The Days of the French Revolution

2 THE DAY OF THE VAINQUEURS DE LA BASTILLE 14 July 1789

The morning of Tuesday, 14 July 1789, was overcast; heavy clouds threatened rain. Throughout the night the atmosphere in Paris had been growing more and more tense as rumours flew from street to street of thousands of troops on the march. In the Hôtel de Ville a Permanent Committee established by the Electors issued urgent orders for the erection of barricades, for the organization of those Gardes-françaises who had declared themselves on the citizens’ side, for the protection of the banks, and for the arrest of all carts and carriages found entering or leaving Paris. Scores of these vehicles were assembled beneath the windows of the Hôtel de Ville in the Place de Grève which was soon littered with piles of stores and provisions of vegetables, with furniture, baskets, boxes and empty powder-barrels whose contents had been distributed the night before to those who had guns.

As yet, few citizens did have guns, and soon after dawn a crowd of about 60,000 people gathered on the parade-ground in front of the Invalides demanding to be supplied with them. They had already made similar demands at the Hôtel de Ville where one of the leaders of the Permanent Committee, an elderly merchant Jacques de Flesselles, had aroused their distrust by his unhelpful, prevaricating manner. The Governor of the Invalides refused to deliver the arms up without audiority. On Monday he had referred an earlier request for arms from a delegation of Electors to the Swiss General Baron de Besenval, Marshal Broglie’s second-in-command, who had told him he must do nothing without audiority from Versailles and had taken the precaution of ordering the pensioners on duty at the Invalides to render the muskets useless by unscrewing the hammers. The pensioners, unwilling to help their masters, set about this task with such extreme laboriousness that in six hours they had unscrewed scarcely more than twenty hammers of the 32,000 muskets awaiting their attention. The Governor told Besenval ‘that a spirit of sedition was rife in the hospital,’ so the General recorded, ‘and that for the past ten days the soldiers had had their pockets full of money. A legless cripple, whom no one suspected, had introduced into the establishment hundreds of licentious and subversive songs. In a word, the Governor concluded, it was hopeless to count on the pensioners, who, if they received orders to load their cannon, would turn them on the Governor’s apartment.’

While they were still at their leisurely work, a representative of the Electors left the Hôtel de Ville with instruction to persuade the Governor to give way to the peoples’ demand. He found the crowd, larger than ever now, pressing round the gate of the Invalides, waving hats adorned with cockades and shouting for muskets. He forced his way up to the gate which was opened just wide enough to let him through. Inside, the Governor told him that no instructions had yet been received from Versailles and that he was, therefore, powerless to help him. The Governor then went out to try to explain this to the mob. But he could not make himself heard above their shouts and, as he withdrew, crowds of men rushed after him, forced the gate wide open and streamed into the building, while others clambered across the moat and up the parapet walls.

The guards of the Invalides stood by their cannon, disinclined to open fire, while 5,000 troops, encamped less than a quarter of a mile away on the Champ de Mars, also remained inactive. Indeed, Baron de Besenval could find no soldiers at all prepared to interfere. One after another their commanding officers told him that their men refused to march, and that, unless they were withdrawn from Paris, they were more likely to join the rioters than act against them.

So the crowd surged down the steps into the cellars of the Invalides undisturbed, seizing armfuls of muskets and dragging out whatever other weapons they could lay their hands on, pressing weapons on anyone who looked in need of them, including two servants of the British Ambassador who had wandered over to see what was going on. But although the rioters got away with over ten cannon as well as 28,000 muskets, they discovered very little powder and very few cartridges. And for these they turned to the Bastille in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

Among them was Jean Baptiste Humbert, a watchmaker born in Langres who had come to Paris in 1787 having learned his craft in Switzerland. He had made first for a shop in the Place de Grève where he had bought some nails which he hoped might serve instead of shot. On leaving the shop, so he later recorded:

I was accosted by a citizen who told me they were now issuing shot at the Hôtel de Ville. So I hurried there and was given a few pellets of buckshot. I then immediately set out for the Bastille, loading my gun as I went. I was joined by a group of people who were also on their way to the Bastille. We found four foot-soldiers of the Watch, armed with guns and I urged them to come along with us. They replied they had neither powder nor shot. So we clubbed together to give each of them enough for two shots. Thus armed they were pleased to join us. As we were passing in front of the Hôtel de la Régie we saw that two cases of bullets had just been broken up and their contents were being freely handed out. I filled one of my coat pockets with them to give to anyone who was short…[Then], passing through the courtyard of the Arsenal, we arrived at the Bastille.

