Parisians stormed the Bastille, igniting the French Revolution
On this day · 14 July 1789
On July 14, 1789, a Paris crowd seized a royal fortress holding just seven prisoners and turned it into the symbol of a revolution.
On July 14, 1789, a Paris crowd besieged the Bastille, a fourteenth-century fortress that had served since 1659 as a royal state prison. Fearing that King Louis XVI was about to crush the newly formed National Assembly, the mob came hunting for gunpowder and arms. They took the stockpile, freed the inmates, and seized the garrison’s commander, whose head was paraded through the streets.
For all its fearsome reputation, the Bastille held only seven prisoners that day: two declared insane, four forgers, and one nobleman jailed for incest. The fortress mattered far more as a symbol of arbitrary royal power than as a working dungeon.
The American minister in Paris, Thomas Jefferson, watched events unfold and sent home a careful account.
“nothing can be believed but what one sees, or has from an eye witness.”
France now marks July 14 as its national day, commemorating the moment the old order began to fall.
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