The Storming of the Bastille: A Hunt for Gunpowder, Not Prisoners

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When the crowd took the Bastille on July 14, 1789, it found seven prisoners: four forgers, two men with severe mental illness, and one locked up at his own family's request. This episode strips the myth from the day that began the French Revolution. France was bankrupt, in part from funding the American Revolution, and its tax burden fell on the Third Estate while bread consumed up to 80 percent of a worker's wages. When Louis XVI fired the popular finance minister Jacques Necker on July 11 and foreign mercenaries massed around Paris, the city concluded a massacre was coming and began a frantic search for weapons.

That search drove everything. The crowd seized roughly 30,000 muskets from the Invalides and found no powder, because 250 barrels had been moved to the Bastille. Fewer than a thousand people, mostly local artisans, went to get it. The fighting began with a misheard shout from the walls, and it ended in a lopsided slaughter, a surrender, and heads carried through the streets on pikes.

• The fortress was defended by 82 aging veterans and 32 Swiss mercenaries under Governor de Launay, who lunched with city negotiators before the violence began.
• Soldiers shouted for the crowd to withdraw after the outer drawbridge fell. In the noise, people took it as an invitation forward, and someone fired.
• Ninety-eight attackers died against a single defender. Mutinous French guards arriving with cannon forced the surrender at 5:30 p.m.
• Days earlier the Marquis de Sade, then a prisoner, had shouted through his window that guards were massacring inmates, feeding the neighborhood's worst fears.
• Entrepreneur Pierre-Francois Palloy demolished the fortress and sold its stones as miniature replicas. In 1790 Lafayette sent the main key to George Washington, and it still hangs at Mount Vernon.