Every Heard of "Storming the Bastille"? Well This Is What Happened

It's Tuesday, July fourteenth. Happy Bastille Day. I grew up in Milwaukee, and every summer the city throws a festival called Bastille Days in the Cathedral Square downtown. They put up a mini Eiffel Tower, there are crepes and French food vendors, live music, and a run called "Storm the Bastille" that goes through the streets around the park. I went pretty much every year growing up. Had a great time. And I never once asked what a Bastille was or why we were storming it. It was just a fun summer festival with a French theme. So for today's episode, I finally looked into it. And the story behind that festival name is a lot more violent, more consequential, and more relevant to modern life than I ever would have guessed. On July 14, 1789, a crowd of Parisians stormed a fortress and prison called the Bastille, launched a revolution that overthrew the monarchy, and set in motion a chain of events that gave us modern democracy, the concept of universal human rights, the metric system, and also a period of mass executions so intense it became known as the Reign of Terror. All of it started because people couldn't afford bread. France in the late 1780s was broke and hungry. King Louis XVI had inherited enormous debt from decades of wars and royal excess, and he kept spending. His wife Marie Antoinette was infamous for her extravagance, though the quote most people associate with her, "let them eat cake," was almost certainly never said by her. The phrase appeared in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiography attributed to "a great princess" when Marie Antoinette was only nine years old. The real Marie Antoinette was politically tone-deaf but probably not that cartoonishly cruel.

What was real was the famine. Crop failures in 1788 caused the price of bread to spike so severely that by the summer of 1789, an average worker was spending roughly 88 percent of their wages on bread alone. Eighty eight percent. The rest of Europe had grain, but France's internal trade policies made it difficult to move food between regions within the country. People in Paris were starving while grain existed elsewhere in France, which is a type of systemic failure that makes populations very angry very quickly.

The political system was structured to make reform nearly impossible. French society was divided into three "estates": the clergy (First Estate), the nobility (Second Estate), and everyone else (Third Estate). The Third Estate made up roughly 98 percent of the population but had limited political representation and bore the heaviest tax burden. The clergy and nobility were largely exempt from taxes. When Louis XVI called a meeting of the Estates-General in May 1789 to address the financial crisis, the Third Estate broke away and formed the National Assembly, declaring that they represented the people of France and demanding a constitution. Louis appeared to accept this, then surrounded Paris with troops and fired his most popular minister, Jacques Necker, who had been sympathetic to reform. Paris interpreted both moves as preparation to crush the Assembly by force. On the morning of July 14, crowds had already raided a military hospital for muskets and cannons but needed gunpowder to use them. The Bastille, a medieval fortress in the heart of Paris, was known to store ammunition. It was also a potent symbol of royal authority, a place where the king could imprison anyone indefinitely with a lettre de cachet, a sealed letter requiring no trial, no charges, and no appeal.

But by 1789, the Bastille's reputation was far more intimidating than its reality. The fortress held exactly seven prisoners on the day it was stormed: four men convicted of forgery, two men considered mentally ill, and one nobleman being held at his family's request. The prison was practically empty and was already scheduled for demolition to make way for a public square. The terrifying symbol of tyranny was, at that point, basically a bureaucratic leftover.

That didn't matter. A crowd of roughly a thousand people surrounded the fortress and demanded its surrender. The governor, Bernard-René de Launay (duh loh-NAY), invited a few protest leaders inside to negotiate. As talks dragged on, the crowd grew restless. Some climbed the walls and lowered the drawbridge. De Launay ordered his troops to fire. Nearly a hundred attackers were killed. Then the French Guard, a military regiment, arrived and turned their cannons on the Bastille. De Launay surrendered. He was dragged out of the fortress, murdered by the crowd, and his head was placed on a pike and paraded through the streets of Paris.

The storming freed seven prisoners, killed nearly a hundred people, and changed the trajectory of Western civilization. Within weeks, the feudal system was abolished. Within months, the National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which declared that "men are born and remain free and equal in rights," a statement that influenced the US Bill of Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and virtually every democratic constitution written since. Within three years, the monarchy was abolished entirely. Louis XVI was executed by guillotine in January 1793. Marie Antoinette followed in October. The revolution that began with the storming of the Bastille produced some of the most important ideas in modern political history and some of the most horrifying violence.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man established principles that most democracies now take for granted: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the presumption of innocence, the right to property, and the idea that sovereignty belongs to the people rather than the monarch. The revolution replaced the old measurement system with the metric system, which is now used by every country on Earth except the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar, a fact we covered in the QWERTY episode when we talked about path dependency and why America still uses imperial measurements. The Napoleonic Code that followed the revolution became the foundation for civil law in most of continental Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia and Africa.

But the revolution also consumed itself. The Reign of Terror, led by Maximilien Robespierre (ROHBZ-pyair) and the Committee of Public Safety from September 1793 to July 1794, executed roughly 17,000 people by guillotine in ten months, many of them fellow revolutionaries accused of insufficient loyalty to the cause. Robespierre himself was eventually arrested and guillotined in July 1794, executed by the same mechanism he had used to execute thousands of others. The revolution that started because ordinary people demanded representation from their government ended, at least temporarily, with a government that killed anyone who disagreed with it.

Out of that chaos came Napoleon Bonaparte, who seized power in 1799 and declared himself emperor in 1804, which is an ironic end to a revolution that began by overthrowing a king. But the ideas the revolution introduced, popular sovereignty, individual rights, equality before the law, the separation of church and state, outlasted both the Terror and Napoleon and became the foundation of modern democratic government worldwide.

All of that started because bread was too expensive and a crowd stormed a prison that was practically empty. The next time you run a 5K called "Storm the Bastille" in a park in Milwaukee, that's what you're commemorating. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. Today is Bastille Day, the anniversary of July 14, 1789, when a crowd of Parisians stormed the Bastille fortress and launched the French Revolution. The revolution was triggered by bread prices that consumed 88 percent of a worker's wages, a tax system that exempted the wealthy, and a king who responded to calls for reform by surrounding Paris with troops. The Bastille itself held only seven prisoners and was scheduled for demolition. Nearly a hundred people died storming it. The revolution that followed produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the metric system, and the foundation of modern democratic government. It also produced the Reign of Terror, where 17,000 people were guillotined in ten months, and eventually Napoleon, who crowned himself emperor, ending the revolution that had started by overthrowing a king. The ideas survived. The people who fought for them mostly didn't.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.