IN the remarkable book entitled Paris during the Revolution, M. Adolphe Schmidt writes : “All the purely revolutionary events, the events of the Fourteenth of July, of October 5 and 6, 1789, were the work of an obscure minority of reckless and violent revolutionists. If they succeeded, it was only because the great majority of the citizens avoided the scene of operations or were mere passive spectators there, attracted by curiosity, and giving in appearance an enhanced importance to the movement.” Further on he says : “After the fall of the Gironde,1 Dutard expressed himself in these terms : #8216;If, out of 50,000 Moderates, you succeed in collecting a compact body of no more than 3,000, I shall be much astonished; and if out of these 3000 there are to be found only 500 who are agreed, and courageous enough to express their opinion, I shall be still more astonished. 239 And these, in truth, must expect to be Septembrised.’2 ‘Twelve maniacs, with their blood well up, at the head of the Sansculotte section,’ writes Dutard in another report, ‘would put to flight the other forty-seven sections of Paris.’ Mercier, after the fall of the Gironde, thus expresses himself in regard to the reign of Terror : ‘Sixty brigands deluged France with blood : 500,000 men within our walls were witnesses of their atrocities, and were not brave enough to oppose them.’ ”
To enable the reader to understand the extraordinary and improbable event which is the subject of this chapter, it would be necessary to begin by explaining the circumstances and describing the material and moral state of things in which it happened; and that, unhappily, would occupy much space. Let us take the two principal facts, see what they led to, and then come to the events of the Fourteenth of July.
For its task of governing France, the royal power had in its hands no administrative instrument, or, at any rate, administrative instruments of a very rudimentary character. It ruled through tradition and sentiment. The royal power had been created by the affection and devotion of the nation, and in this devotion and affection lay its whole strength.
What, actually and practically, were the means of government in the hands of the king? “Get rid of lettres de cachet,” observed Malesherbes, “and you 240 deprive the king of all his authority, for the lettre de cachet is the only means he possesses of enforcing his will in the kingdom.” Now, for several years past, the royal power had practically renounced lettres de cachet. On the other hand, during the course of the eighteenth century, the sentiments of affection and devotion of which we have spoken had become enfeebled, or at least had changed their character. So it was that on the eve of the Revolution the royal power, which stood in France for the entire administration, had, if the expression may be allowed, melted into thin air.
Below the royal power, the lords in the country, the upper ten in the towns, constituted the second degree in the government. The same remarks apply here also. And unhappily it is certain that, over the greater part of France, the territorial lords had forgotten the duties which their privileges and their station imposed. The old attachment of the labouring classes to them had almost everywhere disappeared, and in many particulars had given place to feelings of hostility.
Thus on the eve of ’89 the whole fabric of the state had no longer any real existence; at the first shock it was bound to crumble into dust. And as, behind the fragile outer wall, there was no solid structure — no administrative machine, with its numerous, diverse, and nicely-balanced parts, like that which in our time acts as a buffer against the shocks of political crises, — the first blow aimed at the royal power was bound to plunge the whole country into a state of disorganization 241 and disorder from which the tyranny of the Terror, brutal, blood-stained, overwhelming as it was, alone could rescue it.
Such is the first of the two facts we desire to make clear. We come now to the second. Ever since the year 1780, France had been almost continually in a state of famine. The rapidity and the abundance of the international exchanges which in our days supply us constantly from the remotest corners of the world with the necessaries of life, prevent our knowing anything of those terrible crises which in former days swept over the nations. “The dearth,” writes Taine,” permanent, prolonged, having already lasted ten ears, and aggravated by the very outbreaks which it provoked, went on adding fuel to all the passions of men till they reached a blaze of madness.” The nearer we come to the Fourteenth of July,” says an eye witness, “the greater the famine becomes.” “In consequence of the bad harvest,” writes Schmidt, “the price of bread had been steadily rising from the opening of the year 1789. This state of things was utilized by the agitators who aimed at driving the people into excesses : these excesses in turn paralyzed trade. Business ceased, and numbers of workers found themselves without bread.”
A few words should properly be said in regard to brigandage under the ancien régime. The progress of manners and especially the development of executive government have caused it utterly to disappear. The reader’s imagination will supply all we have not space to 242 say. He will recollect the lengths of daring to which a man like Cartouche3 could go, and recall what the forest of Bondy4 was at the gates of Paris.
So grew up towards the end of the ancien régime what Taine has so happily called a spontaneous anarchy. In the four months preceding the capture of the Bastille, one can count more than three hundred riots in France. At Nantes, on January 9, 1789, the town hall was invaded, and the bakers’ shops pillaged. All this took place to the cries of “Vive le roi!” At Bray-sur-Seine, on May 1, peasants armed with knives and clubs forced the farmers to lower the price of corn. At Rouen, on May 28, the corn in the market place was plundered. In Picardy, a discharged carabineer put himself at the head of an armed band which attacked the villages and carried off the corn. On all sides houses were looted from roof to cellar. At Aupt, M. de Montferrat, defending himself, was “cut into little pieces.” At La Seyne, the mob brought a coffin in front of the house of one of the principal burgesses; he was told to prepare for death, and they would do him the honour to bury him. He escaped, and his house was sacked. We cull these facts haphazard from among hundreds of others.
The immediate neighbourhood of Paris was plunged 243 in terror. The batches of letters, still unpublished, preserved in the National Archives throw the most vivid light on this point. Bands of armed vagabonds scoured the country districts, pillaging the villages and plundering the crops. These were the “Brigands,” a term which constantly recurs in the documents, and more and more frequently as we approach the 14th of July. These armed bands numbered three, four, five hundred men. At Cosne, at Orleans, at Rambouillet, it was the same story of raids on the corn. In different localities of the environs of Paris, the people organized themselves on a military basis. Armed burghers patrolled the streets against the “brigands.” From all sides the people rained on the king demands for troops to protect them. Towns like Versailles, in dread of an invasion by these ruffians, implored the king for protection : the letters of the municipal council preserved in the national Archives are in the highest degree instructive.
