After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Bloody Beginning of the French Revolution

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

The Storming of the Bastille in 1789 marked the beginning of the French Revolution... the day a Parisian crowd stormed the royal fortress-prison that had come to embody absolutist power. This is the story of how mounting unrest erupted into full-scale revolution, and how one looming stone fortress became a lasting symbol of freedom, violence, and the power of the people.Today’s guest is Michael Rapport, a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Glasgow. His works include ‘The Napoleonic Wars: A Very Short Introduction’, ‘1848: Year of Revolution’ and most recently ‘City of Light, City of Shadows: Paris in the Belle Epoque’.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Stuart Beckwith and Tom Delargy. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's July 1789 in Paris. Bread is scarce, rumours are spreading, and fear hangs thick in the summer air. A city waits, tense and angry, unsure of what the future holds. Looming over the eastern streets stands the Bastille. An ancient fortress, a symbol of seemingly indestructible royal power. But, by nightfall, it will be a ruin. What begins as a search for gunpowder will become an act that shakes a kingdom and echoes across the world. This is the story of how a movement spiraled into a full-blown revolution

and how a single building came to define freedom, violence and the power of the people. From the crowded streets of 18th century Paris, this is After Dark. Hello, my name is Anthony. And I'm Maddie. Now, the storming of the infamous Bastie prison has, has become an iconic turning point in French history, an emblematic moment in the history of the tumultuous French Revolution. The prison fell in a single afternoon,

but its shadow stretches across centuries. Today we'll be delving into the build-up to this dramatic scene, how it played out and the consequences that rippled throughout Europe and the world. On today's episode, we are very happy to welcome Dr. Michael Rappore onto the show. Michael is a reader in modern European history at the University of Glasgow and is author of works including the Napoleonic Wars, a very short introduction, 1848 Year of Revolution and most recently the very excellent, might I say, City of Light, City of Shadows, Paris in the Bell epoch.

And before I properly welcome Michael, I have to say, he also inadvertently helped me an awful lot through my undergrad French Revolution because I was reading an awful lot of his work at that time. So it's a real pleasure to have you on. Michael, welcome to After Dark. Thank you, Anthony. Thank you, Manny. Thanks for having me. We're so excited to do these episodes with you because they're oft requested from our listeners. And we've really wanted to delve into this for such long time.

So I don't know why it's taken us so long. But we've been waiting for the right guests and you are absolutely it. So welcome to the show. We're going to talk about the beginnings of the French Revolution, Michael. And I certainly think of it as an incredibly politically and ideologically comprehensive. moment in history and one that has this very fast-paced action that's happening on the ground as well. So we're going to bring a lot of nuance, hopefully, to this conversation and talk about those different dynamics. But I want first to lay a bit of groundwork and talk about what pre-revolutionary

France is like in the 1780s prior to 89 and the revolution kicking off. What does France look like as a nation in this moment economically, politically, socially? Is there a level of unrest that makes sense when it comes to the revolution? Is this something people could have predicted? What's going on in those years beforehand? It's a very good question because nobody expected a revolution in France in the 1780s. I mean, actually almost right up to 1789, nobody was really expecting the upheaval that did happen. Socially, France is primarily, I mean, overwhelmingly a rural country. The vast majority of people were peasants. Many of them were property owners, not the majority, but it's a fairly prosperous peasantry by European standards.

And it's one of the wealthiest kingdoms in Europe at the time, Western Europe, certainly. It's got property-owning peasants. It's got a burgeoning middle class in the cities. It's got a very big, large mercantile elite in ports like Bordeaux, Nantes, La Afque, and so on, which I have to say is underpinned by the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade and the colonial trade. It should have been maybe the last place in Europe, which had a revolution, except for maybe Britain or some of the Nordics.

What actually happens is that you've got a number of structural problems in the relationship between the state and society. So what you have is, first of all, a country which has ambitions for grandeur ever since really Louis XIV, maybe earlier as well. And France, of course, is both a continental power and a global power or aspires to be an imperial power. So it has a foreign policy which has really overstretched as the resources of the old regime. It can be a continental power. It has to be to defend itself, but it also

aspires to be an overseas imperial power. And a lot of its wealth is based on that as well. So it has to defend these interests. The problem with that, of course, is you need money to do that, navies, armies, all that. And the structural problems we have are, first of all, privilege. So nobles pay tax. In fact, the French ability, one of the highest tax abilities in Europe. But it's actually that they don't pay enough of it in proportion of their ability to pay. And so the bulk, the burden of taxation falls on the less privileged. And it's not just the nobles who are privileged. Cities were privileged.

