The Bastille, a huge building of eight round towers linked by walls eighty feet high, had originally been built as a fortress in the fourteenth century. Since then it had been used as a state prison for men who had been arrested in accordance with lettres de cachet but who were not guilty of an offence punishable under common law. It was surrounded by an air of mystery. Prisoners, so it was said, their names not divulged to the gaolers with whom they were forbidden to talk, arrived in coaches with drawn blinds, and when they were escorted inside, the soldiers on duty had to turn to face the wall. Its sinister reputation – sustained by legends that owed much to the gruesome and imaginative Mèmoires sur la Bastille by the lawyer and journalist, Simon Linguet, who published them soon after his release in 1782–was much increased by stories of ‘the man in the iron mask’, of the imprisonment of writers like Voltaire and the Abbé Morellet, and of Latude whose thirty years of intermittent incarceration began when he was accused of attempting to poison Mme de Pompadour. Yet the Bastille was, in fact, one of the least unpleasant of Paris’s prisons. The food was adequate, prisoners were allowed to bring in their own possessions, and the dreaded dungeons, where it was believed scores of wretches lay in chains, had not been used for years. Indeed, the Bastille was never crowded, there being rarely more than ten prisoners inside its massive walls. Discussions had recently been held as to the advisability of maintaining so expensive an establishment for the incarceration of so few offenders, and a suggestion had been put forward that the unsightly structure should be demolished and a square laid out on its site. The architects and contractors who supported this plan were encouraged when informed in the late spring of 1789 that the Bastille contained no more than seven prisoners, none of whom was of much importance. Four were forgers who had been transferred there from some other, overcrowded prison; one was a mentally unbalanced Irishman who, believing himself to be alternately Julius Caesar and God, was supposed to be a spy; the sixth, also deranged, was suspected of being involved in an attempt to assassinate the King; the last was the Comte de Solages whose family had arranged for him to be committed by a lettre de cachet for incest.
To the people of Paris, however, unaware either of its proposed demolition or of the number of prisoners held there, the Bastille was the symbol of an intolerable régime; and it was not merely to obtain powder for their muskets and to release the men held there that they marched so determinedly upon it this Tuesday morning.
For several days now the Governor of the Bastille, the Marquis de Launay, had been anticipating their arrival with the utmost apprehension. Neither a decisive nor an assertive man, de Launay was quite incapable of instilling his officers with any confidence. One of them, Lieutenant Louis Deflue, who had been sent with a detachment of thirty-two Swiss soldiers to reinforce the garrison of eighty-two superannuated soldiers or invalides, described him as being ‘without much knowledge of military affairs, without experience and without much courage’.
‘I could clearly see from his constant uneasiness and irresolution’ [Deflue afterwards wrote in a letter to his brothers],
that if we were attacked we should be very badly led. He was so terrified that at night he mistook me shadows of trees for enemies so that we had to be on the alert throughout the hours of darkness. The staff officers…and I myself often tried to assure him that our position was not as weak as he complained and to persuade him to attend to important matters rather than to expend his energy on trifles. He would listen to us, appearing to agree with our advice. But then he would do just the opposite before changing his mind yet again.
Nervous and indecisive as he evidently was, de Launay had nevertheless done much to prepare the Bastille for an attack. Expecting that he would not have to hold out for long before troops came to disperse a hostile mob, he had not troubled to lay in more than two days’ supply of bread; but in the cellars he had a large stock of powder contained in 250 barrels which had been transferred there from the Arsenal. He also had numerous cannon. There were fifteen eight-pounders standing between the battlements on the towers, a further three eight-pounders below them with their muzzles levelled at the approaches to the entrance gate, as well as twelve smaller rampart guns. In order to give these guns a wider field of fire the embrasures had been widened. Other apertures and windows had been blocked up, the drawbridge across the deep dry moat had been strengthened and the defences generally repaired and improved. Loads of paving-stones had been dragged up to the top of the towers from which they could be hurled down through the machicolations on to the heads of any rioters who managed to approach the foot of the towers.
But if these measures gave some confidence to de Launay’s officers, his increasingly prevaricating manner certainly did not. Nor did the attitude of their men. Most of the invalides of the regular garrison were known to be in sympathy with the people of the surrounding faubourgs in whose shops they bought their tobacco and in whose cafés they sat drinking wine. It was hardly to be expected that they would eagerly obey orders to open fire on them, and not at all unlikely that they would flatly refuse to do so. Lieutenant Deflue’s Swiss soldiers did not share the same close ties with the people of Paris, but they were by no means hostile to their aspirations. They were rumoured already to have sworn to spike their own guns if they were ordered to fire on the crowd, and the next day seventy-five men of the same regiment, the Salis-Samade, billetted in Issy, Vaugirard and Sèvres, were to desert. Besides, the thirty-two men from the Salis-Samade in the Bastille had been occupied throughout the night in carrying the heavy and cumbersome barrels of powder from the Arsenal down into the cellar, and by the morning of the 14th they were tired out.
To the people of the faubourgs, though, the Bastille, the muzzles of its guns depressed towards the Rue Saint-Antoine, the Rue des Tournelles and the Rue de Jean Beaussire, appeared not so much in a ready state of defence as in preparation for attack. And in response to their protests, a delegation of Electors went to the Bastille to ask the Governor to withdraw the guns which were both provocative and alarming. When they arrived shortly after ten o’clock, the Governor was about to sit down to his morning meal which was then usually eaten in France about this time. He invited the delegates to join him. He was a perfectly agreeable host, and entirely amenable to their demands. He readily consented to having the guns pulled back out of sight and to having the embrasures blocked up with planks.
By the time the meal was over, however, the relaxed atmosphere in the Governor’s dining-room had been suddenly shattered by noise from the streets outside. The crowds that had raided the Invalides had now arrived beneath the walls of the Bastille and had been joined by hundreds of demonstrators from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the surrounding districts who pushed their way into the outer court, the Cour du Passage, which was flanked on either side by shops and the barracks of the invalides. When they saw the cannon in the towers above them being withdrawn they presumed that the gunners were about to load them. It was also supposed that the delegates from the Electors, who had not yet risen from the Governor’s dining-room table, had been arrested and were being held as hostages.