The Bastille, a huge building of eight round towers linked by walls eighty feet high, had originally been built as a fortress in the fourteenth century. Since then it had been used as a state prison for men who had been arrested in accordance with lettres de cachet but who were not guilty of an offence punishable under common law. It was surrounded by an air of mystery. Prisoners, so it was said, their names not divulged to the gaolers with whom they were forbidden to talk, arrived in coaches with drawn blinds, and when they were escorted inside, the soldiers on duty had to turn to face the wall. Its sinister reputation – sustained by legends that owed much to the gruesome and imaginative Mèmoires sur la Bastille by the lawyer and journalist, Simon Linguet, who published them soon after his release in 1782–was much increased by stories of ‘the man in the iron mask’, of the imprisonment of writers like Voltaire and the Abbé Morellet, and of Latude whose thirty years of intermittent incarceration began when he was accused of attempting to poison Mme de Pompadour. Yet the Bastille was, in fact, one of the least unpleasant of Paris’s prisons. The food was adequate, prisoners were allowed to bring in their own possessions, and the dreaded dungeons, where it was believed scores of wretches lay in chains, had not been used for years. Indeed, the Bastille was never crowded, there being rarely more than ten prisoners inside its massive walls. Discussions had recently been held as to the advisability of maintaining so expensive an establishment for the incarceration of so few offenders, and a suggestion had been put forward that the unsightly structure should be demolished and a square laid out on its site. The architects and contractors who supported this plan were encouraged when informed in the late spring of 1789 that the Bastille contained no more than seven prisoners, none of whom was of much importance. Four were forgers who had been transferred there from some other, overcrowded prison; one was a mentally unbalanced Irishman who, believing himself to be alternately Julius Caesar and God, was supposed to be a spy; the sixth, also deranged, was suspected of being involved in an attempt to assassinate the King; the last was the Comte de Solages whose family had arranged for him to be committed by a lettre de cachet for incest.

To the people of Paris, however, unaware either of its proposed demolition or of the number of prisoners held there, the Bastille was the symbol of an intolerable régime; and it was not merely to obtain powder for their muskets and to release the men held there that they marched so determinedly upon it this Tuesday morning.

For several days now the Governor of the Bastille, the Marquis de Launay, had been anticipating their arrival with the utmost apprehension. Neither a decisive nor an assertive man, de Launay was quite incapable of instilling his officers with any confidence. One of them, Lieutenant Louis Deflue, who had been sent with a detachment of thirty-two Swiss soldiers to reinforce the garrison of eighty-two superannuated soldiers or invalides, described him as being ‘without much knowledge of military affairs, without experience and without much courage’.

‘I could clearly see from his constant uneasiness and irresolution’ [Deflue afterwards wrote in a letter to his brothers],

that if we were attacked we should be very badly led. He was so terrified that at night he mistook me shadows of trees for enemies so that we had to be on the alert throughout the hours of darkness. The staff officers…and I myself often tried to assure him that our position was not as weak as he complained and to persuade him to attend to important matters rather than to expend his energy on trifles. He would listen to us, appearing to agree with our advice. But then he would do just the opposite before changing his mind yet again.

Nervous and indecisive as he evidently was, de Launay had nevertheless done much to prepare the Bastille for an attack. Expecting that he would not have to hold out for long before troops came to disperse a hostile mob, he had not troubled to lay in more than two days’ supply of bread; but in the cellars he had a large stock of powder contained in 250 barrels which had been transferred there from the Arsenal. He also had numerous cannon. There were fifteen eight-pounders standing between the battlements on the towers, a further three eight-pounders below them with their muzzles levelled at the approaches to the entrance gate, as well as twelve smaller rampart guns. In order to give these guns a wider field of fire the embrasures had been widened. Other apertures and windows had been blocked up, the drawbridge across the deep dry moat had been strengthened and the defences generally repaired and improved. Loads of paving-stones had been dragged up to the top of the towers from which they could be hurled down through the machicolations on to the heads of any rioters who managed to approach the foot of the towers.