Provinces were privileged. France was not really a united kingdom in the sense of the law applied equally to everybody everywhere. France was a patchwork of different provinces, cities and so on with different privileges, different structures and these sorts of things. And so it was very hard to actually, for the monarchy to tap the wealth, which is there in the kingdom. And so what you end up having is a massive financial deficit, which really was inherited from the wars of Louis the 14th in the 17th and early 18th century, and which all successive monarchies, Louis the 15th and then Louis the 16th, who was king when the French Revolution happened, tried to tackle very earnestly, but failed to do so. And they failed to do so, not because, for want to trying, boy, they tried really, really hard, but they came up against opposition, opposition from the privileged orders. France was in theory in absolute monarchy. But in practice there were limits. There are these

structural limits, which I've talked about briefly, but there are also actually political limits. And one of those political limits was the judiciary. There were 13 sovereign courts in France called the Parliamor. And what they did was that they had the right to register royal edicts. And so the edict did not become law within their jurisdiction until they registered them. And they could refuse to register the edicts. Now, the king had various ways of trying to to force those things through, but he had to be absolutely sure of his strength to do that. So the result is, actually, is that so many efforts that reform were stymied by the privileged orders. And here's the other factor, which is important, is when the privileged orders did this,

they seem to sincerely believe that they're doing it not just to defend the nobles and their financial and social interests, but they seem to have argued pretty earnestly that what they were doing was that they were acting as a bulwark against what they call the potential despotism of the absolute monarchy. Therefore, they were the only, only, only defence that ordinary French people had against the power, overweening power of the state. I love this dynamic that they invent, because actually it's quite ingenious in many ways, because it's really hard to get around if you were a monarch. But maybe, Michael, you could talk a little bit about, for people who might not be so aware, about absolutism in its purest form. and what it's supposed to be. I know you've talked about the limits there,

and I think that's really important to bear in mind. And then if you don't mind talking a little bit about how people on the ground, how the peasant class is viewing absolutism, are they falling for that? Obviously, the nobility are not because they're putting these checks and balances in place. But from a peasant's point of view,

is Louis XVI an absolute monarch? I think in many ways they hope he would be, because a lot of peasants see the king as their protector against rapacious landlords. And it's almost quite, on the eve of the revolution when the estates general call it, I know we're running ahead of ourselves here, but before the actual politics of the revolution unfolded,

the old regime, the monarchy, invited Cagé de de de de Léin Lists of grievances from all the communities in France. And when you read those from these peasant villages, it's often we want the king to kind of give us a new road. We want the king to give us more grazing for our, for our cattle or our sheep or whatever it is. And so fundamentally they see the king as their protector. Having said that, though, you've got different varieties of peasants. You have the wealthy ones who

own their land outright and actually quite well off. And then you have all the way down to the landless laborers. And often it depend upon the social well-being and the social position of those particular peasants. But on the whole, I think it's fairly safe to say the peasants see the king as their protector. It doesn't mean they don't rebel. They did rebel from time to time. Usually in an earlier modern period, less so in the 18th century, though it did happen. There was a big flower war in the 1770s when food prices went sky high. But generally speaking, the peasants actually quite light the king because they saw them as a protector against their landlords, who are often nobles, often bourgeois landlords, and sometimes the church as well. So yeah,

but so do they fall for the old idea of absolute monarchy? Yes. But I think that support was conditional, that the king in some ways protects their interests against their immediate oppressors, if you like, who are their landlords. It's fascinating to me, Michael, that you're already painting this very nuanced idea of the structure of French governance, the French society. You know, I think maybe a sort of broader, popular impression that we have of the French Revolution is one of, you know, the sort of grandeur of Versailles and the absolute poverty at the other end of the spectrum. And actually filling in those gaps is really useful. To sort of complicate things further, I suppose,

pose. How does this moment in French history, pre-revolution, fit in with what's happening more globally in terms of the Enlightenment? We've had the American Revolution in the 1770s. We have these ideas of liberty, of republicanism, spreading across Europe. And, you know, these are ideas that are in Britain certainly used to bolster the royal family. These aren't necessarily ideas that are at odds with monarchy. But how is enlightenment playing out in France and how does some of those ideas come into play in the lead up to the revolution? Absolutely essential. France had a very, very important role in the Enlightenment, as we all know, with Voltaire, Rousseau, but there are also a large number of writers who, if you like, want to be writers,

want to be intellectuals who publish and popularize these ideas in newspapers, in pamphlets, in books, you know, people who are lesser known, but who disseminated these ideas quite widely. And there is a big middle class, which has been so steadily growing from the 17th century, who are reading some of this stuff. As you rightly say, Maddie, it should not necessarily have actually undermined the monarchy because the monarchy and monarchies around Europe were very good at harnessing of enlightened ideas in the cause of reform. Because as we kind of hinted already, in order for the state to be strengthened,

you needed structural reform. And to do that, you often have to tackle vested privileged interests. The monarchy was struggling to do that. Where the monarchy fails in France, it was fails to harness public opinion. Britain, as you pointed out, the British monarchy and parliament was very good at doing that at saying, yes, you don't have the right to vote, but what we're doing is in the wider interests of the country. And generally speaking, not always, there's a British radical movement, but generally

speaking, they pretty much convinced the vast majority of the population, it seems. In France, the monarchy failed to do that. And there is a huge kind of burgeoning, especially in the 1770s and 1780s of opposition literature. One of the most important foyes of this in the late 1780s was the Palais Royal in the heart of Paris, which was a kind of no-go zone for the police force because it was private property owned by the Duke of Orleans, who was the rival, the skiing of the rival dynasties to the Bourbons, the Orleanists. And so he was quite happy to open this up to opposition literature, cafes, theaters, bookshops, places where people could go and listen to subversive or revolutionary

