The storming of the Bastille, which occurred on Tuesday July 14, 1789 in Paris, is one of the inaugural and emblematic events of the French Revolution. This day, during which the Bastille was stormed by rioters, is, in historiographical tradition, considered to be the first major intervention by the Parisian people in the course of the Revolution and in French political life.

The siege and surrender of the royal fortress took place in a period of governmental vacuum, economic crisis and political tensions, thanks to the meeting of the Estates General and their proclamation by the Third Estate in the Constituent Assembly. The agitation of the Parisian people is at its height following the dismissal of Jacques Necker (announced on July 12 by the journalist Camille Desmoulins) and due to the presence of mercenary troops on the outskirts of the city.

If its importance is relative on the military level, the event is unprecedented in its repercussions, its political implications and its symbolic impact. The surrender of the Bastille had the effect of an earthquake in France as in Europe and even in Imperial Russia1. The fortress was defended by around a hundred men (Swiss and German) who caused nearly a hundred deaths among the besiegers. There were six among the besieged, including the governor of Launay.

From the outset, the event was considered a radical turning point in the course of events by Parisians and the royal power2. It marks the collapse of the royal administration and provokes a municipal revolution. The capital then the country mobilized behind the constituents. Moreover, it is immediately staged and celebrated by its supporters. It subsequently took on an extremely strong symbolic charge in Republican political culture.

Federation Day was organized on the same date the following year, to coincide with the first anniversary of the event. The date of July 14 was chosen in 1880 to celebrate the French national holiday in memory of this double commemoration.
The national context
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The storming of the Bastille was part of the popular and political mobilization movement which agitated the cities of the Kingdom of France during the summer of 1789. It accompanies the political revolution initiated by the deputies of the Estates General meeting at Versailles, who since June 20 (date of the Jeu de Paume oath) have sought to impose themselves on the king as the National Constituent Assembly.
The food crisis
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The political crisis
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Municipal revolutions
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The local context
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Popular mobilization

The people of Paris had been worried for several days, fearing that the foreign troops massed around the capital since June would end up being used against the States General or to serve in a hypothetical massacre of the population of “patriots”3. The echoes and publicity of the Assembly debates counted as much in the popular mobilization as "the anger and fears accumulated in the different strata of the Parisian population"4, fear of an "aristocratic plot", fear of famine fueled by fantasies of a “starvation pact”5. On July 14, the price of bread reached its highest since the reign of Louis XIV6. The food question is at the heart of the insurrection7. The portrait of the rioters confirms these subsistence concerns. “Professionals”, craftsmen, shop clerks, the processions are made up of employees from the suburbs, fathers of families, two thirds of whom are literate8.
The attitude of the royal administration and the government

The Bastille, where Baron de Besenval had stored the powder from the arsenal, was known for its strategic weakness. His governor was disowned by his superiors and Besenval himself claims to have sought to give him a replacement at the beginning of July9. The situation requires additional human and military resources. Broglie asks his lieutenant to reinforce the force by thirty Swiss soldiers and sends gunners to examine “if the pieces are in good condition, and to serve them, if it becomes necessary, which would be very unfortunate, but is fortunately devoid of any likelihood” 10. The Bastille in 1789 was then defended by a garrison of 32 Swiss soldiers detached from the Salis-Samade regiment and 82 disabled war veterans11.
The Paris Uprising (July 11-17)
Arti

The crowd of rioters demands a reduction in the price of grain and bread. A rumor circulates in Paris: the Saint-Lazare convent and the Bastille are said to store the grains15; the convent is pillaged at six o'clock. Two hours later, a meeting of the “electors” of the capital was held at the town hall (those who, in the second degree, elected the deputies of the Estates General). At their head is the provost of the merchants of Paris, Jacques de Flesselles. In the middle of a raging crowd, they decided to form a “permanent committee” (called an “insurrectionary municipality”, it replaced the old royal municipality16) and took the decision to create a “bourgeois militia” of 48,000 men, in order to to control popular excesses and support and defend the action of the National Assembly17. Each man will wear as a distinctive mark a cockade in the colors of Paris, red and blue. To arm this militia, the rioters ransacked the Garde-Meuble where weapons from old collections were stored. On the orders of Jacques de Flesselles, the manufacture of 50,000 pikes was launched. The crowd, obeying orders which seemed to come from the Palais-Royal[Doubtful information], spoke of taking the Bastille. At 5 p.m., a delegation of Parisian voters went to Les Invalides to demand the weapons of war stored there. The governor refuses. The Court does not react. Voters don't get guns.