But if these measures gave some confidence to de Launay’s officers, his increasingly prevaricating manner certainly did not. Nor did the attitude of their men. Most of the invalides of the regular garrison were known to be in sympathy with the people of the surrounding faubourgs in whose shops they bought their tobacco and in whose cafés they sat drinking wine. It was hardly to be expected that they would eagerly obey orders to open fire on them, and not at all unlikely that they would flatly refuse to do so. Lieutenant Deflue’s Swiss soldiers did not share the same close ties with the people of Paris, but they were by no means hostile to their aspirations. They were rumoured already to have sworn to spike their own guns if they were ordered to fire on the crowd, and the next day seventy-five men of the same regiment, the Salis-Samade, billetted in Issy, Vaugirard and Sèvres, were to desert. Besides, the thirty-two men from the Salis-Samade in the Bastille had been occupied throughout the night in carrying the heavy and cumbersome barrels of powder from the Arsenal down into the cellar, and by the morning of the 14th they were tired out.

To the people of the faubourgs, though, the Bastille, the muzzles of its guns depressed towards the Rue Saint-Antoine, the Rue des Tournelles and the Rue de Jean Beaussire, appeared not so much in a ready state of defence as in preparation for attack. And in response to their protests, a delegation of Electors went to the Bastille to ask the Governor to withdraw the guns which were both provocative and alarming. When they arrived shortly after ten o’clock, the Governor was about to sit down to his morning meal which was then usually eaten in France about this time. He invited the delegates to join him. He was a perfectly agreeable host, and entirely amenable to their demands. He readily consented to having the guns pulled back out of sight and to having the embrasures blocked up with planks.

By the time the meal was over, however, the relaxed atmosphere in the Governor’s dining-room had been suddenly shattered by noise from the streets outside. The crowds that had raided the Invalides had now arrived beneath the walls of the Bastille and had been joined by hundreds of demonstrators from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the surrounding districts who pushed their way into the outer court, the Cour du Passage, which was flanked on either side by shops and the barracks of the invalides. When they saw the cannon in the towers above them being withdrawn they presumed that the gunners were about to load them. It was also supposed that the delegates from the Electors, who had not yet risen from the Governor’s dining-room table, had been arrested and were being held as hostages.

Responding to the frantic appeals of a group of demonstrators, a second delegation of Electors, led by a lawyer, Thuriot de la Rozère, went up to the Governor’s lodging where they met the other delegates on their way out. Thuriot de la Rozère told the Governor that the people outside, believing that the guns had been withdrawn from view only to be loaded, were now demanding that a citizen’s militia should be allowed into the stronghold to hold it in the name of the city. The Governor protested that the guns were certainly not being loaded, and he invited Thuriot – who knew the Bastille well having often visited one of his clients there – to satisfy himself that no attack on the people was intended. He took Thuriot up to the top of the towers to show him the unloaded guns and the blocked-up apertures; he urged him to believe that he would never open fire unless he were attacked; he gave his word of honour that he intended no harm to anyone and, in Thuriot’s presence, he asked the garrison to swear that they would not use their arms except in self-defence, an undertaking which they were only too willing to give. So eager, in fact, was the Governor to display his good intentions that Thuriot believed he would have agreed to accept a citizens’ militia had not his officers declared that they would all be dishonoured if they gave in so meekly.

When Thuriot came out again into the Cour du Passage, the crowds thronging the courtyard had become threatening and angry. A few, impatient with the unsatisfactory negotiations, shouted abuse at him. Others cried out, ‘We want the Bastille! Out with the troops!’ The mob was denser than ever now, the new arrivals pushing forward so that those in front were forced towards the edge of the moat that separated the Cour du Passage from a second courtyard, the Cour du Gouvernement. The two drawbridges which spanned the moat, the pedestrian and the wider one for carriages, had both been pulled up.