ideas. And so these ideas are being knocked around. And often, first of all, in support of the parliament and their opposition to what they saw is despotism, but then later against privilege in general as things heated up in the late 1780s. So there's a real ferment of debate. And this is aided too by the enthusiasm generated by the American Revolution, which in which, of course the French intervened. I want to bring in this idea before we get to the summer of 1789, which we're heading, we're heading there. Don't worry. We're going to get there. But before we do, one of the things that I struggled with as an undergrad in this concept was the three estates. And I just like you to give us a little bit of an insight into what the division is there, how it becomes

important as we're heading into summer 1789, and who exactly were, what exactly were these three estates. Yeah, I think the crucial thing. I struggle with this sometimes because we're, we still think in terms of even now, perhaps we shouldn't, we still think in terms of class, right? Where society has rich, poor, and social, economic gradations and cultural, you know, differences and so on. But old regime society didn't, wasn't thought of in that sense. It was corporate, different bodies, depending upon their privilege. And that's what determines status. So you had three estates very broadly. The first estate were those who prayed, the clergy. The second estate were those who, in theory, defended the kingdom, the nobility. And the third estate was everybody else. But everybody else included a wide, wide range of people from the poorest landless peasant wandering around looking for charity to the wealthiest, non-noble bourgeois, who is at top of the financial tree in France. Some of the wealthiest people in France are not part of the second estate, not part of the nobility, but are in the third estate. But they make their money in business, in finance, often state finance, tax collection,

creaming off some of the funds, and so on. So you have a wide range of people. And that's the problem. That's one of the structural social problems, actually, is that the third estate is the least privileged. But they accounted for, as was pointed out in 1789, they accounted for the most productive elements within French society. And yet they were underrepresented politically when the crunch came. So we have these tensions building, Mike, and these. inequalities at a structural level as well as in practice. I think one of the impressions, again, that we get in a sort of popular imagination with this period is the idea that King Louis XVIth is utterly out of touch with his people, that he sat in Versailles,

just soaking up the glory of his court. But he does, in May 1789, start to try and resolve some of these issues, doesn't he? He is aware that there is a problem. Yeah, so one thing he's aware of actually his public opinion. He is desperate to be popular, and he is actually very well-loved initially. He does try to resolve the, and then May 1789, he convened the Estates General. Now, the Estates General was actually convened in August, 1788, when his chief minister, a Genevaan banker actually called Jack Necker, said, look, he comes to power, and he says, I can't do anything unless you call the Estates General. And the Estates General were the only representative parliament, if you like, that France had never had. And it was

organized into the three estates who we discussed, nobles, clergy, third estate. You convene it and you convene it to consult the representatives of the people of the three estates in order to try to resolve the financial crisis, the structural problems of reform. And hopefully, Louis thought that this would actually in some way resolve it. Now, he actually called the estates general very, very reluctantly because it was unpredictable. Once you actually have elections and these three estates are elected by their members, you end up having, you don't know what the results are going to be. And that's why, in many ways, you had this political crisis in the years leading up to 1789, this kind of political deadlock, because

this had to be drawn out of the monarchy. They were trying other ways of pushing reforms through other gambits, other tactics. But in the end, they had to call the third estate. So there are elections through the autumn in the winter of 1788, 1789. And then finally, it convenes at Velsai in May 1789. And once they're in, then, something almost, something very French and something almost unthinkable happens. They, the Estates General, or part of them at least, declares themselves the sovereign voice of the nation. I mean, in a world where absolute monarchy is supposed to be the rule of the day, this is remarkable. And it's, you know, it is revolutionary.

Even in that act itself is very revolutionary. but talk to us about what happens thereafter because there's divisions even within that. Absolutely. First of all, the bulk of the people who declared, you know, it was the Tennis Corps oath on the 20th of June 1789. There was political gridlock between the third estate and the two privileged orders. I won't go into details to why this gridlock took place, but there was a political gridlock over how to proceed with the meetings of the Estates General.

and the third estate wanted the three estates to meet in such a way that they had the voice that they probably almost certainly deserved, which was because they're being the vast majority of the nation, that they would effectively have the majority voice. They're meeting altogether. The privileged orders wanted to meet separately, vote separately, so the two privileged orders would always, their collective votes would out vote, the single collective vote of the third estate. They finally had enough, and they went to the third estate, joined by some liberal nobles who defected, and by clergy, who defected, swore on the tennis courts at Valci on the 20th of June 789 that they wouldn't separate until they had designed a constitution for the kingdom. And that is a revolutionary moment. The Abbeciet, who is one of the leading voices of the third estate in this point in time, called it cutting the

cable. That this is it. In many ways, this was the revolutionary moment in a constitutional sense. It's a point in which they say the absolute monarchy is dead. We have to build a new political order in France, more representative, more modern, if you like. I love that they meet on the tennis courts. That's so incredibly French. And I think as well speaks to the designation of space at Versailles and this kind of misuse of it in this revolutionary moment. We're getting into a huge change happening now in France, Michael. And we're into the summer of 1789 now. This has happened at Versailles, but presumably in Paris and across the rest of France, chaos is unfolding now that this political deadlock has been

sort of broken or the cable has been cut, let's say. In the city itself of Paris, what is the mood in this moment? On the one hand, there's actually quite a lot of exhilaration. There's the sense of possibility that things might change. There's an anticipation of meaningful political change. But this is underpin. The tension comes from two things. First of all, there was a really, really dire economic crisis caused by an appallingly bad harvest in the autumn of 1788. And this in its turn have been caused by massive hailstorms. People reported hailstones coming down the size of tennis balls. Cattle were killed.