At this moment there had collected in the outskirts of Paris those troops whose presence was in the sequel so skilfully turned to account by the orators of the Palais-Royal. True, the presence of the troops made them uneasy. So far were the soldiers from having designs against the Parisians that in the secret correspondence of Villedeuil we find the court constantly urging that they should be reserved for the safeguarding of the adjoining districts, which were every day exposed to attack, and for the safe conduct of the convoys of corn coming up to Versailles and Paris. Bands mustered 244 around the capital. In the first weeks of May, near Villejuif, a troop of from five to six hundred ruffians met intending to storm Bicêtre and march on Saint-Cloud. They came from distances of thirty, forty, and fifty leagues, and the whole mass surged around Paris and was swallowed up there as into a sewer. During the last days of April the shopmen saw streaming through the barriers “a terrific number of men, ill clad and of sinister aspect.” By the first days of May, it was noticed that the appearance of the mob had altogether changed. There was now mingled with it “a number of strangers from all the country parts, most of them in rags, and armed with huge clubs, the mere aspect of them showing what was to be feared.” In the words of a contemporary, “one met such physiognomies as one never remembered having seen in the light of day.” To provide occupation for a part of these ill-favoured unemployed, whose presence everybody felt to be disquieting, workshops were constructed at Montmartre, where from seventeen to eighteen thousand men were employed on improvised tasks at twenty sous a day.
Meanwhile the electors chosen to nominate deputies to the National Assembly had been collecting. On April 22, 1789, Thiroux de Crosne, the lieutenant of police, speaking of the tranquillity with which the elections were being carried on, added : “But I constantly have my eye on the bakers.”
On April 23, de Crosne referred to the irritation which was showing itself among certain groups of workmen in 245 the Suburb Saint-Antoine against two manufacturers, Dominique Henriot, the saltpetre-maker, and Réveillon, the manufacturer of wall-papers. Henriot was known, not only for his intelligence, but for his kindliness; in years of distress he had sacrificed a portion of his fortune for the support of the workmen; as to Réveillon, he was at this date one of the most remarkable representatives of Parisian industry. A simple workman to begin with, he was in 1789 paying 200,000 livres a year in salaries to 300 workers; shortly before, he had carried off the prize founded by Necker for the encouragement of useful arts. Henriot and Réveillon were said to have made offensive remarks against the workmen in the course of the recent electoral assemblies. They both denied, however, having uttered the remarks attributed to them, and there is every reason to believe that their denials were genuine.
During the night of April 27 and the next day, howling mobs attacked the establishments of Henriot and Réveillon, which were thoroughly plundered. Commissary Gueullete, in his report of May 3, notes that a wild and systematic devastation was perpetrated. Only the walls were left standing. What was not stolen was smashed into atoms. The “brigands” — the expression used by the Commissary — threw a part of the plant out of the windows into the street, where the mob made bonfires of it. Part of the crowd were drunk; nevertheless they flung themselves into the cellars, and the casks were stove in. When casks and bottles were 246 empty, the rioters attacked the flasks containing colouring matter; this they absorbed in vast quantities, and reeled about with fearful contortions, poisoned. When these cellars were entered next day, they presented a horrible spectacle, for the wretches had come to quarrelling and cutting each other’s throats. “The people got on to the roofs,” writes Thiroux de Crosne, “whence they rained down upon the troops a perfect hailstorm of tiles, stones, &c.; they even set rolling down fragments of chimneys and bits of timber; and although they were fired upon several times and some persons were killed, it was quite impossible to master them.”
The riot was not quelled by the troops until 10 o’clock that night; more than a hundred persons were left dead in the street. M. Alexandre Tuetey has devoted some remarkable pages to Réveillon’s affair; he has carefully studied the interrogatories of rioters who were arrested. The majority, he says, had been drunk all day. Réveillon, as is well known, only found safety by taking refuge in the Bastille. He was the only prisoner whom the Bastille received throughout the year 1789.
In the night following these bacchanalian orgies, the agents of the Marquis du Châtelet, colonel of the Gardes Françaises, having crept along one of the moats, “saw a crowd of brigands” collected on the further side of the Trône gate. Their leader was mounted on a table, haranguing them.
We come upon them again in the report of Commissary Vauglenne, quoted by M. Alexander Tuetey. “On 247 April 29, Vauglenne took the depositions of bakers, confectioners, and pork butchers of the Marais, who had been robbed by veritable bands of highwaymen, who proceed by burglary and violence; they may possibly be starving men, but they look and act uncommonly like gentlemen of the road.”
Meanwhile, in the garden of the Palais-Royal, Camille Desmoulins was haranguing groups of the unemployed and ravenous outcasts, who were pressing round him with wide glaring eyes. Desmoulins vociferates : “The beast is in the trap; now to finish him! . . . Never a richer prey has ever been offered to conquerors! Forty thousand palaces, mansions, châteaux, two-fifths of the wealth of France will be the prize of valour. Those who have set up as our masters will be mastered in their turn, the nation will be purged!” It is easy to understand that in Paris the alarm had become as acute as in the country; everyone was in terror of the “brigands.” On June 25 it was decided to form a citizen militia for the protection of property. “The notoriety of these disorders,” we read in the minutes of the electors, “and the excesses committed by several mobs have decided the general assembly to re-establish without delay the militia of Paris.” But a certain time was necessary for the organization of this civil guard. On June 30, the doors of the Abbaye, where some Gardes Françaises had been locked up, some for desertion, others for theft, were broken in by blows from hatchets and hammers. The prisoners were led in triumph to the 248 Palais-Royal, where they were fêted in the garden. The extent of the disorders was already so great that the government, powerless to repress them, had perforce to grant a general pardon. From that day there was no longer any need to capture the Bastille, the ancien régime was lost.
