The uprising in Paris and the storming of the Bastille. Bastille - prison and fortress

Let's start with the question: why did the people destroy the prison for the aristocrats and why did this event cause great rejoicing among the so-called ordinary people?

Indeed, the Bastille existed for a long time as a privileged prison, designed for 42 people. But until the reign of Louis XIV, it rarely housed more than one or two prisoners at a time - mostly rebel princes of the blood, marshals of France, dukes or, at worst, counts. They were given spacious upper rooms (though with iron bars on the windows), which they could furnish to their liking. Their lackeys 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 went there. The conditions of detention of prisoners corresponded to the aristocratic status of the prison. Prisoners received allowances according to their rank and class. Thus, 50 livres a day were allocated for the maintenance of the prince (remember that on this amount the four famous musketeers of Dumas lived for almost a month without knowing sorrow), the marshal - 36, the lieutenant general - 16, the parliamentary adviser - 15, the judge and the priest - 10 , lawyer and prosecutor - 5, bourgeois - 4, footman 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, a first-class lunch consisted of soup, boiled beef, roast, and dessert on fast days, and soup, fish, and dessert on fast days. There was wine every day for lunch. Lunches of the second category consisted of the same number of dishes, but were prepared from lower quality ingredients. On holidays - St. Martin, St. Louis and Epiphany - an extra dish was provided: half a chicken or a roasted pigeon. In addition, prisoners had the right to walk in the Arsenal garden and on the towers.

The prisoners imprisoned in the fortress had servants and even visited each other. Such a population of the Bastille literally devastated France's meager budget at that time.

Over the years, the Bastille began to accept less noble “guests”, and their salaries accordingly decreased to 2.5 livres per day. It happened that a prisoner asked to extend his sentence in order to save some money for himself, and sometimes the prison authorities met him halfway.

In his youth, Voltaire spent almost a year in the Bastille, and during his imprisonment he fruitfully worked on the epic poem “Henriad” and the tragedy “Oedipus.”

Other famous prisoners of the fortress included Cardinal Rohana, the Bishop of Strasbourg (the most “expensive” of all the inmates of the prison: he was paid 120 livres daily), a spirit exorcist, an alchemist and an adventurer in one person, “Count” Cagliostro, who in fact was not at all count, and not Cagliostro, and not at the age of 300 years, but from a poor and rootless Palermo family, Giuseppe, about 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 “storming” of the fortress, was... the Marquis de Sade, from whose surname the ominous word “sadism” came. It was only by chance that he did not take part 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 a mental home because the behavior of the Marquis de Sade convinced him of his complete mental inferiority.

Due to the high costs of maintaining prisoners, the French government began to think about closing the prison altogether. However, as they say, there was one “BUT”... But the Bastille was for the French the personification of power and order in the country. Whoever owned it owned the power.

With the accession of Louis XVI, the Bastille lost its character as a state prison and turned into an ordinary one, with the only difference being that criminals were kept there in comparatively 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 greatly to the easing of prison rules, wrote to the commandant of the fortress: “Prisoners should never be denied reading and writing. In view of the fact that they are so strictly kept, the abuse which they might make in these occupations is not to be feared. One should also not refuse those of them who would like to engage in some other kind of work. You just need to make sure that no tools fall into their hands that could serve them to escape. If any of them wants to write to their family and friends, then this should be allowed, and the letters should be read. Likewise, they should be allowed to receive answers and have them delivered to them through preliminary reading. In all this I rely on your prudence and humanity.”
Such a fairly humane institution - a prototype of modern prisons in civilized countries - for some reason aroused the fiercest hatred of the French. The other two prisons, Bicêtre and Charenton, where political prisoners and commoner criminals died of hunger and swarmed in the mud, no one touched a finger.

With the greatest enthusiasm, having taken and destroyed the prison for aristocrats, the French soon began to throw these same aristocrats into not one, but many prisons, cut them up and guillotine them. Purely revolutionary logic!