People were killed by these falling projectiles, basically. It flattened crops. So by the summer of 1789, food prices have spiraled upward and were going upwards very, very rapidly. So there's that. The other reason there's tension is because the king began to worry about the challenges we've talked about to his authority. And he began to bring up troops from the provinces, from the garrisons of guarding the frontier, brought them into Paris and around Paris and Velsai. There are troops camped in the city of Paris. And there is a real fear in Paris that actually the king is going to assert his authority by using military. force, closing down the Estates General or the National Assembly, as the third estate now called itself, and crushing dissent in Paris, occupying the city. They're very, very worried by this. And it really was, the friction is there. And as we know in retrospect of revolutions, often there's a brewing situation and there's usually a trigger, which then brings out in

violence. Yes, and we're coming to that violence now, aren't we? We're kind of right up against So let's take a little bit of a trip to the Bastille itself, Michael. Before we get to the action of 1789, talk to me about the place this prison fortress held in French and Parisian culture overall. What was its function? How do people view it? And was it iconic at that time? Was it was a real symbol as it has become since? Yeah. I mean, first of all, it was a fortress guarding what had been the eastern approaches of Paris in the Middle Ages and in the 17th century, had eight towers. It dominates the eastern part of the city. Artillery on top. And that's the point. It was meant to be the bulwark on the eastern side of the city of Paris. On the westward approaches, again of the old

medieval city, in early modern city, were guarded by the Louvre. So these were the two lynch pins, if you like, of defense of Paris. It guarded the southern approaches to the northern city wall, if you know, the arc of boulevards going around the northern half of the city. So that's the first thing. It had a moat. It had an inner courtyard inside the citadel of the Bastille, but also had an outer courtyard, which

could be accessed through quite a narrow lane coming from the Rue du Saint-Antoine, which led from the Bastille towards the city center, the city hall, and the city, the central markets of the city. So it's a crucially strategic

position to have. However, By 1789, of course, it's lost that as a citadel defending the outskirts of the descending the Easter approach to the city, because city has grown. And to the east of the Bastille was the Fulbole-Saint-Antoine, the San Antoine suburb, if you like, which is full of independent-minded artisans, particularly cabinet makers and so on, who are highly skilled, well-organized, have a strong sense of community, and for whom the Bastille is this really symbol of what the monarchy might do to you if things go horribly wrong. And just a few months before in April 1789, a number of them were gunned down in the football of Sant'an when they

rioted outside a wallpaper factory because there had been rumors that the owner had said that prices of bread should go up because, you know, he complained about spiling prices of bread because that meant he found it hard to pay his workers. But what he actually, what that was interpreted saying, that I should cut the wages of my workers. There's a riot and these people were gunned down. So the awesome power of the state had already been demonstrated in the Fulbole-Saint-Antoine just a few months before July 1789. So the Bastille represents this despotism also because of its prisoners. Now, we know that there weren't many held that. We know that with retrospect, but there was a kind of a black legend to the Bastille. The man in the Iron Mask was held there

in the late 17th, late 17th century. We also know that there are a number of people who were held there on the basis of the Lettre de Cache, the notorious arrest warrants issued by the monarchy on the basis of, we don't like what they're saying. You could also, if you're wealthy enough, you could pay the king to issue one to imprison a relative you didn't like or whatever. So, you know, there's a legend to it, a dark legend about the man in the Iron Mask. But actually, the Bastille was actually a place where people were imprisoned because of often of what they say. or what they did, including it has to be said, the Marquis de Sad, has spent some time in there. So there's that too. And also, the conditions in there were actually, as it turned out, as we know now,

not too bad. Because actually, to have the king's attention drawn to you in that way, you had to be pretty well off. You had to be very vocal and influential. So once you were in, you were fairly well treated. But there's a legend, it may be true, that there's a ritual when a prisoner was brought into the bastille through the outer court, they were brought in in a covered carriage, closed carriage, and the guards were meant to turn around about face, so they didn't see that they couldn't identify the prisoner inside. And this just added to the notoriety of the jail,

which is effectively what it was. But it was still an important citadel, which could be used for storing ammunition, for storing gunpowder, and it did have a garrison. Mike, you're absolutely doing our work for us here, I'm hooked. I'm actually hooked. The Bastille, I suppose, I mean, you've described it as having this incredibly sort of symbolic meaning as well as being a practical place to house high-profile political prisoners, even the anonymised ones. And so you can see why the revolutionaries would target it.

