Excerpted from Jules Michelet’s History of the French Revolution, translated by Charles Cocks.
The Bastille
THE illustrious Quesnay, physician to Louis XV. and to Madame de Pompadour, who lived in the house of the latter at Versailles, saw the king one day rush in suddenly, and felt alarmed. Madame du Hausset, the witty femme de chambre, who has left such curious memoirs, inquired of him why he seemed so uneasy. “Madam,” returned he, “whenever I see the king, I say to myself: ‘There is a man who can cut my head off.’ ” “Ohl” said she “the king is too good!”
The lady’s maid thus summed up, in one word, the guarantees of the monarchy.
The king was too good to cut a man’s head off; that was no longer agreeable to custom. But he could, with one word, send him to the Bastille, and there forget him.
There were some twenty Bastilles in France, of which six only (in 1775) contained three hundred prisoners. At Paris, in 1779, there were about thirty prisons where people might be incarcerated without any sentence. An infinite number of convents were subsidiary to these Bastilles.
All these state-prisons, towards the close of the reign of Louis XIV, were, like everything else, controlled by the Jesuits. They were, in their hands, instruments of torture for the Protestants and the Jansenists–dens for conversion. A secrecy more profound than that of the leads and the wells of Venice, the oblivion of the tomb, enshrouded everything. The Jesuits were the confessors of the Bastille, and of many other prisons; the prisoners who died were buried under false names in the church of the Jesuits. Every means of terror was in their hands, especially those dungeons whence the prisoners occasionally came out with their ears or noses gnawed away by the rats. Not only of terror, but of flattery also–both so potent with female prisoners. The almoner, to render grace more efficacious, employed even culinary arguments, starving, feeding, pampering the fair captive according as she yielded or resisted. More than one state-prison is mentioned in which the gaolers and the Jesuits paid alternate visits to the female prisoners, and had children by them. One preferred to strangle herself.
The lieutenant of police went, from time to time, to breakfast at the Bastille. That was reckoned as a visit,–a magisterial supervision. That magistrate was ignorant of everything; and yet it was he alone who gave an account to the minister. One family, one dynasty, Chateauneuf, his son La Vrilliere, and his grandson Saint-Florentin (who died in 1777) possessed, for a century, the department of the state-prisons and the lettres-de-cachet. For this dynasty to subsist, it was necessary to have prisoners; when the Protestants were liberated, their places were filled up with the Jansenists; next, they took men of letters, philosophers, the Votaires, Frerets, Diderots. The minister used to give generously blank lettres-de-cachet to the intendants, the bishops, and people in the administration. Saint-Florentin, alone, gave away as many as 50,000. Never had man’s dearest treasure, liberty, been so lavishly squandered. These letters were the subject of a profitable traffic; they were sold to fathers who wanted to get rid of their sons, and given to pretty women, who were inconvenienced by their husbands. the last cause of imprisonment was one of the most common.
And all through good nature. The king was too goo to refuse a lettre-de cachet to a great lord. The intendant was too good-natured not to grant one at a lady’s request. The government-clerks, mistresses of the clerks, and the friends of these mistresses, through good nature, civility or mere politeness, obtained, gave, or lent, those terrible orders by which a man was buried alive. Buried;–for such was the carelessness and levity of those amiable clerks,–almost all nobles, fashionable men, all occupied with their pleasures,–that they never had time, when once the poor fellow was shut up, to think of his position.
Thus the government of grace, with all it advantages,–descending from the king to the lowest clerk,–disposed, according to caprice or fancy, of liberty, of life…
The Bastille, the lettre de cachet, is the king’s excommunication.
Are the excommunicated to die? No. It would require a decision by the king, a resolution painful to take, which would grieve the king himself. It would be a judgement, between him and his conscience. Let us save him the task of judging, of killing. There is a middle term between life and death; a lifeless buried life. Let us organize the world expressly for oblivion…
While I’ve been writing these lines, a mountain, a Bastille has been crushing my breast. Alas! why stay so long, talking of dilapidated prisons, and wretches whom death has delivered? The world is covered with prisons, from Spielberg to Siberia, from Spandau to Mont.-St.-Michel.! The world is a prison!
Vast silence of the globe, stifled groans and sobs from the ever-silent earth, I hear you but too plainly. The captive mind, dumb among inferior animals, and musing in the barbarous world of Africa and Asia, thinks, and sufferes in our Europe!
Where does it speak, if not in Frane, in spite of chains? It is ever here that the mute genius of the earth finds a voice,–an organ. The world thinks, France speaks.
And it precisely on that account the Bastille of Paris (I would rather say the prison of thought), was, of all other Bastilles, execrable, infamous, and accursed. From the last century, Paris was already the voice of the globe. The earth spoke by the voice of three men-Voltaire, Jean-Jacques, and Montesquieu. That the interpreters of the world should behold unworthy threats perpetually suspended over them, that the narrow issue through which the agony of mankind could breathe its sighs, should ever be shut up, was beyond human endurance.
Our fathers shivered that Bastille to pieces, tore away its stones with their bleeding hands, and flung them afar. Afterwards, they seized them again; and, having hewn them into a different form, in order that they might be trampled under foot by the people for ever, built with them the Bridge of Revolution!
All other prisons had become more merciful; but this one had become more cruel. From reign to reign, they diminished what the gaolers would laughingly term,–the liberties of the Bastille. The windows were walled up one after another, and other bars were added. During the reign of Louis XVI., the use of the garden and the walk on the towers were prohibited. ‘
About this period two circumstances occurred which added to the general indignation,–Llnguet’s memoirs, which made what was more decisive, the unwritten, unprinted case of Latude: whispered mysteriously, and transmitted from mouth to mouth, its effect was only rendered more terrible.
