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Source note Episode guide Original audio Topics: History

479. The French Revolution: The Storming of the Bastille (Part 5)

Summary

This The Rest Is History episode reconstructs the storming of the Bastille as both a practical search for gunpowder and a symbolic break in the French Revolution. Bread inflation, financial crisis, troop concentration, Jacques Necker’s dismissal, Camille Desmoulins’ call to arms, military defections, and municipal improvisation removed effective royal control of Paris before the fortress fell.

The episode also refuses a purely liberatory memory. The Bastille held only seven prisoners and some inmates had relatively comfortable conditions, yet arbitrary imprisonment made it politically potent and later images, relics, and tours enlarged it into a Gothic emblem of tyranny. The murders of Bernard-Rene de Launay, Jacques de Flesselle, Joseph Foulon, and Berthier de Sauvigny show that national liberation and crowd vengeance emerged together rather than in separate phases.

Key Claims

  • Hunger, bread prices near 15 sous, debt, troop movements, and Necker’s dismissal made an assault on reform appear imminent even when rumor exceeded established coordination.
  • Desmoulins converted Sunday crowds at the Palais Royal into armed mobilization, while wax heads of Necker and the Duke of Orleans anticipated the severed-head theatre that followed.
  • Defection by the Gardes Francaises and Baron de Besenval’s withdrawal order meant the monarchy lost reliable coercive control of Paris before the Bastille surrendered.
  • The new commune and bourgeois militia, later the French National Guard, show middle-class revolutionaries trying to institutionalize a movement they could not fully control.
  • The crowd seized muskets and cannon at Les Invalides but needed the Bastille’s gunpowder, making the assault strategically practical as well as symbolically anti-absolutist.
  • The fortress’s seven prisoners and mixed conditions qualify later liberation imagery without erasing the significance of lettres de cachet and arbitrary detention.
  • Bastille mythmaking began immediately through exaggerated prison imagery, demolition, tours, relics, souvenirs, and recognition of the vainqueurs.
  • De Launay’s surrender followed failed negotiation, miscommunication, shooting, arrival of defecting soldiers with cannon, and refusal by his own garrison to let him destroy the fortress.
  • The lynchings and public display of heads turned suspicion into corporeal political punishment before revolutionary courts or terror institutions existed.
  • Louis XVI briefly accommodated the new balance by withdrawing troops and accepting the tricolour cockade, while cries of “long live the nation” showed sovereignty shifting away from the crown.

Key Quotes

“To arms” - Desmoulins’s call at the Cafe Foy as presented by the episode.

“Long live the nation” - the crowd’s chant during Louis XVI’s Paris visit as presented by the episode.

Connections

Contradictions

  • No settled contradiction with 480. The French Revolution: The Rights of Man (Part 6). This episode supplies the Parisian regime break and violence immediately before the Great Fear, abolition of privilege, and Declaration.
  • The Bastille was a real instrument and symbol of arbitrary detention, but later torture imagery, battlements, iron masks, and liberation narratives exceeded the seven prisoners and conditions found in July 1789.
  • Schama’s violence-first interpretation is treated as a major reading, not as proof that later Terror was inevitable or that the Revolution’s universal rights claims were insincere.
  • Prices, crowd and troop totals, exact dialogue, first-fire responsibility, prisoner diagnoses, private motives, and many scenes of mutilation remain source-scoped reconstructions.