Friday, March 29, AD 2024 10:16am

July 14, 1789: First Bastille Day

 

Thomas Jefferson remained enamored of the French Revolution long after most of the Founding Fathers, sickened by the atrocities of the Revolution, became critics of it.  Jefferson was the American Minister to France at the start of the Revolution, and here is his account of the storming of the Bastille:

 

 

On the 14th, they send one of their members (Monsieur de Corny, whom we knew in America) to the Hotel des Invalides to ask arms for their Garde Bourgeoise. He was followed by, or he found there, a great mob. The Governor of the Invalids came out and represented the impossibility of his delivering arms without the orders of those from whom he received them.
De Corney advised the people then to retire, retired himself, and the people took possession of the arms. It was remarkable that not only the Invalids themselves made no opposition, but that a body of 5000 foreign troops, encamped within 400 yards, never stirred.

 

 
Monsieur de Corny and five others were then sent to ask arms of Monsieur de Launai, Governor of the Bastille. They found a great collection of people already before the place, and they immediately planted a flag of truce, which was answered by a like flag hoisted on the parapet. The deputation prevailed on the people to fall back a little, advanced themselves to make their demand of the Governor, and in that instant a discharge from the Bastille killed 4. people of those nearest to the deputies. The deputies retired, the people rushed against the place, and almost in an instant were in possession of a fortification, defended by 100 men, of infinite strength, which in other times had stood several regular sieges and had never been taken. How they got in, has as yet been impossible to discover. Those, who pretend to have been of the party tell so many different stories as to destroy the credit of them all.

 

 
They took all the arms, discharged the prisoners and such of the garrison as were not killed in the first moment of fury, carried the Governor and Lieutenant governor to the Greve (the place of public execution) cut off their heads, and set them through the city in triumph to the Palais royal.

 

 

 
About the same instant, a treacherous correspondence having been discovered in Monsieur de Flesselles prevot des marchands, they seize him in the hotel de ville, where he was in the exercise of his office, and cut off his head.

 

 
These events carried imperfectly to Versailles were the subject of two successive deputations from the States to the King, to both of which he gave dry and hard answers, for it has transpired that it had been proposed and agitated in Council to seize on the principal members of the States general, to march the whole army down upon Paris and to suppress it’s tumults by the sword. But at night the Duke de Liancourt forced his way into the king’s bedchamber, and obliged him to hear a full and animated detail of the disasters of the day in Paris. He went to bed deeply impressed.

0 0 votes
Article Rating
13 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Thursday, July 14, AD 2016 9:22am

Although the storming of the Bastille is usually taken as marking the beginning of the French Revolution, the really decisive event was the decision by the Third Estate to declare itself the National Assembly. This took place on 6 June 1789, on the proposal of the Abbé Sieyès, who declared that the other two estates, the nobles and the clergy represented only themselves and their own particular interests, whereas the Third estate represented the nation. This was followed on 20 June by the Serment du Jeu de Paume or Tennis Court Oath, when the deputies swore “not to separate, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require, until the constitution of the kingdom is established.”

The Abbé once again intervened decisively in the history of the nation. As Lord Acton recounts, on 18 Brumaire, “Bonaparte, when threatened with outlawry, lost his head, and Sieyès quietly told him to drive out the hostile deputies. Thereupon the soldier, obeying the man of peace, drew his sword and expelled them.”

Lord Acton’s judgment on this intriguing character is well known: “The Abbé was not a high-minded man, and he has no friends in his own country. Some dislike him because he was a priest, some because he was an unfrocked priest. He is odious to royalists as a revolutionist, and to republicans as a renegade… I should not hesitate to acknowledge him as the first political intellect of his age.”

As for Jefferson, he shared the Jacobin faith that the earth belongs to those who are on it, not under it, that the future would be unlike the past, that it would be better, and that the experience of ages may instruct and warn, but cannot guide or control. He was, one recalls, an extravagant hater of tailzies and perpetuities.

William P. Walsh
William P. Walsh
Thursday, July 14, AD 2016 3:53pm

Teddy Roosevelt, as I recall, said that Jefferson was a much over-rated man, and by the way, of Thomas Paine, a filthy atheist. As to the “prisoners” liberated from the Bastille, there were seven, some demented, there housed by request of family, and including the Marquis de Sade whom I understand dwelt in relative comfort, afforded fine cuisine, imbibing good wine, and with his library to keep him occupied in a pleasant manner. The storming and heroic liberation of the Bastille is an early example of left-wing spin.

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Thursday, July 14, AD 2016 4:10pm

Internet atheists are fond of quoting Jefferson’s various statements about religion, as if Jefferson was the greatest mind that ever lived. Kosciuszko urged Jefferson to give up his slaves, and left a trust of his own money to free them, but Jefferson refused. There was an order of nuns in New Orleans who feared Jefferson due to his support of the French Revolution and wrote to him asking if he supported the same thing in the US, shortly after the Louisiana Purchase.

