Let's start with the question: why did the people destroy the prison for the aristocrats and why did this event cause violent rejoicing among the so-called common people?
Indeed, the Bastille has long existed as a privileged prison for 42 people. But until the reign of Louis XIV, there were rarely more than one or two prisoners in it at the same time - mostly rebellious princes of the blood, marshals of France, dukes, or, at worst, counts. They were assigned spacious upper rooms (albeit with iron bars on the windows), which they could furnish to their liking. Their footmen and other servants lived in adjacent rooms.
Under Louis XIV and XV, the Bastille was somewhat "democratized", but remained a prison for the noble class. Commoners rarely got there. The conditions of detention of the prisoners corresponded to the aristocratic status of the prison. The prisoners received allowance according to their rank and class. So, 50 livres a day were allocated for the maintenance of the prince (remember that the four famous Musketeers of Dumas lived for almost a month, not knowing sorrow), the marshal - 36, the lieutenant general - 16, the councilor of parliament - 15, the judge and the priest - 10, lawyer and prosecutor - 5, bourgeois - 4, lackey or artisan - 3 livres.
Food for prisoners was divided into two categories: for the upper classes (at the rate of 10 livres per day and above) and for the lower classes (less than 10 livres). For example, lunch of the first category consisted of soup, boiled beef, roast, dessert on fast days, and soup, fish, and dessert on lean days. Wine was served daily for dinner. Lunches of the second category consisted of the same number of dishes, but were prepared from lower quality products. On holidays - St. Martin, St. Louis and Epiphany - an extra dish was provided: half a chicken or a roast pigeon. In addition, prisoners had the right to walk in the Arsenal garden and on the towers.
The prisoners in the fortress had servants and even went to visit each other. Such a population of the Bastille literally devastated France's meager budget at the time.
Over the years, the Bastille began to receive "guests" of the less noble, and their salary accordingly dropped to 2.5 livres a day. Sometimes the prisoner asked to extend his sentence in order to save himself a certain amount of money, and sometimes the prison authorities would meet him halfway.
Promotional video:
In his youth, Voltaire spent almost a year in the Bastille, who, during his imprisonment, fruitfully worked on the epic poem "Henriad" and the tragedy "Oedipus".
Among other famous prisoners of the fortress - Cardinal Roan, Bishop of Strasbourg (the most "expensive" of all the keepers of the prison: he was paid 120 livres daily), a spirit spellcaster, alchemist and adventurer in one person, "Count" Cagliostro, who in fact was not at all Count, and not Cagliostro, and not at the age of 300, but a native of a poor and rootless Palermo family, Giuseppe, 40-50 years old, a mysterious man in an "iron mask", which was actually made of velvet.
Among the prisoners, just 10 days before the so-called "assault" of the fortress, there was … the Marquis de Sade, from whose name came the ominous word "sadism". It was only by chance that he did not find himself a participant in the triumphal procession of the liberated "victims" of the Bastille. This notorious sexual pervert was isolated from society, but the commandant of the fortress did not consider it possible to keep him there either. He was sent to an insane asylum because the behavior of the Marquis de Sade convinced him of his complete mental disability.
Due to the high costs of maintaining prisoners, the French government began to think about completely closing the prison. However, as they say, there was one "BUT" … But the Bastille was for the French the personification of power and order in the country. Who owned it - owned the power.
With the accession of Louis XVI, the Bastille lost the character of a state prison and turned into an ordinary one, with the only difference that the criminals were kept in it in relatively better conditions. In the Bastille, torture was finally abolished and it was forbidden to put prisoners in a punishment cell. On September 11, 1775, Minister Maleserb, who contributed much to the relaxation of prison rules, wrote to the commandant of the fortress: “Prisoners should never be denied reading and writing. Because they are so strictly controlled, the abuse they might have done in these pursuits is not alarming. You should also not refuse those of them who would like to do any other kind of work. It is only necessary to make sure that they do not fall into their hands such tools that can serve them to escape. If any of them wishes to write to their relatives and friends,then it must be allowed, and the letters must be read. Likewise, they should be allowed to receive answers and to deliver them upon prior reading. In all this I rely on your prudence and humanity."
