by Will Durant
On July 8 Mirabeau put through a motion asking the King to remove from Versailles the provincial troops that were making the gardens of Le Nôtre an armed camp. Louis answered that no harm was intended to the Assembly, but on July 11 he showed his hand by dismissing Necker and ordering him to leave Paris at once. “All Paris,” Mme. de Staël recalled, “flocked to visit him in the twenty-four hours allowed him to prepare for his journey. … Public opinion transformed his disgrace into a triumph.”75 He and his family left quietly for the Netherlands. Those who had supported him in the ministry were discharged at the same time. On July 12, in complete surrender to the advocates of force, Louis appointed the Queen’s friend, Baron de Breteuil, to replace Necker, and de Broglie was made secretary for war. The Assembly and its incipient revolution seemed doomed.
They were saved by the people of Paris.
VIII. TO THE BASTILLE
Many factors were leading the populace to pass from agitation to action. The price of bread was an irritating issue with housewives, and there was a widespread suspicion that some wholesalers were keeping their grain from the market in hopes of still higher prices.76 The new municipal authorities, fearing that hunger would take to indiscriminate pillage, sent soldiers to protect the bakeries. With the men of Paris the burning issue was the knowledge that out-of-town regiments, not yet won to the popular cause, were threatening the Assembly and the Revolution. The sudden fall of Necker—the only man in the government whom the people had trusted—brought the anger and fear of the populace to a point where only a word was needed to arouse a violent response. On the afternoon of July 12 Camille Desmoulins, a Jesuit graduate but now a radical lawyer, aged twenty-nine, leaped upon a table outside the Café de Foy near the Palais-Royal, denounced the dismissal of Necker as a betrayal of the people, and cried out, “The Germans [the troops] in the Champ de Mars will enter Paris tonight to butcher the inhabitants!” Then, flourishing both a pistol and a sword, he called “To arms!”77 Part of his audience followed him to the Place Vendôme, carrying busts of Necker and the Duc d’Orléans; there some troops put them to flight. In the evening a crowd gathered in the Tuileries Gardens; a regiment of German troops charged it, was resisted with bottles and stones, fired upon it and wounded many. Dispersed, the crowd reassembled at the Hôtel de Ville, forced its way in, and seized all the weapons it could find. Beggars and criminals joined the rioters, and together they pillaged several homes.
On July 13 the crowd gathered again. They entered the Monastery of St.-Lazare, appropriated its store of grain, and carried this to the market at Les Halles. Another crowd opened the prison of La Force and liberated the inmates, mostly debtors. Everywhere the people searched for guns; finding only a few, they forged fifty thousand pikes.78 Fearing for their homes and possessions, the middle classes in Paris formed and armed their own militia; yet at the same time agents of the rich continued to encourage, finance, and arm revolutionary crowds, hoping thereby to deter the King from using force on the Assembly.79
Early on July 14 a crowd of eight thousand men invaded the Hôtel des Invalides, and captured 32,000 muskets, some powder, and twelve pieces of artillery. Suddenly someone cried out, “To the Bastille!” Why the Bastille? Not to release its prisoners, who were only seven; and generally, since 1715, it had been used as a place of genteel confinement for the well-to-do. But this massive fortress, one hundred feet high, with walls thirty feet thick, and surrounded by a moat seventy-five feet wide, had long been a symbol of despotism; it stood in the public mind for a thousand prisons and secret dungeons; some of the cahiers had already demanded its destruction. Probably what moved the crowd was the knowledge that the Bastille had pointed some cannon at the Rue and Faubourg St.-Antoine, a quarter seething with revolutionary sentiment. Perhaps most important of all, the Bastille was said to contain a great store of arms and ammunition, especially powder, of which the rebels had little. In the fortress was a garrison of eighty-two French soldiers and thirty-two Swiss Guards, under the command of the Marquis de Launay, a man of mild temper80 but popularly reported to be a monster of cruelty.81
While the crowd, composed mainly of shopkeepers and artisans, converged upon the Bastille, a deputation from the municipal council was received by de Launay. It asked him to withdraw the threatening cannon from their positions, and not to take any hostile action against the people; in return it promised to use its influence to dissuade the crowd from attacking the fortress. The commandant agreed, and entertained the deputation for lunch. Another committee, from the besiegers themselves, received de Launay’s pledge that his soldiers would not fire upon the people unless there was an attempt at forcible entry. This did not satisfy the excited assemblage; it was resolved to capture the ammunition without which its muskets could not resist the expected advance of Besenval’s foreign troops into the city. Be-senval was not anxious to move into Paris, for he suspected that his men would refuse to fire upon the people. He waited for orders from de Broglie; none came.
