Bastille

Paris kept its main royal castle, the Louvre, in the west, and by the mid-14th century the city had spread east with nothing to guard that side. With John II a prisoner in England after Poitiers, the Provost of Paris, Étienne Marcel, covered the Porte Saint-Antoine in 1357 with two high stone towers and a ditch 24 m across — a fortified gateway of the kind called a bastille.

Charles V, uneasy about the same approach, told his new provost Hugues Aubriot to build far larger on the site; Aubriot laid the first stone on 22 April 1370 and the work ran to 1383. Towers went up in pairs until eight of them and their curtain walls formed one block, ringed by ditches fed from the Seine and garrisoned by a captain, a knight, eight squires and ten crossbowmen. Walls and towers rose to the same height, 24 m, so their tops made one crenellated walkway right round the fortress, letting men be shifted fast and cannon be positioned. Charles died in 1380 with the work probably unfinished and Charles VI completed it. Sidney Toy has described the result as "one of the most powerful fortifications" of its period; the design was copied at Pierrefonds and Tarascon, and reached as far as Nunney Castle in south-west England.

The Bastille had already held prisoners — its builder Hugues Aubriot, locked in the Liberté tower under Charles VI, was the first man confined there — and in 1417 it formally became a state prison as well as a royal fortress. It was also the royal bolt-hole inside the capital: the future Charles VII sheltered there during the Burgundian massacre of the Armagnacs in 1418 before slipping out through the Porte Saint-Antoine. It fell with Paris to Henry V of England in 1420 and was garrisoned by the English for the next sixteen years; Henry V appointed Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter, as its new captain. Charles VII recovered the city in 1436, and his enemies shut themselves in the Bastille until, besieged and out of food, they surrendered and bought their way out of Paris with a ransom; in 1464 the Burgundians talked the royal troops inside into giving it up, then used it to launch a surprise attack that came close to capturing the king. Under Louis XI it became a penitentiary in earnest, and the Constable of France, Louis de Luxembourg, went in on 27 November 1475 to be beheaded on the Place de Grève three weeks later.

Fearing an English or Imperial attack, Henry II closed three of the four gateways in 1553 and threw out an earthwork bastion to the east, reached by a drawbridge fitted in the Comté tower. The Wars of Religion then put the fortress in hostile hands: hard-line Catholics rose against Henry III on the Day of the Barricades, 12 May 1588, the king fled, and the Bastille surrendered to Henry I, Duke of Guise, who installed Bussy-Leclerc as captain. Bussy-Leclerc raided the Parlement of Paris from it, arresting magistrates he suspected of royalism and holding them until heavy ransoms were paid. He gave the castle up in December 1592, and the League's grip ended when Henry IV took Paris in March 1594 — though the accounts disagree over whether the fortress held out under a four-day siege or surrendered by agreement.

The Fronde took it twice more. The royal government fled Paris in September 1648 leaving twenty-two men inside; on 11 January 1649 the Fronde gave Elbeuf the task of reducing it, and five or six shots brought its surrender two days later. In July 1652 the Battle of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine was fought beneath the walls, Condé's forces trapped against a Porte Saint-Antoine the Parlement would not open, until La Grande Mademoiselle obtained her father's order, went into the Bastille and saw to it that its cannon were turned on Turenne's army — inflicting significant casualties and letting Condé withdraw. Every siege it faced ended the same way: the Bastille was never taken by storm, and never held out.

Richelieu began the Bastille's transformation into a formal organ of the French state, and from 1659 it worked chiefly as a state penitentiary; by 1789 some 5,279 prisoners had passed through its gates. Louis XIV accounted for 2,320 of them, roughly 43 a year, each held on a lettre de cachet — a letter under royal seal naming the person to be detained — with the king deciding personally who went in, usually for no fixed term. Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and used the fortress to break up Protestant networks; some 254 Protestants were imprisoned there across his reign, mostly upper-class Calvinists.

Conditions divided by rank: prisoners of quality had the forty-two furnished cells and ate the same meals as the governor, while the pailleux slept on straw changed once a month and six cachots lay six metres down at the level of the ditch, one fitted as a torture chamber. Voltaire was brought in on 17 May 1717, aged twenty-two, for verses against the Regent, and the marquis de Sade on 29 February 1784 with tapestries, perfume and 133 books. Under Louis XV and Louis XVI the intake shifted towards printers and writers — 40 per cent of those sent in during the 1750s were arrested over banned material — and prison memoirs, Linguet's of 1783 and Latude's after an escape up a cell chimney on a home-made rope ladder, made the place a byword for despotism. Louis XVI abolished the lettres de cachet on 26 June 1789, and that same month the Académie royale d'architecture proposed clearing the site for an open square with a column dedicated to the king as "restorer of public freedom".