The prison that no longer existed

Was it necessary to destroy the Bastille? From 1783 to 1789, the Bastille stood almost empty, and if it were not for the occasional placement of criminals, whose place was in ordinary prisons, the fortress would have been uninhabited. Already in 1784, due to the lack of state criminals, the Vincennes prison, which served as a kind of branch of the Bastille, had to be closed. Of course, the Bastille was very expensive for the treasury. Its commandant alone received a salary of 60 thousand livres annually, and if we add to this the costs of maintaining the garrison, jailers, doctor, pharmacist, priests, plus the money given for food for prisoners and their clothing (in 1784 alone, 67 thousand livres were spent on this), then the amount turned out to be enormous.

Based on these considerations - “for the sake of economy” - Finance Minister Necker proposed abolishing the Bastille. And he was not the only one talking about this. In 1784, the city architect of Paris, Courbet, presented an official plan, proposing to open a “Place Louis XVI” on the site of the fortress. There is information that other artists also developed designs for various structures and monuments on the site of the Bastille. Particularly interesting is one of them, who proposed tearing down the seven towers of the fortress and erecting 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 liberation, extends his hand towards the eighth, preserved tower. (Perhaps now it is worth regretting that this plan remained unfulfilled.) And on June 8, 1789, after the convening of the Estates General, a similar project by Davi de Chavigne was submitted to the Royal Academy of Architecture. It was with this project that the Estates General wanted to honor Louis XVI, “the restorer of popular freedom.” The monument was never erected, but prints have been preserved: the king extends his hand to the high towers of the prison, which are being destroyed by workers.

The archives of the Bastille contain two reports submitted in 1788 by Puget, the second person in the fortress after the commandant. He proposed demolishing the state prison and selling the land to the treasury.

All these projects would hardly have existed and been discussed if they had not reflected 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 were still intact, but it seemed to no longer exist - it had turned into a ghost, 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 swindlers, the fifth was a libertine imprisoned in the Bastille at the request of his father, the sixth was involved in the case of the assassination attempt on Louis XV, the seventh had 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.”

Encore Assault

The storming of the Bastille was the result of purely French frivolity. It was, first of all, the authorities who showed the height of frivolity. Although, after the convening of the Estates General, Paris became more and more revolutionized every day, Louis XVI (not a bad man in general, who adored hunting and carpentry more than anything else in the world) stubbornly refused to take countermeasures. We must give him credit - he loved his people. To all proposals to send troops into Paris and 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 found itself 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, forced them to open the doors of houses, give them food, drink, money and weapons.” All city outposts were captured by them and burned. In broad daylight, drunken “creatures pulled out earrings from the ears of civilians 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 their path, and plundered the wine cellar. After they left, thirty corpses remained in the shelter, among which was a pregnant woman.

“During these two days,” writes the deputy of the Estates General of Bailly, “Paris was almost completely plundered; he was saved from robbers only thanks to the National Guard.” On the afternoon of July 14, the bandits were disarmed and several bandits were hanged. Only from this moment did the uprising take on a purely political character.

The Parisians behaved frivolously. 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 booty been given to the victors. Forty thousand palaces, hotels, castles, two-fifths of the property of all France will be a reward for bravery... The nation will cleared.") The rest of Paris gathered in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine to admire the spectacle. The square in front of the Bastille was crowded with gawking people, the aristocracy took better places - on the 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 magnificent spectacle was famine, terror, general brutality, twenty-five years of war, and the death of six million French people.

Who took the Bastille?

Everyone knows the most popular joke about a teacher who complained to the school principal about 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 it. The director, after thinking, began to reassure the teacher that perhaps they were not lying, and Bastille could have been taken by someone from another class or even from a neighboring school.

The anecdote is funny, with a subtle hint of incompetence in matters of history not only of the students, but also of the school director himself.

But it is rightly said that the 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?” and came to the impartial but honest conclusion that there was no storming of the Bastille, since the commandant of the fortress surrendered it without a fight, opening the gates.

Taking of the Bastille. Etching by J.F. Janine. End of the 18th century

But how can this be? After all, history textbooks tell to this day about how 15 cannons of the Bastille mercilessly fired into the crowd of Parisians at the walls of the fortress, about hundreds of dead rebels, about the famous gap in the wall, formed after many hours of fierce firefight, through which the Parisians broke into the prison to “liberate the unfortunate prisoners languishing in its gloomy dungeons” and, finally, about the triumphant procession of freed prisoners through the streets of Paris! The commission’s conclusions 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

The taking of the Bastille is, militarily, a more than modest affair. The success of the assault should be entirely attributed to the numerical superiority of the rebels and the fear of the besieged. On July 14, the commandant of the Bastille de Launay had at his disposal only 32 Swiss soldiers of the Salis-Samad regiment, 82 disabled people (as retired military veterans were then called, 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 Minister of Finance Necker, who had become rich through speculation and was trying to impose a constitution on the French on the English model. Through deft manipulation of the opinions of gullible deputies from different classes 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 to 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'etat.