Everyone on the ground was aware of the price that could be paid if you revolted, if you rioted, if you drew the attention of the state unfavourably on you, you could be gunned down in the streets. So it's a risk, therefore, to storm the Bastille, an incredible risk to life and limb and to the cause more generally. Is the targeting of it then to do with its symbolism? Because we know at the time, I think there's only seven prisoners being held inside, isn't there? So this isn't an attempt of a sort of mass release of prisoners who can then join the mob. Is there a practical element to this as well? Are there things – I mean, you mentioned gunpowder was stored there. are there things that the revolutionaries need in the Busti? What is the thinking in the moment when

the storming takes place? Why do they do it? Well, it happens famously on the 14th of July 789, but if you roll back just a couple of days, the 14th of July was a Tuesday. Sunday, the popular minister Nekker, the guy who actually summoned the Estates German in the first place, was dismissed by Louis, the 16th. And Nekker was liked by the people because he was a believer, not in the free market in the food and grain trade, and the flour trade, but actually in state control of the flower trade, which made sure that food moved freely around the country, guided by the state to make sure that people were fed. And he was well liked by that, for that reason. But he was also associated with the kind of reformist wing, if you like,

of royal government. Louis at this point seems to have decided to appoint a more hardline conservative government, small sea, in order to kind of crack down on opposition. So the dismissal of NECR, which reached Paris, filtered through to Paris, actually ended up being seen as a prelude to the much feared coup d'etat they were worried about. And so people went insert, people burned down the barrier, which were custom, internal customs barriers around Paris. There are a number of them still around. You can see them usually kind of dotted around the city. They burn those down. But above all, they went. in search of arms, munitions, and gunpowder. They raided the Anvalid, the Royal Hospital for,

they had the equivalent of the Chelsea Hospital in London. They raided that, looking for arms, found some. They raided the Hotel de Ville, the city, the city hall, didn't find much in there, and so on. But what they really needed then was munitions, gunpowder. And the military governor of Paris actually understood that actually this is what they were after. So what he did, the night before, the 14th of July, is he ordered the garrison of the Bastille, which was a Swiss regiment, the Salis Samad Regiment, to move the gunpowder from the arsenal, which is still there, now a library, to roll it up the street to the Bastille and store it in the Bastille for safekeeping so it wouldn't be taken. People knew this, and that's what made the Bastille a target.

It wasn't just its symbolism. It wasn't just the fear of what its artillery could do to the surrounding districts. It was also really quite a kind of, if you like, a more kind of aggressive or positive act of trying to seize the gunpowder so that Paris could defend itself. Because by this point, the prisons are arming themselves. They're forming themselves into a militia, which would ultimately become the National Guard. And that was to protect the city, but also to protect property against people taking advantage of the chaos. And there's a city government. And the city government itself takes power in Paris, because the city government are made up with the prison electors who then chose the deputies to this state's general. So they assume control of the city.

And this is when you begin to see the royal power collapsing in the day or two just before the fall in the Bastille. Right. Listeners, a warning here. You are about to hear the words, Bastie, you're about to hear barricades, you're about to hear revolution. But it is not that revolution that we're talking about. This is not Les Mis. It's a different one. It's earlier than Les Mis. Just so there's clarity. Right. Michael, take us. to the morning then of the 14th of July. This is the pivotal moment. And just weave us through that day. You've talked about they go there looking for ammunition. There is a prison governor who is almost shares my name. And we have this weaving of events that starts to take, which leads us up to the point, I think, in the

afternoon where the first shots are fired. So if you can lead us to there. Yeah, you had eventually something like about 8,000 Parisians gathered in the outer court of the Bastille. Basically, they were laying siege to the Bastille. You know, in the Rue Saint-Antoine, outside to the east on the Rue du Fubourg Saint-Anne. They force the way in. You know, they are armed. They have weapons. They are calling on the Bastille's, they call on the Bastille to surrender. Delolet actually refuses to do so. Now, in the hiatus, what happens is that members of the city government, which is why I mentioned them, come running down the Rue Saint-Antoine from the Hotel de Ville, the City Hall, to try to negotiate. And as an, they go inside and as an act of goodwill, DeLone, the governor of the Bastille,

says, okay, I'll pull the cannon back from the ramparts and as an act to show that we mean no harm. But of course, these cannon, these artillery pieces are muzzle loaders. So the only way of actually loading them is by pulling them back from the ramparts. So you could ram the charge and the ball down the barrel. And so people not unreasonably assumed that this was the prelude to opening fire on the city itself. They thought now that they've captured some, they thought they may have captured a kiddaps, these representatives from the Paris government, the commune.

So they thought, right, this is a prelude to the bombardment. And so that unleashed the attack. And as I said, there's always a trigger. And I think this is the trigger for sort of absolute violence. There had been an earlier one. Cavalry had charged crowds and hurt people, killed people on the 12th of July. But this is the trigger which sparks the storming of the Bastille. And there are already people in the outer courtyard, but there's absolute mayhem. A large number of casualties get taken. Something like 93

insurgents attackers are getting killed eventually in all this. And it's a confined space. So the fire of the Salli Samad regiment on the battlements is lethal. Eventually what happens, is they reach the main gate. The drawbridge is brought up. There's a moat around the Bastille. And somebody threw a little hole in the bridge of the Bastille and the drawbridge of the Bastille. It's up. It's closed.