The disturbances at the Palais-Royal, the rendezvous of idlers, light women, and hot-headed fools, were becoming ever more violent. They began to talk of setting fire to the place. If some honest citizen plucked up courage to protest he was publicly whipped, thrown into the ponds, and rolled in the mud.
On July 11, Necker was dismissed from the ministry and replaced by Breteuil. At this time Necker was very popular; Breteuil was not, though he ought to have been, particularly in the eyes of supporters of a revolutionary movement. Of all the ministers of the ancien régime, and of all the men of his time, Breteuil was the one who had done most for the suppression of lettres de cachet and of state prisons. It was he who had closed Vincennes and the Châtimoine tower of Caen, who had got the demolition of the Bastille decided on, who had set Latude at liberty, and how many other prisoners! who had drawn up and made respected, even in the remotest parts of the kingdom, those admirable circulars which will immortalize his name, by which he ordered the immediate liberation of all prisoners, whose detention was not absolutely justified, and laid down such rigorous formalities for the future, that the arbitrary character of lettres de cachet may 249 be said to have been destroyed by them. Nevertheless the orators of the Palais-Royal succeeded in persuading many people that the advent of Bretueil to the ministry presaged a “St. Bartholomew of patriots.” The agitation became so vehement, the calumnies against the court and the government were repeated with so much violence, that the court, in order to avoid the slightest risk of the outbreak of a “Bartholomew,” ordered all the troops to be withdrawn and Paris to be left to itself.
Meanwhile, Camille Desmoulins was continuing to thunder forth : “I have just sounded the people. My rage against the despots was turned to despair. I did not see the crowds, although keenly moved and dismayed, strongly enough disposed to insurrection. . . . I was rather lifted on to the table than mounted there myself. Scarcely was I there than I saw myself surrounded by an immense throng. Here is my short address, which I shall never forget : “Citizens! there is not a moment to lose. I come from Versailles; M. Necker is dismissed; this dismissal is the alarm bell of a St. Bartholomew of patriots; this evening all the Swiss and German battalions will march from the Champ de Mars to cut our throats. Only one resource remains to us : we must fly to arms!’ ”
The Parisians were in an abject state of fright, but it was not the Swiss and German battalion which terrified them. The author of the Memorable Fortnight, devoted heart and soul as he was to the revolutionary movement, 250 acknowledges that during the days from the 12th to the 14th of July, all respectable people shut themselves up in their houses. And while the troops and decent people were retiring, the dregs were coming to the surface. During the night of July 12, the majority of the toll gates, where the town dues were collected, were broken open, plundered, and set on fire. “Brigands,” armed with pikes and clubs, scoured the streets, threatening the houses in which the trembling and agitated citizens had shut themselves. Next day, July 13, the shops of the bankers and wine merchants were rifled. “Girls snatched the earrings from women who went by; if the ring resisted, the ear was torn in two.” “The house of the lieutenant of police was ransacked, and Thiroux de Crosne had the utmost difficulty in escaping from the bands armed with clubs and torches. Another troop, with murderous cries, arrived at the Force, where prisoners for debt were confined : the prisoners were set free. The Garde-Meuble was ransacked. One gang broke in with their axes the door of the Lazarists, smashed the library, the cupboards, the pictures, the windows, the physical laboratory, dived into the cellar, stove in the wine-casks and got gloriously drunk. Twenty-four hours afterwards some thirty dead and dying were found there, men and women, one of the latter on the point of childbirth. In front of the house the street was full of dêbris and of brigands, who held in their hands, some eatables, others a pitcher, forcing wayfarers to drink and filling for all and sundry. Wine flowed in 251 torrents.” Some had possessed themselves of ecclesiastical robes, which they put on, and in this attire yelled and gesticulated down the street. In the minute books of the electors we read at this date : “On information given to the committee that the brigands who had been dispersed showed some disposition to reassemble for the purpose of attacking and pillaging the Royal Treasury and the Bank, the committee ordered these two establishments to be guarded.” On the same day, they luckily succeeded in disarming more than a hundred and fifty of these roisterers, who, drunk with wine and brandy, had fallen asleep inside the Hôtel de Ville. Meanwhile the outskirts of Paris were no safer than the city itself, and from the top of the towers of the Bastille they could see the conflagrations which were started in various quarters.
The organization of the citizen militia against these disorders was becoming urgent. When evening came, the majority of the districts set actively to work. Twelve hundred good citizens mustered in the Petit Saint-Antoine district. It was a motley crew : tradesmen and artisans, magistrates and doctors, writers and scholars, cheek by jowl with navvies and carpenters. The future minister of Louis XVI., Champion de Villeneuve, filled the post of secretary. The twelve hundred citizens, as we read in the minutes, “compelled to unite by the too well founded alarm inspired in all the citizens by the danger which seems to threaten them each individually, and by the imminent necessity of taking prompt measures 252 to avert its effects, considering that a number of individual, terrified perhaps by the rumours which doubtless evil-disposed persons have disseminated, are traversing, armed and in disorder, all the streets of the capital, and that the ordinary town guard either mingles with them or remains a passive spectator of the disorder it cannot arrest; considering also that the prison of the Force had been burst into and opened for the prisoners, and that it is threatened to force open in the same way the prisons which confine vagabonds, vagrants, and convicts . . . in consequence, the assembled citizens decided to organize themselves into a citizen militia. Every man will carry while on duty whatever arms he can procure, save and except pistols, which are forbidden as dangerous weapons. . . . There will always be two patrols on duty at a time, and two others will remain at the place fixed for headquarters.” Most of the other districts imitated the proceedings of the Petit Saint-Antoine. They sent delegates to the Hôtel des Invalides to ask for arms. The delegates were received by Besenval, who would have been glad to grant them what they requested; but he must have proper instructions. He writes in his Memoirs that the delegates were in a great state of fright, saying that the “brigands” were threatening to burn and pillage their houses. The author of the Memorable Fortnight dwells on the point that the militia of Paris was formed in self-defence against the excesses of the brigands. Speaking of the minute book of the Petit-Saint-Antoine district, an excellent authority, M. Charavay, 253 writes : “The burgesses of Paris, less alarmed at the plans of the court than at the men to whom the name of brigands had already been given, organized themselves into a militia to resist them : that was their only aim. The movement which on the next day swept away the Bastille might perhaps have been repressed by the National Guard if its organization had had greater stability.” The fact could not have been better put.
