The Days of the French Revolution (8 page)

When Thuriot came out again into the Cour du Passage, the crowds thronging the courtyard had become threatening and angry. A few, impatient with the unsatisfactory negotiations, shouted abuse at him. Others cried out, ‘We want the Bastille! Out with the troops!’ The mob was denser than ever now, the new arrivals pushing forward so that those in front were forced towards the edge of the moat that separated the Cour du Passage from a second courtyard, the Cour du Gouvernement. The two drawbridges which spanned the moat, the pedestrian and the wider one for carriages, had both been pulled up.

In the towers high above these bridges the
involutes
looked down at the swirling mass of cockaded hats and heaving shoulders of the crowds that now stretched as far as the Rue des Tournelles. They shouted at them to retreat, as the cannon were loaded now and the Swiss troops might be persuaded to open fire. They waved their caps in the air and made warning gestures. The sound of their words was lost above the roar of voices in the Cour du Passage, but the gesticulations were observed and apparently misinterpreted as signs of encouragement. For at that moment two men, followed by several others, clambered on to the roof of one of the shops that lined the northern side of the Cour du Passage, dashed along the walk at the top of the rampart wall and jumped down into the Cour du Gouvernement on the other side of the moat. Here they broke into the guardhouse, emerged with axes and sledge-hammers, and
began to slash at the pulleys of the drawbridges. There was a sudden rattle of chains; the drawbridges began to move. The men on the far side of the moat pushed furiously against the bodies behind them in an effort to get back from the edge as the immense bound planks, now fully released, fell towards them. But one man was killed and another badly hurt by an impact they could not avoid. The crowd behind them rushed over their bodies into the Cour du Gouvernement.

To their right were the Governor’s lodgings; to their left the main gate of the Bastille itself, its huge entrance blocked by a further raised drawbridge across another deep moat. For a moment the leaders seemed to hesitate, wondering what to do. Then the crackling sound of musketry fire rang out, followed by the boom of a cannon.

Afterwards there was bitter controversy as to who first started firing. According to the assailants it was the defenders who opened fire on them as soon as they debouched from the narrow passage between the Governor’s lodgings and the guardhouse, shouting ‘Down with the drawbridge!’ But Lieutenant Deflue insisted that it was the besiegers who ‘fired the first shots at those on top of the towers…The assailants were asked what they wanted, and the general demand was for the bridge to be lowered. They were told that this could not be done and that they must withdraw, or else they would be shot. They renewed their cries, “Down with the bridge!” It was then that the order to fire was given.’

Finding themselves under a heavier fire than they were able to return, the assailants took shelter in a range of buildings to the right of the gate which contained the Bastille’s kitchens. From here several ran out to attack the drawbridge but were driven back by the fire of the garrison. So two carts filled with straw were brought up from Santerre’s brewery, set alight and dragged in front of the drawbridge to afford the protection of a smoke screen.

It was now about two o’clock in the afternoon. And it was at this time that yet another delegation from the Permanent Committee at the Hôtel de Ville, led by Delavigne, the Chairman of the Assembly of Electors, and the Abbé Fauchet, arrived at the Bastille hoping to prevent further bloodshed by persuading the Governor to hand
over the fortress to a citizens’ militia who would ‘guard it in conjunction with the troops of the existing garrison’ and who would be ‘under orders from the city’. But so great was the noise of firing and shouting that they could not make themselves heard above the din; nor was the slightest notice taken by the garrison of the white handkerchiefs which the Electors’ delegates waved above their heads. ‘We do not know whether our signals were noticed and understood,’ they subsequently reported. ‘But the firing never stopped.’ Eventually they managed to affect a partial ceasefire in the Rue Saint-Antoine. ‘Although we renewed our signals, however, the garrison went on firing at us,’ the report continued. ‘And we experienced the pain and mortification of seeing several citizens, whose brave fight we had interrupted, fall at our sides. The assailants therefore resumed their fire with as much indignation now as courage. And we could do nothing to prevent them. They were no longer interested in our deputation. What they wanted now, and loudly clamoured for, was the destruction of that fearful prison and the death of its Governor.’

