To the people of Paris, however, unaware either of its proposed demolition or of the number of prisoners held there, the Bastille was the symbol of an intolerable régime; and it was not merely to obtain powder for their muskets and to release the men held there that they marched so determinedly upon it this Tuesday morning.
For several days now the Governor of the Bastille, the Marquis de Launay, had been anticipating their arrival with the utmost apprehension. Neither a decisive nor an assertive man, de Launay was quite incapable of instilling his officers with any confidence. One of them, Lieutenant Louis Deflue, who had been sent with a detachment of thirty-two Swiss soldiers to reinforce the garrison of eighty-two superannuated soldiers or invalides, described him as being ‘without much knowledge of military affairs, without experience and without much courage’.
‘I could clearly see from his constant uneasiness and irresolution’ [Deflue afterwards wrote in a letter to his brothers],
that if we were attacked we should be very badly led. He was so terrified that at night he mistook me shadows of trees for enemies so that we had to be on the alert throughout the hours of darkness. The staff officers…and I myself often tried to assure him that our position was not as weak as he complained and to persuade him to attend to important matters rather than to expend his energy on trifles. He would listen to us, appearing to agree with our advice. But then he would do just the opposite before changing his mind yet again.
Nervous and indecisive as he evidently was, de Launay had nevertheless done much to prepare the Bastille for an attack. Expecting that he would not have to hold out for long before troops came to disperse a hostile mob, he had not troubled to lay in more than two days’ supply of bread; but in the cellars he had a large stock of powder contained in 250 barrels which had been transferred there from the Arsenal. He also had numerous cannon. There were fifteen eight-pounders standing between the battlements on the towers, a further three eight-pounders below them with their muzzles levelled at the approaches to the entrance gate, as well as twelve smaller rampart guns. In order to give these guns a wider field of fire the embrasures had been widened. Other apertures and windows had been blocked up, the drawbridge across the deep dry moat had been strengthened and the defences generally repaired and improved. Loads of paving-stones had been dragged up to the top of the towers from which they could be hurled down through the machicolations on to the heads of any rioters who managed to approach the foot of the towers.
But if these measures gave some confidence to de Launay’s officers, his increasingly prevaricating manner certainly did not. Nor did the attitude of their men. Most of the invalides of the regular garrison were known to be in sympathy with the people of the surrounding faubourgs in whose shops they bought their tobacco and in whose cafés they sat drinking wine. It was hardly to be expected that they would eagerly obey orders to open fire on them, and not at all unlikely that they would flatly refuse to do so. Lieutenant Deflue’s Swiss soldiers did not share the same close ties with the people of Paris, but they were by no means hostile to their aspirations. They were rumoured already to have sworn to spike their own guns if they were ordered to fire on the crowd, and the next day seventy-five men of the same regiment, the Salis-Samade, billetted in Issy, Vaugirard and Sèvres, were to desert. Besides, the thirty-two men from the Salis-Samade in the Bastille had been occupied throughout the night in carrying the heavy and cumbersome barrels of powder from the Arsenal down into the cellar, and by the morning of the 14th they were tired out.
To the people of the faubourgs, though, the Bastille, the muzzles of its guns depressed towards the Rue Saint-Antoine, the Rue des Tournelles and the Rue de Jean Beaussire, appeared not so much in a ready state of defence as in preparation for attack. And in response to their protests, a delegation of Electors went to the Bastille to ask the Governor to withdraw the guns which were both provocative and alarming. When they arrived shortly after ten o’clock, the Governor was about to sit down to his morning meal which was then usually eaten in France about this time. He invited the delegates to join him. He was a perfectly agreeable host, and entirely amenable to their demands. He readily consented to having the guns pulled back out of sight and to having the embrasures blocked up with planks.