The Hôtel de Ville was attacked, and one of the electors, Legrand, only cleared it of the hordes who were filling it with their infernal uproar by ordering six barrels of powder to be brought up, and threatening to blow the place up if they did not retire.
During the night of July 13, the shops of the bakers and wine-sellers were pillaged. The excellent Abbé Morellet, one of the Encyclopædists, who, as we have seen, was locked up in the Bastille under Louis XV., writes : “I spent a great part of the night of the 13th at my windows, watching the scum of the population armed with muskets, pikes, and skewers, as they forced open the doors of the houses and got themselves food and drink, money and arms.” Mathieu Dumas also describes in his Souvenirs these ragged vagabonds, several almost naked, and with horrible faces. During these two days and nights, writes Bailly, Paris ran great risk of pillage, and was only saved by the National Guard.
The proceedings of these bandits and the work of the National Guard are described in a curious letter from an English doctor, named Rigby, to his wife. “It was 254 necessary not only to give arms to those one could rely on, but to disarm those of whom little protection could be expected and who might become a cause of disorder and harm. This required a good deal of skill. Early in the afternoon we began to catch a glimpse here and there among the swarms of people, where we saw signs of an irritation which might soon develop into excesses, of a man of decent appearance, carrying a musket with a soldierly air. These slowly but surely increased in number; their intention was evidently to pacify and at the same time to disarm the irregular bands. They had for the most part accomplished their task before nightfall. Then the citizens who had been officially armed occupied the streets almost exclusively : they were divided into several sections, some mounting guard at certain points, others patrolling the streets, all under the leadership of captains. When night came, only very few of those who had armed themselves the evening before could be seen., Some, however, had refused to give up their arms, and during the night it was seen how well founded had been the fears they had inspired, for they started to pillage. But it was too late to do so with impunity. The looters were discovered and seized, and we learnt next morning that several of these wretches, taken redhanded, had been executed.” Indeed, the repressive measures of the citizens were not wanting in energy. Here and there brigands were strung up to the lamp-posts, and then despatched, as they hung there, with musket shots.
255The author of the Authentic History, who left the best of the contemporary accounts of the taking of the Bastille which we possess, says rightly enough : “The riot begun on the evening of July 12.” There was thus a combination of disorders and “brigandage” in which the capture of the Bastille, though it stands out more prominently than the other events, was only a part, and cannot be considered by itself.
The morning of the Fourteenth dawned bright and sunny. A great part of the population had remained up all night, and daylight found them still harassed with anxiety and alarm. To have arms was the desire of all; the citizens and supporters of order, so as to protect themselves; the brigands, a part of whom had been disarmed, in order to procure or recover the means of assault and pillage. There was a rush to the Invalides, where the magazines of effective arms were. This was the first violent action of the day. The mob carried off 28,000 muskets and twenty-four cannon. And as it was known that other munitions of war were deposited in the Bastille, the cry of “To the Invalides!” was succeeded by the cry of “To the Bastille!”
We must carefully distinguish between the two elements of which the throng flocking to the Bastille was composed. On the one hand, a horde of nameless vagabonds, those whom the contemporary documents invariably style the “brigands”; and, on the other hand, the respectable citizens — these certainly formed the minority — who desired arms for the equipment of 256 the civil guard. The sole motive impelling this band to the Bastille was the wish to procure arms. On this point all documents of any value and all the historians who have studied the matter closely are in agreement. There was no question of liberty or of tyranny, of setting free the prisoners or of protesting against the royal authority. The capture of the Bastille was effected amid cries of “Vive le roi!” just as, for several months past in the provinces, the granaries had been plundered.
About 8 o’clock in the morning, the electors at the Hôtel de Ville received some inhabitants of the Suburb Saint-Antoine who came to complain that the district was threatened by the cannon trained on it from the towers of the Bastille. These cannon were used for firing salutes on occasions of public rejoicing, and were so placed that they could do no harm whatever to the adjacent districts. But the electors sent some of their number to the Bastille, where the governor, de Launey, received the deputation with the greatest affability, kept them to lunch, and at heir request withdrew the cannons from the embrasures. To this deputation were succeeded another, which, however, was quite unofficial, consisting of three persons, with the advocate Thuriot de la Rosière at the head. They were admitted as their predecessors had been. Thuriot was the eloquent spokesman, “in the name of the nation and the fatherland.” He delivered an ultimatum to the governor and harangued the garrison, consisting of 95 Invalides and 30 Swiss soldiers. Some 257 thousand men were thronging round the Bastille, vociferating wildly. The garrison swore not to fire unless they were attacked. De Launey said that without orders he could do no more than withdraw the cannon from the embrasures, but he went so far as to block up these embrasures with planks. Then Thuriot took his leave and returned to the Hôtel de Ville, the crowd meanwhile becoming more and more threatening.
“The entrance to the first courtyard, that of the barracks, was open,” says M. Fernand Bournon in his admirable account of the events of this day; “but de Launey had ordered the garrison to retire within the enclosure, and to raise the outer drawbridge by which the court of the governor was reached, and which in the ordinary way used to be lowered during the day. Two daring fellows dashed forward and scaled the roof of the guard-house, one of them a soldier named Louis Tournay : the name of the other is unknown. They shattered the chains of the drawbridge with their axes, and it fell.”