“Having made a mess,” Necker secretly left Paris on July 11 and lived comfortably with his family on his Swiss estate. And the Parisians, incited by his fiery speeches, walked through the streets of the city with a bust of their idol, heading to the walls of the Bastille.

The signal to begin the assault early in the morning was given by two young men, Davan and Dassin. They went down the roof of the perfume shop onto the fortress wall adjacent to the guardhouse, and jumped into the outer (commandant) courtyard of the Bastille; Aubert Bonmaire and Louis Tournai, former soldiers, followed them. The four of them used axes to cut the chains of the drawbridge, which fell down with such force that it jumped almost two meters from the ground - the first victims appeared: one of the townspeople crowding at the gate was crushed, another was crippled. With shouts of triumph, the people rushed through the commandant's yard to the second drawbridge, leading directly to the fortress. But here they were met by a musket volley. The crowd scattered across the courtyard in confusion, leaving the bodies of the dead and wounded on the ground. Most of the attackers did not know how the first gate was opened, and decided that the commandant himself had done it in order to lure them into a trap. Meanwhile, Commandant de Launay, despite the constant shelling of the fortress, still kept the soldiers from returning fire.

In the fortress they did not even think of starting a battle, but given the current situation, the commandant of the Bastille, the 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. Committee members demanded that the commandant withdraw the guns from their positions and hand over the weapons to the people.

At that time the commandant was having breakfast with three city deputies who had come to see him. Having finished breakfast, he escorted the guests and listened to the demands of the committee representatives. He refused to remove the guns. Having no order to do so, he agreed, in order to avoid conflict, to roll them away from the loopholes, and took an oath from the officers and soldiers that they would not start shooting first.

However, the crowd gathered at the walls of the Bastille was not satisfied with this turn of events; their impatience grew and the accumulated energy demanded an outlet. When the commandant of the Bastille lowered the bridges in order to let in the next delegation of citizens, the people rushed behind them and began to shoot at the soldiers. And then the garrison of the fortress, in order to push back the attackers, responded with counter fire, for which they were accused of violating this oath.

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 to the situation. But the committee representatives were not happy with this outcome. After milling about for a few minutes near the fortifications, some of them returned and announced that negotiations could not take place because they were being shot at. The other part rushed to the second bridge, and then the commandant was actually forced to give the order to shoot.

These events took place near residential and domestic buildings outside 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 primarily disturbed them.

And then from the direction of the fortress garrison there was a sound ONE shot from a cannon with heavy buckshot, which is still talked about as continuous firing from 15 cannons at civilian Parisians.

The situation was getting out of the control of the members of the Election Committee themselves, since cannon fire immediately opened on the fortress itself. The initiative was unexpectedly seized by the Swiss Julen, who was in Paris at that time on commercial affairs. With his incendiary speech in the city square, he managed to convince the king’s guards to “stand up for the defenseless people,” and they with five guns joined the rebels.

The soldiers and officers of the fortress garrison did not want a battle and asked the commandant to capitulate. Having received consent, they announced that they would lay down their arms if they were provided with a reliable escort to leave the fortress.

Yulen gave such guarantees, but keeping them turned out to be difficult. Following Yulen, who entered the fortress, an angry crowd rushed there, having long been bored at the gates of the fortress. The attackers knocked Yulen down and, seizing the commandant Marquis Delaunay, cut off his head with a butcher knife. Several garrison officers were also killed.

Over the next few hours, the Bastille turned into ruins. The most paradoxical thing is that in this euphoria they did not immediately remember the prisoners, “victims of despotism.” When the prisoners were brought to the walls of the Town Hall, there were only... seven people, but what kind! One is an inveterate criminal, two are mentally ill, four were held temporarily for forgery of bills.