By the time the meal was over, however, the relaxed atmosphere in the Governor’s dining-room had been suddenly shattered by noise from the streets outside. The crowds that had raided the Invalides had now arrived beneath the walls of the Bastille and had been joined by hundreds of demonstrators from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the surrounding districts who pushed their way into the outer court, the Cour du Passage, which was flanked on either side by shops and the barracks of the invalides. When they saw the cannon in the towers above them being withdrawn they presumed that the gunners were about to load them. It was also supposed that the delegates from the Electors, who had not yet risen from the Governor’s dining-room table, had been arrested and were being held as hostages.
Responding to the frantic appeals of a group of demonstrators, a second delegation of Electors, led by a lawyer, Thuriot de la Rozère, went up to the Governor’s lodging where they met the other delegates on their way out. Thuriot de la Rozère told the Governor that the people outside, believing that the guns had been withdrawn from view only to be loaded, were now demanding that a citizen’s militia should be allowed into the stronghold to hold it in the name of the city. The Governor protested that the guns were certainly not being loaded, and he invited Thuriot – who knew the Bastille well having often visited one of his clients there – to satisfy himself that no attack on the people was intended. He took Thuriot up to the top of the towers to show him the unloaded guns and the blocked-up apertures; he urged him to believe that he would never open fire unless he were attacked; he gave his word of honour that he intended no harm to anyone and, in Thuriot’s presence, he asked the garrison to swear that they would not use their arms except in self-defence, an undertaking which they were only too willing to give. So eager, in fact, was the Governor to display his good intentions that Thuriot believed he would have agreed to accept a citizens’ militia had not his officers declared that they would all be dishonoured if they gave in so meekly.
When Thuriot came out again into the Cour du Passage, the crowds thronging the courtyard had become threatening and angry. A few, impatient with the unsatisfactory negotiations, shouted abuse at him. Others cried out, ‘We want the Bastille! Out with the troops!’ The mob was denser than ever now, the new arrivals pushing forward so that those in front were forced towards the edge of the moat that separated the Cour du Passage from a second courtyard, the Cour du Gouvernement. The two drawbridges which spanned the moat, the pedestrian and the wider one for carriages, had both been pulled up.
In the towers high above these bridges the involutes looked down at the swirling mass of cockaded hats and heaving shoulders of the crowds that now stretched as far as the Rue des Tournelles. They shouted at them to retreat, as the cannon were loaded now and the Swiss troops might be persuaded to open fire. They waved their caps in the air and made warning gestures. The sound of their words was lost above the roar of voices in the Cour du Passage, but the gesticulations were observed and apparently misinterpreted as signs of encouragement. For at that moment two men, followed by several others, clambered on to the roof of one of the shops that lined the northern side of the Cour du Passage, dashed along the walk at the top of the rampart wall and jumped down into the Cour du Gouvernement on the other side of the moat. Here they broke into the guardhouse, emerged with axes and sledge-hammers, and began to slash at the pulleys of the drawbridges. There was a sudden rattle of chains; the drawbridges began to move. The men on the far side of the moat pushed furiously against the bodies behind them in an effort to get back from the edge as the immense bound planks, now fully released, fell towards them. But one man was killed and another badly hurt by an impact they could not avoid. The crowd behind them rushed over their bodies into the Cour du Gouvern
ement.
To their right were the Governor’s lodgings; to their left the main gate of the Bastille itself, its huge entrance blocked by a further raised drawbridge across another deep moat. For a moment the leaders seemed to hesitate, wondering what to do. Then the crackling sound of musketry fire rang out, followed by the boom of a cannon.
Afterwards there was bitter controversy as to who first started firing. According to the assailants it was the defenders who opened fire on them as soon as they debouched from the narrow passage between the Governor’s lodgings and the guardhouse, shouting ‘Down with the drawbridge!’ But Lieutenant Deflue insisted that it was the besiegers who ‘fired the first shots at those on top of the towers…The assailants were asked what they wanted, and the general demand was for the bridge to be lowered. They were told that this could not be done and that they must withdraw, or else they would be shot. They renewed their cries, “Down with the bridge!” It was then that the order to fire was given.’
