A small party climbed onto the roof of a building next to the gate to the inner courtyard and broke the chains on the drawbridge. Soldiers of the garrison called to the people to withdraw but in the noise and confusion these shouts were misinterpreted as encouragement to enter. Gunfire began, apparently spontaneously, turning the crowd into a mob.
A analysis of the Bastille dimensions showed that it did not tower over the neighborhood as was depicted in the paintings but was a comparable height. The firing continued and a substantial force of Royal Army troops encamped on the Champs de Mars did not intervene. With the possibility of mutual carnage suddenly apparent, Governor de Launay ordered a cease-fire at 5 p.
A letter offering his terms was handed out to the besiegers through a gap in the inner gate. His demands were refused, but de Launay nonetheless capitulated as he realized that with limited food stocks and no water supply his troops could not hold out much longer. He accordingly opened the gates to the inner courtyard, and the conquerors swept in to liberate the fortress at p.
The king first learned of the storming only the next morning through the Duke of La Rochefoucauld. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Search for:. The Storming of the Bastille Learning Objective Explain the swell of popular emotion that led to the storming of the Bastille.
Among the troops under the royal authority, there were foreign mercenaries, most notably Swiss and German regiments, that were seen as less likely to be sympathetic to the popular cause than ordinary French soldiers. Following failed mediation efforts, gunfire began, apparently spontaneously, turning the crowd into a mob. Governor de Launay opened the gates to the inner courtyard, and the conquerors swept in to liberate the fortress at Key Terms National Assembly A revolutionary assembly formed by the representatives of the Third Estate the common people of the Estates-General that existed from June 13 to July 9, Though much of the late s had seen such reformers in alliance with the defenders of the unwritten constitution, half a century of the philosophy and subversion of the Enlightenment had pushed the arguments of this grouping towards a dramatic divergence.
With sciences from physiology to physics on their side, thinkers set out a fresh role for the free individual in society. They wanted a new order — still a monarchy, but one both publicly accountable, and stripped of the buttresses of privilege that kept the talents of the majority from reaching the peaks of public office. What should have been a panacea provoked a further sharp divide, as the privileged nobility and clergy were granted half the delegates, and possibly two-thirds of the votes.
As the opening of the Estates in May approached, the mood turned apocalyptic. This conflict of words was already matched by one of deeds. Harsh weather and poor harvests had left French peasants impoverished and anxious. The political storm over the Estates-General provoked fears of an aristocratic plot to beat the people into submission.
Meanwhile, urban populations, dependent on the countryside for food, and always suspicious of peasant motivations, increasingly saw such disruption as part of the aristocratic plot itself — for any trouble threatened the fragile supply-lines that brought grain to the cities. Town-dwellers formed militias, and waited anxiously for news from the men they had sent to the Estates at Versailles. What played out over the summer months of was partly a violent confrontation — nowhere clearer than in the storming of the Bastille on 14 July — but also a strange mixture of dread and euphoria, as even many of the feared aristocrats came to be swept up in the idea of change.
From this euphoric peak, however, the only way was down. War was declared on Austria in April , with Prussia entering the conflict shortly afterwards. Newly-republican French armies rallied to save the country from defeat, but France moved inexorably towards the horrors of civil war and state terror, the revolutionary political class clawing at itself in furious division. Even amid such internal conflict, the spirit of free citizenship and newfound republicanism inspired continued prodigies of military effort.
France went to war with Britain, Spain, the Netherlands and the Italian states from early , plunging Europe into a generation of conflict. The true tragedy of this descent was that it suffocated all the international hopes of Americans found themselves forced to choose sides, with enmity towards either Britain or France a key component of the vicious factional politics reigning in the United States by the later s.
Britain, where Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man had tried to bring the message of the American and French Revolutions home, saw assaults on freedoms such as habeas corpus and public assembly. Real revolt broke out in Ireland in , fomented by exaggerated hopes of French intervention and exacerbated by the brutality of an establishment wedded to a view of the Catholic peasantry as little better than beasts.
Thirty thousand died in months of savage repression. Napoleon Bonaparte , also in , tried to take the war to Britain in the East, and the chaotic failure of his Egyptian expedition did not prevent him from ascending first to dictatorship the next year, and to an imperial throne in By then he had already, in , broken a short-lived peace with Britain, and for the following decade was to pursue a relentless policy of expansion.
Together, they made for a spiral of warfare that criss-crossed Europe from Lisbon to Moscow, until the final insane Russia campaign of turned the tide. The Ohio State University. Department of History. Home Topics Africa. Middle East. North America. International Relations Religion Education Sports. Search form Search. Connecting History. Hot off the Press. History Talk. Printer Friendly Version. By Mircea Platon More than any other event of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution, which began in , changed the face of modern politics across Europe and the world.
The palace of the Bastille, that old symbol of despotism, is taken by the statue of the benevolent king Louis XVI in this engraving. Louis XVI was indeed planning to erase the gothic—and thus un-enlightened—and expensive prison, but the Revolution moved faster than him. In this painting , the King the lion is constitutionally tamed, while the First the Clergy and the Second the Nobles Estates are dancing to the tune of the Third Estate, that is of the people.
In , the French government commissioned from Alfred-Philippe Roll a painting that would preserve the memory of the first official celebration of 14 July as a national holiday. Finished in , Roll's work depicted the inauguration of the monument dedicated to the French Republic at Le Petit Palais, on 14 July Fireworks in Paris on Bastille Day,
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