For my part, I must acknowledge the extremely agonizing effect which the prisoner’s letters produced on me. Though a sworn enemy to barbarous fictions about everlasting punishments, I found myself praying to God to construct a hell for tyrants.
Ah! M. de Sartines, Ah! Madame de Pompadour, how heavy is your burden! How plainly do we perceive, by that history, how, having once embraced injustice, we go on from bad to worse; how terror, descending from the tyrant to the slave, returns again more forcibly to torment the tyrant. Having once kept this man a prisoner without judgment, for some trifling fault, Madame de Pompadour and M. de Sartines are obliged to hold him captive for ever, and seal over him with an eternal stone the hell of silence.
But that cannot be. That stone is ever restless; and a low, terrible voice–a sulphurous blast–is ever arising. In 1781, Sartines feels its dread effect,–in 1784, the king himself is hurt by it,–in 1789, the people know all, see all, even the ladder by which the prisoner escaped. In 1793, they guillotine the family of Sartines.
For the confusion of tyrants, it so happened that they had in that prisoner confined a daring, terrible man, whom nothing could subdue, whose voice shook the very walls, whose spirit and audacity were invincible. A body of iron, indestructible, which was to wear out all their prisons, the Bastille, Vincennes, Charenton, and lastly the horrors of Bicetre, wherein any other would have perished.
What makes the accusation heavy, overwhelming, and without appeal, is, that this man, good or bad, after escaping twice, twice surrendered himself by his own acts. Once, from his hiding-place, he wrote to Madame de Pompadour, and she caused him to be seized again! The second time, he goes to Versailles, wishes to speak to the king, reaches his antechamber, and she orders him again to be seized. What! Not even in the king’s apartment a sacred asylum?
I am unfortunately obliged to say that in the feeble, effeminate, declining society of that period, there were a great many philanthopists,–ministers, magistrates, and great lords, to mourn over the adventure; but not one stirred. Malesherbes wept, and so did Gourgues, and Lamoignon, and Rohan,–they all wept bitterly.
He was lying upon his dunghill at Bicetre, literally devoured by vermin, lodged under ground, and often howling with hunger. He had addressed one more memorial to some philanthropist or other, by means of a drunken turnkey. The latter luckily lost it, and a woman picked it up. She read it, and shuddered; she did not weep, but acted instantly.
Madame Legros was a poor mercer who lived by her work, by sewing in her shop; her husband was a private teacher of Latin. She did not fear to embark in that terrible undertaking. She saw with her firm good sense what others did not, or would not, see: that the wretched man was not mad, but the victim of a frightful necessity, by which the government was obliged to conceal and perpetuate the infamy of its old transgressions. She saw it, and was neither discouraged nor afraid. No heroism was ever more complete: she had the courage to undertake; the energy to persevere; and the obstinacy to sacrifice every day and every hour; the courage to despise the threats, the sagacity, and saintly plots of every kind· in order to elude and foil the calumny of the tyrants.
For three consecutive years, she persevered in her endeavours with an unheard-of obstinacy; employing in the pursuit of justice and equity that singular eagerness peculiar to the huntsman or the gamester, and to which we seldom resort but for the gratification of our evil passions. All kinds of misfortunes beset her; but she will not give up the cause. Her father dies; then her mother; she loses her little business, is blamed by her relations, nay, subjected to villainous suspicion. They tax her with being the mistress of that prisoner in whom she is so much interested. The mistress of that spectre, that corpse, devoured with filth and vermin!
The temptation of temptations, the summit, the highest point of the Calvary are the complaints, the injustices, the distrust of that very man for whom she is wearing herself out, sacrificing herself.
Oh! It is a grand sight to see that poor woman, so ill dressed, begging from door to door, courting the valets to gain admittance into the mansions, pleading her cause before grandees, and demanding their assistance.
The police are furious and indignant. Madame Legros may be kidnapped, shut up, lost for ever; everybody gives her warning. The lieutenant of police sends for her, and threatens her; he finds her firm and unalterable; it is she who makes him tremble.
Happily, they manage to get her the protection of Madame Duchesne, a femme de chambre to the princesses. She sets out for Versailles, on foot, in the depth of winter; she was in the seventh month of her pregnancy. The protectress was absent; she runs after her, sprains her foot, but still runs on. Madame Duchesne sheds many tears, but alas! what can she do? One femme de chambre against two or three ministers; it is a difficult game! She was holding the petition, when an abbe of the court, who happened to be present, tore it out of her hands, telling her that it was all about a miserable mad-man, and that she must not interfere.
A word of this sort was enough to freeze the heart of Marie Antoinette, who had been told about the matter. She had tears in her eyes; someone spoke in jest; all was over.
There was hardly a better man in France than the king. At length they applied to him. Cardinal de Rohan (a debauchee, but charitable after all) spoke three times to Louis XVI., who thrice refused to interfere. Louis XVI. was too good not to believe M. de Sartines. He was no longer in power, but that was no reason for dishonouring him, and handing him over to his enemies. Setting Sartines out of the question, we must say that Louis XVI. was fond of the Bastille, and would not wrong it, or injure its reputation.
The king was very humane. He had suppressed the deep dungeons of the Chatelet, done away with Vincennes and created La Force to receive prisoners for debt, to separate them from criminals.
But the Bastille! the Bastille! That was an old servant not to be lightly ill-treated by the ancient monarchy. It was a mystery of terror, what Tacitus calls, “Instrumentum regni.”
When the count d’Artois and the Queen, wishing to have Figaro played, read it to him, he merely observed, as an un answerable objection, “Then must the Bastille be suppressed?”