Hands out a note. And somebody puts a plank of wood across. One of the insurgents puts a blank of wood across and gathers. And I think it's this, one of the leaders of the revolt, guy called Stanislaz-Meyer, who's quite a mysterious figure in the French Revolution, grabs the note. And it's a threat by Deloney. He will blow up the four.

fortress unless they withdraw. And of course, blowing out the fortress would do an untold damage and visit carnage on the people around. And so eventually what happens is instead of surrender, at this critical moment, the Guard Francaise, who had been the elite regiment in Paris, their job as policing Paris. They're also used on the battlefield. They are one of the elite French regiments had defected, or a few companies of them had defected to the insurgents. And they brought artillery pieces, five guns, which they train on the bridge. And somehow the bridge collapses, the insurgents surge in to the Bastille. There's more fighting in there. And eventually what happens is the garrison surrender. Dolané himself is captured and surrenders and is taken by

the crowd and meets a rather sticky end. It's remarkable to me that he threatens to blow the Bastille up. Do you think he was really prepared to do that, Mike? I like to think he was bluffing, because didn't, I suppose. The thing is there's lots of different narrative accounts of this, because after the Bastille, and there's quite a large number of people, I mean, some 600 people who were actually identified as being what was called Vanquil de la Bastille, and conquerors of the Bastille, they're given a little triangular medal, which you can see in the Musei Carnivalet in Paris, in the French Revolution galleries, which, by the way, I'd recommend a visit if you're ever in the city, it's free as well. I'm not sure if you're allowed to plug these things, but it's a city

museum. You are. You are, of course. it's okay. But, you know, a lot of them rush, because these are often highly skilled tradespeople, highly skilled artisans, they're highly literate, and there's no censorship now. It's all but collapse. They rush to publish their own accounts. And so the accounts vary as to what actually happened, who was in the Bastille first. There's one, a clockmaker who rushes up to the towers of the Bastille, says, I was the first up there. He actually manages to disarm a Swiss soldier there and take some prisoner. So there are lots of different accounts.

So, yeah, it does seem crazy that he would say, I've threatened to blow this up, the whole this place. I think by that point, if he did that, then it's absolutely desperate. Yeah, absolutely. So what do we know of, I mean, this is presumably a bloody battle at this point. The bridge has been broken. The insurgents are streaming into the Bastie itself. How many people die and what do those casualties look like on both sides? So 93 of the insurgents were killed on the field, if you like, battlefield, if you like, in the siege and the storming.

Nine defenders were killed, but 15 of the insurgents later on died of wounds. So a total of 117. Well, whatever. 170 people were killed in all. So, yeah, I mean, it is by no means the bloodiest day of the French Revolution. In many ways, Bastille is the prelude to much more horrifying violence later on. But it's still, you know, in a city center, for 117 people to be killed in a day, They were attacking a fortress, but still, you know, these are people, these are not soldiers, right?

These are artisans. These are people like joiners, cabinet makers. They're cobblers, clockmakers, goldsmiths. And there are quite a large number of bourgeois amongst them, you know, well-heeled bourgeois. You know, they're the minority, but there are middle-class people who join in the insurrection as well. A couple of women who don't do the fighting, but there's a very famous testimony by a woman who breaks bottles in a cafe. and the cafe owner gives her all these bottles to smash, and she carries it in her skirts and aprons so the guys can load their weapons with broken glass. Any projectile they possibly can throw at the Bastille.

It's really very much a people's revolt in a very genuine sense, which is I think is why it's probably celebrated in France as its national holiday. Just in terms of the – you mentioned that the elite regiment who turncoat and join the revolutionaries, how important do you think that alliance is? You talk about the fact they've introduced canon into this situation on the revolutionary side and they are able to get into the busty. Is that a turning point when that regiment gets involved?

And why do they get involved? If they are so prestigious an instrument of the state, why are they then deciding to change sides? Yeah, I mean, I think it's crucial. The defection of the French military, which is affecting what happens, is crucial. I think there are several things to be said about this. First of all, it's even more of a shock. The defection is even more a shock because it was the Guard Franceses who did the gunning down in the riots in the Fubour Saint-Antoine in April 1789. So they were disciplined then, and over the ensuing months, they lose their discipline. This happens because, yes, they're an elite regiment, but they're French, they're barrens. They're barrens. their barracks are dotted around the city, and they fraternized, they speak. And the Peretians were very good at saying, here, have a bottle of wine. Let's have a chat. You know, so they basically get won over. And it's the French regiments that get one over because they have something in common with the people. Interestingly enough, and one of the reasons there had been so much fear

generated by the military buildup was that a lot of the regiments brought from the frontiers into the city and around the city and around Valsai were foreign regiments. mercenary regiments, if you like, regiments in the service, foreign regiments in the service of the French state, French monarchy. They maintain their discipline because they're outsiders. They find it harder to fraternize.

Their officers often are quite draconian about keeping them in line. And so they don't defect. But the defection of the French military is enough, and it's crucial because not just in the taking of the Bastille, but then what happens subsequently, the king is now confronted with us, what do I do?

I've now got this massive urban insurrection on my hands in the old capital city of Paris. What do I do? And the advice he was given by his own ministers and by his military commanders was, if you send the army in, we cannot guarantee that they will follow orders. So it's that loss, if you like, of the monopoly of legitimate force that actually means that it's over for the old regime. They have no more cards to play. I have a question that you might be familiar with, Mike, and it was asked by Louis himself. is it a revolt?