The Capture of the Bastille.
From an anonymous contemporary painting now in the Hôtel Carnavalet.
It has been said in a recent work, in which defects of judgment and criticism are scarcely masked by a cumbrous parade of erudition, that Tournay and his companion performed their feat under the fire of the garrison. At this moment the garrison did not fire a single shot, contenting themselves with urging the besiegers to retire. “While M. de Launey and his officers contented themselves with threats, these two vigorous champions succeeded in breaking in the doors and in lowering the outer drawbridge; then the horde 258 of brigands advanced in a body and dashed towards the second bridge, which they wished to capture, firing at the troops as they ran. It was then for the first time that M. de Launey, perceiving his error in allowing the operations at the first bridge to be managed so quietly, ordered the soldiers to fire, which caused a disorderly stampede on the part of the rabble, which was more brutal than brave; and it is at this point that the calumnies against the governor begin. Transposing the order of events, it has been asserted that he had sent out a message of peace, that the people had advanced in reliance on his word, and that many citizens were massacred.” This alleged treachery of de Launey, immediately hawked about Paris, was one of the events of the day. It is contradicted not only by all the accounts of the besieged, but by the besiegers themselves, and is now rejected by all historians.
A wine-seller named Cholat, aided by one Baron, nicknamed La Giroflée, had brought into position a piece of ordnance in the long walk of the arsenal. They fired, but the gun’s recoil somewhat seriously wounded the two artillerymen, and they were its only victims. As these means were insufficient to overturn the Bastille, the besiegers set about devising others. A pretty young girl named Mdlle. De Monsigny, daughter of the captain of the company of Invalides at the Bastille, had been encountered in the barrack yard. Some madmen imagined that she was Mdlle. de Launey. They dragged her to the edge of the moat, and gave the garrison to 259 understand by their gestures that they were going to burn her alive if the place was not surrendered. They had thrown the unhappy child, who had fainted, upon a mattress, to which they had already set light. M. de Monsigny saw the hideous spectacle from a window of the towers, and, desperately rushing down to save his child, he was killed by two shots. These were tricks in the siege of strongholds of which Duguesclin would never have dreamed. A soldier named Aubin Bonnemère courageously interposed and succeeded in saving the girl.
A detachment of Gardes Françaises, coming up with two pieces of artillery which the Hôtel de Ville had allowed to be removed, gave a more serious aspect to the siege. But the name of Gardes Françaises must not give rise to misapprehension : the soldiers of the regular army under the ancien régime must not be compared with those of the present day. The regiment of Gardes Françaises in particular had fallen into a profound state of disorganization and degradation. The privates were permitted to follow a trade in the city, by this means augmenting their pay. It is certain that in the majority of cases the trade they followed was that of the bully. “Almost all the soldiers in the Guards belong to his class,” we read in the Encyclopédie méthodique, “and many men indeed only enlist in the corps in order to live on the earnings of these unfortunates.” The numerous documents relating to the Gardes Françaises preserved in the archives of the 260 Bastille give the most precise confirmation to this statement. We see, for example, that the relatives of the engraver Nicolas de Larmessin requested a lettre de cachet ordering their son to be locked up in jail, where they would pay for his keep, “because he had threatened to enlist in the Gardes Françaises.”
From the fifteen cannon placed on the towers, not a single shot was fired during the siege. Within the château, three guns loaded with grape defended the inner drawbridge; the governor had only one of them fired, and that only once. Not wishing to massacre the mob, de Launey determined to blow up the Bastille and find his grave among the ruins. The Invalides Ferrand and Béquart flung themselves upon him to prevent him from carrying out his intention. “The Bastille was not captured by main force,” says Elis, whose testimony cannot be suspected of partiality in favour of the defenders; “it surrendered before it was attacked, on my giving my words of honour as a French officer that all should escape unscathed if they submitted.”
We know how this promise was kept, in spite of the heroic efforts of Elie and Hulin, to whom posterity owes enthusiastic homage. Is the mob to be reproached for these atrocious crimes? It was a savage horde, the scum of the population. De Launey, whose confidence and kindness had never faltered, was massacred with every circumstance of horror. “The Abbé Lefèvre,” says Dusaulx, “was an involuntary witness of his last moments : ‘I saw him fall,’ he told me, ‘without being able to help 260 him; he defended himself like a lion, and if only ten men had behaved as he did at the Bastille, it would not have been taken.’ ” His murderers slowly severed his head from his trunk with a penknife. The operation was performed by a cook’s apprentice named Desnot, “who knew, as he afterwards proudly said, how to manage a joint.” The deposition of this brute should be read. It has been published by M. Guiffrey in the Revue historique. To give himself courage, Desnot had gulped down brandy mixed with gunpowder, and he added that what he had done was done in the hope of obtaining a medal.