Finding themselves under a heavier fire than they were able to return, the assailants took shelter in a range of buildings to the right of the gate which contained the Bastille’s kitchens. From here several ran out to attack the drawbridge but were driven back by the fire of the garrison. So two carts filled with straw were brought up from Santerre’s brewery, set alight and dragged in front of the drawbridge to afford the protection of a smoke screen.
It was now about two o’clock in the afternoon. And it was at this time that yet another delegation from the Permanent Committee at the Hôtel de Ville, led by Delavigne, the Chairman of the Assembly of Electors, and the Abbé Fauchet, arrived at the Bastille hoping to prevent further bloodshed by persuading the Governor to hand over the fortress to a citizens’ militia who would ‘guard it in conjunction with the troops of the existing garrison’ and who would be ‘under orders from the city’. But so great was the noise of firing and shouting that they could not make themselves heard above the din; nor was the slightest notice taken by the garrison of the white handkerchiefs which the Electors’ delegates waved above their heads. ‘We do not know whether our signals were noticed and understood,’ they subsequently reported. ‘But the firing never stopped.’ Eventually they managed to affect a partial ceasefire in the Rue Saint-Antoine. ‘Although we renewed our signals, however, the garrison went on firing at us,’ the report continued. ‘And we experienced the pain and mortification of seeing several citizens, whose brave fight we had interrupted, fall at our sides. The assailants therefore resumed their fire with as much indignation now as courage. And we could do nothing to prevent them. They were no longer interested in our deputation. What they wanted now, and loudly clamoured for, was the destruction of that fearful prison and the death of its Governor.’
At the Hôtel de Ville the Permanent Committee, concerned by the failure of Delavigne’s delegation to restore order at the Bastille, decided to make one final effort to persuade the Governor to agree to their terms. Wounded men were being carried into the building on makeshift stretchers and in the arms of their friends. Others arrived to demand more ammunition and then shouted abuse at Flesselles who was disbelieved when he declared that he had none left to give them. It was even feared that if the slaughter continued unavailingly at the Bastille, the people might turn upon the Hôtel de Ville in their fury. So Ethis de Corny set out with five other delegates, carrying a large flag and accompanied by a drummer of the Gardes-françaises.
As the delegation approached the Bastille by the Cour de l’Orme, the flag was vigorously waved and the Garde-française loudly beat his drum. Two of their number, Boucheron and Piquod de Saint-Honorine, forced their way through the crowds across the Cour du Passage and over the drawbridges into the Cour du Gouvernement where, persuading the assailants to stop firing for a moment, Boucheron shouted to the garrison at the top of his voice that the city had sent a delegation to discuss terms but that they must all hold their fire and lay down their arms.
‘A person in a coloured coat, in the middle of a group of invalides who were all holding their hats in their hands, answered me from the summit of the citadel,’ Boucheron recorded. ‘He said he was willing to receive the delegation but the crowd must withdraw.’
Behind Boucheron and Piquod de Saint-Honorine, the other members of the delegation could see that the invalides were quite ready to accept their terms. They were waving their hats in the air and turning their muskets upside down; one went so far as to wave a white flag. But these friendly gestures suddenly ceased, being brought to a halt, so the invalides later maintained, by the Governor who insisted that the delegates did not really represent the city but were leaders of the mob, intent on trickery.
The delegates now saw a cannon levelled in their direction. At the same time a volley of musketry fire killed three people who had come up to talk to them, tore a hole in the hat of another, and struck an epaulette from a delegate’s coat. Cursed by the crowd, who blamed them for the deaths of the three men who had just fallen at their feet, the delegates now hastily returned to the Hôtel de Ville where, in their absence, a dramatic scene had taken place.
At about three o’clock a thirty-one-year-old former non-commissioned officer in the Gardes-françaises, Pierre Hulin, had arrived in the square. A large, excitable man, he had recently returned to Paris from Geneva where, as an official in government service, he had taken part in the rebellion of 1782. He had made inflammatory speeches to the crowds in the Palais Royal two days before, and now, finding himself confronted by two companies of Gardes-françaises outside the Hôtel de Ville, he began to harangue them with the same stridency and passion, tears pouring down his cheeks.