When the Revolution of Paris took place, in July 1789, the king, indifferent enough, seemed to be reconciled to the matter. But when he was informed that the Parisian municipality had ordered the demolition of the Bastille, he seemed as if he had been shot to the heart; “Ohl” said he, “this is awful!”
He was unable, in 1781, to listen to a request that compromised the Bastille. He rejected also the one which Rohan presented to him in favour of Latude. But noble ladies insisted. He then made a conscientious study of the business, read all the papers; they were few, save those of the police and people interested in keeping the victim in prison until death. At length he decided that he was a dangerous man, and that he could never restore him to liberty.
Never! Any other person would have stopped there. Well then, what is not done by the king shall be done in spite of him. Madame Legros persists. She is well received by the Conde family, ever discontented and grumbling; welcomed by the young duke of Orleans and his kind-hearted spouse, the daughter of the good Penthievre; and hailed by the philosophers, by the Marquis de Condorcet, perpetual secretary of the Academy of Sciences, by Dupaty, by Villette, Voltaire’s quasi son in-law, &c. &c.
The public voice murmurs louder and louder, like a flood, or the waves of the rising tide. Necker had dismissed Sartines; his friend and successor, Lenoir, had also fallen in his turn. Perseverance will presently be crowned. Latude is obstinately bent on living, and Madame Legros as obstinately bent on delivering Latude.
The queen’s man, Breteuil, succeeds in 1783; he wants to win admirers for her. He allows the Academy to award the prize for virtue to Madame Legros, to crown her–on the singular condition that no reasons for the award be given.
At length, in 1784, they force from Louis XVI, the deliverance of Latude. And a few weeks after, comes a strange and whimsical ordinance enjoining the intendants never more to incarcerate anybody, at the request of families, without a well-grounded reason, and to indicate the duration of confinement, &c. That is to say, they unveiled the depth of the monstrous abyss of arbitrariness into which France had been plunged. She already knew much; but the government confessed still more.
From the priest to the king, from the Inquisition to the Bastille, the road is straight, but long. Holy, holy Revolution, how slowly dost thou come!–I, who have been waiting for thee for a thousand years in the furrows of the middle ages, what must I wait still longer?–Oh! how slowly time passes! Oh! how I have counted the hours. Wilt thou never arrive?
Men believed no longer in its near approach. All had foreseen the Revolution in the middle of the century. Nobody, at the end, believed in it. Far from Mont-Blanc, you see it; when at its foot, you see it no more…
The Taking of the Bastille, July 14, 1789
VERSAILLES, with an organised government, a king, ministers, a general, and an army, was all hesitation, doubt, uncertainty, and in a state of the most complete moral anarchy.
Paris, all commotion, destitute of every legal authority, and in the utmost confusion, attained, on the 14th of July, what is morally the highest degree of order,–unanimity of feeling.
On the 13th, Paris thought only of defending itself; on the 14th, it attacked.
On the evening of the 13th, some doubt still existed, but none remained in the morning. The evening had been stormy, agitated by a whirlwind of ungovernable frenzy. The morning was still and serene,–an awful calm.
With daylight, one idea dawned upon Paris, and all were illumined with the same ray of hope. A light broke upon every mind, and the same voice thrilled through every heart: “Go! and thou shalt take the Bastille!” That was impossible, unreasonable, preposterous. And yet everybody believed it. And the thing was done.
The Bastille, though an old fortress, was nevertheless impregnable, unless besieged for several days and with an abundance of artillery. The people had, in that crisis, neither the time nor the means to make a regular siege. Had they done so, the Bastille had no cause for fear, having enough provisions to wait for succour so near at hand, and an immense supply of ammunition. Its walls, ten feet thick at the· top of the towers, and thirty or forty at the base, might long laugh at cannon-balls; and its batteries firing down upon Paris, could, in the meantime, demolish the whole of the· Marais and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Its towers, pierced with windows and loop-holes, protected by double and triple gratings, enabled the garrison, in full security, to make a dreadful carnage of its assailants.
The attack on the Bastille was by no means reasonable. It was an act of faith.
Nobody proposed; but all believed, and all acted. Along the streets, the quays, the bridges, and the boulevards, the crowd shouted to the crowd: “To the Bastille! The Bastille!” And the tolling of the tocsin thundered in every ear: “a la Bastille!”
Nobody, I repeat, gave the impulse. The orators of the Palais Royal passed the time in drawing up a list of proscription, in condemning the queen to death, as well as Madame de Polignac, Artois, Flesselles the provost, and others. The names of the conquerors of the Bastille do not include one of these makers of motions. The Palais Royal was not the starting-point, neither was it to the Palais Royal that the conquerors brought back the spoils and prisoners.
Still less had the electors, assembled in the Hotel-de-Ville, the idea of the attack. On the contrary, in order to prevent it, as well as the carnage which the Bastille could so easily make, they went so far as to promise the governor, that if he withdrew his cannon he should not be attacked. The electors did not behave treacherously, though they were accused of having done so; but they had no faith.
Who had? They who had also the devotion and the strength to accomplish their faith. Who? Why, the people,–everybody.
Old men who have had the happiness and the misery to see all that has happened in this unprecedented half century, in which ages seem to be crowded together, declare, that the grand and national achievements of the Republic and the Empire, had nevertheless a partial non-unanimous character, but that the 14th of July alone was the day of the whole people. Then let that great day remain ever one of the eternal fetes of the human race, not only as having been the first of deliverance. but as having been superlatively the day of concord!
What had happened during that short night, on which nobody slept, for every uncertainty and difference of opinion to disappear with the shades of darkness, and all to have the same thoughts in the morning?
What took place at the Palais Royal and the Hotel-de-Ville is well known; but what would be far more important to know, is, what took place on the domestic hearth of the people.