In the towers high above these bridges the involutes looked down at the swirling mass of cockaded hats and heaving shoulders of the crowds that now stretched as far as the Rue des Tournelles. They shouted at them to retreat, as the cannon were loaded now and the Swiss troops might be persuaded to open fire. They waved their caps in the air and made warning gestures. The sound of their words was lost above the roar of voices in the Cour du Passage, but the gesticulations were observed and apparently misinterpreted as signs of encouragement. For at that moment two men, followed by several others, clambered on to the roof of one of the shops that lined the northern side of the Cour du Passage, dashed along the walk at the top of the rampart wall and jumped down into the Cour du Gouvernement on the other side of the moat. Here they broke into the guardhouse, emerged with axes and sledge-hammers, and began to slash at the pulleys of the drawbridges. There was a sudden rattle of chains; the drawbridges began to move. The men on the far side of the moat pushed furiously against the bodies behind them in an effort to get back from the edge as the immense bound planks, now fully released, fell towards them. But one man was killed and another badly hurt by an impact they could not avoid. The crowd behind them rushed over their bodies into the Cour du Gouvernement.

To their right were the Governor’s lodgings; to their left the main gate of the Bastille itself, its huge entrance blocked by a further raised drawbridge across another deep moat. For a moment the leaders seemed to hesitate, wondering what to do. Then the crackling sound of musketry fire rang out, followed by the boom of a cannon.

Afterwards there was bitter controversy as to who first started firing. According to the assailants it was the defenders who opened fire on them as soon as they debouched from the narrow passage between the Governor’s lodgings and the guardhouse, shouting ‘Down with the drawbridge!’ But Lieutenant Deflue insisted that it was the besiegers who ‘fired the first shots at those on top of the towers…The assailants were asked what they wanted, and the general demand was for the bridge to be lowered. They were told that this could not be done and that they must withdraw, or else they would be shot. They renewed their cries, “Down with the bridge!” It was then that the order to fire was given.’

Finding themselves under a heavier fire than they were able to return, the assailants took shelter in a range of buildings to the right of the gate which contained the Bastille’s kitchens. From here several ran out to attack the drawbridge but were driven back by the fire of the garrison. So two carts filled with straw were brought up from Santerre’s brewery, set alight and dragged in front of the drawbridge to afford the protection of a smoke screen.

It was now about two o’clock in the afternoon. And it was at this time that yet another delegation from the Permanent Committee at the Hôtel de Ville, led by Delavigne, the Chairman of the Assembly of Electors, and the Abbé Fauchet, arrived at the Bastille hoping to prevent further bloodshed by persuading the Governor to hand over the fortress to a citizens’ militia who would ‘guard it in conjunction with the troops of the existing garrison’ and who would be ‘under orders from the city’. But so great was the noise of firing and shouting that they could not make themselves heard above the din; nor was the slightest notice taken by the garrison of the white handkerchiefs which the Electors’ delegates waved above their heads. ‘We do not know whether our signals were noticed and understood,’ they subsequently reported. ‘But the firing never stopped.’ Eventually they managed to affect a partial ceasefire in the Rue Saint-Antoine. ‘Although we renewed our signals, however, the garrison went on firing at us,’ the report continued. ‘And we experienced the pain and mortification of seeing several citizens, whose brave fight we had interrupted, fall at our sides. The assailants therefore resumed their fire with as much indignation now as courage. And we could do nothing to prevent them. They were no longer interested in our deputation. What they wanted now, and loudly clamoured for, was the destruction of that fearful prison and the death of its Governor.’

At the Hôtel de Ville the Permanent Committee, concerned by the failure of Delavigne’s delegation to restore order at the Bastille, decided to make one final effort to persuade the Governor to agree to their terms. Wounded men were being carried into the building on makeshift stretchers and in the arms of their friends. Others arrived to demand more ammunition and then shouted abuse at Flesselles who was disbelieved when he declared that he had none left to give them. It was even feared that if the slaughter continued unavailingly at the Bastille, the people might turn upon the Hôtel de Ville in their fury. So Ethis de Corny set out with five other delegates, carrying a large flag and accompanied by a drummer of the Gardes-françaises.