Such a rather humane institution - the prototype of modern prisons in civilized countries - for some reason aroused the fiercest hatred of the French. Two other prisons, Bicetre and Charenton, where political prisoners and criminals from common people were dying of hunger and swarming in the mud, no one touched a finger.
Taking and destroying a prison for aristocrats with the greatest enthusiasm, the French soon began to throw these very aristocrats into not one, but many prisons, slaughter and guillotine. Purely revolutionary logic!
The prison that was gone
Was the Bastille necessary to destroy? From 1783 to 1789, the Bastille stood almost empty, and if criminals were not sometimes placed in it, the place of which was in ordinary prisons, then the fortress would have been uninhabited. Already in 1784, in the absence of state criminals, the Vincennes prison had to be closed, which served as a kind of branch of the Bastille. Of course, the Bastille was very expensive for the Treasury. Its commandant alone received an annual salary of 60 thousand livres, and if we add to this the expenses for the maintenance of the garrison, the jailers, the doctor, the pharmacist, the priests, plus the money given out to feed the prisoners and their clothes (in 1784 alone it took 67 thousand livres), the amount was enormous.
Proceeding precisely from these considerations - "for the sake of economy" - the Minister of Finance Necker proposed to abolish the Bastille. And he was not the only one talking about this. In 1784, the city architect Courbet of Paris presented an official plan, proposing to open the place of the fortress "Place Louis XVI". There is evidence that other artists have developed projects for various structures and monuments on the site of the Bastille. One of them is especially curious, proposing to tear down the seven towers of the fortress and erect a monument to Louis XVI in their place. On a pedestal from a pile of chains of the state prison, the figure of the king was supposed to rise, who, with a gesture of the liberator, stretches out his hand towards the eighth, preserved tower. (Perhaps now we should regret that this plan remained unfulfilled.) And on June 8, 1789, after the convening of the States General,the Royal Academy of Architecture received a similar project by Davie de Chavigne. It was with this project that the States-General wanted to honor Louis XVI, the "restorer of people's freedom" The monument was never installed, but the prints have survived: the king stretches out his hand to the high towers of the prison, destroyed by the workers.
The Bastille archives contain two reports presented in 1788 by Puget, the second person in the fortress after the commandant. He offered to demolish the state prison, and sell the land in favor of the treasury.
All these projects would hardly have existed and been discussed if they did not reflect the mood of the supreme power: the destruction of the Bastille was a foregone conclusion, and if the people had not done it, the government itself would have done it.
By July 14, 1789, all the towers and bastions of the Bastille are still intact, but it no longer seems to exist - it has turned into a ghost, into a legend. As you know, those who took the fortress after a long search found only seven prisoners in this "stronghold of despotism". Four of them turned out to be financial fraudsters, the fifth was a libertine imprisoned in the Bastille at the request of his father, the sixth was in the case of an attempt on Louis XV, the seventh annoyed one of the king's favorites. The day before the assault, another prisoner was transferred from the Bastille to Charenton - the notorious Marquis de Sade, who was imprisoned for his numerous crimes. Otherwise, on July 14, he would have been released by the people as a "victim of royal tyranny."
Assault for an encore
The taking of the Bastille is the result of purely French frivolity. The top of frivolity showed, first of all, power. Although after the convening of the States General, Paris became more and more revolutionary every day, Louis XVI (not a bad man in general, who loved hunting and carpentry more than anything else) stubbornly refused to take countermeasures. We must give him his due - he loved his people. On all proposals to send troops to Paris and to suppress the rebellion by force, the king exclaimed in horror: "But this means shedding blood!" At Versailles, they tried not to notice what was going on.
