"into an open public area, with a tall column at the centre surrounded by fountains, dedicated to Louis XVI as the ""restorer of public freedom"". The number of prisoners held in the Bastille at any one time declined sharply towards the end of Louis's reign; the prison contained ten prisoners in September 1782 and, despite a mild increase at the beginning of 1788, by July 1789 only seven prisoners remained in custody. Before any official scheme to close the prison could be enacted, however, disturbances across Paris brought a more violent end to the Bastille. By July 1789, revolutionary sentiment"
"Protestants. From 1659 onwards, the Bastille functioned primarily as a state penitentiary; by 1789, 5,279 prisoners had passed through its gates. Under Louis XV and XVI, the Bastille was used to detain prisoners from more varied backgrounds, and to support the operations of the Parisian police, especially in enforcing government censorship of the printed media. Although inmates were kept in relatively good conditions, criticism of the Bastille grew during the 18th century, fueled by autobiographies written by former prisoners. Reforms were implemented and prisoner numbers were considerably reduced. In 1789 the royal government's financial crisis and the formation of the"
"surrounding the storming of the Bastille. The Bibliothèque nationale de France held a major exhibition on the legacy of the Bastille between 2010 and 2011, resulting in a substantial edited volume summarising the current academic perspectives on the fortress. Bastille The Bastille (; ) was a fortress in Paris, known formally as the Bastille Saint-Antoine. It played an important role in the internal conflicts of France and for most of its history was used as a state prison by the kings of France. It was stormed by a crowd on 14 July 1789, in the French Revolution, becoming an important"
"drawn, and increasing numbers deserted during 1789. The bulk of the rank and file of the Gardes Françaises: the largest regiment of the maison militaire du roi de France and the permanent garrison of Paris, refused to obey their officers at a crucial point in the early stages of the Revolution. Some Gardes joined with the Parisian mob on July 14, 1789 and participated in the storming of the Bastille, the medieval fortress-prison thought of as a symbol of governmental repression. King Louis' powers were regulated by the National Assembly, which also authorized the creation of the National Guard, which"
"Bastille The Bastille (; ) was a fortress in Paris, known formally as the Bastille Saint-Antoine. It played an important role in the internal conflicts of France and for most of its history was used as a state prison by the kings of France. It was stormed by a crowd on 14 July 1789, in the French Revolution, becoming an important symbol for the French Republican movement, and was later demolished and replaced by the Place de la Bastille. The Bastille was built to defend the eastern approach to the city of Paris from the English threat in the Hundred"
"Paris was soon in a state of anarchy. It was consumed with riots and widespread looting. Because the royal leadership essentially abandoned the city, the mobs soon had the support of the French Guard, including arms and trained soldiers. On 14 July 1789, the insurgents set their eyes on the large weapons and ammunition cache inside the Bastille fortress, which also served as a symbol of royal tyranny. Insurgents seized the Bastille prison, killing the governor and several of his guards. The French now celebrate 14 July each year as 'Bastille day' or, as the French say: ""Quatorze Juillet (the"
"The reform movement turned quickly into a revolution. On 13 July, a crowd of Parisians occupied the Hôtel de Ville, and the Marquis de Lafayette organized the French National Guard to defend the city. On 14 July, a mob seized the arsenal at the Invalides, acquired thousands of guns, and stormed the Bastille, a prison that was a symbol of royal authority, but at that time held only seven prisoners. 87 revolutionaries were killed in the fighting. The governor of the Bastille, the Marquis de Launay, surrendered and then was killed, his head put on the end of a pike"
"Alboize de Pujol presented the years of the Bastille between 1358 and 1789 as a single, long period of royal tyranny and oppression, epitomised by the fortress; their works featured imaginative 19th-century reconstructions of the medieval torture of prisoners. As living memories of the Revolution faded, the destruction of the Bastille meant that later historians had to rely primarily on memoires and documentary materials in analysing the fortress and the 5,279 prisoners who had come through the Bastille between 1659 and 1789. The Bastille's archives, recording the operation of the prison, had been scattered in the confusion after the seizure;"
"Of these, 1,054 were women, and 615 were under the age of 16. They were marched in groups of 150 or 200, escorted by cavalrymen, to Versailles or the Camp de Satory where they were held in extremely crowded and unsanitary conditions until they could be tried. More than half of the prisoners, 22,727 to be exact, were released before trial for extenuating circumstances or on humanitarian grounds. Since Paris had been officially under a state of siege during the Commune, the prisoners were tried by military tribunals. Trials were held for 15,895 prisoners, of whom 13,500 were found guilty."