On July 14, at 10 a.m., rioters seized the rifles stored at Les Invalides. Faced with the refusal of its governor, a composite crowd — nearly 80,000 people including a thousand fighters18 — showed up to seize it by force. To defend the Hôtel des Invalides there are cannons manned by invalids but they do not seem willing to open fire on the Parisians. A few hundred meters away, several infantry cavalry and artillery regiments camped on the Champ-de-Mars esplanade, under the command of Pierre-Victor de Besenval. This brings together the leaders of the corps to find out if their soldiers would march on the rioters. Informed of their refusal, Besenval decided to abandon his position and set his troops on the road towards Saint-Cloud and Sèvres19. The crowd climbed the ditches, broke down the gates, descended into the cellars and seized the 30,000 to 40,000 black powder rifles stored there as well as twenty pieces of firearms and a mortar. Parisians are now armed. All they need is gunpowder and bullets. Rumor has it that there are some at the Château de la Bastille20,21,22. Besenval had in fact given the order to store the powder in the fortress.
The siege of the Bastille
The Storming of the Bastille, anonymous around 1790, museum of the French Revolution.

At 10:30 a.m., a delegation from the Assembly of Voters of Paris went to the Bastille. The members of the Standing Committee do not plan to take the building by force but wish to open the way to negotiations23. Pressed by the crowd of rioters, notably those from the popular suburb of Saint-Antoine where the Réveillon affair was a significant episode of the pre-revolution, the voters sent a delegation to the governor of the Bastille, Bernard-René Jordan de Launay. The latter took care to put it in defense by sealing windows, raising surrounding walls and placing cannons on the towers and behind the drawbridge24. The delegation's mission was to request the withdrawal of the cannons and the distribution of powder and bullets to the Parisians who formed the “bourgeois militia”25. Indeed, above the monumental portal of the Bastille built in 1643, there is an arsenal, a weapons and powder store. As a safety measure, de Launay had them moved the night before to an interior courtyard. This delegation was received with kindness, it was even invited to lunch, but left without having won its case26. However, the crowd grew impatient and some imagined that the delegation was being held prisoner. This misunderstanding aggravates tensions.

At 11:30 a.m., a second delegation led at the initiative of Jacques Alexis Thuriot, accompanied by Louis Éthis de Corny, city prosecutor, went to the Bastille fort27. Thuriot, who wishes to avoid a confrontation, urges the Invalides to pass the second enclosure, inspects the premises and asks for guarantees. The governor undertakes not to take the initiative for the shootings. The crowd of rioters armed with rifles taken from the Invalides gathered in front of the Bastille. She brought with her five of the cannons taken the day before from Les Invalides and Garde-Meubles, including two silver damascened cannons offered a century earlier by the King of Siam to Louis XIV28. They are served by soldiers who joined the crowd and fired on the doors of the fortress.

An explosion, wrongly taken by the rioters as a cannonade ordered by the governor, triggers the first attacks. The Royal Army

An already old divide widened further within the royal armies after the events in Paris. The officers no longer have confidence in their men. On July 14, five of six battalions of the Gardes-Françaises mutinied and some joined the rioters. The week preceding the events, there were already sixty-nine desertions in the Provence Regiment and twenty-nine in the Royal-Picardie Cavalry Regiment46.

The German Royal-Hesse-Darmstadt regiment, then stationed in Strasbourg, learned of the storming of the Bastille on July 23, 1789. He received the news with great joy and uproar, which led to him being sent to garrison at Neufbrisach. Nevertheless, his patriotic ardor (he was the first to adopt the tricolor cockade) earned him a triumphant return to Strasbourg, where he was acclaimed by the city's bourgeoisie.
Farewell Bastille! (1789), anonymous engraving representing the jubilant third estate and the decline of the privileged.
The components
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Foreign observers

As early as July 16, the Duke of Dorset, English ambassador and friend of the Count of Artois, wrote to the Foreign Office: “Thus, my lord, the greatest revolution of which history has preserved the memory has been accomplished, and , relatively speaking, if we consider the importance of the results, it cost very little blood. From this moment, we can consider France as a free country”47. For Charles James Fox, it was “the greatest event that ever happened to the world”48.

This incredible spectacle provokes such astonishment in Edmund Burke that he does not know whether he should subscribe to it or condemn it49.

An English traveler, Doctor Edward Rigby, arrived in Paris on the evening of July 7 with two companions and left on Sunday the 19th,