It was these prisoners who were led with all honors and triumph through the streets of Paris, carrying in front of them a pike crowned with the head of the Marquis Delaunay, who had fulfilled his duty to the king and the Fatherland to the end. The Marquis de Sade could also be a “decoration” of the company of these renegades.

This ended the “storm” of the Bastille, after which the banker Necker solemnly returned to Paris as a national hero.

For several weeks before the demolition of the Bastille, it was a place for citizens to walk. Holding their breath, they felt the cannons that were “continuously firing” at the people, with bated breath they looked at the “instrument of torture” - a mechanism that was actually a printing machine, they were speechless when they discovered several skeletons in the ground on the territory of the fortress, which were the remains of Protestant prisoners who died from various causes in the Bastille. They were buried there because the burial of Protestants was not allowed 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 “taking” of the Bastille, the same commission created by the city authorities, having studied eyewitness accounts, wrote in its report that “THE BASTILLE WAS NOT TAKEN BY STORM, ITS GATES OPENED BY THE GARRISON ITSELF. THESE FACTS ARE TRUE AND CANNOT BE DOUBTED."

This begs the question: why was such a rigmarole around the Bastille necessary and why was it necessary to capture an essentially empty fortress?

Precisely because she was the personification of power in the country. At the same time, the rebels were least concerned about the troubles of the prisoners. These events were soon 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'll sell the pieces

In Versailles they learned about the capture of the Bastille only at midnight (the king noted in his diary that day: “Nothing”). As is known, only one courtier - the Duke de Liancourt - understood the meaning of what happened. “But this is a riot!” - Louis XVI exclaimed in surprise when he heard the news. “No, Your Majesty, this is not a rebellion, this is a revolution,” Liancourt corrected him.

And when the king was informed of de Launay’s death, he responded indifferently: “Well, well! He fully deserved his fate!” (I wonder if he thought that way about himself when he ascended the scaffold three years later?) On the same day, Louis put on a tricolor cockade, seeing which Marie Antoinette winced with disgust: “I didn’t think that I was marrying a tradesman.”

This is how the court reacted to an event that heralded the future death of the monarchy.

But in both hemispheres the storming 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 fuses 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 US President. Donations were sent from San Domingo, England, Spain, and Germany in favor of the families of those killed during the assault. The University of Cambridge has established a prize for the best poem on the Storming of the Bastille. The architect Palua, 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. 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 storming of the Bastille, July 14, the mayor's office of Paris, accepting Danton's proposal, created a commission to destroy the fortress. The work was led by Palua. When the walls of the Bastille were demolished by more than half, people held festivities on its ruins and hung a sign: “They dance here.” The fortress was finally destroyed on May 21, 1791. The stones of its walls and towers were auctioned for 943,769 francs.

The destruction of the Bastille did not mean that the new government no longer needed prisons. On the contrary, very soon there came a time when many French began to remember the Bastille, as, perhaps, the entire old regime with nostalgia. Revolutionary tyranny left the abuses of royal power far behind, and each city acquired its own Jacobin Bastille, which, unlike the Royal Bastille, was not empty.

sources

http://www.nkj.ru/archive/articles/11029/

http://berloga.net/view.php?id=121968

Of the interesting and controversial historical events, I would remind you of these moments: or The original article is on the website InfoGlaz.rf Link to the article from which this copy was made -

Subsequence

On July 12, 1789, Camille Desmoulins made his speech at the Palais Royal; on July 13, the Arsenal, Les Invalides and the city hall were looted, and on the 14th, a large armed crowd approached the Bastille. Gülen and Eli, both officers of the royal troops, were chosen as commanders of the offensive. The garrison of the fortress consisted of 82 disabled people and 32 Swiss with thirteen cannons, but its main defense was drawbridges and thick walls. There were only seven prisoners in the fortress - four counterfeiters, two mentally ill and one murderer. After the negative response of the commandant of the Bastille, the Marquis de Launay, to the offer of voluntary surrender made to him, the people, at about one o'clock in the afternoon, moved forward. Easily penetrating the first outer courtyard and cutting the chains of the drawbridge with axes, he rushed into the second courtyard, where the apartments of the commandant and the service were located. Fierce firing began from both sides; to protect themselves from shots from above, the people dragged three huge carts of straw and set them on fire; thick smoke hid them.