The crisis that reached the Porte Saint-Antoine was fiscal before it was political: the cost of intervening in the American war, regressive taxes and poor harvests in the late 1780s, made worse by a finance minister, Calonne, who thought lavish spending would secure loans by making the monarchy look rich. The Estates General met on 5 May 1789 and stalled on archaic protocol and the conservatism of the Second Estate, which stood for less than two per cent of the population. On 17 June the Third Estate reconstituted itself as the National Assembly to write a constitution, and on 9 July renamed itself the National Constituent Assembly. On 11 July, under the influence of the conservative nobles of his privy council, Louis XVI dismissed and banished Necker and remade the ministry around Broglie, La Galissonnière, La Vauguyon, Breteuil and Foullon.

The news reached Paris on the afternoon of 12 July and was taken for the opening move of a coup — the more so because troops had been drawn in from the frontier garrisons to Versailles, Sèvres, the Champ de Mars and Saint-Denis, and about half of the 25,000 regulars around the capital were foreign regiments thought less likely to sympathise with the crowd. More than ten thousand people gathered at the Palais-Royal, where Camille Desmoulins mounted a table with a pistol in his hand: "Citizens, there is no time to lose; the dismissal of Necker is the knell of Saint Bartholomew for patriots! This very night all the Swiss and German battalions will leave the Champ de Mars to massacre us all; one resource is left; to take arms!" The marchers clashed with the Royal-Allemand cavalry between the Place Vendôme and the Tuileries, and the Prince of Lambesc charged from the Champs-Élysées to scatter what was left of them at the Place Louis XV; the Baron de Besenval, afraid both of a massacre and of defections among his own men, pulled the cavalry back to Sèvres. That night the customs posts blamed for the price of bread and wine were attacked, and Saint-Lazare was broken open and stripped of fifty-two wagons of wheat, which went to the public market.

The permanent garrison of the city decided it. The Gardes Françaises had local ties and leanings to match, and had been kept in barracks; when Lambesc posted sixty dragoons outside their depot in the Chaussée d'Antin their own officers could not rally them, and the crowd had acquired a trained military contingent. On the morning of 13 July the electors of Paris agreed to raise a bourgeois militia of 48,000 men from the city's sixty districts, wearing cockades of blue and red; Lafayette was elected its commander on 14 July, renamed it the National Guard, and on 27 July added the white of the Bourbons to make the tricolour. On the morning of the 14th the militia stormed the Hôtel des Invalides with no real opposition and took between 29,000 and 32,000 muskets — and no powder or shot, because its commandant had moved 250 barrels of gunpowder to the Bastille days before for safe keeping.

Fighting on 12 July drove the royal forces out of central Paris, and through 13 July the crowds looted royal stores, gunsmiths and armourers for weapons and powder. That left the Bastille the only royalist stronghold in the middle of the city, holding a newly delivered stock of 250 barrels of gunpowder. Its governor, Bernard-René de Launay — conscientious, but a soldier of no great rank or experience — had been sent 32 Swiss soldiers of the Salis-Samade regiment on 7 July to stiffen the 82 invalides pensioners of the standing garrison. He raised the drawbridge in the Comté tower, destroyed the stone abutment linking the fortress to its bastion and locked the gates. He had thirty small artillery pieces, two days' food and no source of water.

About 900 people gathered outside on the morning of 14 July, mostly working men of the faubourg Saint-Antoine but with mutinous soldiers and local traders among them; Godechot later showed that at least half were recent arrivals in Paris from the provinces. De Launay admitted two of their leaders at 10 a.m. and a third just after midday, but the delegates now wanted the guns as well as the powder and he would surrender neither without authorisation from Versailles. The walls mounted eighteen eight-pound guns and twelve smaller pieces, and the crowd's first demand was that they be pulled back from the embrasures. The official list of vainqueurs de la Bastille compiled afterwards runs to 954 names, most of them local artisans, with some army deserters and twenty-one wine merchants among them.

At about half past one the crowd pushed into the undefended outer courtyard, and a small party climbed onto the roof of a building beside the inner gate and cut the chains of the drawbridge, which fell and crushed one of them. Soldiers called down to the people to withdraw; in the noise the shouts were taken for encouragement to come on. Firing began, apparently of its own accord, and the crowd, believing it had been drawn into a trap deliberately, fought harder and ignored the deputies trying to arrange a cease-fire. After three o'clock mutinous gardes françaises arrived with trained officers and two cannon, each reportedly fired about six times; farm wagons were filled with damp straw and set alight to screen the attackers, but the smoke blinded both sides and the wagons were hauled away again. Five thousand Royal Army troops sat on the Champ de Mars and did not move. The only order Besenval sent read: "M. de Launay is to hold firm to the end; I have sent him sufficient forces".