"This musing was misinterpreted by an already angry Parisian populace, who believed that Monseigneur Reveillon was advocating a lowering in wages. On 28 April 1789 his mansion was attacked and looted by an angry mob, all the wallpaper, glue, furniture and paintings were burned. His wine cellar, containing 2,000 bottles of wine, was pillaged and quickly consumed by the riotous mob. Réveillon and his family escaped by climbing a wall and fleeing to the nearby Bastille. It was a bloody day, some say 25 people dying in the ensuing melee. The rioters were eventually dispersed in an opening episode of"
"it in 1494, when Charles VIII invaded the city, and Pope Clement VII escaped to safety through it during the Sack of Rome, in 1527. Catholic priests, in Britain, used hidden rooms called priest holes to escape Protestant persecution, starting from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. In 1789, at the outset of what would become the French Revolution, angry demonstrators in Paris marched in the streets and stormed the Bastille. The revolution spread to smaller towns, where tax offices were attacked, and to the French countryside, where peasants attacked rich nobles living in manor houses and castles. Many French"
"anniversary history of the Bastille, which typically focused on a handful of themes and stories involving the more glamorous prisoners from the upper classes of French society. One of the major debates on the actual taking of the Bastille in 1789 has been the nature of the crowds that stormed the building. Hippolyte Taine argued in the late 19th century that the crowd consisted of unemployed vagrants, who acted without real thought; by contrast, the post-war left-wing intellectual George Rudé argued that the crowd was dominated by relatively prosperous artisan workers. The matter was reexamined by Jacques Godechot in the"
"which 16,594 official death sentences were carried out against those accused of being enemies of the revolution. Among the executed were persons who had aided the American rebels during the Revolutionary War, such as the navy commander Comte D'Estaing. Lafayette, who was appointed commander-in-chief of the National Guard following the storming of the Bastille, fled France and ended up in captivity in Austria, while Thomas Paine, in France to support the revolutionaries, was imprisoned in Paris. Though originally most Americans were in support of the revolution, the political debate in the U.S. over the nature of the revolution soon exacerbated"
"prisoners within the Tuileries Palace. In 1793, as the revolution turned more and more radical, the king, queen, and the mayor were guillotined, along with more than 16,000 others (throughout France), during the Reign of Terror. The property of the aristocracy and the church was nationalised, and the city's churches were closed, sold or demolished. A succession of revolutionary factions ruled Paris until 9 November 1799 (""coup d'état du 18 brumaire""), when Napoléon Bonaparte seized power as First Consul. The population of Paris had dropped by 100,000 during the Revolution, but between 1799 and 1815, it surged with 160,000 new"
"The Bastille, already hugely unpopular with the revolutionary crowds, was now the only remaining royalist stronghold in central Paris, in addition to which he was protecting a recently arrived stock of 250 barrels of valuable gunpowder. To make matters worse, the Bastille had only two days' supply of food and no source of water, making it impossible to withstand a long siege. On the morning of 14 July around 900 people formed outside the Bastille, primarily working-class members of the nearby faubourg Saint-Antoine, but also including some mutinous soldiers and local traders. The crowd had gathered in an attempt to"
"Siege of the Bastille (Cholat) La Prise de la Bastille is a gouache painting by Claude Cholat, now in the Carnavalet Museum in Paris, France. Claude Cholat was a wine merchant living in Paris on the rue Noyer at the start of the French Revolution in 1789. On the morning of 14 July a large Revolutionary crowd gathered outside the royal prison called the Bastille and in the afternoon fighting broke out between the crowd and the royal garrison. Cholat fought on the side of the Revolutionaries, manning one of their cannon during the battle. Afterwards, Cholat produced a famous"
"the clubs who helped to precipitate the insurrection of the fourteenth of July 1789."" On that morning twelve cannons and 40,000 muskets were seized from Les Invalides for the new militia. The Bastille, a state prison, containing a sizeable quantity of ammunition, including 250 barrels of powder, too, posed an irresistible temptation for the militant minded of the revolutionaries. In the popular mind the Bastille was conceived as a symbol of royal despotism, as attested to by Eoghan O Néill's comment: 'Whatever the designs of the founders the use of it is in the end a disgrace to any nation.'"
