One Day,
Out of All Days

The Morning

The day began as most days begin in a great capital: without ceremony, without any visible tremor of the earth. In the narrow streets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, bakers had been at their work since three in the morning, and the first pale light of a July dawn was already catching on the tiled roofs of the Quai de la Râpée when the night-watchmen, yawning, made their last rounds.

There had been unrest for a week — the dismissal of the finance minister, Necker, on the eleventh had lit a slow-burning anger — yet nothing about the fourteenth, in its first hours, announced itself as extraordinary. A man going to market, a woman drawing water from a public fountain, a dog asleep in the shadow of a stonemason's cart: these were the elements of the morning, and the morning was indistinguishable from any other.

Only the knowing observer, standing in the Place de Grève at six o'clock, might have noticed a faint, continuous sound — not yet a roar, but the low, chordal thrum of a city holding its breath. The cobblestones were warm. The air smelled of river water and green wood smoke. It was the kind of morning that, remembered afterwards, seems impossibly calm, impossibly ordinary — the last morning of a world.

The Gathering

By nine, the thrum had become a murmur. By ten, a voice. The word had passed, as words pass in cities, from one mouth to another without any single speaker being named: to the Hôtel des Invalides, where muskets were kept. And so the crowd — not yet an army, not yet a mob, but something in between, some provisional creature compounded of apprentices and journeymen, of fishwives and schoolboys, of old soldiers on half-pay — gathered on the Esplanade.

The governor of the Invalides, the Marquis de Sombreuil, was a courteous man. He received the delegates politely, listened to their claim upon the public arms with every sign of attention, and delayed his answer. While he delayed, some thirty thousand muskets were carried out of the cellars by hands that had, until that week, held only hammers and awls and the wooden handles of flatirons.

There was no powder. The powder, it was said, was at the Bastille.

The Fortress

The Bastille in 1789 was already an anachronism — a medieval fortress stranded in the middle of a Renaissance city, its walls thirty metres high and five metres thick, its eight towers capped with lead, its moat half-dry and choked with the runoff of the Rue Saint-Antoine. It had been, in its long life, an arsenal, a treasury, a prison for Protestants and philosophers, a symbol, and finally, on that morning, an inconvenience.

Within its walls were seven prisoners — four forgers, two men held at the request of their families, and one nobleman whose madness had moved the King to a gentle confinement. Within its walls were also one hundred and fourteen men under arms: eighty-two pensioner-veterans too old for field duty, and thirty-two Swiss mercenaries of the Salis-Samade regiment, who had arrived only the week before.

And within its walls was the Marquis de Launay, governor, who had been born in the fortress while his father commanded it, and who, by the peculiar symmetry that history reserves for its pivotal figures, would die within a stone's throw of his own birthplace before the sun set.

The Moment

Two deputations were sent in, across the morning and into the early afternoon. Both were received, entertained, delayed, and detained. By one o'clock the crowd outside — now in excess of nine hundred, by the best estimates — had grown impatient. A pair of men climbed onto the roof of a perfumer's shop abutting the outer wall, cut the chains of the outer drawbridge with axes, and let the bridge crash down.

What followed was not a siege in any formal sense. It was something more like a conversation conducted in the grammar of smoke and shouted rumour: desultory musket-fire from the towers; a roll of a dairyman's cart, commandeered, burning, into the inner court; a parley offered and withdrawn; an officer of the Garde Française, one Hulin, appearing at the head of a column of regulars who had crossed over to the crowd's side the preceding evening.

At three o'clock, or thereabouts — no two witnesses agree precisely — the inner drawbridge was lowered from within. Not stormed, not breached, but opened. The garrison had voted, in the only way garrisons ever vote, which is to say by ceasing to fire. The crowd poured in. The prisoners were found. The Bastille had fallen.

The Evening

News reached Versailles by the ordinary means: a sweat-stained horseman in the forecourt, a chamberlain hurrying along a gallery, a duke bending to murmur at a king's ear. The king, who had hunted that day and killed nothing — a fact he noted in his private journal, under the laconic entry "rien" — heard the dispatch and, according to the memoirists, asked whether it was a revolt.

He was told, by the duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, that it was not a revolt but a revolution. The king asked no further question. The court dispersed. In Paris the bells of Notre-Dame rang until midnight; in Versailles a window was closed against the evening air; in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine a woman, whose name no chronicle records, began to sweep the cobbles in front of her doorway as she did every evening, as though the world had not turned on its axis in the course of a single afternoon.

The Legacy

The fortress, declared surplus, was sold on the sixteenth to a contractor named Palloy, who in the course of the following year dismantled it stone by stone and distributed the stones, suitably inscribed, to the eighty-three new Departments of the Republic as commemorative medals. The site became a square; the square became a roundabout; the roundabout, with a bronze column at its centre, became the Place de la Bastille.

Each year, on the fourteenth of July, the square fills with people who were not there and with the descendants of people who were, and of people who were not. Fireworks are set off. The Marseillaise is sung. Children eat pastries shaped like the fortress that no longer exists. Historians disagree about what happened, in what order, and what it meant.

But the day itself — the simple fact of it, the Tuesday of it, the warm July air of it — cannot be argued with. It passed, as all days pass. It was chronicled, misremembered, mythologised, taught, forgotten, and remembered again. And now, two and a half centuries on, it rests in the archive of hours, one day among millions, and also, uniquely, the day.