“We learnt by-and-by,” continues Dusaulx, “of the death of M. de Losme-Salbray, which all good men deplored.” De Losme had been the good angel of the prisoners during his term of office as major of the Bastille : there are touching details showing to what lengths he carried his kindliness and delicacy of feeling. At the moment when the mob was hacking at him, there happened to pass the Marquis de Pelleport, who had been imprisoned in the Bastille for several years; he sprang forward to save him : “Stop!” he cried, “you are killing the best of men.” But he fell badly wounded, as also did the Chevalier de Jean, who had joined him in the attempt to rescue the unfortunate man from the hands of the mob. The adjutant Miray, Person the lieutenant of the Invalides, and Dumont, one of the Invalides, were massacred. Miray was led to the Grève, where the mob had resolved to execute him. Struck 262 with fists and clubs, stabbed with knives, he crawled along in his death agony. He expired, “done to death with pin-pricks,” before arriving at the place of execution. The Invalides Asselin and Béquart were hanged. It was Béquart who had prevented de Launey from blowing up the Bastille. “He was gashed with two sword-strokes,” we read in the Moniteur, “and a sabre cut had lopped off his wrist. They carried the hand in triumph through the streets of the city — the very hand to which so many citizens owed their safety.” “After I had passed the arcade of the Hôtel de Ville,” says Restif de la Bretonne, who has left so curious a page about the 14th of July, “I came upon some cannibals : one — I saw him with my own eyes — brought home to me the meaning of a horrible word heard so often since : he was carrying at the end of a taille-cime5 the bleeding entrails of a victim of the mob’s fury, and this horrible top-knot caused no one to turn a hair. Farther on I met the captured Invalides and Swiss : from young and pretty lips — I shudder at it still — came screams of ‘Hang them! hang them!’ ”
Further, they massacred Flesselles, the provost of the guilds, accused of a treacherous action as imaginary as that of de Launey. They cut the throat of Foulon, an old man of seventy-four years, who, as Taine tells us, had spent during the preceding winter 60,000 francs in order to provide the poor with work. They assassinated Berthier, one of the distinguished men of the time. Foulon’s head was cut off; they tore Berthier’s heart 263 from his body to carry it in procession through Paris — charming touch! — in a bouquet of white carnations. For the fun was growing fast and furious. De Launey’s head was borne on a pike to the Palais Royal, then to the new bridge, where it was made to do obeisance three times to the statue of Henri IV., with the words, “Salute thy master!” At the Palais Royal, two of the conquerors had merrily set themselves down at a dining-table in an entresol. As we garnish our tables with flowers, so these men had placed on the table a trunkless head and gory entrails; but as the crowd below cried out for them, they shot them gaily out of the window.
Those who had remained in front of the Bastille had dashed on in quest of booty. As at the pillage of the warehouses of Réveillon and Henriot, and of the convent of the Lazarists, the first impulse of the conquerors was to bound forward to the cellar. “This rabble,” writes the author of the Authentic History, “were so blind drunk that they made in one body for the quarters of the staff, breaking the furniture, doors, and windows. All this time their comrades, taking the pillagers for some of the garrison, were firing on them.”
No one gave a thought to the prisoners, but the keys were secured and carried in triumph through Paris. The doors of the room in which the prisoners were kept had to be broken in. The wretched men, terrified by the uproar, were more dead than alive. These victims of arbitrary power were exactly seven in number. Four were forgers, Béchade, Laroche, La Corrège, and 264 Pujade; these individuals had forged bills of exchange, to the loss of two Parisian bankers : while their case was being dealt with in regular course at the Châtelet, they were lodged in the Bastille, where they consulted every day with their counsel. Then there was the young Comte de Solages, who was guilty of monstrous crimes meriting death; he was kept in the Bastille out of regard for his family, who defrayed his expenses. Finally there were two lunatics, Tavernier and de Whyte. We know what immense progress has been made during the past century in the methods of treating lunatics. In those days they locked them up. Tavernier and de Whyte were before long transferred to Charenton, where assuredly they were not so well treated as they had been at the Bastille.
Such were the seven martyrs who were led in triumphant procession through the streets, amid the shouts of a deeply moved people.
Of the besiegers, ninety-eight dead were counted, some of whom had met their death through the assailants’ firing on one another. Several had been killed by falling into the moat. Of this total, only nineteen were married, and only five had children. These are details of some interest.
There was no thought of burying either the conquerors or the conquered. At midnight on Wednesday the 15th, the presence of the corpses of the officers of the Bastille, still lying in the Place de Grève, was notified to the commissaries of the Châtelet. In his admirable work 265 M. Furnand Bournon has published the ghastly report that was drawn up on that night. It is a fitting crown to the work of the great day : “We, the undersigned commissaries, duly noted down the declaration of the said Sieur Houdan, and having then gone down into the courtyard of the Châtelet (whither the corpses had just been carried), we found there seven corpses of the male sex, the first without a head clothed in a coat, vest, breeches, and black silk stockings, with a fine shirt, but no shoes; the second also without a head, clothed in a vest of red stuff, breeches of nankeen with regimental buttons, blue silk stockings with a small black pattern worked in; the third also headless, clothed in a shirt, breeches, and white cotton stockings; the fourth also headless, clothed in a blood-stained shirt, breeches, and black stockings; the fifth clad in a shirt, blue breeches, and white gaiters, with brown hair, apparently about forty years old, and having part of his forearm cut off and severe bruises on his throat; the sixth clothed in breeches and white gaiters, with severe bruises on his throat; and the seventh, clothed in a shirt, breeches, and black silk stockings, disfigured beyond recognition.”
Meanwhile the majority of the victors, the first moments of intoxication having passed, were hiding themselves like men who had committed a crime. The disorder in the city was extreme. “The commissioners of the districts,” writes the Sicilian ambassador, “seeing the peril in which the inhabitants were placed before this enormous number of armed men, including brigands 266 and men let out of prison on the pervious days, formed patrols of the National Guard. They proclaimed martial law, or rather, they issued one solitary law declaring that whoever robbed or set fire to a house would be hanged. Indeed, not a day passed without five and even as many as ten persons suffering this penalty. To this salutary expedient we owe our lives and the safety of our houses.”
More than one conqueror of the Bastille was hanged in this way, which was a great pity, for two days later his glorious brow might have been crowned with laurels and flowers!
