, Marie-Antoinette, were sent to the guillotine for treason in 1793. And every July 14 since, France has celebrated its national holiday — Bastille Day — in honor of the morning when ordinary people, armed with whatever they could find, walked up to the symbol of absolute power and knocked it down.

Painting: Jean-Pierre Houël, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).