About one o’clock in the afternoon eighteen of the rebels climbed the wall of an adjoining structure, leaped into the forecourt of the Bastille, and lowered two drawbridges. Hundreds crossed over the moat; two other drawbridges were lowered; soon the court was filled with an eager and confident crowd. De Launay commanded them to withdraw; they refused; he ordered his soldiers to fire upon them. The attackers fired back, and set fire to some wooden structures attached to the stone walls. Toward three o’clock some members of the radical French Guard joined the besiegers, and began to bombard the fortress with five of the cannon that had been taken that morning at the Hôtel des Invalides. In four hours of fighting, ninety-eight of the attackers and one of the defenders were killed. De Launay, seeing the multitude always increasing with new arrivals, receiving no word cf help from Besenval, and having no supply of food to stand a siege, bade his soldiers to cease fire and hoist a white flag. He offered to surrender if his troops were allowed to march out, with their arms, to safety. The crowd, infuriated by the sight of its dead, refused to consider anything but unconditional surrender.82 De Launay proposed to blow up the fortress; his men prevented him. He sent down to the assailants the key to the main entrance. The crowd rushed in, disarmed the soldiers, slew six of them, seized de Launay, and freed the bewildered prisoners.
While many of the victors took what weapons and ammunition they could find, part of the crowd led de Launay toward the Hôtel de Ville, apparently intending to have him tried for murder. On the way the more ardent among them knocked him down, beat him to death, and cut off his head. With this bleeding trophy held aloft on a pike, they marched through Paris in a triumphal parade.
That afternoon Louis XVI returned to Versailles from a day’s hunting, and entered a note into his diary: “July 14: Nothing.” Then the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, arriving from Paris, told him of the successful attack upon the Bastille. “Why,” exclaimed the King, “this is a revolt!” “No, Sire,” said the Duk% “it is a revolution.”
On July 15 the King went humbly to the Assembly and assured it that the provincial and foreign troops would be sent away from Versailles and Paris. On July 16 he dismissed Breteuil and recalled Necker to a third ministry. Breteuil, Artois, de Broglie, and other nobles began the exodus of émigrés from France. Meanwhile the populace, with pickaxes and gunpowder, demolished the Bastille. On July 17 Louis, escorted by fifty deputies of the Assembly, went to Paris, was received at the Hôtel de Ville by the municipal council and the people, and affixed to his hat the red-white-and-blue cockade of the Revolution.
Envoi
SO we end our survey, in these last two volumes, of the century whose conflicts and achievements are still active in the life of mankind today. We have seen the Industrial Revolution begin with that Mississippi of inventions which may, by the year two thousand, realize Aristotle’s dream of machines liberating men from all menial toil. We have recorded the advances of a dozen sciences toward a better understanding of nature and a more effective application of her law
s. We have welcomed the passage of philosophy from futile metaphysics to the tentative pursuit of reason in the mundane affairs of men. We have followed with living concern the attempt to free religion from superstition, bigotry, and intolerance, and to organize morality without supernatural punishments and rewards. We have been instructed by the efforts of statesmen and philosophers to evolve a just and competent government, and to reconcile democracy with the simplicity and natural inequality of men. We have enjoyed the diverse creations of beauty in baroque, rococo, and neoclassical art, and the triumphs of music in Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi, in Gluck, Haydn, and Mozart. We have witnessed the flowering of literature in Germany with Schiller and Goethe, in England with the great novelists and the greatest of historians, in Scotland with Boswell and Burns, in Sweden with the outburst of song under Gustavus III; and in France we have wavered between Voltaire defending reason with wit and Rousseau pleading with tears for the rights of feeling. We have heard the applause on which Garrick and Clairon lived. We have admired the succession of fascinating women in the salons of France and England, and the brilliant reigns of women in Austria and Russia. We have watched philosopher kings.
It seems absurd to end our story just when so many historic events were about to enliven and incarnadine the page. We should have been happy to advance through the turmoil of the Revolution, to contemplate that volcanic eruption of energy known as Napoleon, and then feast upon the wealth of the nineteenth century in literature, science, philosophy, music, art, technology, and statesmanship. Still more we should have enjoyed coming home to America, South as well as North, and trying to weave the complex tapestry of American life and history into one united and moving picture. But we must reconcile ourselves to mortality, and leave to fresher spirits the task and risk of adding experiments in synthesis to the basic researches of historical and scientific specialists.
We have completed, as far as we could go, this Story of Civilization; and though we have devoted the best part of our lives to the work, we know that a lifetime is but a moment in history, and that the historian’s best is soon washed away as the stream of knowledge grows. But as we followed our studies from century to century we felt confirmed in our belief that historiography has been too departmentalized, and that some of us should try to write history whole, as it was lived, in all the facets of the complex and continuing drama.
Forty years of happy association in the pursuit of history have come to an end. We dreamed of the day when we should write the last word of the last volume. Now that that day has come we know that we shall miss the absorbing purpose that gave meaning and direction to our lives.
We thank the reader who has been with us these many years for part or all of the long journey. We have ever been mindful of his presence. Now we take our leave and bid him farewell.
Bibliographical Guide
to editions referred to in the Notes
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