look closer

The towers go up 80 feet, and smoke stands along the top of them. The whole fortress is held this morning by 82 old soldiers and 32 Swiss grenadiers.

Paris has been hungry all year. The harvest failed, and this morning the price of bread stands at its highest point of the century: a laborer’s whole day buys barely a loaf. Two days ago the king dismissed Necker, the one minister the city trusted with its money. A young lawyer named Camille Desmoulins jumped onto a café table at the Palais-Royal and tore a green leaf from a tree for a cockade. He told the crowd the court meant to starve Paris into obedience. Since then the city has been arming itself. At dawn today, some 30,000 muskets came out of the cellars of the Invalides without a shot fired. The veterans assigned to guard them stood aside. But a musket is only iron and wood without powder, and the powder, 250 barrels of it, was moved days ago into the one building in Paris designed to outlast a siege. The Bastille was built to keep England out of Paris. For 400 years it has kept Paris in. This morning the city wants two things it cannot vote for: gunpowder, and proof that stone can fall. By ten o’clock a crowd of tradesmen, deserters, and clockmakers presses against the outer gate. Inside, Governor de Launay commands 82 old soldiers, 32 Swiss grenadiers, and seven prisoners: four forgers, two madmen, one disgraced aristocrat. Negotiations stretch past noon; a delegation is received politely, invited to breakfast, assured the cannon will not fire. Then two men climb onto the roof of the perfume shop beside the gate and cut the drawbridge chains with axes. The bridge crashes down, the crowd floods the courtyard, and someone opens fire. For four hours the fortress and the city shoot at each other through musket smoke. The attackers drag up cannon from the royal storehouse, two of them inlaid with silver, sent to Louis XIV by the king of Siam a century before. They aim at the wooden inner gate. The crowd loses 98 dead in the courtyards. The garrison loses one man in the fighting. When de Launay surrenders at five against a promise of safety, the promise lasts as far as the Hôtel de Ville, where the crowd kills him on the steps. The people pour through the smoke into the cells and find almost nothing inside, and understand it does not matter. They begin tearing the building apart with their hands, stone by stone, starting from the top. At Versailles that night, the duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt wakes the king to tell him. It is a revolt, the king says. No, Sire, the duke answers, it is a revolution. In his diary the king has written one word: nothing. He meant the day’s hunt, which had gone badly, but the word will follow him forever. Within a week, masons are selling the stones as souvenirs, and a builder named Palloy is carving scale-model Bastilles from the rubble to send to every province in France. Lafayette takes the iron key of the main gate and mails it across the ocean to George Washington, who hangs it in the hallway of his house in Virginia. It hangs there still.