Launay, knowing full well that there was nothing to count on for help from Versailles, and that he would not be able to withstand this siege for long, decided to blow up the Bastille. But at the very time when he, with a lit fuse in his hands, wanted to go down into the powder magazine, two non-commissioned officers Beccard and Ferran rushed at him, and, taking away the fuse, forced him to convene a military council. Almost unanimously it was decided to surrender. A white flag was raised, and a few minutes later Gülen and Elie, followed by a huge crowd, entered the courtyard of the Bastille over the lowered drawbridge.

Several officers and soldiers were hanged; As for Launay, Gülen and Eli wanted to save him, but on the way to the city hall, the crowd took him away from them and, beheading him, stuck the unfortunate man’s head on a pike, with which they then walked around the entire city.

Contrary to popular belief, the Marquis de Sade was not kept in the Bastille during the assault; on July 2, he was transferred to a mental asylum near Paris. Immediately after his release, he made a speech. The extremely interesting archive of the Bastille was looted, and only part of it has survived to this day.

After July 14, the Parisian municipality decided to demolish the Bastille, and a sign was placed on the vacant lot with the inscription “Désormais ici dansent,” which means “From now on, people dance here.” Within two months, the fortress was destroyed by the common efforts of the townspeople. In 1790, its stones were used to build the Louis XVI Bridge (later the Bridge of the Revolution, and now the Bridge of Concorde). Currently, in its place and to the east is the Place de la Bastille, in the center of which stands the July Column, erected in 1840.

Storm

One of the central episodes of the Great French Revolution, the storming of the Bastille prison fortress on July 14, 1789.

The fortress was built in 1382. It was supposed to serve as a fortification on the approaches to the capital. Soon it began to serve as a prison, mainly for political prisoners. For 400 years, there were many famous personalities among the prisoners of the Bastille. For many generations of French people, the fortress was a symbol of the omnipotence of kings. By the 1780s, the prison had practically ceased to be used.

The French Revolution

In France, starting in the spring-summer of 1789, a major transformation of the social and political systems of the state led to the destruction of the old order and monarchy in the country, and the proclamation of a de jure republic (September 1792) of free and equal citizens under the motto “Liberty, equality, Brotherhood".

The beginning of the revolutionary actions was the capture of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and historians consider the end to be November 9, 1799 (the coup of the 18th Brumaire).

Bastille

Originally a fortress, built in 1370-1381, and a place of detention for state criminals in Paris. At the beginning of the French Revolution on July 14, 1789, the fortress was taken by the revolutionary-minded population and a year later destroyed, and in its place Pierre-François Palloy (demolition contractor) installed a sign with the inscription “They dance here and everything will be fine.” Currently, on the site of the demolished fortress there is the Place de la Bastille - the intersection of a dozen streets and boulevards with an underground node of the Paris metro of three lines and the new Paris Opera.

On July 14, 1789, in Paris, an armed crowd approached the walls of the Bastille. After four hours of firefight, having no prospects of withstanding the siege, the garrison of the fortress surrendered. The Great French Revolution began.

For many generations of French, the Bastille fortress, where the garrison of the city guard, royal officials and, of course, the prison were located, was a symbol of the omnipotence of kings. Although initially its construction was purely military in nature - it began in the middle of the 14th century, when the Hundred Years' War was going on in France. After the devastating defeats at Cressy and Poitiers, the issue of defense of the capital was very acute and a boom in the construction of bastions and watchtowers began in Paris. Actually, the name Bastille came from this very word (bastide or bastille).

However, the fortress was immediately intended to be used as a place of detention for state criminals, which was quite common in the Middle Ages. Building separate structures for this was costly and irrational. The Bastille acquired its famous outlines under Charles V, during whose time construction was especially intensive. In fact, by 1382 the structure looked almost the same as when it fell in 1789.

The Bastille was a long, massive quadrangular building, one side facing the city and the other to the suburbs, with 8 towers, a vast courtyard, and surrounded by a wide and deep moat, over which a suspension bridge was thrown. All this together was still surrounded by a wall, which had only one gate on the side of the Saint-Antoine suburb. Each tower had three types of premises: at the very bottom - a dark and gloomy cellar, where restless prisoners or those caught trying to escape were kept; The length of stay here depended on the commandant of the fortress. The next floor consisted of one room with a triple door and a window with three bars. In addition to the bed, the room also had a table and two chairs. At the very top of the tower there was another roofed room (calotte), which also served as a place of punishment for prisoners. The commandant's house and the soldiers' barracks were located in the second, outer courtyard.