He was woken up. He was woken up the next morning, I think it was, when the news came through. And it was actually, I think it's mainly apocryphal because it was in La Roche-Foucault's memoirs. The Duke de la Roche-Foucault was a liberal progressive noble. One of the types who may have had sympathies with the third estate. He was very much one of the enlightened figures that Maddie was talking about earlier. He had gone on a trip to visit Britain to see how agriculture was done there. So he's very much a man of the Enlightenment. But he's also courtier. And he woke up Louis XVI and said, you know, sire, the people of Paris has risen up. And Louis XVI says, ah, it's a revolt then. He says, non-sir, it's a revolution. No, sire, it is a revolution. A very iconic moment. And one of those moments we think, oh, God, I hope that one's true. I really hope that's true story. Yeah, yeah. But what we do see, however, is this almost immediate shift of power in Paris specifically, where something revolutionary does start to happen. And I agree, I think that's probably apocopal. But we start to see something really shift now, don't we, as a consequence of what's happened at the Busti? Yes. I mean, basically, royal power collapses in Paris. Not only that, it collapses everywhere in the kingdom. There's a famous revolution in Paris, of course, but then every,

other municipality, every other city, Marseille, and so on, they all have their own local revolutions where their own militias, which they formed, take power. And then when royal authority is collapsed in the countryside as well, the peasants rise up. And again, the peasants don't rise up necessarily against the monarchy. They rise up against their landlords. Interestingly enough, they don't burn many chattos. There's this image of pitch-fort-wheeling peasants, flaming torches, burning down shadows. That happens very, very rarely. if at all. What they do is they burn the records. They go in there, they burn the records of the rights, the legal records that document the rights that their landlords had over them. And so in

that sense, they destroy the seigneurial, sometimes referred to as the feudal system. You know, within a matter of weeks, it's gone. Wow. Okay. So it's very, you know, the impact of the fall of the Bastille is very, very far reaching. And in Paris itself, the city government is now basically in charge, unambiguously. The Erzine electors. They formed the Paris commune, ultimately, which becomes the city government of Paris. The militia becomes the National Guard, and they adopt the treacle or cockade as their symbol. And it just becomes, we're now talking about a transformation in the politics of France beginning, you know, in a really quite radical way. Yes, I think we think of this moment maybe

as sort of incredible chaos, you know, the storming of the Bastille and its destruction and everything's exploding and people are dying on the street. But actually, there is a real scramble very early on to organise and, you know, the fact that Lafayette of American Revolutionary fame becomes the commander of the National Guard, for example, you know, shows just how professionalised this is straight away. Am I right, might, in thinking that he, when the Bastille is properly dismantled in the days afterwards, that Lafayette actually sends one of the keystones to George Washington in the US? He sent, yeah, he sends the keys to the Bastille. Oh, the The keys, right?

Yeah. Brilliant. And it was actually Thomas Payne as well. He wrote, who wrote, who wrote to Washington. It says living through two revolutions is living to some purpose because Payne was involved in the American. But yeah, Lafayette sends the key to the Bastille to Washington. You know, he's like, the Americans are seen as the forerunners, the progenitors, if you

like, the distant progenitors of the French Revolution. Later on, a lot of Americans would rather wish they hadn't been the progenitors of the French revolution. But yes, I think that's, yeah, absolutely. It's very symbolic. And what's more, as you rightly say, the bastille gets demolished. It's a symbol of despotism. And it's this guy called Palois, this contractor called Palois, who I think made a lot of money out of it.

And stones of the Bastille were kind of sold off, carved into souvenirs, rather like, you know, the Berlin Wall. When it came down in 1989, I'm old enough to remember what it happened. and people were buying chunks of the Berlin Wall, you know, saying, you know, this was really an iconic moment. And in much the same way the Bastille was used in that way. And some of the stones were used to build the bridge across the Sen, which now connects the Plast de la Concorde, with then called Plas Louis I, 15th Square, with what is now the National Assembly. So that bridge, you know, was partially constructed out of stones from the Bastille. The idea being that Parisians would forever tread on the symbol of despotism. Yeah, there's something so great about the city itself and it's people kind of cannibalizing that symbol and making it into something new.

And I think the explicit connection that's being made there with the American Revolution, and obviously, you know, there are sort of personal connections with some of these figures, but also that inheritance of sort of revolutionary spirit is, is really explicit here, isn't it? What happens in terms of the ideas then of revolutionists, the ideas of liberty, of legally enshrining into constitutional law, equality greater than what has been in France before? Does this happen in the immediate aftermath? Is this something that's going to take a really long time? I'm thinking of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in this moment. You know, how fast are people to formalize what is happening on the ground into something more

being full and long-lasting. Very. It happens remarkably quickly. I think there was a remarkable thing about the National Assembly, as it now was, still in Valsai, is that it works with such energy. And it's, for all the violence that it has happened, it's remarkably constructive, and it's an important legacy. But immediately afterwards, in the weeks immediately afterwards, it does two really big things. First of all, night of 4th of August, 1789, it abolishes privilege, incredibly. It's this tumultuous session. We're in almost like this fit of altruism. It's one of these really quite inspiring moments. The idea was that to bring peace back to the countryside, which was an absolute mayhem with all these little mini-insurrections going on everywhere,

