The delegates now saw a cannon levelled in their direction. At the same time a volley of musketry fire killed three people who had come up to talk to them, tore a hole in the hat of another, and struck an epaulette from a delegate’s coat. Cursed by the crowd, who blamed them for the deaths of the three men who had just fallen at their feet, the delegates now hastily returned to the Hôtel de Ville where, in their absence, a dramatic scene had taken place.
At about three o’clock a thirty-one-year-old former non-commissioned officer in the Gardes-françaises, Pierre Hulin, had arrived in the square. A large, excitable man, he had recently returned to Paris from Geneva where, as an official in government service, he had taken part in the rebellion of 1782. He had made inflammatory speeches to the crowds in the Palais Royal two days before, and now, finding himself confronted by two companies of Gardes-françaises outside the Hôtel de Ville, he began to harangue them with the same stridency and passion, tears pouring down his cheeks.
‘Brave Gardes-françaises,’ he cried. ‘Can’t you hear the cannon?…That villain de Launay is murdering our brothers, our parents, our wives and children who are gathered unarmed around the Bastille. Will you allow them to be massacred?…Parisians are being slaughtered like sheep. Will you not march on the Bastille?’
They replied that they would if he would lead them. So, with Hulin at their head, some sixty Gardes-françaises followed by about 300 armed civilians with four cannon, marched off towards the Bastille where they were joined by another band of armed citizens under the command of Lieutenant Jacob Élie, who after twenty years in the ranks had recently been granted a commission in the Queen’s Regiment of Infantry.
While Hulin’s cannon opened fire ineffectively on the fifteen-foot-thick walls of the Bastille, Élie made up his mind that the only way of taking the fortress would be to attack the drawbridge and effect an entry through the main gate. So, accompanied by a few civilian volunteers, he ran forward to drag away the carts whose loads of burning straw had earlier provided the assailants with a smoke screen. While he was performing this dangerous operation, during which two of his companions were killed, the crowds of armed men and Gardes-françaises behind him maintained a continuous fire on the towers.
They did not shelter behind retrenchments while they did so [in the words of a contemporary account]. They stood in the very courts of the Bastille and so close to the towers that M. de Launay himself repeatedly made use of the paving-stones and other debris that had been taken up on to the platforms. It cannot be denied that there was much confusion and disorder…Yet the invalides, who had been through many sieges and battles, have assured us that they never experienced such musketry fire as that of these besiegers. They dared not raise their heads above the parapets of the towers.
Having dragged the carts out of the way, Lieutenant Élie gave orders for two cannon to be brought forward into the Cour du Gouvernement and levelled at the underside of the raised drawbridge.
Opposite them, on the other side of the drawbridge, were three eight-pounders, mounted on naval gun carriages. But these remained silent, for the Governor, seeing the besiegers’ cannon in the courtyard facing the gate, now decided to surrender. He ordered a drummer to march round the platform behind the battlements of the towers beating a retreat and two men to accompany him waving large white handkerchieves. But the crowds below took not the least notice of these signals, continuing to fire their muskets as energetically as ever, shouting ‘Down with the bridges! Down with the bridges!’
Hearing these cries, de Launay went into the Council Chamber beside the Tour de la Chapelle on the far side of the Bastille where he wrote a note which read: ‘We have twenty thousand pounds of powder. We shall blow up the garrison and the whole neighbourhood unless you accept our capitulation. From the Bastille at five in the evening. July 14th, 1789, Launay.’ He handed this note to Lieutenant Deflue who went down into the Grande Cour and pushed it through a slit which he had himself cut earlier in the gate by the drawbridge to enable his men to fire on the people outside.
Seeing the note being waved through the slit on the other side of the moat, a group of men, led by a clerk, ran off to fetch some planks from a carpenter’s workshop in the Rue des Tournelles. The longest of these was pushed forward over the edge of the moat. While three or four men leant on one end of it to hold it down, a cobbler walked gingerly towards the other end, but lost his balance and fell over into the moat, breaking his elbow. Another man then tried and, managing to retain his balance as the plank bent under his weight he seized the note and ran back with it to Hulin.
When its contents became known there were renewed shouts of ‘Down with the bridges!’ ‘No capitulation!’ Hulin marched purposefully towards the guns as though about to give the order to open fire, while, inside the fortress, Lieutenant Deflue ‘was expecting the Governor to keep his word and blow up the fort’. But, to Deflue’s ‘great surprise’, de Launay suddenly decided to open the gate. He took out a key from his pocket, handed it to a corporal who unlocked the gate and lowered the drawbridge. The siege was over and the crowd rushed in.
I was about the eighth or tenth man to enter the courtyard [the watchmaker, Jean-Baptiste Humbert, wrote]. The invalides shouted, ‘Lay down your arms!’ Apart from one Swiss officer they all did so. I went up to this officer and threatened him with a bayonet, repeating, ‘Lay down your arms!’ He appealed to the others, saying, ‘Gentlemen, please believe me, I never fired.’
‘How dare you say you never fired,’ I immediately replied, ‘when your lips are still black from biting your cartridges?’ As I said this I made a grab for his sword.
‘They disarmed us immediately,’ confirmed Deflue. ‘They took us prisoner, each of us having a guard. They flung our papers and records out of the windows and plundered everything.’ Deflue, and those of his men who were captured with him, were marched away to the Hôtel de Ville, and all the way were ‘met with threats and insults, and a clamour from the whole mob that [they] ought to be hanged’. ‘The streets through which we passed and the houses flanking them (even the roof-tops) were filled with masses of people shouting at me and cursing me,’ Deflue wrote. ‘Swords, bayonets and pistols were being continually pressed against me. I did not know how I should die but felt that my last moment had come. Stones were thrown at me and women gnashed their teeth and brandished their fists at me.’ He firmly ‘believed that but for the efforts of an officer of the Arquebusiers to protect the Swiss prisoners’ none of them would have escaped with their lives.
Other defenders of the Bastille were not so fortunate; three of the invalides were killed, so were three of the Governor’s staff. The Governor himself was seized by one of the Gardes-françaises and Marie Julien Stanislas Maillard, a tall, dark man, suffering from consumption, who claimed to have walked the plank to snatch the ultimatum. As a hostile crowd gathered round de Launay, shouting for his death, his sword was snatched from his side. Hulin and Élie tried to get him away to the Hôtel de Ville, Élie, leading the party and carrying the text of the capitulation on the point of his sword; but on the way he was attacked by an out-of-work cook named Desnot. Kicking out wildly de Launay caught Desnot an agonizing blow in the testicles. Desnot cried out, ‘He’s done me in’, whereupon someone else stabbed de Launay in the stomach with a bayonet. The mob gathered round him as he lay in the gutter, firing pistols at him and thrusting the blades of swords and bayonets into his now lifeless body. A man bent down and tore the queue from his scalp as a souvenir, another ripped the Cross of Saint Louis from his coat and fixed it to his own. There was a call for his head to be cut off so that it could be displayed to the people as that of a traitor. ‘Here,’ said a man to Desnot, handing him a sword. ‘You do it. It was you he hurt.’ Desnot knelt down to do so, but could not manage the operation with the sword; then, having swallowed some brandy mixed with gunpowder, he finished the job with his pocket-knife.