On July 13, the city was at the mercy of armed gangs. An eyewitness recalls that on the night of July 14 "a whole horde of ragamuffins, armed with guns, pitchforks and stakes, were forced to open the doors of their houses, to give them drink, food, money and weapons." All city outposts were captured by them and burned. In broad daylight, drunken "creatures pulled out the earrings from the ears of citizens and took off their shoes", brazenly making fun of their victims. One gang of these scoundrels broke into the Lazarist missionary house, destroying everything in its path, and plundered the wine cellar. After their departure, thirty corpses remained in the orphanage, among which was a pregnant woman.
“During these two days,” writes the deputy of the States-General of Bailly, “almost all of Paris was plundered; he was saved from robbers only thanks to the National Guard. On the afternoon of July 14, the robber gangs were disarmed, several bandits were hanged. Only from that moment did the uprising take on a purely political character.
The Parisians behaved lightly. True, about eight hundred people responded to Camille Desmoulins' call to go to the Bastille. (Here are the lines from this drum-revolutionary demagoguery: "Once an animal has fallen into a trap, it should be killed … Never before has such rich prey been given to winners. Forty thousand palaces, hotels, castles, two-fifths of the property of all of France will be a reward for bravery … cleared.”) The rest of Paris gathered in the Saint-Antoine suburb to admire the spectacle. The square in front of the Bastille was packed with goggling people, the aristocracy took better places - on ramparts and hills, noble ladies watched what was happening, sitting in chairs specially taken with them. The applause for the "artists with guns" did not stop.
The price of this gorgeous spectacle was famine, terror, general brutality, twenty-five years of war, the death of six million French.
Who took the Bastille?
Everyone knows the most popular anecdote about a teacher who complained to the school principal about her students who could not answer a simple question: "Who took the Bastille?" Each of them sincerely assured the teacher that he personally did not take. The director, having thought, began to reassure the teacher that perhaps they were not lying, and that Bastille could have been taken by someone from another class or even from a neighboring school.
The joke is funny, with a flat hint of incompetence in matters of history, not only of the students, but also of the school principal himself.
But it is true that a fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it, a lesson for good fellows.
138 years after such a significant event, the French government commission asked the same question: "Who took the Bastille?"
Taking of the Bastille. Etching by J. F. Janine. End of the 18th century
But how is that? After all, history textbooks tell to this day about how 15 Bastille cannons fired mercilessly into the crowd of Parisians at the walls of the unfortunate prisoners languishing in her gloomy casemates”and, finally, about the triumphal procession of the freed prisoners through the streets of Paris! The conclusions of the commission are more than strange, since 863 Parisians were officially awarded the title "Participant in the storming of the Bastille" and honorary pensions until old age, paid from the French budget.
Disabled Winners
Taking the Bastille militarily is more than modest. The success of the assault should be entirely attributed to the numerical superiority of the rebels and the fright of the besieged. On July 14, the commandant of the Bastille de Launay had at his disposal only 32 Swiss Salis-Samad regiment, 82 invalids (this was the name of then retired military service veterans, regardless of whether they had arms and legs) and 15 guns. But even with these insignificant forces, de Launay managed to hold out for almost twelve hours.
The impetus for the uprising of the Parisians was the dismissal by the king of the finance minister Necker, who had grown rich on speculation, who tried to impose a constitution on the French on the English model. Through clever manipulation of the opinions of gullible deputies from different estates representing the National Assembly, he managed to put Louis XVI in such conditions that he was forced to abandon the absolute monarchy and open the way for a constitutional monarchy. In the eyes of the Parisians, Necker looked like the guarantor of the constitution, and the king was suspected of preparing a coup d'état.
Having “brewed the porridge,” Necker secretly left Paris on July 11 and settled comfortably with his family on his Swiss estate. And the Parisians, infuriated by his fiery speeches, walked the streets of the city with a bust of their idol, heading for the walls of the Bastille.
