Why parisians stormed the bastille

Louis responded a few weeks later by firing his finance minister, Jacques Necker, who had showed support for the Third Estate. The revolutionaries saw this—and a buildup of royal troops throughout Paris in early July —as proof that the king planned to purge his government of all republican sympathizers. In response, people took to the streets to protest, clashing with soldiers along the way. But they had no gunpowder for their new weapons.

Unbeknownst to the revolutionaries, only seven people were imprisoned there at the time. Who was the nameless Bastille prisoner who wore an iron mask? Prison guards fired on them, and fighting broke out as royal guards stood by. The revolutionaries stormed in, freed the prisoners, and took the gunpowder. They killed at least six prison guards, beat and stabbed Launay to death, then put his head on a pike to display.

About a hundred people died during the Storming of the Bastille, and the event is now remembered as one of the pivotal events of the French Revolution. Over the 10 years of upheaval that followed, France would execute its king and queen—and countless others—and transform into a republic. The building that had once stood as a monument of monarchical tyranny was now a symbol of liberty—and within months, it was demolished in a symbolic gesture.

Its bricks were distributed throughout France and the world as souvenirs. A French revolutionary's year-old blood may reveal the disease that struck him down in life. Since , France has celebrated July 14 as its national holiday, and usually a military parade and fireworks mark the occasion in Paris.

On July 13 and 14, firefighters all over France open their stations to the public for all-night dance parties with plenty of free champagne.

All rights reserved. A backlash against the monarchy's excesses Louis took power in the midst of a financial crisis due to overspending and years of expensive wars. Editor's note: This story originally published on July 13, It has been updated.

Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Their rage was directed at aristocratic enemies they suspected were ready to destroy the city to save their privilege. Men leapt over rooftops to smash drawbridge chains, others dismantled cannon and hauled them by hand over barricades. The tiny garrison yielded on the point of being overwhelmed, and at the news, royal troops elsewhere in the city packed up and marched away, their officers unwilling to try their loyalty against the triumphant people.

It was a complete overthrowing of an old order, following a failed attempt to prop up an absolute monarchy. That monarchy had bankrupted itself, in one of the greatest ironies of this age, paying for a war of liberation halfway around the world.

When the French king Louis XVI heeded the enthusiasts for American independence and sent his troops and fleets to fight the British Empire in , he thought he was dealing a death-blow to an age-old foe. In fact, he launched a process that would make Britain an even more dominant global power than it had been before the United States broke free. But he would also create, against his will, a culture of equality and rights with a disputed heritage all the way to the present day.

King George III had fallen into raving mania, and a bitter political battle was under way for the powers of a regency. Now the opposition, led by Charles James Fox, saw the chance to eject Pitt when their royal patron, the Prince of Wales, took on the regency. Listen: Stephen Clarke argues that our views of the events of and beyond need to be completely revised, on this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast:.

In America, a transition scarcely less delicate or contested was in train. The years after American independence in were a time of political and fiscal disorder. For two years the much-disputed form of a new constitution for the new nation crept towards fulfilment. At stake in all of these countries was a tangled web of ideas about the meaning of freedom, its connection to the concept of rights, and the besetting question of whether such terms covered the privileged possessions of a few, or were the natural heritage of all.

For the Anglo-American world, freedom and rights had first been seen as the historical consequence of a very particular evolution. From the medieval days of Magna Carta and the time-honoured maxims of English Common Law, radicals in Britain and its North American colonies drew an inspiration that blended seamlessly with the new philosophies of men such as John Locke in the s, so that rebellious Virginians in could assert boldly that:.

Yet as they did so, they also excluded their very many slaves from these same rights. Many on the more radical side of British politics, meanwhile, had supported the American quest for freedom, and seen it as part of a larger transatlantic struggle against tyranny. Celebrating its centenary in November , the speaker at a grand dinner of such radicals expressed a wish for universal freedoms, that:.

Such talk was cheap, however. While George III recovered from his madness in Britain and the United States eased slowly into existence across the Atlantic, in France the clash between the forces of freedom and privilege, rights and subjection, was played out in a dire and epochal confrontation.

On one side stood institutions that claimed to be time-honoured defenders of liberty against overweening power. French nobles and judges asserted their rights to protect the nation from arbitrary rule, in the name of an unwritten constitutional tradition much like that accepted in Britain. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! On July 14, , thousands gathered along the seafront of Nice, France to celebrate Bastille Day—the country's independence holiday.

The mood turned from joy to horror, when a white truck barreled through a pedestrian-filled closed street. In the end, 86 were dead, including Henry Aaron was born February 5, , in Mobile, Alabama. The third of eight children, Aaron was a star football player, third baseman On July 14, , Gerald R. Ford is born Leslie Lynch King, Jr. His biological father left the family when Ford was three years old.

The young Ford went on to become the Romanticized in both life and death, John Ringo was supposedly a Shakespeare-quoting gentleman whose wit was as quick as his gun. Some believed he was college educated, and his sense of Garrett, who had been tracking the Kid for three months after the gunslinger had escaped from prison only days before his scheduled execution, got a tip that