‘Brave Gardes-françaises,’ he cried. ‘Can’t you hear the cannon?…That villain de Launay is murdering our brothers, our parents, our wives and children who are gathered unarmed around the Bastille. Will you allow them to be massacred?…Parisians are being slaughtered like sheep. Will you not march on the Bastille?’
They replied that they would if he would lead them. So, with Hulin at their head, some sixty Gardes-françaises followed by about 300 armed civilians with four cannon, marched off towards the Bastille where they were joined by another band of armed citizens under the command of Lieutenant Jacob Élie, who after twenty years in the ranks had recently been granted a commission in the Queen’s Regiment of Infantry.
While Hulin’s cannon opened fire ineffectively on the fifteen-foot-thick walls of the Bastille, Élie made up his mind that the only way of taking the fortress would be to attack the drawbridge and effect an entry through the main gate. So, accompanied by a few civilian volunteers, he ran forward to drag away the carts whose loads of burning straw had earlier provided the assailants with a smoke screen. While he was performing this dangerous operation, during which two of his companions were killed, the crowds of armed men and Gardes-françaises behind him maintained a continuous fire on the towers.
They did not shelter behind retrenchments while they did so [in the words of a contemporary account]. They stood in the very courts of the Bastille and so close to the towers that M. de Launay himself repeatedly made use of the paving-stones and other debris that had been taken up on to the platforms. It cannot be denied that there was much confusion and disorder…Yet the invalides, who had been through many sieges and battles, have assured us that they never experienced such musketry fire as that of these besiegers. They dared not raise their heads above the parapets of the towers.
Having dragged the carts out of the way, Lieutenant Élie gave orders for two cannon to be brought forward into the Cour du Gouvernement and levelled at the underside of the raised drawbridge.
Opposite them, on the other side of the drawbridge, were three eight-pounders, mounted on naval gun carriages. But these remained silent, for the Governor, seeing the besiegers’ cannon in the courtyard facing the gate, now decided to surrender. He ordered a drummer to march round the platform behind the battlements of the towers beating a retreat and two men to accompany him waving large white han
dkerchieves. But the crowds below took not the least notice of these signals, continuing to fire their muskets as energetically as ever, shouting ‘Down with the bridges! Down with the bridges!’
Hearing these cries, de Launay went into the Council Chamber beside the Tour de la Chapelle on the far side of the Bastille where he wrote a note which read: ‘We have twenty thousand pounds of powder. We shall blow up the garrison and the whole neighbourhood unless you accept our capitulation. From the Bastille at five in the evening. July 14th, 1789, Launay.’ He handed this note to Lieutenant Deflue who went down into the Grande Cour and pushed it through a slit which he had himself cut earlier in the gate by the drawbridge to enable his men to fire on the people outside.
Seeing the note being waved through the slit on the other side of the moat, a group of men, led by a clerk, ran off to fetch some planks from a carpenter’s workshop in the Rue des Tournelles. The longest of these was pushed forward over the edge of the moat. While three or four men leant on one end of it to hold it down, a cobbler walked gingerly towards the other end, but lost his balance and fell over into the moat, breaking his elbow. Another man then tried and, managing to retain his balance as the plank bent under his weight he seized the note and ran back with it to Hulin.
When its contents became known there were renewed shouts of ‘Down with the bridges!’ ‘No capitulation!’ Hulin marched purposefully towards the guns as though about to give the order to open fire, while, inside the fortress, Lieutenant Deflue ‘was expecting the Governor to keep his word and blow up the fort’. But, to Deflue’s ‘great surprise’, de Launay suddenly decided to open the gate. He took out a key from his pocket, handed it to a corporal who unlocked the gate and lowered the drawbridge. The siege was over and the crowd rushed in.
The Days of the French Revolution Page 7