The signal for the start of the assault in the early morning was given by two young men, Davan and Dassin. They went down the roof of the perfumery shop to the ramparts adjacent to the guardhouse and jumped into the outer (commandant) courtyard of the Bastille; Aubert Bonmer and Louis Tournai, former soldiers, followed. The four of them cut the chains of the drawbridge with axes, which collapsed down with such force that it jumped almost two meters off the ground - the first victims appeared: one of the townspeople crowding at the gate was crushed, the other was crippled. With shouts of triumph, the people rushed across the commandant's courtyard to the second drawbridge leading directly to the fortress. But here they were met by a musket salvo. The crowd scattered across the courtyard in confusion, leaving the bodies of the dead and wounded on the ground. Most of the storming men did not know how the first gate was opened, and decidedthat the commandant himself did it to lure them into a trap. Meanwhile, the commandant de Launay, despite the constant shelling of the fortress, still kept the soldiers from returning fire.
The fortress did not even think about starting a battle, but in the current situation, the commandant of the Bastille, Marquis Delaunay, simply had to give the order to take up arms.
On the morning of July 14, the Electoral Committee, created here, sent a "deputation" to the Bastille. The members of the committee demanded that the commandant withdraw the guns from the positions and transfer the weapons to the people.
The commandant at this time was having breakfast with three city deputies who came to him. Having finished breakfast, he accompanied the guests and listened to the demands of the commissioners of the committee. He refused to remove the guns. Lacking an order, he agreed, in order to avoid a conflict, to roll them away from the loopholes, and from the officers and soldiers he took an oath that they would not start shooting first.
However, the crowd gathered at the walls of the Bastille was not happy with such an alignment of events, their impatience grew and the accumulated energy demanded an exit. When the commandant of the Bastille lowered the bridges in order to admit another delegation of citizens, the people rushed after them and began to shoot at the soldiers. And then the garrison of the fortress, in order to drive back the attackers, responded with oncoming fire, for which they were accused of breaking this oath.
The members of the Electoral Committee, accompanied by drummers, went to the Bastille with a new deputation, carrying a white flag. The defenders of the Bastille were happy to begin negotiations, hoping for a peaceful outcome of the situation. But the representatives of the committee did not like this outcome. After huddling for several minutes at the fortress buildings, some of them returned and announced that negotiations could not take place, since they were being fired at. Another part rushed to the second bridge, and then the commandant really had to give the order to fire.
These events took place near residential and domestic buildings outside of the fortress itself. Contrary to common sense, the besiegers set fire to these premises, including the commandant's house, although the fire was not part of their plans and, first of all, interfered with them.
And then, from the side of the garrison of the fortress, there was a ONE-SINGLE shot from a cannon with heavy grapeshot, which is still talked about as a continuous firing from 15 cannons at peaceful Parisians.
The situation was getting out of control of the members of the Election Committee themselves, since cannon fire immediately opened at the fortress itself. The initiative was unexpectedly intercepted by the Swiss Yulen, who was at that time on commercial affairs in Paris. With his incendiary speech in the city square, he succeeded in convincing the king's guards "to intercede for the defenseless people" and those with five guns joined the rebels.
The soldiers and officers of the fortress garrison did not want a battle and offered the commandant to surrender. With their consent, they announced that they would lay down their arms if they were provided with a reliable convoy to leave the fortress.
Yulen gave such guarantees, but it was not easy to keep them. Following Yulen, who entered the fortress, an angry crowd rushed there, long bored at the gates of the fortress. The attackers knocked down Yulen, and, seizing the commandant of the Marquis Delaunay, cut off his head with a butcher's knife. Several officers of the garrison were also killed.
Over the next few hours, the Bastille fell into ruins. The most paradoxical thing is that in this euphoria they did not immediately remember the prisoners, the "victims of despotism." When the prisoners were taken out to the walls of the Town Hall, there were only seven of them … but what kind! One is an inveterate criminal, two are mentally ill, and four were held temporarily for forging bills.