For there indeed, as we may sufficiently divine by what followed, there every heart summoned the past to its day of judgment, and every one, before a blow was struck, pronounced its irrevocable condemnation. History returned that night a long history of sufferings to the avenging instinct of the people. The souls of fathers who, for so many years died in silence, descended into their sons, and spoke.
O brave men, you who till then hid been so patient, so pacific, who, on that day, were to inflict the heavy blow of Providence, did not the sight of your families, whose only resource is in you, daunt your hearts? Far from it: gazing once more at your slumbering children, those children for whom that day was to create a destiny, your expanding minds embraced the free generations arising from their cradle, and felt at that moment the whole battle of the future!
The future and the past both gave the same reply; both cried Advance! And what is beyond all time,–beyond the future and the past,–immutable right, said the same. The immortal sentiment of the Just imparted a temper of adamant to the fluttering heart of man; it said to him: “Go in peace; what matters? Whatever may happen, I am with thee, in death or victory!”
And yet what was the Bastille to them? The lower orders seldom or never entered it. Justice spoke to them, and, a voice that speaks still louder to the heart, the voice of humanity and mercy; that still small voice which seems so weak but that overthrows towers, had, for ten years, been shaking the very foundations of the doomed Bastille.
Let the truth be told; if any one had the glory of causing its downfall, it was that intrepid woman who wrought so long for the deliverance of Latude against all the powers in the world. Royalty refused, and the nation forced it to pardon; that woman, or that hero, was crowned in a public solemnity. To crown her who had, so to speak, forced open the state prisons, was already branding them with infamy, devoting them to public execration, and demolishing them in the hearts and desires of men. That woman had shaken the Bastille to its foundations.
From that day, the people of the town and the faubourg, who, in that much-frequented quarter; were ever passing and re-passing in its shadow, never failed to curse it. And well did it deserve their hatred. There were many other prisons, but this one was the abode of capricious arbitrariness, wanton despotism, and ecclesiastical and bureaucratic inquisition. The court, so devoid of religion in that age, had made the Bastille a dungeon for free minds,–the prison of thought. Less crowded during the reign of Louis XVI, it had become more cruel; the prisoners were deprived of their walk: more rigorous, and no less unjust: we blush for France, to be obliged to say that the crime of one of the prisoners was to have given a useful secret to our navy! They were afraid lest he should tell it elsewhere.
The Bastille was known and detested by the whole world. Bastille and tyranny were, in every language, synonymous terms. Every nation, at the news of its destruction, believed it had recovered its liberty.
In Russia, that empire of mystery and silence,–that monstrous Bastille between Europe and Asia, scarcely had the news arrived when you might have seen men of every nation shouting and weeping for joy in the open streets; they rushed into each other’s arms to tell the news: “Who can help weeping for joy? The Bastille is taken.”
On the very morning of that great day, the people had as yet no arms.
The powder they had taken from the arsenal the night before, and put in the Hotel-de-Ville, was slowly distributed to them, during the night, by only three men. The distribution having ceased for a moment, about two o’clock, the desperate crowd hammered down the doors of the magazine, every blow striking fire on the nails.
No guns!–It was necessary to go and take them, to carry them off from the Invalides; that was very hazardous. The Hotel des Invalides is, it is true, an open mansion; but Sombreuil, the governor, a brave old soldier, had received a strong detachment of artillery and some cannon, without counting those he had already. Should those cannon be brought to act, the crowd might be taken in the flank, and easily dispersed by the regiments that Besenval had at the military school.
Would those foreign regiments have refused to act? In spite of what Besenval says to the contrary, there is reason to doubt it. What is much plainer, is, that being left without orders, he was himself full of hesitation, and appeared paralysed in mind. At five o’clock that same morning, he had received a strange visit;–a man rushed in; his countenance was livid, his eyes flashed fire, his language was impetuous and brief, and his manner audacious. The old coxcomb, who was the most frivolous officer of the ancien regime, but brave and collected, gazed at the man, and was struck with admiration. “Baron,” said the man, “I come to advise you to make no resistance; the barriers will be burnt to-day; I am sure of it, but cannot prevent it; neither can you–do not try.”
Besenval was not afraid; but he had, nevertheless, felt the shock, and suffered its moral effect. “There was something eloquent in that man,” says he, “that struck me; I ought to have had him arrested, and yet I did not.” It was the ancien regime and. the Revolution meeting face to face, and the latter left the former lost in astonishment.
Before nine o’clock thirty thousand men were in front of the lnvalides; the Attorney General of the City was at their head: the committee of the electors had not dared to refuse him. Among them were seen a few companies of the French Guards, who had escaped from their barracks, the Clerks of the Basoche, in their old red dresses, and the Curate of Saint Etienne-du-Mont, who, being named president of the Assembly formed in his church, did not decline the perilous office of heading this armed multitude.
Old Sombreuil acted very adroitly. He showed himself at the gate, said it was true he had guns, but that they had been intrusted to him as a deposit, and that his honour, as a soldier and a gentleman, did not allow him to be a traitor.
This unexpected argument stopped the crowd at once; a proof of the admirable candour of the people in that early age of the Revolution. Sombreuil added, that he had sent a courier to Versailles, and was expecting the answer; backing all this with numerous protestations of attachment and friendship for the Hotel-de-Ville and the city in general.
The majority was willing to wait. Luckily, there was one man present who was less scrupulous, and prevented the crowd from being so easily mystified.
‘There is no time to be lost,” said he, “and whose arms are these but the nation’s?” Then they leaped into the trenches, and the Hotel was invaded; twenty-eight thousand muskets were found in the cellars, and carried off, together with twenty pieces of cannon.
All this between nine and eleven o’clock; but, let us hasten to the Bastille.
