Storming of the Bastille

On 14 July 1789 a crowd of Parisians, joined by mutinous soldiers, attacked and captured the Bastille, a medieval fortress and state prison in the east of Paris. Militarily the prize was small: the fortress held only seven prisoners and was already due to be demolished. But as a symbol of royal power its fall was immense. It forced Louis XVI to back down, gave the people of Paris a decisive role in politics, and became the defining image of the French Revolution. Its anniversary is France's national day.

By the late 1780s the Kingdom of France was in deep financial trouble, worsened by the cost of supporting the American Revolution, an unfair tax system and poor harvests. The king summoned the Estates-General, which met in May 1789. In June the deputies of the Third Estate, representing commoners, declared themselves a National Assembly with the aim of giving France a constitution, and the king was obliged to accept it. Paris followed the debates with intense excitement.

On 11 July, under pressure from conservative courtiers, Louis dismissed his popular finance minister, Jacques Necker. The news reached Paris the next day. With around 25,000 troops, many of them foreign mercenaries, gathered around Paris and Versailles, Parisians feared a royal coup against the Assembly. The journalist Camille Desmoulins urged a crowd at the Palais-Royal to take up arms. Protesters clashed with cavalry, customs posts were burned, and crowds hunted for food and weapons. The French Guards, the city's permanent garrison, increasingly sided with the people, while the royal commander withdrew his troops. City electors began raising a citizens' militia, soon to become the National Guard.

Crowds had already seized tens of thousands of muskets from the Hôtel des Invalides, but they lacked gunpowder, and some 250 barrels of it had recently been moved to the Bastille. On the morning of 14 July a crowd, probably fewer than a thousand strong and mostly local artisans, gathered outside and demanded the powder and the withdrawal of the fortress's cannon. The garrison numbered 114 men: 82 veteran invalides and 32 Swiss grenadiers, under the governor, Bernard-René de Launay. Negotiations dragged on. In the early afternoon attackers broke into the outer courtyard and cut the chains of a drawbridge, and firing broke out. Later, mutinous French Guards arrived with cannon. A large royal force camped nearby on the Champ de Mars never intervened.

At about half past five in the afternoon de Launay, short of food and without water, ordered a ceasefire and opened the gates. Roughly a hundred attackers had been killed or fatally wounded, against a single defender, a difference explained by the protection of the walls. After the surrender the crowd turned on the garrison. De Launay was dragged towards the Hôtel de Ville, stabbed to death and beheaded, and several other defenders were killed. The city's chief magistrate, Jacques de Flesselles, accused of treachery, was also murdered.

When the king heard the news, the Duke of La Rochefoucauld reportedly told him that it was not a revolt but a revolution. Louis withdrew the troops from around Paris and recalled Necker. Jean Sylvain Bailly, a leader of the Third Estate, became mayor of Paris and the Marquis de Lafayette commander of the National Guard. On 17 July the king came to Paris and accepted the city's red and blue cockade, to which white was later added to form the tricolour. Some nobles, including the Count of Artois, the future Charles X, began to flee abroad, and unrest spread through the countryside in the "Great Fear".

The Bastille was torn down within months, and its stones were sold or sent around France as souvenirs. Lafayette sent its key to George Washington, and it still hangs at Mount Vernon. Revolutionary propaganda exaggerated the fortress's horrors, but its fall became one of the most enduring symbols of popular revolt against tyranny.

Our 1783 map shows the Kingdom of France on the eve of the Revolution, and our 1800 map shows the French First Republic that replaced it.