It was these prisoners who were led with all honors and triumph through the streets of Paris, carrying in front a pike crowned with the head of the Marquis Delaunay, who had completely fulfilled his duty to the king and the Fatherland. The Marquis de Sade could also become a "decoration" for the company of these renegades.
This ended the "storming" of the Bastille, after which the banker Necker solemnly returned to Paris as a national hero.
For a few weeks before the demolition of the Bastille, it was a place for walking the townspeople. Holding their breath, they groped the cannons that “continuously fired” at the people, gazed with bated breath at the “instrument of torture” - a mechanism that was actually a printing machine, lost their speech, finding several skeletons in the ground on the territory of the fortress, which were the remains Protestant prisoners who died for various reasons in the Bastille. They were buried there because Protestants were not allowed to be buried in the city's Catholic cemeteries.
Of all that remained of the Bastille, the archives were the most valuable. Thanks to them, 138 years after the “capture” of the Bastille, the very same commission created by the city authorities, having studied eyewitness accounts, wrote in its report that “THE BASTILE WAS NOT STORMED, THE GARRISON ITSELF OPENED THE GATE. THESE FACTS ARE TRUE AND CANNOT BE SUBJECTED TO DOUBT."
This begs the question: why was such a gimmick around the Bastille needed and why it was necessary to capture an empty, in fact, fortress?
Precisely because she was the personification of power in the country. At the same time, the rebels were the least concerned about the troubles of the prisoners. Soon, these events were followed by natural changes in the country's politics, starting with the loss of power by King Louis XVI.
To the ground and then? Then we will sell the fragments
In Versailles, they learned about the capture of the Bastille only at midnight (the king on that day noted in his diary: "Nothing"). As you know, only one courtier - the Duke de Liancourt - understood the meaning of what had happened. "But this is a riot!" - Louis XVI exclaimed in surprise upon hearing the news. “No, Your Majesty, this is not a riot, this is a revolution,” Liancourt corrected him.
And when the king was informed about de Launay's death, he responded indifferently: “Well then! He fully deserved his fate! (I wonder if he thought about himself that way, ascending the scaffold three years later?) Louis on the same day put on a three-color cockade, seeing which Marie Antoinette frowned disdainfully: “I did not think that I was marrying a tradesman.”
This is how the court reacted to the event announcing the future death of the monarchy.
But in both hemispheres, the capture of the Bastille made a huge impression. Everywhere, especially in Europe, people congratulated each other on the fall of the famous state prison and on the triumph of freedom. In St. Petersburg, the heroes of the day were the Golitsyn brothers, who took part in the storming of the Bastille with fusées in their hands. General Lafayette sent his American friend, Washington, the keys to the gates of the Bastille - they are still kept in the country house of the President of the United States. Donations were sent from San Domingo, England, Spain, Germany to the families of those killed in the assault. The University of Cambridge has established the Bastille Conquest Poem Award. The architect Palois, one of the participants in the assault, made copies of the Bastille from the stones of the fortress and sent them to scientific institutions in many European countries. The stones from the walls of the Bastille were in great demand: set in gold,they appeared in the ears and on the fingers of European ladies.
On the day of the taking of the Bastille, July 14, the city hall of Paris, accepting Danton's proposal, created a commission to destroy the fortress. The work was headed by Palois. When the walls of the Bastille were demolished more than half, festivities were organized on its ruins and a sign was posted: "They dance here." The fortress was finally destroyed on May 21, 1791. The stones of its walls and towers were sold at auction for 943,769 francs.
The destruction of the Bastille did not at all mean that the new government no longer needed prisons. On the contrary, very soon the times came when many Frenchmen began to remember the Bastille, as, perhaps, about the whole old regime, with nostalgia. The revolutionary tyranny left far behind the abuses of royal power, and each city acquired its own Jacobin Bastille, which, unlike the Royal Bastille, was not empty.