The governor, De Launey, had been under arms ever since two o’clock in the morning of the 13th; no precaution had been neglected; besides his cannon on the towers, he had others from the arsenal, which he placed in the court, and loaded with grape-shot. He caused six cart-loads of paving stones, cannon-balls, and old iron, to be carried to the tops of the towers, in order to crush his assailants. In the bottom loop-holes he had placed twelve large rampart guns, each of which carried a pound and a half of bullets. He kept below his trustiest soldiers, thirty-two Swiss, who had no scruple in firing upon Frenchmen. His eighty-two Invalides [Pensioned soliders (Ed. note)] were mostly distributed in different posts, far from the gates, upon the towers. He had evacuated the outer buildings which covered the foot of the fortress.
On the 13th, nothing save curses bestowed on the Bastille by passersby.
On the 14th, about midnight, seven shots were fired at the sentinels upon the towers.–Alarm!–The governor ascends with staff, remains half-an-hour, listening to the distant murmuring of the town; finding all quiet he descends.
The next morning many people were about, and, from time to time, young men (from the Palais Royal, or others) were calling out that they must give them arms. They pay no attention to them. They hear and introduce the pacific deputation of the Hotel-de-Ville, which, about ten o’clock, intreats the governor to withdraw his cannon, promising that if he does not fire, he shall not be attacked. He, willingly, accepts, having no orders to fire, and highly delighted, obliges the envoys to
breakfast with him.
As they were leaving, a man arrives who speaks in a very different tone.
A violent, bold man, unacquainted with human respect, fearless and pitiless, knowing neither obstacle nor delay, and bearing in his breast the passionate genius of the Revolution–he came to summon the Bastille.
Terror accompanied him. The Bastille was afraid; the governor, without knowing why, was troubled and stammered.
That man was Thuriot, a monster of ferocity, one of the race of Danton. We meet with him twice, in the beginning and at the end. And twice his words are deadly; he destroys the Bastille, and he kills Robespierre.[1]
He was not to pass the bridge; the governor would not allow it; and yet he passed. From the first court, he marches to a second; another refusal; but he passes on, and crosses the second ditch by the draw-bridge. Behold him now in front of the enormous iron gate by which the third court was shut. This seemed a monstrous well rather than a court, its eight towers united together, forming its inside walls. Those frightful gigantic towers did not look towards the ·court, nor had they a single window. At their feet, in their shadow, was the prisoners’ only walk. Lost at the bottom of the pit, and overwhelmed by those enormous masses, he could contemplate only the stern nudity of the walls. On one side only, had been placed a clock, between two figures of captives in chains, as if to fetter time itself, and make the slow succession of hours still more burdensome.
There were the loaded cannon, the garrison, and the staff. Thuriot was daunted by nothing. “Sir,” said he to the governor, “I summon you, in the name of the people, in the name of honour, and of our native land, to withdraw your cannon, and surrender the Bastille.”–Then, turning towards the garrison, he repeated the same words.
If M. De Launey had been a true soldier, he would not thus have introduced the envoy into the heart of the citadel; still less would he have let him address the garrison. But, it is very necessary to remark, that the officers of the Bastille were mostly officers by favour of the lieutenant of police; even those who had never seen service, wore the cross of Saint Louis. All of them, from the governor down to the scullions, had bought their places, and turned them to the best advantage. The governor found means to add every year to his salary of sixty thousand francs, a sum quite as large by his rapine. He supplied his establishment at the prisoners’ expense; he had reduced their supply of firewood, and made a profit on their wine, and their miserable furniture. What was most infamous and barbarous, was, that he let out to a gardener the little garden of the Bastille, over a bastion; and, for that miserable profit, he had deprived the prisoners of that walk, as well as of that on the towers; that is to say, of air and light.
That greedy, sordid soul had moreover good reason to be dispirited; he felt he was known; Linguet’s terrible memoirs had rendered De Launey infamous throughout Europe. The Bastille was hated; but the governor was personally detested. The furious imprecations of the people, which he heard, he appropriated to himself; and he was full of anxiety and fear.
Thuriot’s words acted differently on the Swiss and the French. The Swiss did not understand them; their captain, M. de Flue, was resolved to hold out. But the Staff and the Invalides were much shaken; those old soldiers, in habitual communication with the people of the faubourg, had no desire to fire upon them: Thus the garrison was divided; what will these two parties do? If they cannot agree, will they fire upon each other?
The dispirited governor said, in an apologetic tone, what had just been agreed with the town. He swore, and made the garrison swear, that if they were not attacked they would not begin.
Thuriot did not stop there. He desired to ascend to the top of the towers, to see whether the cannon were really withdrawn. De Launey, who had been all this time repenting of having allowed him already to penetrate so far, refused; but, being pressed by his officers, he ascended with Thuriot.
The cannon were drawn back and masked, but still pointed. The view from that height. of a hundred and forty feet was immense and startling; the·streets and openings full of people, and all the garden of the arsenal crowded with armed men. But, on the other side, a black mass was advancing. It was the faubourg Saint Antoine.
The governor turned pale. He grasped Thuriot by the arm: ”What have you done? You abuse your privilege as an envoy! You have betrayed me!”
They were both standing on the brink, and De Launey had a sentinel on the tower. Everybody in the Bastille was bound by oath to the governor; in his fortress, he was king and the law. He was still able to avenge himself.
But, on the contrary, it was Thuriot who made him afraid: “Sir,” said he, “one word more, and I swear to you that one of us two shall be hurled headlong into the moat!”