It has been said that the Bastille was captured by the people of Paris. But the number of the besiegers amounted to no more than a thousand, among whom, as Marat has already brought to our notice, there were many provincials and foreigners. As to the Parisians, they had come in great numbers, as they always do, to see what was going on. We have this too on the testimony of Marat. “I was present at the taking of the Bastille,” writes the Chancellor de Pasquier also : “what has been called the ‘fight’ was not serious, and of resistance there was absolutely none. A few musket shots were fired to which there was no reply, and four or five cannon shots. We know the results of this boasted victory, which has brought a shower of compliments upon the heads of the so-called conquerors : the truth is that this great fight did not give a moments’ uneasiness to the numerous spectators who had hurried up to see the 267 result. Among them were many a pretty woman; they had left their carriages at a distance in order to approach more easily. I was leaning on the end of the barrier which closed in the garden skirting Beaumarchais’ garden in the direction of the Place de la Bastille. By my side was Mdlle. Contat, of the Comédie Française : we stayed to the end, and I gave her my arm to her carriage. As pretty as any woman could be, Mdlle. Contat added to the graces of her person an intelligence of the most brilliant order.”
By next day there was quite another story. The Bastille had been “stormed” in a formidable and heroic assault lasting a quarter of an hour. The guns of the assailants had made a breach in its walls. These, it is true, were still standing intact; but that did not signify, the guns had made a breach, unquestionably! The seven prisoners who had been set free had been a disappointment, for the best will in the world could not make them anything but scoundrels and lunatics; some one invented an eighth, the celebrated Comte de Lorges, the white-headed hero and martyr. This Comte de Lorges had no existence; but that fact also is nothing to the purpose : he makes an admirable and touching story. There was talk of instruments of torture that had been discovered : “an iron corslet, invented to hold a man fast by all his joints, and fix him in eternal immobility : ” it was really a piece of knightly armour dating from the middle ages, taken from the magazine of obsolete arms which was kept at the Bastille. Some one discovered also 268 a machine “not less destructive, which was brought to the light of day, but no one could guess its name or its special use”; it was a secret printing-press seized in the house of one François Lenormand in 1786. Finally, while digging in the bastion, some one came upon the bones of Protestants who had once been buried there, the prejudices of the time not allowing their remains to be laid in the consecrated ground of the cemetery : the vision of secret executions in the deepest dungeons of the Bastille was conjured up in the mind of the discoverers, and Mirabeau sent these terrible words echoing through France : “The ministers were lacking in foresight, they forgot to eat the bones!”
The compilation of the roll of the conquerors of the Bastille was a laborious work. A great number of those who had been in the thick of the fray did not care to make themselves known : they did not know but that their laurel-crowned heads might be stuck aloft! It is true that these bashful heroes were speedily replaced by a host of fine fellows who — from the moment when it was admitted that the conquerors were heroes, deserving of honours, pensions, and medals — were fully persuaded that they had sprung to the assault, and in the very first rank. The final list contained 863 names.
Victor Fournel in a charming book has sung the epic, at once ludicrous and lachrymose, of the men of the 14th of July. The book, which ought to be read, gives a host of delightful episodes it is impossible to abridge. In the sequel these founders of 269 liberty did not shine either through the services they rendered to the Republic or through their fidelity to the immortal principles. The Hulins — Hulin, however, had done nobly in trying to save de Launey — the Palloys, the Fourniers, the Latudes, and how many others! were the most servile lackeys of the Empire, and those of them who survived were the most assiduous servants of the Restoration. Under the Empire, the conquerors of the Bastille tried to secure the Legion of Honour for the whole crew. They went about soliciting pensions even up to 1830, and at that date, after forty-three years, there were still 401 conquerors living. In 1848 the conquerors made another appearance. There was still mention of the pensions for the conquerors of the Bastille in the budget of 1874 — let us save the ladder, the ladder of Latude!
This is the amusing side of their story. But there is a painful side too : their rivalries with the Gardes Françaises, who charged them with filching the glory from them, and with the “volunteers of the Bastille.” The heroes were acquainted with calumny and opprobrium. There were, too, deadly dissensions among their own body. There were the true conquerors, and others who, while they were true conquerors, were nevertheless not true : there were always “traitors” among the conquerors, as well as “patriots.” On July 1, 1790, two of the conquerors were found beaten to death near Beaumarchais’ garden, in front of the theatre of their exploits. Next day there was a violent quarrel between four conquerors and some soldiers. In December two 270 others were assassinated near the Champs de Mars. Early in 1791 two were wounded, and a third was discovered with his neck in a noose, in a ditch near the military school. Such were the nocturnal doings on the barriers.
It remains to explain this amazing veering round of opinion, this legend, of all things the least likely, which transformed into great men the “brigands” of April, June, and July, 1789.
The first reason is explained in the following excellent passage from Rabagas6 : —
Carle. — But how then do you distinguish a riot from a revolution?
Boubard — A riot is when the mob is defeated . . . They are all curs. A revolution is when the mob is the stronger : they are all heroes!
During the night of July 14, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld woke Louis XVI. to announce to him the capture of the Bastille. “It’s a revolt, then,” said the king. “Sire,” replied the duke, “it is a revolution.”
The day on which the royal power, in its feebleness and irresolution, abandoned Paris to the mob, was the day of its abdication. The Parisians attempted to organize themselves into a citizen militia in order to shoot down the brigands. The movement on the Bastille was a stroke of genius on the part of the latter — instinctive, no doubt, but for all that a stroke of genius. The people now recognized its masters, and with its usual facility it hailed the new régime with adulation. “From that moment,” said a deputy, “there was an end 271 of liberty, even in the Assembly; France was dumb before thirty factionaries.”
What rendered the national enthusiasm for the conquerors more easy was precisely all those legends to which credence was given, in all sincerity, by the most intelligent people in France — the legends on the horrors of the Bastille and the cruelties of arbitrary power. For fifty years they had been disseminated throughout the kingdom, and had taken firm root. The pamphlets of Linguet and Mirabeau, the recent stupendous success of the Memoirs of Latude, had given these storied renewed strength and vigour. Compelled to bow before the triumphant mob, people preferred to regard themselves — so they silenced their conscience — as hailing a deliverer. There was some sincerity in this movement of opinion, too. The same districts which on July 13 took arms against the brigands could exclaim, after the crisis had passed : “The districts applaud the capture of a fortress which, regarded hitherto as the seat of despotism, dishonoured the French name under a popular king.”