As the delegation approached the Bastille by the Cour de l’Orme, the flag was vigorously waved and the Garde-française loudly beat his drum. Two of their number, Boucheron and Piquod de Saint-Honorine, forced their way through the crowds across the Cour du Passage and over the drawbridges into the Cour du Gouvernement where, persuading the assailants to stop firing for a moment, Boucheron shouted to the garrison at the top of his voice that the city had sent a delegation to discuss terms but that they must all hold their fire and lay down their arms.

‘A person in a coloured coat, in the middle of a group of invalides who were all holding their hats in their hands, answered me from the summit of the citadel,’ Boucheron recorded. ‘He said he was willing to receive the delegation but the crowd must withdraw.’

Behind Boucheron and Piquod de Saint-Honorine, the other members of the delegation could see that the invalides were quite ready to accept their terms. They were waving their hats in the air and turning their muskets upside down; one went so far as to wave a white flag. But these friendly gestures suddenly ceased, being brought to a halt, so the invalides later maintained, by the Governor who insisted that the delegates did not really represent the city but were leaders of the mob, intent on trickery.

The delegates now saw a cannon levelled in their direction. At the same time a volley of musketry fire killed three people who had come up to talk to them, tore a hole in the hat of another, and struck an epaulette from a delegate’s coat. Cursed by the crowd, who blamed them for the deaths of the three men who had just fallen at their feet, the delegates now hastily returned to the Hôtel de Ville where, in their absence, a dramatic scene had taken place.

At about three o’clock a thirty-one-year-old former non-commissioned officer in the Gardes-françaises, Pierre Hulin, had arrived in the square. A large, excitable man, he had recently returned to Paris from Geneva where, as an official in government service, he had taken part in the rebellion of 1782. He had made inflammatory speeches to the crowds in the Palais Royal two days before, and now, finding himself confronted by two companies of Gardes-françaises outside the Hôtel de Ville, he began to harangue them with the same stridency and passion, tears pouring down his cheeks.

‘Brave Gardes-françaises,’ he cried. ‘Can’t you hear the cannon?…That villain de Launay is murdering our brothers, our parents, our wives and children who are gathered unarmed around the Bastille. Will you allow them to be massacred?…Parisians are being slaughtered like sheep. Will you not march on the Bastille?’

They replied that they would if he would lead them. So, with Hulin at their head, some sixty Gardes-françaises followed by about 300 armed civilians with four cannon, marched off towards the Bastille where they were joined by another band of armed citizens under the command of Lieutenant Jacob Élie, who after twenty years in the ranks had recently been granted a commission in the Queen’s Regiment of Infantry.

While Hulin’s cannon opened fire ineffectively on the fifteen-foot-thick walls of the Bastille, Élie made up his mind that the only way of taking the fortress would be to attack the drawbridge and effect an entry through the main gate. So, accompanied by a few civilian volunteers, he ran forward to drag away the carts whose loads of burning straw had earlier provided the assailants with a smoke screen. While he was performing this dangerous operation, during which two of his companions were killed, the crowds of armed men and Gardes-françaises behind him maintained a continuous fire on the towers.

They did not shelter behind retrenchments while they did so [in the words of a contemporary account]. They stood in the very courts of the Bastille and so close to the towers that M. de Launay himself repeatedly made use of the paving-stones and other debris that had been taken up on to the platforms. It cannot be denied that there was much confusion and disorder…Yet the invalides, who had been through many sieges and battles, have assured us that they never experienced such musketry fire as that of these besiegers. They dared not raise their heads above the parapets of the towers.

Having dragged the carts out of the way, Lieutenant Élie gave orders for two cannon to be brought forward into the Cour du Gouvernement and levelled at the underside of the raised drawbridge.

Opposite them, on the other side of the drawbridge, were three eight-pounders, mounted on naval gun carriages. But these remained silent, for the Governor, seeing the besiegers’ cannon in the courtyard facing the gate, now decided to surrender. He ordered a drummer to march round the platform behind the battlements of the towers beating a retreat and two men to accompany him waving large white handkerchieves. But the crowds below took not the least notice of these signals, continuing to fire their muskets as energetically as ever, shouting ‘Down with the bridges! Down with the bridges!’