At the same moment, the sentinel approached, as frightened as the governor, and, addressing Thuriot: ”Pray, Sir,” said he, “show yourself; there is no time to lose; they are marching forward. Not seeing you, they will attack us.” He leaned over through the battlements; and the people seeing him alive, and standing boldly upon the tower, uttered deafening shouts of joy and approbation.
Thuriot descended with the governor, again crossed through the court, and addressing the garrison once more: “I am going to give my report,” said he; “I hope the people will not refuse to furnish a citizen guard to keep the Bastille with you.”
The people expected to enter the Bastille as soon as Thuriot came forth. When they saw him depart, to make his report to the Hotel-de-Ville, they took him for a traitor, and threatened him. Their impatience was growing into fury. The crowd seized on three Invalides, and wanted to tear them to pieces. They also seized on a young lady whom they believed to be the governor’s daughter, and some wanted to bum her, if he refused to surrender. Others dragged her from them.
What will become of us, said they, if the Bastille be not taken before night? The burly Santerre, a brewer, whom the faubourg. had elected its commander, proposed to bum the place by throwing into it poppyseed and spikenard oil that they had seized the night before, and which they could fire with phosphorus. He sent off for the fire-engines.
A blacksmith, an old soldier, without wasting time in idle talk, sets bravely to work. He marches forward, hatchet in hand, leaps upon the roof of a small guard-house, near the first drawbridge, and, under a shower of bullets, coolly plies his hatchet, cuts away; and loosens the chains; down falls the bridge. The crowd rush over it, and enter the court.
The firing began at once from the towers and from the loop holes below. The assailants fell in crowds, and did no harm to the garrison. Of all the shots they fired that day, two took effect: only one of the besieged was killed.
The committee of electors, who saw the wounded already arriving at the Hotel-de-Ville, and deplored the shedding of blood, would have wished to stop it. There was now but one way of doing so, which was to summon the Bastille, in the name of the city, to surrender, and to allow the citizen-guard to enter. The provost hesitated for a long time; Fauchet insisted; and other electors entreated him. They went as deputies; but in the fire and smoke, they were not even seen; neither the Bastille nor the people ceased firing. The deputies were in the greatest danger. A second deputation, headed by the city proctor, with a drum and a flag of truce, was perceived from the fortress. The soldiers who were upon the towers hoisted a white flag, and reversed their. arms. The people ceased firing, followed the deputation, and entered the court. There, they were welcomed by a furious discharge, which brought down several men by the side of the deputies. Very probably the Swiss who were below with De Launey, paid no attention to the signs made by the Invalides.
The rage of the people was inexpressible. Ever since the morning, it had been said that the governor had enticed the crowd into the court to fire upon them; they believed themselves twice deceived, and resolved to perish, or to be revenged on the traitors. To those who were calling them back, they exclaimed in a transport of frenzy: ‘”Our bodies at least shall serve to fill the moats!” And on they rushed obstinately and nothing daunted, amid a shower of bullets and against those murderous towers, as if, by dying in heaps, they could at length overthrow them.
But then, numbers of generous men, who had hitherto taken no part in the action, beheld, with increased indignation, such an unequal struggle, which was actual assassination. They wanted to lend their assistance. It was no longer possible to hold back the French Guards; they all sided with the people. They repaired to the commandants nominated by the town, and obliged them to surrender their five cannons. Two columns were formed, one of workmen and citizens, the other of French Guards. The former took for its chief a young man, of heroic stature and strength, named Hullin, a clockmaker of Geneva, but now a servant, being gamekeeper to the Marquis de Conflans; his Hungarian costume as a chasseur was doubtless taken for a uniform; and thus did the livery of servitude guide the people to the combat of liberty. The leader of the other column was Elie, an officer of fortune belonging to the Queen’s regiment, who, changing his private dress for his brilliant uniform, showed himself bravely a conspicuous object to both friends and foes.
Among his soldiers, was one admirable for his valour, youth, and candour, Marceau, one of the glories of France, who remained satisfied with fighting, and claimed no share in the honour of the victory.
Things were not very far advanced when they arrived. Three cart-loads of straw had been pushed forward and set on fire, and the barracks and kitchens had been burnt down. They knew not what else to do. The despair of the people was vented upon the Hotel-de-Ville. They blamed the provost and the electors, and urged them, in threatening language, to issue formal orders for the siege of the Bastille. But they could never induce them to give those orders.
Several strange and singular means were proposed to the electors for king the fortress. A carpenter advised the erection of a Roman catapult, in wood-work, to hurl stones against the walls. The commanders of the town said it was necessary to attack in a regular way, and open a trench. During this long and useless debate, a letter at that moment intercepted, was brought in and read; it was from Besenval to de Launey, commanding him to hold out to the last extremity.
To appreciate the value of time at that momentous crisis, and understand the dread felt at any delay, we must know that there were false alarms every instant. It was supposed that the court, informed at two o’clock of the attack on the Bastille, which had begun at noon, would take that opportunity of pouring down its Swiss and German troops upon Paris. Again, would those at the Military School pass the day in inaction? That was unlikely. What Besenval says about the little reliance he could place on his troops seems like an: excuse. The Swiss showed themselves very firm at the Bastille, as appeared from the carnage; the German dragoons had, on the 12th, fired several times, and killed some of the French Guards; the latter had killed several dragoons; a spirit of mutual hatred ensured fidelity.
In the faubourg Saint Honore, the paving-stones were dug up, the attack being expected every moment; La Villette was in the same state, and a regiment really came and occupied it, but too late.
Every appearance of dilatoriness appeared treason. The provost’s shuffling conduct caused him to be suspected, as well as the electors. The exasperated crowd perceived that it was wasting time with them. An old man exclaimed·: “Friends, why do we remain with these traitors? Let us rather hasten to the Bastille!”‘ They all vanished. The electors, thunderstruck, found themselves alone. One of them goes out, but returns with a livid, spectral countenance: “You have not two minutes to live,” says he, “if you remain here. La Greve is filled by a furious crowd. Here they are coming.” They did not, however, attempt to fly; and that saved their lives.
