The Fall of the Bastille

Storming of the Bastille

The Bastille has long served as a symbol of a ruthless King Louis XVI oppressing his hapless and demoralized subjects. The wretchedness of this royal prison before the French Revolution is perhaps best depicted by Charles Dickens in his epic novel A Tale of Two Cities, in which the upstanding Doctor Manette is incarcerated in the Bastille in 1757 and left to rot in solitude as “Prisoner 105, North Tower,” maintaining a lifeline to sanity only by cobbling shoes. 


The roster of prison inmates on July 14, 1789 was of a quite different pedigree. On that date the Bastille hosted but six inmates. (Some historical sources claim seven.) Two of them had been judged insane and another was the son of a wealthy chevalier who had him tossed in there as punishment for disobedience.

No, it was not revenge to save the oppressed and the wrongfully accused that inflamed a Parisian mob to take to the streets that fateful July day. Citizens of France had finally reached a tipping point after too many months of (a) economic bankruptcy brought on by excessive government spending on the American Revolution and revenge against England, (b) crop failures brought on by miserable winter-like weather that kept its icy grip on French wheat fields deep into the months of spring, and (c) moral bankruptcy brought on by a corpulent and incompetent king, his despised Austrian-born and free-spending queen known contemptuously as “Madame Deficit,” and a well-heeled and privileged aristocracy that remained utterly oblivious to the abject misery of 98 percent of the French population.

King Louis XVI

So what happened on that momentous day of July 14, 1789? Perhaps the question can best be answered by John Paul Jones in a conversation with Richard Cutler as profiled in chapter 13 of For Love of Country, Volume II of the Cutler Family Chronicles. Richard was in Paris on his return voyage to Boston to confer with his former naval commander after he, Richard, had sailed from Algiers where he had tried to ransom his brother Caleb and his shipmates being held there as prisoners in conditions far worse than anything suffered in the Bastille. President Washington had recently appointed Jones as special envoy to the Barbary States to negotiate the release of all American sailors being detained by the Barbary regencies. Richard had information about North Africa that he and Thomas Jefferson, American ambassador to France, thought Jones would find useful in his upcoming mission.  

            “What exactly do you know about what happened at the Bastille?”

            Richard shrugged. “Not a lot, really. A thousand people marched to the prison and demanded that the garrison surrender. They were armed with muskets and cannon, taken from an army arsenal. The Invalids Hospital, as I recall. Their goal, they claimed, was to free the prisoners inside. But according to General Lafayette; what they really wanted was to destroy this symbol of royal authority and seize the powder inside. The prisoners were actually of minor importance.”

            “Lafayette is correct. Go on.”

            “At first, the governor of the prison refused to surrender. He ordered his troops to fire on the crowd. Some people were killed. He sent word to the mob that he would blow up the Bastille himself if they didn’t disperse. Since something close to twenty thousand pounds of powder was stored inside (editor’s note: the most powder stored anywhere in France), that was no small threat.”

            “That’s not exactly how it happened. Yes, the governor did order his men to fire, but into the air, over the heads of the crowd. He wanted to scare them, to bring them to their senses. And yes, the governor did threaten to blow up the Bastille, but only if the mob refused to accept his terms of surrender -- which basically were to allow his garrison to leave the prison unharmed. He was simply trying to defuse the situation, avoid further bloodshed on both sides, and guarantee the safety of his soldiers. He realized he couldn’t defend the Bastille with a hundred aging veterans and a few Swiss guards dispatched from Versailles. He lost all hope when three hundred Gardes Françaises defected from the regular army and marched into Paris to join the ranks of the mob. But the governor had his honor to consider.”

            “What happened next?” Richard asked, caught up in the telling and seeing no point in recounting events that Jones obviously knew far better than he.

            “When a leader of the mob – a man named Aubriot -- refused the governor’s terms, the mob stormed into the outer courtyard, which was undefended, and cut the chains on the drawbridge leading into the inner yard.  When they did that, the garrison opened fire. Many people were killed, which only served to inflame the mob further. They stormed inside in ever greater numbers until the governor finally was forced to surrender. When he did, he and his officers were seized and dragged off to la place de Grève, a spot where traitors and criminals have traditionally been executed. He was defiant to the end. He was even able to free himself long enough to kick one of his captors in the balls and spit in Aubriot’s face. The mob pounced on him like a pack of dogs, after that.  They tore at his body and cut into his neck with a dull knife. As his lifeblood flowed out of him, he managed to gurgle out: Vive le roi!  They cut off his head, impaled it on a pike, and paraded it through the city streets followed by rioters shouting,  ‘Death to all aristocrats!’”

The French Revolution was under way, and many more years of suffering and bloodshed would elapse before the citizens of France – high-brow and low-brow alike -- would find any sort of reprieve.

(As a footnote to history, John Paul Jones never did serve as special envoy to the Barbary States. He died in Paris not long after the fall of the Bastille.)

Photo credits: Storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789, public domain; Louis XVI in Coronation Robes, public domain.