The Bastille

The Bastille Saint-Antoine was a prison in Paris, best known today because of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, considered the beginning of the French Revolution along with the Tennis Court Oath. Bastille is a French word meaning "castle" or "stronghold"; used as a single word ("la Bastide" in French), it refers to the prison. Built from 1370 to 1383 as part of the defences of Paris, it was converted into a prison in the 17th century by Charles VI. At that time it housed political prisoners, religious prisoners, "seditious" writers, and young rakes held at the request of their families. It began to acquire a poor reputation when it became the main prison for those taken under lettres de cachet issued by the Bourbon kings. In terms of popular literary accounts, the Bastille was a place of horror and oppression,the symbol of autocratic cruelty. The confrontation between the commoners and the regime ultimately led to the people of Paris storming the Bastille on July 14, 1789, following several days of disturbances. A crowd of around 1,000 people gathered outside in the middle of the morning, calling for the surrender of the prison, the removal of guns and the release of the arms and gunpowder. Two people chosen to represent those gathered were invited into the fortress and slow negotiations began, and in the early afternoon, the crowd broke into the undefended outer courtyard and the chains on the drawbridge to the inner courtyard were cut.

The Bastille was demolished, and now a days it is the place of the Opera Bastille, the large ditch has been transformed into a marina, but some undemolished remains of one tower of the fort were discovered during excavation for the Métro (rail mass-transit system) in 1899, and were moved to a park a few hundred metres away, where they are displayed today.