Bastille, Paris

A prison with seven inmates

When the Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille on 14 July 1789, they expected to free hundreds of political prisoners languishing under royal lettres de cachet.

There were seven prisoners inside.

Four forgers. Two men declared insane. One aristocrat (the Comte de Solages) imprisoned at his family's request for sexual misconduct.

The Bastille had been gradually disused as a state prison through the 1770s and was scheduled for demolition. The crowd's actual objective was the gunpowder stored in the fortress, which they needed for the muskets they had looted from the Hôtel des Invalides that morning.

Governor de Launay's miscalculation

The Marquis Bernard-René de Launay, governor of the Bastille, commanded a garrison of 82 invalids — retired soldiers — and 32 Swiss Guards.

He had ammunition for several days of resistance and a formidable fortification. His position was militarily sound. Politically it was disastrous.

The crowd of perhaps 8 000 outside the walls was reinforced by 61 guardsmen from the Gardes Françaises who had defected. De Launay attempted to negotiate, then ordered his gunners to fire. After six hours of fighting, he surrendered around 5 p.m. on the promise of safe conduct.

The crowd dragged him to the Place de Grève and beheaded him with a butcher's knife.

A fortress becomes a symbol

The actual storming was, by the standards of revolutionary action, relatively bloodless. 83 attackers killed. Six defenders died.

What made the event matter was the symbolism.

The Bastille had been the visible symbol of royal arbitrary power for two hundred years — the place where Louis XIV had imprisoned the Man in the Iron Mask, where Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade had been held without trial. Its fall meant the end of the arbitrary monarchy.

Within months the demolition of the building itself began. The Place de la Bastille where it stood is today an open square with a single column commemorating not 1789 but the 1830 July Revolution.

Which 14 July?

The choice of 14 July as the French national holiday was made in 1880, almost a century after the event.

The choice was contested. Some republican deputies wanted 5 May 1789 (the opening of the Estates-General). Others wanted 4 August 1789 (the abolition of feudal privileges).

The compromise text deliberately referred to "the festival of 14 July" without specifying which 14 July — 1789 or 1790 (the Fête de la Fédération, the celebration of national unity held a year after the Bastille fell).

This ambiguity allowed monarchists to celebrate the federation, republicans to celebrate the storming, and the holiday to enter French civic life as the foundational national day it remains.