The Reign of Terror 1793–1794: Leading the Angry Mob and Murdering Political Rivals. Part 2: La Prise de la Bastille
Armed with stolen muskets, pistols, and cannons from Les Invalides (the military veterans’ hospital), the angry mob marched on to the Bastille to steal more arms and ammunition. Managing to cut the drawbridge chain, the mob swarmed the inner courtyard. After hours of fighting and 140 casualties, the symbol of despotism surrendered, and the angry mob dragged the guards to the Hotel de Ville to murder them. Charles Dickens (2003, 223; 229) beautifully describes the storming of the Bastille and uses his bloodthirsty fictional character, Madame Defarge, to cut off the head of the Bastille’s governor in his 1859 classic, A Tail of Two Cities, when he writes, “with a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into the detested word, the living sea rose, wave on wave, depth on depth, and overflowed the city to that point…she put her foot on his neck, and with her cruel knife-long ready-hewed off his head.” The storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 marks the French Revolution’s inauguration. For the next thirteen years, France would experience not only a revolution but regicide, multiple foreign wars, counterrevolutions, and civil war. Fear is what caused the angry mob to storm the Bastille and arm themselves, but it was the dismissal of finance minister, Jacques Necker, on 12 July that sparked the panic.
Louis XVI did not intend for the Estates General to meet in 1789, he intended to rule France like the absolute monarchs before him. Following the Estates General’s last meeting in 1614, Cardinal Richelieu conducted a successful and often vicious kingdom for Louis XIII. During the 1614 Estates General, Cardinal Richelieu (then a bishop), remarked on the constant infighting and unagreeable nature to solve any political issues when he says, “the conclusion bore no fruit, all this assembly having no other effect than to overburden the provinces with the tax which was necessary to pay their deputies” (Rothrock 1960, 316). Louis XIII, with Cardinal Richelieu running the government, never assembled the governing body again. Louis XIV and Louis XV saw no need for the Estates General, for they ruled as absolute monarchists. By the time Louis XVI invited the Estates General to Versailles after a 175-year hiatus, nothing changed in their unagreeable nature, except the nobles and clergy conceding the Third Estate’s further taxation and subjugation. If a certain matter came to a vote in the Estates General, it almost always concluded with a two to one vote, and always favoring the first two estates. Author Clifford D. Conner (2012, 34) explains, “The three estates had one vote each despite the fact that the First Estate (the clergy) represented some 100,000 people, the Second Estate (the nobility) about 400,000, and the Third Estate (everybody else) about 25 million.”
With the monarchy bankrupt, along with the 1788 drought and hailstorm, King Louis finally called back his most successful financial advisor, Jacques Necker, to stabilize the government. A Swiss Protestant by birth, Necker held a long history of either resigning or being dismissed from the financial minister position since his initial incumbency in 1776. Out of necessity, Louis XVI invited the Assembly of Notables (the Second Estate) in early 1787 to discuss economic changes, but it was the nobility who called for Necker’s return. Along with calls for Necker’s return to office, “the first overt claim that the Notables had no power to approve taxation” began to foment and they adamantly claimed, “that right…belonged only to the Estates-General” (Doyle 2002, 72). The nobility thought by bringing back the Estates General, they could seize more power over Louis and the Third Estate. Once again as the finance minister, Necker exuded a calming and confident aura providing the peasantry hope for better days and less starvation. A brilliant and progressive economist, “Necker’s return to power was greeted by several weeks of jubilation on the streets of Paris” (Doyle 2002, 87), and a widespread call for the Estates General to convene spread throughout France. Necker planned to rehabilitate the economy, but he recognized the need for severe change to satiate public unrest. While the nobility attempted to wrestle power and authority from the bankrupt king, a highly corrosive rumor spread throughout the land, “a pacte de famine between government ministers and grain racketeers to starve the French people into submission” (Blanning 2007, 338). Although government reforms derived out of necessity, “the potent combination of fear of starvation and hatred of their exploiters” (Blanning 2007, 338) began long before the Estates General met in May 1789.
Finally meeting after 175 years, 1,200 elected deputies gathered at the Palace of Versailles with their authorized cahiers de doléances (list of grievances). With the 56 million national debt looming over the king, the separate estates only cared about themselves. A major concern coming into the Estates General was the discussions about doubling the Third Estate’s vote or vote by representative head. This would not only make voting equal between the conflicting powers, but to vote by head would give the Third Estate an overwhelming advantage. Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Marat changed his career from physician to journalist and published his first political work, Offering to the Nation. In this journal he warned the aristocratic oppressors to consider the urban poor before “pushing to the point of despair an immense and courageous people who at present are demanding no more than a little solace for their pains; who still ask for nothing more than a legal system committed to justice” (Conner 2012, 36). After a month of useless deliberations, the Third Estate, now meeting in the Versailles tennis court due to renovations, decided to take the law in their own hands, broke off from the Estates General, and established themselves as the National Assembly. Delegates took an oath and refused to leave the Versailles tennis court till a constitutional monarchy and adequate judicial rights were established. Author James Robinson (1895, 462) comments on the Tennis Court Oath when he writes, “all that is novel in the Tennis Court oath is the clear enunciation that the establishment of the constitution is the essential task of the assembly.”
June 1789 held Parisians and the entire country in suspense while the monarchy and the National Assembly jockeyed for power. During this time, clergy members and noblemen separated from their own estates to join the newly formed National Assembly. Yet, while the delegates debated in Versailles, the monarchy ordered over 20,000 troops to gather around Paris proper on 1 July. When petitioned to remove the soldiers, the king merely replied with, “their presence was necessary to preserve public order” (Doyle 2002, 108). Noticing the troops massing outside Paris, the urban poor’s fear began to rise and suspicions of the king going back on his word and disbanding the National Assembly grew. On 12 July, the king dismissed finance minister Jacques Necker, and Parisians began to fear the worst. With the famine hitting its peak, troops massing outside Paris proper, and now Necker’s dismissal, fear stuck the hearts of the angry mob. Storming the Bastille was the natural solution for people who would either die from starvation or tyranny.
References
Blanning, Tim. 2007. The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions That Made Modern Europe 1648–1815. London: Penguin Books.
Conner, Clifford D. 2012. Jean Paul Marat: Tribune of the French Revolution. New York: Pluto Press.
Dickens, Charles. 2003. A Tale of Two Cities. Edited by Richard Maxwell. London: Penguin Books.
Doyle, William. 2002. The Oxford History of the French Revolution. 2nd ed. New York: University of Oxford Press.
Robinson, James Harvey. 1895. “The Tennis Court Oath.” Political Science Quarterly 10, no. 3 (September): 460–74.
Rothrock, George A. 1960. “The French Crown and the Estates General of 1614.” French Historical Studies 1, no. 3 (Spring): 295–318.