All the fury of the people was now concentrated on the provost. The envoys of the different districts came successively to accuse him of treachery to his face. A part of the electors, finding themselves compromised with the people, by his imprudence and falsehood, turned round and accused him. Others, the good old Dussaulx (the translator of Juvenal), and the intrepid Fauchet endeavoured to defend him, innocent or guilty, and to save him from death. Being forced by the people to move from their office into the great hall of Saint Jean, they surrounded him, and Fauchet sat down by his side. The terrors of death were impressed on his countenance. “I saw him,” says Dussaulx, “chewing his last mouthful of bread; it stuck in his teeth, and he kept it in his mouth two hours before he could swallow it.” Surrounded with papers, letters, and people who came to speak to him on business, and amid shouts of death, he strove hard to reply with affability. The crowds of the Palais Royal and from the district of Saint Roch, being the most inveterate, Fauchet hastened to them to pray for pardon. The district body was assembled in the church of Saint Roch; twice did Fauchet ascend the pulpit, praying, weeping, and uttering the fervent language which his noble heart dictated in that hour of need; his robe, torn to tatters by the bullets of the Bastille, was eloquent also; it prayed for the people, for the honour of that great day, and that the cradle of liberty might be left pure and undefiled.
The provost and the electors remained in the hall of Saint Jean, between life and death, guns being levelled at them several times. All those who were present, says Dussaulx, were like savages; sometimes they would listen and look on in silence; sometimes a terrible murmur, like distant thunder, arose from the crowd. Many spoke and shouted; but the greater number seemed astounded by the novelty of the sight. The uproar, the exclamations, the news, the alarms, the intercepted letters, the discoveries, true or false, so many secrets revealed, so many men brought before the tribunal, perplexed the mind and reason. One of the electors exclaimed: “Is not doomsday come?” So dizzy, so confounded was the crowd, that they had forgotten everything, even the provost and the Bastille.
It was half-past five when a shout arose from La Greve. An immense noise, like the growling· of distant thunder, resounds nearer and nearer, rushing on with the rapidity and roaring of a tempest. The Bastille is taken.
That hall already so full is at once invaded by a thousand men, and ten thousand pushing behind. The wood-work cracks, the benches are thrown down, and the barrier driven upon the bureau, the bureau upon the president.
All were armed in a fantastical manner; some almost naked, others dressed in every colour. One man was borne aloft upon their shoulders and crowned with laurel; it was Elie, with all the spoils and prisoners around him. At the head, amid all that din, which would have drowned a clap of thunder, advanced a young man full of meditation and religion; he carried suspended and pierced with his bayonet a vile, a thrice accursed object,–the regulations of the Bastille.
The keys too were carried,–those monstrous, vile, ignoble keys,–worn out by centuries and the sufferings of men. Chance or Providence directed that they should be entrusted to a man who knew them but too well,–a former prisoner. The National Assembly placed them in its Archives; the old machine of tyrants thus lying beside the laws that had destroyed them. We still keep possession of those keys, in the iron safe of the Archives of France. Oh! would that the same iron-chest might contain the keys of all the Bastilles in the world!
Correctly speaking, the Bastille was not taken; it surrendered. Troubled by a bad conscience it went mad, and lost all presence of mind.
Some wanted to surrender; others went on firing, especially the Swiss, who, for five hours, pointed out, aimed at, and brought down whomsoever they pleased, without any danger or even the chance of being hurt in return. They killed eighty-three men and wounded eighty-eight. Twenty of the slain were poor fathers of families, who left wives and children to die of hunger.
Shame for such cowardly warfare, and the horror of shedding French blood, which but little affected the Swiss, at length caused the lnvalides to drop their arms. At four o’clock the subaltern officers begged and prayed De Launey to put an end to this massacre. He knew what he deserved; obliged to die one way or other, he had, for a moment, the horribly ferocious idea of blowing up the citadel: he would have destroyed one-third of Paris. His hundred and thirty-five barrels of gun-powder would have blown the Bastille into the air, and shattered or buried the whole faubourg, all the Marais, and the whole of the quartier of the Arsenal. He seized a match from a cannon. Two subaltern officers prevented the crime; they crossed their bayonets and barred his passage to the magazines. He then made a show of killing himself, and seized a knife, which they snatched from him.
He had lost his senses and could give no orders. When the French Guards had ranged their cannon and fired (according to some), the captain of the Swiss saw plainly that it was necessary to come to terms; he wrote and passed a note, in which he asked to be allowed to go forth with the honours of war. Refused. Next, that his life should be spared. Hullin and Elie promised it. The difficulty was to fulfill their promise. To prevent a revenge accumulating for ages, and now incensed by so many murders perpetrated by the Bastille, was beyond the power of man. An authority of an hour’s existence, that had but just come from La Greve, and was known only to the two small bands of the vanguard, was not adequate to keep in order the hundred thousand men behind.
The crowd was enraged, blind, drunk with the very sense of their danger. And yet they killed but one man in the fortress. They spared their enemies the Swiss, whom their smock-frocks caused to pass for servants or prisoners; but they ill-treated and wounded their friends the Invalides. They wished to have annihilated the Bastille; they pelted and broke to pieces the two slaves of the clock-dial; they ran up to the top of the towers to spurn the cannon; several attacked the stones, and tore their hands in dragging them away. They hastened to the dungeons to deliver the prisoners: two had become mad. One; frightened by the noise, wanted to defend himself, and was quite astonished when those who had battered down his door threw themselves into his arms and bathed him with their tears. Another, whose beard reached to his waist, inquired about the health of Louis XV, believing him to be still reigning. To those who asked him his name, he replied that he was called the Major of Immensity.