"and why: the legend of the ""Man in the Iron Mask"", a mysterious prisoner who finally died in 1703, symbolises this period of the Bastille. Although in practice many were held at the Bastille as a form of punishment, legally a prisoner in the Bastille was only being detained for preventative or investigative reasons: the prison was not officially supposed to be a punitive measure in its own right. The average length of imprisonment in the Bastille under Louis XIV was approximately three years. Under Louis, only between 20 and 50 prisoners were usually held at the Bastille at any"
"and surrounded by a considerable and threatening reputation. Under Louis XV, around 250 Catholic convulsionnaires, often called Jansenists, were detained in the Bastille for their religious beliefs. Many of these prisoners were women and came from a wider range of social backgrounds than the upper-class Calvinists detained under Louis XIV; historian Monique Cottret argues that the decline of the Bastille's social ""mystique"" originates from this phase of detentions. By Louis XVI, the background of those entering the Bastille and the type of offences they were detained over had changed markedly. Between 1774 and 1789, the detentions included 54 people accused"
"Louis XV and only 306 under Louis XVI up until the Revolution, annual averages of around 23 and 20 respectively. A second trend was a slow shift away from the Bastille's 17th-century role of detaining primarily upper-class prisoners, towards a situation in which the Bastille was essentially a location for imprisoning socially undesirable individuals of all backgrounds – including aristocrats breaking social conventions, criminals, pornographers, thugs – and was used to support police operations, particularly those involving censorship, across Paris. Despite these changes, the Bastille remained a state prison, subject to special authorities, answering to the monarch of the day"
"Stanislas-Marie Maillard Stanislas-Marie Maillard (December 11, 1763 – April 11, 1794) was a captain of the Bastille Volunteers. As a national guardsman, he participated in the attack on the Bastille, being the first revolutionary to get into the fortress, also and accompanied the women who marched to Versailles on October 5, 1789. Maillard testified in court to the events at Versailles. Maillard participated in the taking of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. Henceforth bearing the title “Captain of the Volunteers of the Bastille”, he took an active part in most of the landmark revolutionary events. Recruited into the ranks"
"Place de la Bastille The Place de la Bastille is a square in Paris where the Bastille prison stood until the storming of the Bastille and its subsequent physical destruction between 14 July 1789 and 14 July 1790 during the French Revolution. No vestige of the prison remains. The square straddles 3 ""arrondissements"" of Paris, namely the 4th, 11th and 12th. The square and its surrounding areas are normally called simply ""Bastille"". The July Column (""Colonne de Juillet"") which commemorates the events of the July Revolution (1830) stands at the center of the square. Other notable features include the Bastille"
"amateur gouache painting showing the events of the day; produced in primitive, naive style, it combines all the events of the day into a single graphical representation. Siege of the Bastille (Cholat) La Prise de la Bastille is a gouache painting by Claude Cholat, now in the Carnavalet Museum in Paris, France. Claude Cholat was a wine merchant living in Paris on the rue Noyer at the start of the French Revolution in 1789. On the morning of 14 July a large Revolutionary crowd gathered outside the royal prison called the Bastille and in the afternoon fighting broke out between"
"nine years after his birth. He was a Black Musketeer of the King, officer in the Gardes Françaises until 1763-1764, then captain of a cavalry regiment. During the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, De Launay was arrested and escorted to the town hall by one of the leaders of the Revolution, Pierre-Augustin Hulin. In the Place de Greve the furious crowd attacked the escort, assaulting and eventually beheading Governor Launay. After the capture of the fortress, Prosper Soulès assumed the interim duties of acting commander. Governor of the Bastille The Bastille or Bastille Saint-Antoine was completed in"
"such as during 1691 when numbers were inflated by the campaign against French Protestants and the annual cost of running the Bastille rose to 232,818 livres. Between 1715 – the year of Louis's death – and 1723, power transferred to the ""Régence""; the regent, Philippe d'Orléans, maintained the prison but the absolutist rigour of Louis XIV's system began to weaken somewhat. Although Protestants ceased to be kept in the Bastille, the political uncertainties and plots of the period kept the prison busy and 1,459 were imprisoned there under the Regency, an average of around 182 a year. During the Cellamare"