Napoleon was the result of the Revolution. Poles were his allies as he marched to Moscow. The Polish anthem even mentions him.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Friday, July 15, AD 2016 3:10am

William P. Walsh wrote, “including the Marquis de Sade…”

No, owing to deterioration in his mental condition, the Marquis had been transferred to the mental hospital at Charenton ten days earlier, on 4 July.
Released in 1790, he adopted the name of Citoyen de Sade and in 1792 he was elected a deputy for the Section des Piques in Paris to the National Convention that proclaimed the Republic on 20 September (4 brumaire an 1) His speeches show him to have been a vehement and abundant orator, but not florid. His intemperate criticisms of Maximilien Robespierre, the Committee of Public Safety’s spokesman in the Assembly and, as we should say, Leader of the House, earned him the unwelcome attention of Lazare Carnot, the War Minister and, in effect, Prime Minister. Accused of “moderatism,” on 5 December 1793, he was expelled from the Assembly, thereby losing his immunity from arrest. Imprisoned for a year, he never returned to public life.

The longest serving prisoner was Auguste Tavernier, confined in 1757 for his part in Damien’s plot to assassinate King Louis XV. Marat’s newspaper L’Ami du peuple raised a considerable public subscription for him.

Tito Edwards
Admin
Wednesday, July 20, AD 2016 5:31pm

Bastille Day is a dark day for the Catholic Church, I don’t believe any French Catholic should celebrate it all.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Thursday, July 21, AD 2016 6:10am

Tito Edwards wrote, “I don’t believe any French Catholic should celebrate it all.”
I tend to agree with two Catholic writers, G K Chesterton and Belloc. Chesterton wrote “The French Revolution was attacked because it was democratic and defended because it was democratic; and Napoleon was not feared as the last of the iron despots, but as the first of the iron democrats. What France set out to prove France has proved; not that common men are all angels, or all diplomatists, or all gentlemen (for these inane aristocratic illusions were no part of the Jacobin theory), but that common men can all be citizens and can all be soldiers; that common men can fight and can rule.”
And Hilaire Belloc said this: “The scorn which was in those days universally felt for that pride which associates itself with things not inherent to a man (notably and most absurdly with capricious differences of wealth) never ran higher; and the passionate sense of justice which springs from this profound and fundamental social dogma of equality, as it moved France during the Revolution to frenzy, so also moved it to creation. Those who ask how it was that a group of men sustaining all the weight of civil conflict within and of universal war without, yet made time enough in twenty years to frame the codes which govern modern Europe, to lay down the foundations of universal education, of a strictly impersonal scheme of administration, and even in detail to remodel the material face of society—in a word, to make modern Europe—must be content for their reply to learn that the Republican Energy had for its flame and excitant this vision: a sense almost physical of the equality of man.”

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Thursday, July 21, AD 2016 9:03am

Donald R McClarey wrote, “the shortcomings of the England of his time.”

No shortage of those, in Chesterton’s time, or any other. He never identified them more bitingly than when he remarked that “Our middle classes did well to adorn their parlours with the picture of the “Meeting of Wellington and Blücher.” They should have hung up a companion piece of Pilate and Herod shaking hands.”

I have seen it myself in the bar parlours of old inns.
http://tinyurl.com/hybdzwn

As for Belloc, he was one of the few writers in English to do justice to Carnot, the War Minister and, effectively Prime Minister, as “the Organiser of Victory,” as Michelet calls him. Belloc is good, too, on the “Generation of Genius,” Kléber, Moreau, Reynier, Marceau, and Ney on Sambre-et-Meuse, Hoche, Desaix, and St. Cyr on the Rhine and Bonaparte and Masséna in the Apennines, in the period between the fall of the frontier fortresses and the victory of Fleurus.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Thursday, July 21, AD 2016 10:51am

Donald R McClarey wrote, “The nineteenth century would witness democratization and an improvement in the standard of living in England…”
One recalls Disraeli’s taunt to his Liberal opponents: “You proclaim ‘Peace and Plenty’ amid a starving people and a world in arms!”
As for “democratization,” Chesterton himself pointed out, “The politicians said the working-class was now strong enough to be allowed votes. It would be truer to say it was now weak enough to be allowed votes. So in more recent times Payment of Members, which would once have been regarded (and resisted) as an inrush of popular forces, was passed quietly and without resistance, and regarded merely as an extension of parliamentary privileges. The truth is that the old parliamentary oligarchy abandoned their first line of trenches because they had by that time constructed a second line of defence. It consisted in the concentration of colossal political funds in the private and irresponsible power of the politicians, collected by the sale of peerages and more important things, and expended on the jerrymandering of the enormously expensive elections. In the presence of this inner obstacle a vote became about as valuable as a railway ticket when there is a permanent block on the line. The façade and outward form of this new secret government is the merely mechanical application of what is called the Party System. The Party System does not consist, as some suppose, of two parties, but of one. If there were two real parties, there could be no system.”

Discover more from The American Catholic

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Scroll to Top