The reason for the storming of the Bastille was rumors about the decision of King Louis XVI to disperse the Constituent Assembly formed on July 9, 1789 and about the removal of the reformer Jacques Necker from the post of state controller of finance.

On July 12, 1789, Camille Desmoulins made his speech at the Palais Royal, after which an uprising broke out. On July 13, the Arsenal, Les Invalides and the city hall were looted, and on the 14th, a large armed crowd approached the Bastille. Gülen and Eli, both officers of the royal troops, were chosen to command the assault. The assault had not so much a symbolic as a practical meaning - the rebels were mainly interested in the Bastille arsenal, which could be used to arm volunteers.

True, at first they tried to resolve the matter peacefully - a delegation of townspeople invited the commandant of the Bastille, the Marquis de Launay, to voluntarily surrender the fortress and open the arsenals, to which he refused. After this, from about one o'clock in the afternoon, a shootout began between the defenders of the fortress and the rebels. Launay, knowing full well that there was nothing to count on for help from Versailles, and that he would not be able to withstand this siege for long, decided to blow up the Bastille.

But at the very time when he, with a lit fuse in his hands, wanted to go down into the powder magazine, two non-commissioned officers Beccard and Ferran rushed at him, and, taking away the fuse, forced him to convene a military council. Almost unanimously it was decided to surrender. A white flag was raised, and a few minutes later Gülen and Elie, followed by a huge crowd, entered the courtyard of the Bastille over a lowered drawbridge.

The matter was not without atrocities, and several officers and soldiers, led by the commandant, were immediately hanged. Seven Bastille prisoners were released, among them the Count de Lorges, who had been imprisoned here for more than forty years. However, the reality of the existence of this prisoner is questioned by many historians. Skeptics believe that this character and his entire story are the figment of the imagination of the revolutionary-minded journalist Jean-Louis Kapp. But it is reliably known that the extremely interesting archive of the Bastille was looted, and only part of it has survived to our times.

The day after the assault, it was officially decided to destroy and demolish the Bastille. Work began immediately, which continued until May 16, 1791. Miniature images of the Bastille were made from broken fortress stones and sold as souvenirs. Most of the stone blocks were used to build the Concord Bridge.

In 1789, Parisian citizens and rebel soldiers stormed the French Bastille, freeing prisoners and seizing an ammunition depot. This event quickly became a symbol of the French Revolution, which led to the overthrow of the absolute monarchy. Before this, the Bastille had a terrible reputation. There were real legends about the terrible conditions in which the prisoners were kept, about the torture and murders in the fortress-prison. Our review contains 15 facts about the Bastille and its famous prisoners.

1. The French do not call their national holiday “Bastille Day”

Bastille Day is a national holiday in France, which is also celebrated in French-speaking countries around the world. But the French themselves call this day simply and unpretentiously - “National Holiday” or “July 14th”.

2. The Bastille was originally a gate fortress

The Bastille was built as a gateway fortress to protect the eastern side of Paris from English and Burgundian forces during the Hundred Years' War. The first stone was laid in 1370, and the fortifications were completed over the years. During the reign of Henry IV (1589 - 1610), the royal treasury was kept in the Bastille.

3. The British took the Bastille

Following the English victory under Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt during the Hundred Years' War, the English occupied Paris. The French capital was under occupation for 15 years, starting in 1420. British troops were stationed at the Bastille, the Louvre and the Château de Vincennes.

4. The Bastille wasn't always a prison

The Bastille began to be used as a fortress-prison only after the Hundred Years' War. Before this, French monarchs received high-ranking guests there.

5. Cardinal de Richelieu was the first to use the Bastille as a state prison

Cardinal Richelieu (whom Alexandre Dumas recalled in his novel “The Three Musketeers”), after Louis XIII came to power, proposed using the Bastille as a state prison for high-ranking persons. Many of them were imprisoned for political or religious reasons. The Sun King Louis XIV also constantly imprisoned his enemies or undesirables.