Hearing these cries, de Launay went into the Council Chamber beside the Tour de la Chapelle on the far side of the Bastille where he wrote a note which read: ‘We have twenty thousand pounds of powder. We shall blow up the garrison and the whole neighbourhood unless you accept our capitulation. From the Bastille at five in the evening. July 14th, 1789, Launay.’ He handed this note to Lieutenant Deflue who went down into the Grande Cour and pushed it through a slit which he had himself cut earlier in the gate by the drawbridge to enable his men to fire on the people outside.

Seeing the note being waved through the slit on the other side of the moat, a group of men, led by a clerk, ran off to fetch some planks from a carpenter’s workshop in the Rue des Tournelles. The longest of these was pushed forward over the edge of the moat. While three or four men leant on one end of it to hold it down, a cobbler walked gingerly towards the other end, but lost his balance and fell over into the moat, breaking his elbow. Another man then tried and, managing to retain his balance as the plank bent under his weight he seized the note and ran back with it to Hulin.

When its contents became known there were renewed shouts of ‘Down with the bridges!’ ‘No capitulation!’ Hulin marched purposefully towards the guns as though about to give the order to open fire, while, inside the fortress, Lieutenant Deflue ‘was expecting the Governor to keep his word and blow up the fort’. But, to Deflue’s ‘great surprise’, de Launay suddenly decided to open the gate. He took out a key from his pocket, handed it to a corporal who unlocked the gate and lowered the drawbridge. The siege was over and the crowd rushed in.

I was about the eighth or tenth man to enter the courtyard [the watchmaker, Jean-Baptiste Humbert, wrote]. The invalides shouted, ‘Lay down your arms!’ Apart from one Swiss officer they all did so. I went up to this officer and threatened him with a bayonet, repeating, ‘Lay down your arms!’ He appealed to the others, saying, ‘Gentlemen, please believe me, I never fired.’

‘How dare you say you never fired,’ I immediately replied, ‘when your lips are still black from biting your cartridges?’ As I said this I made a grab for his sword.

‘They disarmed us immediately,’ confirmed Deflue. ‘They took us prisoner, each of us having a guard. They flung our papers and records out of the windows and plundered everything.’ Deflue, and those of his men who were captured with him, were marched away to the Hôtel de Ville, and all the way were ‘met with threats and insults, and a clamour from the whole mob that [they] ought to be hanged’. ‘The streets through which we passed and the houses flanking them (even the roof-tops) were filled with masses of people shouting at me and cursing me,’ Deflue wrote. ‘Swords, bayonets and pistols were being continually pressed against me. I did not know how I should die but felt that my last moment had come. Stones were thrown at me and women gnashed their teeth and brandished their fists at me.’ He firmly ‘believed that but for the efforts of an officer of the Arquebusiers to protect the Swiss prisoners’ none of them would have escaped with their lives.

Other defenders of the Bastille were not so fortunate; three of the invalides were killed, so were three of the Governor’s staff. The Governor himself was seized by one of the Gardes-françaises and Marie Julien Stanislas Maillard, a tall, dark man, suffering from consumption, who claimed to have walked the plank to snatch the ultimatum. As a hostile crowd gathered round de Launay, shouting for his death, his sword was snatched from his side. Hulin and Élie tried to get him away to the Hôtel de Ville, Élie, leading the party and carrying the text of the capitulation on the point of his sword; but on the way he was attacked by an out-of-work cook named Desnot. Kicking out wildly de Launay caught Desnot an agonizing blow in the testicles. Desnot cried out, ‘He’s done me in’, whereupon someone else stabbed de Launay in the stomach with a bayonet. The mob gathered round him as he lay in the gutter, firing pistols at him and thrusting the blades of swords and bayonets into his now lifeless body. A man bent down and tore the queue from his scalp as a souvenir, another ripped the Cross of Saint Louis from his coat and fixed it to his own. There was a call for his head to be cut off so that it could be displayed to the people as that of a traitor. ‘Here,’ said a man to Desnot, handing him a sword. ‘You do it. It was you he hurt.’ Desnot knelt down to do so, but could not manage the operation with the sword; then, having swallowed some brandy mixed with gunpowder, he finished the job with his pocket-knife.

