The People Take the Fortress: Storming of the Bastille
1789 · event
On 14 July 1789 the crowds of Paris stormed the Bastille, the royal fortress-prison that loomed over the city as stone-made tyranny. Militarily it was almost nothing: the garrison surrendered within hours and only seven prisoners were inside. Symbolically, it was everything.
"Is it a revolt?" Louis XVI asked that evening. "No, Sire," came the reply, "it is a revolution." Within weeks feudalism was abolished and the Declaration of the Rights of Man proclaimed what kings had never permitted anyone to write down: men are born free and equal.
The Revolution would devour its own children in the Terror, but the idea escaped and never went back in the box. Liberté, égalité, fraternité crossed every border in Europe, and July 14th remains the day France gave the modern world its loudest birth-cry.