6. Voltaire sat in the Bastille

François-Marie Arouet, better known today as the writer Voltaire, was imprisoned in the Bastille for 11 months in 1717 for satirical poems about the regent and his daughter. In prison he wrote his first play and took the pseudonym Voltaire.

7. In fact, Voltaire was imprisoned twice

Voltaire's reputation not only did not suffer from his imprisonment in the Bastille, but on the contrary, it brought him popularity in certain circles. At 31, Voltaire was already rich and popular, but he was sent to the Bastille again in 1726. The reason was a quarrel and a duel with an aristocrat - the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot. In order not to sit in prison “before the trial,” Voltaire chose to leave France for England.

8. The Man in the Iron Mask Was Really a Prisoner in the Bastille

In 1998, Leonardo DiCaprio played the main role in the film “The Man in the Iron Mask,” based on the novel of the same name by Alexandre Dumas. The film was extremely popular, but few people know that the movie character had a real prototype - Estache Doge. True, the mask on his face, which he wore throughout his 34-year imprisonment, was not iron, but made of black velvet.

9. Aristocrats sent unwanted relatives to the Bastille

People could only be sent to the Bastille on the basis of a Lettre de cachet (an order for the extrajudicial arrest of a person in the form of a letter bearing the royal seal), and the prison served to “ensure public discipline.” There were frequent cases when a father could send his disobedient son to prison, a wife could punish her husband for raising his hand against her, and an adult daughter could hand over her “mad mother” to the royal guards.

10. The Marquis de Sade wrote “The 120 Days of Sodom” at the Bastille

The Marquis de Sade spent many years in prison. He spent ten years in the Bastille, during which time he wrote Justine (his first published book) and The 120 Days of Sodom. The manuscript of the last book was written in tiny letters on scraps of paper that were smuggled into the Bastille.

11. Before the revolution, prisoners in the Bastille were treated well

There were legends about torture in the Bastille, its casemates and the infernal machines with which people were dismembered. But it is known for certain that before the revolution, some prisoners enjoyed special benefits. The king decided to pay prisoners a daily allowance of ten livres. This was enough to provide them with decent food and living conditions. Often prisoners asked to be fed for 5 livres, and the second half of the amount was given in their hands after serving their sentence. For example, Voltaire received five to six visitors a day during his second imprisonment in the Bastille. Moreover, he even served a day more than he was supposed to in order to settle some personal matters.

12. The government was thinking about destroying the Bastille long before 1789

The government could not help but pay attention to the growing unpopularity of the Bastille, so there was talk of closing the prison even before 1789, although Louis XVI was against it. The city architect Corbet in 1784 proposed a plan to demolish the 400-year-old fortress and completely rebuild the quarter.

13. On the site of the destroyed Bastille stood a guillotine

In June 1794, revolutionaries placed a guillotine on the Place de la Bastille. At that time, terror was raging in Paris, and Maximilian Robespierre sought to introduce a non-Catholic religion into society, which, however, unlike the controversial cult of the Revolution of Reason, presupposed the preservation of the concept of deity. It was on this very guillotine that Robespierre was executed in July 1794. True, by that time the guillotine had been moved to Revolution Square.

14. George Washington was given the key to the Bastille

The Marquis de Lafayette, who was friendly with George Washington, sent him one of the keys to the Bastille during the American Revolution. Today this key can be seen in the Mount Vernon Presidential Residence Museum.

15. A monument to an elephant was erected on the spot.

After the destruction of the Bastille, Napoleon decided to erect a monument on this site and announced a competition. Of all the presented projects, he chose the most unusual option - a monument-fountain in the shape of an elephant. The height of the bronze elephant was supposed to be 24 meters, and it was going to be cast from cannons captured from the Spaniards. Only a wooden model was built and stood in Paris from 1813 to 1846.

On July 14, all of France annually, for more than 220 years, once again rejoices and celebrates. In the morning, people took to the streets of the city and did not leave until the morning of July 15th. People sing, dance, have fun. The main celebrations take place on the site where the famous Bastille stood until 1789, stories about which still terrify the townspeople. Mr. President himself, in his motorcade, greets and congratulates the people on the national holiday - Bastille Day. On this day, parades of military equipment are traditionally held. It is a great honor for every French person to take part in the parade.