Jacques de Flesselles, accused of hindering the people’s search for arms, was also killed and decapitated. And the two dripping heads were then carried through the streets on pikes to what a witness described as loud applause from the spectators.

No one knew for sure how many men had been killed in the fighting. Deflue reported that only one invalide was killed on top of the towers and three or four wounded. None of his own soldiers was hurt, but he afterwards ‘learned that two were massacred by the populace on their way to the Hôtel de Ville’. He could ‘never discover the exact number of casualties among the besiegers’; he had heard them put as high as 160 but he thought this figure must be exaggerated. Subsequent estimates suggested that eighty-three of the assailants were killed, fifteen died from wounds, and seventy-three were wounded.

Most of them were artisans from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine who had been born outside Paris whence they had come to find work. Of those who survived the assault 954 were awarded the title of Vainqueur de la Bastille the following June. As the occupation of more than two-thirds of these are known, it is possible to form some idea of the kind of people who were involved in the assault, allowing for the probability that a good number were not anxious to claim the title of Vainqueur as they were already in trouble with the police. There were several men from bourgeois homes, including the oldest ‘conqueror’ of all, a man of seventy-two. The youngest was a boy of eight. Thirty-five described themselves as merchants, fourteen, more specifically as wine merchants, four were rentiers, three were industrialists, and one, Antoine Santerre of whom much more was to be heard, owned the nearby brewery. Eighty were soldiers. Of the artisans, most worked in the furniture industry which was largely centred in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Ninety-seven were cabinet-makers of whom four were unemployed. There were twenty-eight cobblers, twenty-three workers of gauze, nine jewellers, nine dyers and nine masons, nine nailsmiths, nine hatters and nine tailors. There was one woman, a laundress.

All were eventually granted a certificate describing their services, and those able to bear arms were rewarded at public expense with a uniform coat as well as a sword and musket, their names engraved on blade and barrel. It was also decreed that an honourable certificate would ‘similarly be sent…to the widows and children of those who died, as a public record of the gratitude and honour due to men who brought about the triumph of liberty over despotism’.

During the evening of 14 July most of these Vainqueurs de la Bastille were to be seen in the streets of the city celebrating the great victory which they had helped to bring about and which the officers of the King’s army, aware of the feelings of their men, had been unable to prevent. They marched up and down joyfully shouting the news of the Bastille’s fall, while guns fired in salute of their triumph.

At the same time crowds of sightseers surged into the Bastille to see the inside of the fearful place of which they had heard so many grisly tales. They were shown parts of a suit of fifteenth-century armour which was described as a kind of strait-jacket used to keep prisoners in tight constraint, and a confiscated printing-press which they were told was an instrument of torture. Later they were regaled with bones, probably of soldiers killed in a long-forgotten siege, but ascribed to poor unfortunate prisoners of much later date.

The next morning, a contractor specializing in the demolition of old buildings submitted an application he had put forward before to pull the building down, supporting his claim for consideration by making the unfounded assertion that he had played a leading role in its capture. He was given the contract and, having taken on a thousand workmen to fulfil the Permanent Committee’s instructions that the Bastille ‘should be demolished without delay’, he made a great deal of money in providing the people of France with relief plans of the fortress carved on stones and with souvenir paperweights, boxes, inkpots, doorstops and key-plates made from the irons in which the prisoners had allegedly been locked.

While Paris celebrated the fall of the Bastille, voices were heard in the crowds urging the people to follow up their triumph by marching on Versailles and demanding the recall of Necker. But more cautious men suggested that, so long as there were so many troops in and around Paris, it would be better to wait and see what the King would now do. In the meantime the tocsin rang repeatedly to warn them that the danger was not past, and the more determined and wary citizens continued to tear up paving-stones and to build barricades. Before nightfall a heavy rain began to pour down, driving the revellers home and bringing their celebrations to an end.