Bastille

Timeline

1. 1357

   Two-Tower Origin

   Etienne Marcel, provost of Paris merchants, fortifies the Porte Saint-Antoine with two stone towers and a 24-meter moat, creating the first 'bastille' at the spot.

2. 1370

   Full Fortress Begins

   Charles V orders provost Hugues Aubriot to expand the gate into a regular eight-towered fortress, anticipating renewed English attacks during the Hundred Years' War.

3. 1417

   Declared a State Prison

   The Bastille is formally designated a state prison, beginning a four-century career as confinement of choice for political detainees of the French crown.

4. 1659

   Lettres de Cachet Era

   From this year onward the Bastille functions almost exclusively as a state penitentiary under royal warrants requiring no public charge or trial, the 'lettres de cachet'.

5. 1717

   Voltaire Imprisoned

   At twenty-one, the future Voltaire is locked up for satirizing the Regent of France; he leaves the Bastille months later with the pen name that defines his career.

6. 14 July 1789

   Storming of the Bastille

   A crowd of roughly a thousand Parisians storms the fortress in search of gunpowder, executes Governor de Launay, and frees the seven prisoners then inside the walls.

7. 1790

   Demolition Begins

   The city of Paris orders the fortress dismantled as a public works project; workers carve souvenir miniatures from the stones, sold across revolutionary France.

8. 1806

   Demolition Completed

   After sixteen years of dismantling, the site is finally cleared; a circular open space gradually emerges as a major traffic hub of eastern Paris.

9. 1840

   July Column Completed

   On the tenth anniversary of the 1830 July Revolution, the 47-meter bronze column rises at the square's center, crowned by the gilded Genius of Liberty statue.

10. 1880

    Bastille Day Established

    The Third Republic designates 14 July as the national holiday 'La Fete nationale', inaugurating the annual military parade and fireworks that continue to this day.

11. 1899

    Foundations Rediscovered

    During construction of Metro Line 1, workers uncover the base of the Liberty Tower; part of it is later relocated to Square Henri-Galli for permanent preservation.

12. 1989

    Opera Bastille Opens

    President Francois Mitterrand inaugurates the Opera Bastille on the eastern edge of the square to mark the bicentenary of the Revolution — a 'people's opera'.

Detailed History

The story of the Bastille begins in 1357, when Etienne Marcel, provost of Paris merchants, raised two stone towers and a 24-meter moat at the Porte Saint-Antoine to form a fortified gate called a 'bastille'. In 1369, fearing English attacks during the Hundred Years' War, Charles V ordered his provost Hugues Aubriot to expand it into a full fortress. Construction proper began in 1370: two more towers were added behind the original pair, then two on the north and two on the south, producing a rectangular fortress of eight towers ringed by a 30-meter wall and a deep moat. Through the fifteenth century it served military roles in the rivalry between Burgundians and Armagnacs, and again in the Wars of Religion. Its career as a state prison was formally declared in 1417; under Cardinal Richelieu it became the standard destination for prisoners detained by 'lettres de cachet' — royal warrants requiring no public charge. From 1659 onward it functioned almost exclusively as a state penitentiary. Under Louis XIV it received Huguenot prisoners after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, plus intellectuals like Voltaire and noble dissidents like the Marquis de Sade; by 1789 some 5,279 prisoners had passed through. Confinement was milder than legend suggested: cells were roughly five meters square with eight-meter ceilings, prisoners brought their own furniture, cooks, and servants, and meals ran to three courses at midday and five at supper. On 14 July 1789, with royal finances collapsing and the National Assembly newly formed, around a thousand Parisians from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine marched on the fortress for gunpowder. Governor Bernard-Rene de Launay was killed by the crowd after surrendering; the seven prisoners then present were released. The very next day the Paris Commune ordered the fortress demolished as a public works project — work began in 1790 and finished in 1806. Workers carved souvenir miniatures from the salvaged stone, distributed across France as revolutionary relics. Today the cleared site is the circular Place de la Bastille; the July Column at its center was completed in 1840 for the tenth anniversary of the 1830 revolution, while a wall fragment inside Bastille metro station and a tower base preserved at Square Henri-Galli, found during metro excavations in 1899, remain the principal physical remnants.

Cultural Significance

The Bastille was never merely a medieval fortress. By the eighteenth century it had become one of the most charged symbols in European political imagination — the very emblem, for Enlightenment writers, of absolutist tyranny. Memoirs by famous prisoners such as Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade circulated widely, and by the reign of Louis XVI, when actual prisoner numbers had been radically reduced, the Bastille had ballooned in popular feeling into a 'castle of stolen liberty' far larger in myth than in fact. The storming on 14 July 1789 was, in strict tactical terms, a raid for gunpowder. But as the first occasion on which a Parisian crowd physically dismantled a symbol of royal power, it electrified revolutionary intellectuals across Europe; Hegel and the young William Wordsworth would hail it as the dawn of liberty. In 1880 the Third Republic established 14 July as the national holiday 'La Fete nationale', inaugurating the parade and fireworks at the Bastille square that have since become rituals of republican self-renewal. To mark the bicentenary in 1989, President Francois Mitterrand inaugurated the Opera Bastille beside the square as a 'people's opera'. The Bastille endures as a foundational stage of revolutionary literature: Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Hugo's Ninety-Three, Anatole France's The Gods Are Athirst — each draws its gravity from this fortress.

Architectural Details

Built in its main phase between 1370 and 1383, the medieval Bastille was an unusually rational fortification — an early flagship of late-medieval military architecture. The plan was almost perfectly rectangular, roughly 68 by 37 meters, with eight cylindrical towers ten to twelve meters in diameter at the four corners and the midpoint of each long side. All eight towers rose to the same crown height of about 24 meters, linked at the top by a continuous battlemented walkway — a striking departure from earlier French castles centered on a tall keep. Because every tower carried its own rooftop terrace, defenders could pour fire over a 360-degree field with no blind spots, a design idea later copied at Nunney Castle in south-west England. Walls of dressed limestone about three meters thick at their bases were the strongest defense against early artillery in northern Europe. A moat about 24 meters wide ringed the structure; only two drawbridges gave access. Internally the fortress had five levels: cisterns and powder magazines in the basement, a garrison floor, two to three floors of cells and the governor's apartments above, and the artillery platform on the roof. Each tower's uppermost cell was an octagonal chamber called a 'calotte', lit by a single barred window. Demolition yielded twenty thousand tons of stone, much reused in the Pont de la Concorde.