At the Hôtel de Ville the Permanent Committee, concerned by the failure of Delavigne’s delegation to restore order at the Bastille, decided to make one final effort to persuade the Governor to agree to their terms. Wounded men were being carried into the building on makeshift stretchers and in the arms of their friends. Others arrived to demand more ammunition and then shouted abuse at Flesselles who was disbelieved when he declared that he had none left to give them. It was even feared that if the slaughter continued unavailingly at the Bastille, the people might turn upon the Hôtel de Ville in their fury. So Ethis de Corny set out with five other delegates, carrying a large flag and accompanied by a drummer of the
Gardes-françaises
.

As the delegation approached the Bastille by the Cour de l’Orme, the flag was vigorously waved and the
Garde-française
loudly beat his drum. Two of their number, Boucheron and Piquod de Saint-Honorine, forced their way through the crowds across the Cour du Passage and over the drawbridges into the Cour du Gouvernement where, persuading the assailants to stop firing for a moment, Boucheron shouted to the garrison at the top of his voice that the
city had sent a delegation to discuss terms but that they must all hold their fire and lay down their arms.

‘A person in a coloured coat, in the middle of a group of
invalides
who were all holding their hats in their hands, answered me from the summit of the citadel,’ Boucheron recorded. ‘He said he was willing to receive the delegation but the crowd must withdraw.’

Behind Boucheron and Piquod de Saint-Honorine, the other members of the delegation could see that the
invalides
were quite ready to accept their terms. They were waving their hats in the air and turning their muskets upside down; one went so far as to wave a white flag. But these friendly gestures suddenly ceased, being brought to a halt, so the
invalides
later maintained, by the Governor who insisted that the delegates did not really represent the city but were leaders of the mob, intent on trickery.

The delegates now saw a cannon levelled in their direction. At the same time a volley of musketry fire killed three people who had come up to talk to them, tore a hole in the hat of another, and struck an epaulette from a delegate’s coat. Cursed by the crowd, who blamed them for the deaths of the three men who had just fallen at their feet, the delegates now hastily returned to the Hôtel de Ville where, in their absence, a dramatic scene had taken place.

At about three o’clock a thirty-one-year-old former non-commissioned officer in the
Gardes-françaises
, Pierre Hulin, had arrived in the square. A large, excitable man, he had recently returned to Paris from Geneva where, as an official in government service, he had taken part in the rebellion of 1782. He had made inflammatory speeches to the crowds in the Palais Royal two days before, and now, finding himself confronted by two companies of
Gardes-françaises
outside the Hôtel de Ville, he began to harangue them with the same stridency and passion, tears pouring down his cheeks.

‘Brave
Gardes-françaises
,’ he cried. ‘Can’t you hear the cannon?…That villain de Launay is murdering our brothers, our parents, our wives and children who are gathered unarmed around the Bastille. Will you allow them to be massacred?…Parisians are being slaughtered like sheep. Will you not march on the Bastille?’

They replied that they would if he would lead them. So, with
Hulin at their head, some sixty
Gardes-françaises
followed by about 300 armed civilians with four cannon, marched off towards the Bastille where they were joined by another band of armed citizens under the command of Lieutenant Jacob Élie, who after twenty years in the ranks had recently been granted a commission in the Queen’s Regiment of Infantry.

While Hulin’s cannon opened fire ineffectively on the fifteen-foot-thick walls of the Bastille, Élie made up his mind that the only way of taking the fortress would be to attack the drawbridge and effect an entry through the main gate. So, accompanied by a few civilian volunteers, he ran forward to drag away the carts whose loads of burning straw had earlier provided the assailants with a smoke screen. While he was performing this dangerous operation, during which two of his companions were killed, the crowds of armed men and
Gardes-françaises
behind him maintained a continuous fire on the towers.

They did not shelter behind retrenchments while they did so [in the words of a contemporary account]. They stood in the very courts of the Bastille and so close to the towers that M. de Launay himself repeatedly made use of the paving-stones and other debris that had been taken up on to the platforms. It cannot be denied that there was much confusion and disorder…Yet the
invalides
, who had been through many sieges and battles, have assured us that they never experienced such musketry fire as that of these besiegers. They dared not raise their heads above the parapets of the towers.

Having dragged the carts out of the way, Lieutenant Élie gave orders for two cannon to be brought forward into the Cour du Gouvernement and levelled at the underside of the raised drawbridge.

Opposite them, on the other side of the drawbridge, were three eight-pounders, mounted on naval gun carriages. But these remained silent, for the Governor, seeing the besiegers’ cannon in the courtyard facing the gate, now decided to surrender. He ordered a drummer to march round the platform behind the battlements of the towers beating a retreat and two men to accompany him waving large white handkerchieves. But the crowds below took not the
least notice of these signals, continuing to fire their muskets as energetically as ever, shouting ‘Down with the bridges! Down with the bridges!’

