Fallen Glory by James Crawford

Author:James Crawford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

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By July 1789, Paris was a tinderbox, just waiting for any stray spark. Two months earlier, the Estates-General – a meeting of the king, the nobility, the clergy, and the common people – had been convened at Versailles for the first time in over one hundred and seventy years.81 The purpose of this extraordinary gathering was to address the dire financial crisis afflicting France: a legacy of the profligate monarchy and the huge costs involved in fighting to support the newly-constituted thirteen colonies of the United States in the American War of Independence.

Yet for the ‘Third Estate’, the representatives of ninety-five per cent of the French population82, finance was a side issue. Instead, they used the meeting as their opportunity to agree a radical reform of the political landscape, one that would finally enshrine the Enlightenment ideals of equality and democracy in a written constitution. The American victory, billed as a triumph for the Age of Reason, had galvanised both the intellectuals in their salons and the masses on the streets.83 As negotiations descended into an impasse, on 17 June the Third Estate unilaterally declared themselves to be the ‘National Assembly’ – the true representatives of the people of France, and the new body that would govern the affairs of the nation.84

At first Louis XVI moved to resist, but as members of the clergy and the most liberal among the aristocracy began to join the Assembly, he appeared to concede his political authority.85 Had the Third Estate achieved a bloodless coup? As June turned into July, this hope would fade. News reached the National Assembly and the people of Paris that troops from the provinces, made up of foreign regiments thought to be loyal to the Crown86, were marching on the city. On 11 July, the king dismissed the popular finance minister Jacques Necker and replaced him with the hard-line Baron de Breteuil.87

Hysterical reports spread that the approaching army was 30,000 strong and under orders to sack Paris and massacre its rebellious citizens. Breteuil himself was reported to have said, ‘If it should be necessary to burn Paris, it shall be burned, and the inhabitants decimated: desperate diseases require desperate remedies’.88 Unsurprisingly, the Bastille was at the centre of many of the rumours. Its cannons were armed, people said, and ready to fire into the suburb of Saint-Antoine89; it was already holding in its cells representatives of the National Assembly90; it had just received a delivery of 31,000 pounds of gunpowder.91

On the morning of 14 July, over nine hundred Parisians had massed below the walls of the fortress. Cannon may have bristled from its towers and ramparts, but in fact the Bastille was manned only by eighty-two ageing, retired soldiers known as invalides, and a small complement of thirty-two Swiss guards. Moreover, the prison’s food supplies wouldn’t last much more than twenty-four hours, and there were no reserves of drinking water.92

Nevertheless, the reputedly impregnable Bastille had found itself the last outpost of royal authority in Paris. And its

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