On July 14, 1789, a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille amid a political crisis and a search for weapons and gunpowder. The prison became widely remembered for its symbolic significance. Few prisoners were held there at the time. The event mattered beyond their release, marking a change in the relationship between royal power and the urban population.

Background

During the reign of Louis XVI, France faced a major economic crisis caused in part by the cost of intervening in the American Revolution and exacerbated by regressive taxes as well as poor harvests in the late 1780s. Furthermore, Finance Minister Calonne, Louis XVI's replacement for Jacques Necker, thought that lavish spending would secure loans by presenting the monarchy as wealthy. This only added to Louis' financial woes. On 5 May 1789, the Estates General convened to deal with the issue but were held back by archaic protocols and the conservatism of the Second Estate, representing the nobility, which made up less than 2% of France's population.

On 17 June the Third Estate, with its representatives drawn from the commoners, reconstituted itself as the National Assembly, a body whose purpose was the creation of a French constitution. The king initially opposed that development but was forced to acknowledge the authority of the assembly, which renamed itself the National Constituent Assembly on 9 July.

Necker's dismissal

On 11 July 1789, Louis XVI, acting under the influence of the conservative nobles of his privy council, dismissed and banished Necker (who had been sympathetic to the Third Estate) and completely reconstituted the ministry. The marshals Victor-François, duc de Broglie, La Galissonnière, the duc de la Vauguyon, the Baron Louis de Breteuil, and the intendant Joseph Foullon de Doué, took over the posts of Puységur, Armand Marc, comte de Montmorin, La Luzerne, Saint-Priest, and Necker.

News of Necker's dismissal reached Paris on the afternoon of 12 July. Many Parisians feared that conservative forces were preparing to suppress the National Constituent Assembly. Royal troops had been brought into the area around Paris and Versailles, adding to those anxieties. Crowds gathered, including a large assembly at the Palais-Royal, where Camille Desmoulins urged action. This unrest provided the immediate setting for the search for weapons and the confrontation at the Bastille. The prison acquired meaning through the wider struggle over who would control the revolution.

Attack

On the morning of 14 July, Paris was in a state of alarm. The partisans of the Third Estate in France, now under the control of the Bourgeois Militia of Paris (soon to become Revolutionary France's National Guard), had earlier stormed the Hôtel des Invalides without meeting significant opposition. Their intention had been to gather the weapons held there (29,000 to 32,000 muskets, but without powder or shot). The commandant at the Invalides had in the previous few days taken the precaution of transferring 250 barrels of gunpowder to the Bastille for safer storage.

At this point, the Bastille was nearly empty, housing only seven prisoners: four forgers arrested under warrants issued by the Grand Châtelet court; James F.X. Whyte, an Irish born "lunatic" suspected of spying and imprisoned at the request of his family; Auguste-Claude Tavernier, who had tried to assassinate Louis XV 30 years before; and one "deviant" aristocrat suspected of murder, the Comte de Solages, imprisoned by his father using a lettre de cachet. A previous prisoner the Marquis de Sade had been transferred out ten days earlier, after shouting to passers-by that the prisoners were being massacred.

The high cost of maintaining a garrisoned medieval fortress, for what was seen as having a limited purpose, had led to a decision being made shortly before the disturbances began to replace it with an open public space. Amid the tensions of July 1789, the building remained as a symbol of royal tyranny.

Political

Immediately after the violence of 14 July members of the nobility—little assured by the apparent and, as it was to prove, temporary reconciliation of king and people—started to flee the country as émigrés. Among the first to leave were the Count of Artois (the future Charles X of France) and his two sons, the Prince of Condé, the Prince of Conti, the Polignac family, and (slightly later) Charles Alexandre de Calonne, the former finance minister. They settled at Turin, where Calonne (as agent for the Count of Artois and the Prince of Condé) began plotting civil war within the kingdom and agitating for a European coalition against France.