The conquerors were not yet at the end of their labours: in the Rue Saint Antoine they had to fight a battle of a different kind. On approaching La Greve, they came on successive crowds of men, who, having been unable to take any part in the fight, wanted at all events to do something, were it merely to massacre the prisoners. One was killed at the Rue des Toumelles, and another on the quay. Women, with dishevelled hair, came rushing forward, and recognizing their husbands among the slain, left them to fly upon their assassins; one of them, foaming at the mouth, ran about asking everybody for a knife.
De Launey was conducted and supported in that extreme danger by two men of extraordinary courage and strength, Hullin, and another. The latter went with him as far as the Petit Antoine, but was there tom from his side by the rush of the crowd. Hullin held fast. To lead his man from that spot to La Greve, which is so near, was more than the twelve labours of Hercules. No longer knowing how to act, and perceiving that they knew De Launey only by his being alone without a hat, he conceived the heroic idea of putting his own upon his head; and, from that moment, he received the blows intended for the governor. At length, he passed the Arcade Saint Jean; if he could but get him on the flight of steps, and push him toward the stairs, all was over. The crowd saw that very plainly, and accordingly made a desperate onset. The Herculean strength hitherto displayed by Hullin no longer served him here. Stifled by the pressure of the crowd around him, as in the crushing fold of an enormous boa, he lost his footing, was hurled to and fro, and thrown upon the pavement. Twice he regained his feet. The second time he beheld aloft the head of De Launey at the end of a pike.[2]
Another scene was unfolding in the hall of Saint Jean. The prisoners were there, in great danger of death. The crowd was particularly bent on punishing three Invalides, whom they supposed to have been the cannoneers of the Bastille. One was wounded; De la Salle, the commandant, by incredible efforts, and proclaiming loudly his title of commandant, at last managed to save him; whilst he was leading him out, the two others were dragged out and hung tip to the lamp at the comer of the Vannerie, facing the Hotel-de-Ville.
All this great commotion, which seemed to have caused Flesselles to be forgotten, was nevertheless what caused his destruction. His implacable accusers of the Palais Royal, few in number, but discontented to see the crowd occupied with any other business, kept close to the bureau, menacing him, and summoning him to follow them. At length he yielded: whether the long expectation of death appeared to him worse than death itself, or that he hoped to escape in the universal preoccupation about the great event of the day. “Well gentlemen,”said he, “let us go to the Palais Royal.” He had not reached the quay before a young man shot him through the head with a pistol bullet.
The dense multitude crowding the hall did not wish for bloodshed; according to an eye-witness, they were stupefied on beholding it. They stared gaping at that strange, prodigious, grotesque, and maddening spectacle. Arms of the middle ages and of every age were mingled together; centuries had come back again. Elie, standing on a table, with a helmet on his brow, and a sword hacked in three places, in his hand, seemed a Roman warrior. He was entirely surrounded by prisoners, and pleading for them. The French Guards demanded the pardon of the prisoners as their reward.
At that moment, a man, followed by his wife, is brought or rather carried in; it was the Prince de Montbarrey, a former minister, arrested at the barrier. The lady fainted; her husband was thrown upon the bureau, held down by the arms of twelve men, and bent double. The poor man, in that strange posture, explained that he had not been minister for a long time, and that his son has taken a prominent part in the revolution of his province. De la Salle, the commandant, spoke for him, and exposed himself to great danger. Meanwhile, the people relented a little, and for a moment let go their hold. De la Salle, a very powerful man, caught him up, and carried him off. This trial of strength pleased the people, and was received with applause.
At the same moment, the brave and excellent Elie found means to put an end at once to every intention of trial or condemnation. He perceived the children of the Bastille, and began to shout: “Pardon! for the children, pardon!”
Then you might have seen sunburnt faces and hands blackened with gunpowder, washed with big tears, falling like heavy drops of rain after a shower. Justice and vengeance were thought of no longer. The tribunal was broken up; for Elie had conquered the conquerors of the Bastille. They made the prisoners swear fidelity to the nation, and led them away; the Invalides marched off in peace to their Hotel; the French Guards took charge of the Swiss, placed them in safety within their ranks, conducting them to their own barracks, and gave them lodging and food.
What was most admirable, the widows showed themselves equally magnanimous. Though needy, and burdened with children, they were unwilling to receive alone a small sum allotted to them; they shared it with the widow of a poor Invalide who had prevented the Bastille from being blown up, but was killed by mistake. The wife of the besieged was thus adopted, as it were, by those of the besiegers.
Notes
1 He destroyed it in two ways. He introduced division and demoralization, and when it was taken, it was he who proposed to have it demolished. He killed Robespierre, by refusing to let him speak, on the 9th of thermidor. Thuriot was president of the Convention.
2 The royalist tradition which aspires to the difficult task of inspiring interest for the least interesting of men, has pretended that De Launey, still more heroic than Hullin, gave him his hat back again, wishing rather to die than expose him. The same tradition attributes the honour of a similar deed to Berthier, the intendant of Paris. Lastly, they relate that the major of the Bastille, on being recognized and defended at La Greve, by one of his former prisoners, whom he had treated with kindness, dismissed him, saying: “You will ruin yourself without saving me.” This last story, being authentic, very probably gave rise to the two others. As for De Launey and Berthier, there is nothing in their previous conduct to incline us to believe in the heroism of their last moments. The silence of Michaud, the biographer, in the article De Launey, drawn up from information furnished by that family, sufficiently shows that they did not believe in that tradition.