The Bastille, a fourteenth-century fortress with eight round towers and walls five feet thick, had been converted into a state prison to which men who had broken the law or offended the government were spirited away, sometimes never to reappear. By 1789, however, this had changed and the prison had become more a symbol of tyranny than a grim place of incarceration. The Marquis de Sade, a prisoner in the Bastille until a week before the fortress was stormed, hung family portraits on his walls and kept a wardrobe of fashionable clothing and a library of dozens of volumes. On the day of the attack, the fortress contained only seven prisoners: five forgers and two people who were mentally adrift. Still, because it was considered a royal arsenal and possessed a garrison of 114 soldiers, the government decided to use it as a place to deposit 250 barrels of gunpowder.
On July 14, twenty thousand Parisians, incensed by the royal dismissal of the Estates-General, the presence of a growing number of soldiers in Paris, and the stocking of gunpowder, marched on the Bastille. A few hours later, the fortress had surrendered, and the mob had liberated the seven prisoners and taken possession of the gunpowder. The governor of the fortress was stabbed with knives, swords, and bayonets, his neck was sawed through with a pocket knife, and his head, mounted on a pike, was bobbing at the head of a street parade.
The fall of the Bastille was a political and psychological turning point. The National Assembly wrote a new constitution and voted on August 4 to abolish most of the aristocratic rights and fiscal privileges of the nobility and clergy. On August 26, the assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a charter of liberties whose wording reflected the ideas of the Enlightenment and the language of the American Declaration of Independence.
Louis XVI and his family remained at Versailles. On October 5, a procession of five thousand women (and men disguised as women; it was rightly believed that the king would not order soldiers guarding the palace to fire on women) walked ten miles from Paris, invaded the palace built by the Sun King, and, the following day, forced the royal family to return with them to Paris. The family was installed in the Tuileries Palace in a state of semidetention (afternoon carriage rides in city parks were permitted). They remained there for nine months while the leaders of the National Assembly, most of them intellectuals and lawyers, with a few noblemen, all of whom thought in terms of maintaining order while bringing reform, tried to create a new form of constitutional monarchy. While they worked, and until the spring of 1791—twenty-four months after the summoning of the Estates-General, and twenty-two months after the storming of the Bastille—France was governed by a National Assembly with a monarchist majority led by Mirabeau.
On the night of March 25, 1791, Mirabeau took two dancers from the opera home with him, slept with them, became violently ill, and, eight days later died. His departure removed the one figure whose political reputation and oratorical powers might have ensured the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. Even without him, on May 3, the National Assembly proclaimed a new constitution, establishing a limited monarchy. The monarch now would be titled King of the French rather than King of France, but France remained a monarchy and bourgeois politicians remained in control.
On June 20, Louis and Marie Antoinette opened the door to personal and political catastrophe. Managing to escape from the Tuileries disguised as servants, the king and queen fled Paris with their children and headed toward the eastern frontier and the Austrian Netherlands. The royal carriage traveled no faster than seven miles an hour because the queen insisted that the whole family remain together in a single large overweight vehicle. Believing that they were out of danger, they stopped for the night at Varennes, only a few miles from the border. There, the awkward figure wearing a bottle-green coat and a lackey’s hat was recognized, apprehended, and, with his family, ignominiously brought back to Paris.
Politically, the failure of the flight to Varennes cut the ground from under the king. It discredited the leaders of the National Assembly, who had been negotiating with Louis to create a new form of monarchy and who now felt themselves betrayed. Many abroad also condemned the king. Until Louis’s capture and return from Varennes, Catherine had still regarded him as a free agent—weak, but free. But after he had been trundled back to Paris like an animal in a cage, any illusion of freedom disappeared. “I fear that the greatest obstacle to the escape of the king is the king himself,” Catherine said. “Knowing her husband, the queen does not leave him, and she is right, but it complicates the problem.”