This is how France annually celebrates the last day of the existence of the stronghold of strength and power of monarchical France of the 18th century.

It would seem: what do we care about France?

The anecdote is funny, with a subtle hint of incompetence in matters of history not only of the students, but also of the school director himself.

But it is rightly said that the fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it, a lesson for good fellows. 135 years after such a significant event, a French government commission asked the same question: “Who took the Bastille?” and came to the impartial but honest conclusion that there was no storming of the Bastille, since the commandant of the fortress surrendered it without a fight, opening the gates.

So after all, “was it or wasn’t it?”
“It wasn’t!” say the authors of the collection “Kunstkammer of Anomalies” (“OLIMP”, M., 1999) I. Vinokurov and N. Nepomnyashchiy. But what happened then? After all, the mere mention of the word “Bastille” still makes Parisians tremble!

This is what the authors say about that distant event on the pages of their book.
In fact, the Bastille was originally not even a prison, but part of the fortifications erected in the 14th century. for protection from the British. It became a prison only in the 17th century, under Cardinal Richelieu, when it began to be used to hold noble persons of the kingdom: dukes, princes, marshals, members of the royal family.

The prisoners imprisoned in the fortress had servants and even visited each other. Such a population of the Bastille literally devastated France's meager budget at that time. The prince of the blood was paid 50 livres a day from the state's pocket, the marshal - 36, and the smaller citizen - only 5 livres. Moreover, this money was not given for their maintenance, but for their personal use, and each prisoner used it at his own discretion.

In his youth, Voltaire spent almost a year in the Bastille, and during his imprisonment he fruitfully worked on the epic poem “Henriad” and the tragedy “Oedipus.”

The impetus for the uprising of the Parisians was the dismissal by the king of the Minister of Finance Necker, a Jewish banker who got rich from speculation, trying to impose a constitution on the French on the English model. Through deft manipulation of the opinions of gullible deputies from different classes 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 to 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'etat.

In the fortress they did not even think of starting a battle, but given the current situation, the commandant of the Bastille, the Marquis Delaunay, simply had to give the order to take up arms.

And then, from the side of the fortress garrison, there was a ONE shot from a cannon with heavy buckshot, which is still talked about as continuous firing from 15 cannons at peaceful Parisians.

This ended the “storm” of the Bastille, after which the banker Necker solemnly returned to Paris as a national hero.
For several weeks before the demolition of the Bastille, it was a place for citizens to walk. Holding their breath, they felt the cannons that were “continuously firing” at the people, with bated breath they looked at the “instrument of torture” - a mechanism that was actually a printing machine, they were speechless when they discovered several skeletons in the ground on the territory of the fortress, which were the remains of Protestant prisoners who died from various causes in the Bastille. They were buried there because the burial of Protestants was not allowed in the city's Catholic cemeteries.

This begs the question: why was such a rigmarole around the Bastille necessary and why was it necessary to capture an essentially empty fortress?

And the people of France inherited the myth about those notorious 15 firing guns, the cruelty of the jailers, the breach, the damp dark dungeons and other “horror stories.” A MYTH THAT LIVES TO THIS DAY, HAS BEEN TURNED INTO A NATIONAL HOLIDAY OF THE FRENCH.

So what do we care about France? None. But everything is learned by comparison, and the story of the “taking of the Bastille” is literally a textbook example for us.

After all, Russia is also no exception in terms of absurd “assaults” and dubious holidays. For example, the “assault” of the Winter Palace, about which conscientious historians have yet to tell the truth. And perhaps the most odious “holiday” today is the so-called “Russian INDEPENDENCE DAY”. So odious that the authorities are already shyly hushing up this word, wary of an explosion of indignation of the Russian people, whose life depends on any arrogant official, careless semi-literate bureaucrat, incompetent president, overseas political strategist obsessed with a schizophrenic thirst for ownership of Russian territories, etc.

You can count a dozen more similar “holidays”. For example, the day of an elderly person, whom the authorities have long since given a damn about, nullifying all his attempts to somehow survive, the day of a child, who today they are trying to turn into a marketable commodity, the day of national unity, which, by the way, is in the Presidential Decree called the holiday of RUSSIAN unity. Startled by their own oversight, such a “scandalous” word was quietly removed, replacing it with “folk”. So calmer...