"his supplies of powder. Instead, de Launay attempted to negotiate a surrender, threatening to blow up the Bastille if his demands were not met. In the midst of this attempt, the Bastille's drawbridge suddenly came down and the revolutionary crowd stormed in. Popular myth believes Stanislas Marie Maillard was the first revolutionary to enter to the fortress. De Launay was dragged outside into the streets and killed by the crowd, and three officers and three soldiers were killed during the course of the afternoon by the crowd. The soldiers of the Swiss Salis-Samade Regiment, however, were not wearing their uniform"
"1789. In 1783, the Palace was the site of the signing of three treaties of the Peace of Paris (1783), in which the United Kingdom recognized the independence of the United States. The King and Queen learned of the storming of the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789. while they were at the Palace, and remained isolated there as the Revolution in Paris spread. The growing anger in Paris led to the Women's March on Versailles on 5 October 1789. A crowd of several thousand men and women, protesting the high price and scarcity of bread, marched from the"
"Bastille on 14 July 1789 was followed by a mass uproar spreading from Paris to the countryside. Noble families were attacked and many aristocratic manors were burned. Abbeys and castles were also attacked and destroyed. The season of ""La Grande Peur"" – the Great Fear – was characterised by social hysteria and anxiety over who was going to be the next victim. In many cases, the violence was begun not by homeless people or hunger-driven peasants but by settled countrymen who took this opportunity to further their own cause. The Great Fear opened up the vulnerability of the French government"
"and the Hôtel de Ville. They took control of the area of the city between Bastille and Les Halles, but there was little public support outside these neighborhoods. Despite fierce resistance from the students and workers, the rebellious area was gradually reduced by the army to the streets around cloister of Saint-Merri and crushed on 6 June. The state of emergency lasted until 29 June. 5000 persons were arrested, but only 82 were sentenced; seven were sentenced to death, with the sentences finally reduced to deportation. This event became a dramatic episode in Victor Hugo's novel ""Les Misérables"". There were"
"1,300–1,400 killed were no counter-revolutionaries or ""villains"", but convicts, forgers of assignats, 37 women, and 66 children. In ""Paris in the Terror"", Stanley Loomis reports that during the massacre at the prison of Bicêtre, 43 boys aged between 12 and 18 were murdered. Loomis also reported that ""girls as young as ten"" were murdered when the group of 1,500-2,000 people subsequently attacked the Salpêtrière institution for women, mentally insane and prostitutes. According to Caron it was the only prison were the number of victims seems to be exactly known, 35. On 3 September a circular letter had been sent to"
"troops were brought in and several dozen people were killed. During the French Revolution (1789–99) the ""faubourg"" was given the name ""Faubourg-de-Gloire"". The faubourg gained a reputation for turbulence during the revolution, starting with the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789. The people of the Quinze-Vingts and Montreuil sections took part in the insurrection of 10 August 1792, and that of 2 June 1793 that caused to Girondins to fall from power. The revolt of 1 Prairial Year III began in the faubourg, and was savagely repressed. In 1808 there were 750 workers, mostly children, in the rue"
"supporting fortifications to replace them with an avenue of trees, later called Louis XIV's boulevard, which passed around the Bastille. The Bastille's bastion survived the redevelopment, becoming a garden for the use of the prisoners. Louis XIV made extensive use of the Bastille as a prison, with 2,320 individuals being detained there during his reign, approximately 43 a year. Louis used the Bastille to hold not just suspected rebels or plotters but also those who had simply irritated him in some way, such as differing with him on matters of religion. The typical offences that inmates were accused of were"
"Assembly reconstituted itself as the National Constituent Assembly. On July 11, 1789 King Louis, acting under the influence of the conservative nobles, as well as his wife, Marie Antoinette, and brother, the Comte d'Artois, banished the reformist minister Necker and completely reconstructed the ministry. Much of Paris, presuming this to be the start of a royal coup, moved into open rebellion. Some of the military joined the mob; others remained neutral. On July 14, 1789, after four hours of combat, the insurgents seized the Bastille fortress, killing the governor and several of his guards. The king and his military supporters"