De Launay ordered the firing stopped at five o'clock. A letter offering surrender, and threatening to blow the powder if the garrison were not allowed to march out unharmed, was passed through a gap in the inner gate; the demand was refused, and he capitulated anyway, with limited food and no water. The gates were opened and the vainqueurs swept in at half past five. Ninety-eight attackers had died in the fighting or of their wounds, against one of the defenders — a disparity the walls account for. Lieutenant Ludwig von Flüe of the Salis-Samade wrote a detailed report of the defence that went into his regiment's logbook and survives; it blames de Launay for weak and indecisive leadership.

De Launay was seized and dragged towards the Hôtel de Ville through a storm of abuse, and outside it the crowd argued over what to do with him. Badly beaten, he shouted "Enough! Let me die!" and kicked a pastry cook named Dulait in the groin; he was stabbed repeatedly and died. An English traveller, Doctor Edward Rigby, wrote of what he saw next: "[We] perceived two bloody heads raised on pikes, which were said to be the heads of the Marquis de Launay, Governor of the Bastille, and of Monsieur Flesselles, Prévôt des Marchands. It was a chilling and a horrid sight!" Three officers of the permanent garrison were killed with him and three of the invalides lynched, along with perhaps two of the Swiss reported missing; the rest of the Swiss were protected by the French Guards and returned to their regiment. Jacques de Flesselles, accused of treachery, was killed on the way to an ostensible trial at the Palais-Royal.

Louis XVI heard of it the next morning from the Duke of La Rochefoucauld. "Is it a revolt?" the king asked. "No sire," the duke answered, "it's not a revolt; it's a revolution." By the morning of 15 July the king and his commanders had given way: the twenty-three regiments concentrated around Paris were dispersed to their frontier garrisons, Lafayette took command of the National Guard and Jean Sylvain Bailly became mayor under the new Commune de Paris. Necker was recalled, and on 17 July the king came into Paris, accepted a blue-and-red cockade from Bailly at the Hôtel de Ville and was met with cries of "Long live the King" and "Long live the Nation". The first émigrés were already going — the Count of Artois and his two sons, the Prince of Condé, the Prince of Conti, the Polignacs and, a little later, Calonne — settling at Turin, where Calonne began plotting civil war and pressing for a European coalition against France.

The search turned up seven prisoners, fewer than anyone expected: four convicted forgers who vanished into the streets, Count Hubert de Solages, detained at his own family's request, and two mentally ill men, de Whyte de Malleville and Auguste-Claude Tavernier, both in due course sent to the Charenton asylum — the white-bearded Whyte paraded through the streets first, waving happily to the crowds. Sade had been moved to Charenton in early July, after claiming the authorities meant to massacre the prisoners. Old armour and pieces of a printing press were carried out as torture machinery, Latude returned and was handed the rope ladder he had escaped on, and more than 150 broadsides took the storming as their subject.

Mirabeau settled the argument over what to do with the building by starting on the battlements himself; the Permanent Committee of the Hôtel de Ville then appointed five experts to manage the demolition, and one of them, the entrepreneur Pierre-François Palloy, took the whole job over. Most of the fortress was down by November 1789 and the work ran on until 21 May 1791. Palloy set an altar of prison chains and restraints on the site in February 1790, and when old bones — probably 15th-century soldiers — came up in April they were presented as prisoners' skeletons and ceremonially reburied at Saint-Paul's. He then sold what he called "relics of freedom", carving models of the Bastille from its own stones and sending them to the provinces at his own expense. A revolutionary fountain went up on the cleared ground in 1793 and the square took the fortress's name. Lafayette had sent the key to George Washington in 1790; the foundations of the Liberté tower, uncovered during Métro excavations in 1899, were moved to the corner of the Boulevard Henri IV.

Palloy put about a thousand workers on the job. The clock, which showed prisoners in chains, was melted down and four statues broken up, all inside five months. The key Lafayette sent to Washington weighed one pound three ounces; Washington showed it at government buildings and events in New York and Philadelphia until shortly before he retired in 1797, and it is still at Mount Vernon. Stone from the fortress went into the Pont de la Concorde, the clock bells and pulley system into the Musée d'Art Campanaire, and pieces were sent to every district in France. The outline of the building is now laid in brick on the ground above, and the line of the moat runs through the Métro station beneath it, where a piece of the foundation is on display. About nine hundred people who claimed to have stormed the place received certificates as vainqueurs de la Bastille from the National Assembly in 1790, and 14 July became the Fête nationale, marking both the storming and the Fête de la Fédération held on its first anniversary.