Hearing these cries, de Launay went into the Council Chamber beside the Tour de la Chapelle on the far side of the Bastille where he wrote a note which read: ‘We have twenty thousand pounds of powder. We shall blow up the garrison and the whole neighbourhood unless you accept our capitulation. From the Bastille at five in the evening. July 14th, 1789, Launay.’ He handed this note to Lieutenant Deflue who went down into the Grande Cour and pushed it through a slit which he had himself cut earlier in the gate by the drawbridge to enable his men to fire on the people outside.

Seeing the note being waved through the slit on the other side of the moat, a group of men, led by a clerk, ran off to fetch some planks from a carpenter’s workshop in the Rue des Tournelles. The longest of these was pushed forward over the edge of the moat. While three or four men leant on one end of it to hold it down, a cobbler walked gingerly towards the other end, but lost his balance and fell over into the moat, breaking his elbow. Another man then tried and, managing to retain his balance as the plank bent under his weight he seized the note and ran back with it to Hulin.

When its contents became known there were renewed shouts of ‘Down with the bridges!’ ‘No capitulation!’ Hulin marched purposefully towards the guns as though about to give the order to open fire, while, inside the fortress, Lieutenant Deflue ‘was expecting the Governor to keep his word and blow up the fort’. But, to Deflue’s ‘great surprise’, de Launay suddenly decided to open the gate. He took out a key from his pocket, handed it to a corporal who unlocked the gate and lowered the drawbridge. The siege was over and the crowd rushed in.

I was about the eighth or tenth man to enter the courtyard [the watchmaker, Jean-Baptiste Humbert, wrote]. The
invalides
shouted, ‘Lay down your arms!’ Apart from one Swiss officer they all did so. I went up to this officer and threatened him with a bayonet, repeating, ‘Lay down your arms!’ He appealed to the others, saying, ‘Gentlemen, please believe me, I never fired.’

‘How dare you say you never fired,’ I immediately replied, ‘when your lips are still black from biting your cartridges?’ As I said this I made a grab for his sword.

‘They disarmed us immediately,’ confirmed Deflue. ‘They took us prisoner, each of us having a guard. They flung our papers and records out of the windows and plundered everything.’ Deflue, and those of his men who were captured with him, were marched away to the Hôtel de Ville, and all the way were ‘met with threats and insults, and a clamour from the whole mob that [they] ought to be hanged’. ‘The streets through which we passed and the houses flanking them (even the roof-tops) were filled with masses of people shouting at me and cursing me,’ Deflue wrote. ‘Swords, bayonets and pistols were being continually pressed against me. I did not know how I should die but felt that my last moment had come. Stones were thrown at me and women gnashed their teeth and brandished their fists at me.’ He firmly ‘believed that but for the efforts of an officer of the
Arquebusiers
to protect the Swiss prisoners’ none of them would have escaped with their lives.

Other defenders of the Bastille were not so fortunate; three of the
invalides
were killed, so were three of the Governor’s staff. The Governor himself was seized by one of the
Gardes-françaises
and Marie Julien Stanislas Maillard, a tall, dark man, suffering from consumption, who claimed to have walked the plank to snatch the ultimatum. As a hostile crowd gathered round de Launay, shouting for his death, his sword was snatched from his side. Hulin and Élie tried to get him away to the Hôtel de Ville, Élie, leading the party and carrying the text of the capitulation on the point of his sword; but on the way he was attacked by an out-of-work cook named Desnot. Kicking out wildly de Launay caught Desnot an agonizing blow in the testicles. Desnot cried out, ‘He’s done me in’, whereupon someone else stabbed de Launay in the stomach with a bayonet. The mob gathered round him as he lay in the gutter, firing pistols at him and thrusting the blades of swords and bayonets into his now lifeless body. A man bent down and tore the queue from his scalp as a souvenir, another ripped the Cross of Saint Louis from his coat and fixed it to his own. There was a call for his head to be
cut off so that it could be displayed to the people as that of a traitor. ‘Here,’ said a man to Desnot, handing him a sword. ‘You do it. It was you he hurt.’ Desnot knelt down to do so, but could not manage the operation with the sword; then, having swallowed some brandy mixed with gunpowder, he finished the job with his pocket-knife.