In his edition of the Memoirs of Barras, M. George Duruy has well explained the transformation of opinion. “In the Memoirs, the capture of the Bastille is merely the object of a brief and casual mention. Barras only retained and transmits to us one single detail. He saw leaving the dungeons the ‘victims of arbitrary power, saved at last from rack and torture and from living tombs.’ Such a dearth of information is the more likely 272 to surprise us in that Barras was not only a spectator of the event, but composed, in that same year 1789, an account of it which has now been discovered. Now his narrative of 1789 is as interesting as the passage in the Memoirs is insignificant. The impression left by these pages, written while the events were vividly pictured in his mind, is, we are bound to say, that the famous capture of the Bastille was after all only a horrible and sanguinary saturnalia. There is no word of heroism in this first narrative : nothing about ‘victims of arbitrary power’ snatched from ‘torture and living tombs’; but on the other hand, veritable deeds of cannibalism perpetrated by the victors. That is what Barras saw, and what he recorded on those pages where, at that period of his life, he noted down day by day the events of which he was a witness. Thirty years slip by. Barras has sat on the benches of the ‘Montagne.’7 He has remained an inflexible revolutionist. He gathers his notes together in view of Memoirs he intends to publish. At this time, the revolutionist version of the capture of the Bastille is officially established. It is henceforth accepted that the Bastille fell before an impulse of heroism on the part of the people of Paris, and that its fall brought to light horrible mysteries of iniquity. This legend, which has so profoundly distorted the event, was contemporary with the event itself, a spontaneous fruit of the popular imagination. And Barras, having to speak of the capture in his 273 Memoirs, discovers his old narrative among his papers, and reads it, I imagine, with a sort of stupefaction. What! the capture of the Bastille was no more than that! — and he resolutely casts it aside.”
In the provinces, the outbreak had a violent counterpart. “There instantly arose,” writes Victor Fournel, “a strange, extraordinary, grotesque panic, which swept through the greater part of France like a hurricane of madness, and which many of us have heard our grandfathers tell stories about under the name of the ‘day of the brigands’ or ‘the day of the fear.’ It broke out everywhere in the second fortnight of July, 1789. Suddenly, one knew not whence, an awful rumour burst upon the town or village : the brigands are here, at our very gates : they are advancing in troops of fifteen or twenty thousand, burning the standing crops, ravaging everything! Dust-stained couriers appear, spreading the terrible news. An unknown horseman goes through at the gallop, with haggard cheeks, and dishevelled hair : ‘Up, to arms, they are here!’ Some natives rush up : it is only too true : they have seen them, the bandits are no more than a league or two away! The alarm bell booms out, the people fly to arms, line up in battle order, start off to reconnoitre. In the end, nothing happens, but their terrors revive. The brigands have only turned aside : every man must remain under arms.” In the frontier provinces, there were rumours of foreign enemies. The Bretons and Normans shook in fear of an English descent : in 274 Champagne and Lorraine a German invasion was feared.
Along with these scenes of panic must be placed the deeds of violence, the assassinations, plunderings, burnings, which suddenly desolated the whole of France. In a book which sheds a flood of light on these facts, Gustave Bord gives a thrilling picture of them. The châteaux were invaded, and the owner, if they could lay hands on him, was roasted on the soles of his feet. At Versailles the mob threw themselves on the hangman as he was about to execute a parricide, and the criminal was set free : the state of terror in which the town was plunged is depicted in the journals of the municipal assembly. On July 23, the governor of Champagne sends word that the rising is general in his district. At Rennes, at Nantes, at Saint-Malo, at Angers, at Caen, at Bordeaux, at Strasburg, at Metz, the mob engaged in miniature captures of the Bastille more or less accompanied with pillage and assassination. Armed bands went about cutting down the woods, breaking down the dikes, fishing in the ponds.8 The disorganization was complete.
Nothing could more clearly show the character of the government under the ancien régime : it was wholly dependent on traditions. Nowhere was there a concrete organization to secure the maintenance of order and the 275 enforcement of the king’s decrees. France was a federation of innumerable republics, held together by a single bond, the sentiment of loyalty every citizen felt towards the crown. One puff of wind sent the crown flying, and then disorder and panic bewilderment dominated the whole nation. The door was open to all excesses, and the means of checking them miserably failed. Under the ancien régime, devotion to the king was the whole government, the whole administration, the whole life of the state. And thus arose the necessity for the domination of the Terror and the legislative work of Napoleon.
THE END.
[The Index follows.]
1 The Girondists (so called from Gironde, a district of Bordeaux) were the more sober republican party in the Assembly who were forced by circumstances to join the Jacobins against Louis XVI. With their fall from power in the early summer of 1792 the last hope of the monarchy disappeared. — T.
2 Referring to the horrible massacres of September, 1792, when about 1400 victims perished. — T.
3 The French Dick Turpin. Of good education, he formed when quite a youth a band of robbers, and became the terror of France. Like Turpin, he is the subject of dramas and stories. — T.
4 A forest near Paris, on the line to Avricourt. It was a famous haunt of brigands. There is a well-known story of a dog which attacked and killed the murderer of its master there. — T.
5 Literally “cut-top” : we have no equivalent in English. — T.
6 A five-act comedy by Victorien Sardou.
7 The nickname given to the Jacobins, the extreme revolutionists, who sat on the highest seats on the left in the National Assembly. — T.
8 Which were the strict preserves of the aristocrats; to fish in them was as great a crime as to shoot a landlord’s rabbit was, a few years ago, in England. — T.