The Fall of the Bastille

JUL 14 1789 · 12:00

Storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789. Anonymous, oil on canvas, c. 1789. Musee de la Revolution francaise. Place: Bastille fortress, Saint-Antoine, Paris Figures: Bernard-René Jordan de Launay, Bastille governor (killed) · the crowd, perhaps a thousand strong The Storming The crowd assembles outside the medieval fortress on the morning of 14 July, looking for the gunpowder rumored to be stored inside. The fortress has eighty-two retired soldiers and thirty-two Swiss guards defending it; it holds seven prisoners (four forgers, two lunatics, one aristocratic offender). De Launay attempts to negotiate; the crowd misreads a lowering drawbridge as an attack, storms in, takes the fortress in four hours. De Launay is dragged to the Hôtel de Ville, killed, his head paraded on a pike. The seven prisoners are freed. The act, in itself, is smaller than its symbolic charge: the fortress had four times more cannons than prisoners. From King's to People's Sovereignty Within six weeks the National Assembly publishes the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Article 3: Le principe de toute souveraineté réside essentiellement dans la nation. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. The Westphalian sovereign of 1648 was the prince; after 1789, the sovereign is the people. The revolution's wars (1792 to 1815) export this principle across Europe by bayonet. Where Napoleon's armies pass, monarchies are replaced or reorganized along French-revolutionary lines. The principle that sovereignty descends from the people, not God, becomes — over the next century — the operating assumption of every European state, even when nominally monarchical. Video: John Green walks the road from the Estates-General to the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789.