something called the Great Fear gripping the countryside, rumors of brigands and bandits, brought in them by the nobility to crush the peasant uprising. You know, all these, it just generated, became a spiral. of insurrection in the countryside, attacking the seigneurial system, attacking noble privilege and landlord privilege. Eventually, the National Assembly, most of these people are property owners or good bourgeois, middle class lawyers and so on, and say, we've got to restore order. So initially they say, look, we've got to make some concessions to the peasants, give up some of the privileges. And initially, it's meant to be quite limited. But in the end, all these

deputies to the Assembly, who are now gathered, all the deputies from all three estates, were now ordered by the king to gather together in one national assembly, which becomes known as the constituent assembly because its job is now, as promised, to create a constitution for France. But the first thing they have to do is tackle the violence to the countryside. And what happens is all these people, all these deputies, nobles, clergymen, some of the bourgeois come in and renounce their own privileges. And the decree says the National Assembly abolishes feudalism in its entirety. In other words, they abolish privilege. In fact, they did kind of back. And backpedal a few days, about a week later, in the definitive degree. But it's a moment where those

provincial privileges we talked about, the corporate privileges, the noble privilege, the clerical ecclesiastical privilege, they're all abolished. From now on, every French person is meant to be an equal citizen of a new political order. In practice, we know that doesn't happen, not least women are excluded from the political order in terms of the rights of citizenship. slavery was still in place and wasn't abolished until 1794 under very, very different circumstances. The second thing they do, as you say, on the 26th of August 1789, they issued the Declaration of Rights of Man of the Citizen, in which basically rights were declared to be pretty much universal. They don't use that term, but they say man is born free and equal in rights. Social distinction can only be founded on public utility. So if you have any distinguishing features within a society,

it has to be out of public service or how useful you are to society, not because you were born to privilege. And this declaration to write 17 articles gets inserted into the Constitution of 1791, which is France's first constitution. I have some very good news for you, if you're listening to this episode and are absolutely gripped as I am. This is only the beginning of the French Revolution, of course, but it's also one of two episodes that we are doing with Mike. So we are going to get to explore another aspect of this in another episode that is soon to follow. But Mike, before we wrap up this episode, I would like to know if you can let us know, I was there last month, and that's why I'm hesitating. I'm literally envisaging myself back on that particular spot. But I'd love

to hear how this is remembered now in France, this particular event. Is there a great pride around this? I mean, the monument there is a monument for the later. events as far as I remember. So give us an idea about how it's memorialized today. Well, the monument was to the 1830 revolution, which is later one, as you rightly say. Yes, it's memorialized today primarily in the shape of Bastille Day. But also, I would say, I'll get back to that. But before I forget, it also, the term Bastille is often used as a, as something like an injustice to be stormed. So often you find that, that like, 19th century feminists talked about the bastille of women's legal inequality.

You know, that's got to be stormed. And Mugly Durant, who's one of my favorite 19th century feminists, talked about that. You know, this is a Bastille we've got to take. You know, so it becomes rhetorically very, very emotive. But I think now it's part of the wider kind of landscape, if you like, of commemoration of history. And often state-states sponsored.

The Bastille Day on the 14th of July, the 14th of July became a national holiday in 1880. And that date is very significant because it's the day. date that the third republic, we're now on the fifth, but the third republic really finally found its feet having been established in 1870. There were throughout the 1870s, it looked like it might not survive. The Republicans win the elections. And in celebration, the Republicans now in power through elections actually say, well, let's commemorate the French Revolution. They see themselves as the heirs to 1789. And so you have 1880, Bastille Day becomes a national holiday.

the national holiday in France. And that's when you have the first military parade down the Chanss Lise, goes back to 1880, and I believe it's the longest running military parade in Europe, I think. The Eiffel Tower is built because of the universal exposition of 1889. But 1889 also happened to be the centenary of the French Revolution. And Gustav Eiffel, the engineer, was explicit that he wanted to celebrate the ideas of the Enlightenment, human reason, human science, rights of man, as opposed to superstition, hierarchy, privilege, looking back, and those sorts of activism, those sorts of things. So, 14th of July, and 1789 left its mark

and is remembered in many, many different ways. And you can still see bits of the Bastille lying around the city. The Bastille Metro Station, if you go onto line 5, the northbound towards at the Pre Saint-Gervé, you can see a little bit jutting out onto the platform. So they still see bits of it knocking around and there are bits, hunks of it in the Muzé Carnivalet again and so on. So yeah, so there's a lot of memory associated with the Bastille. It's rhetorical. It's commemorative. And above all, it's just historical.

It's a very dramatic moment in the history of France and indeed of Europe. Maybe the world, some people call it a world historical event. Well, there you have it, listener. The history of the story of the Bastille is still written large. across the city of Paris. And you might be thinking there's a slight contradiction maybe in terms of this memorialisation, this celebration of this day that is held up by the state as it is now and as it was in the 19th century. And the storming itself has this kind of heroic romance about it. There's a clear moral purpose. There's success. There's individual figures who we can pick out

in the crowd. But of course the reality is also one of fear and confusion. of mob violence, and there is going to be further darkness to come. There always is on this show, unfortunately. So you will need to join us next time when we're going to be discussing the reign of terror. But for now, thank you so much for listening. If you want to hear more topics about French history or revolutions more generally, you can get in touch with us after dark at historyhit.com. See you next time.