This coming Monday, France will observe Bastille Day, which traditionally has been seen as the beginning of the French Revolution. The Bastille was a prison in the center of Paris. Contemporary paintings show it as a large stone fortress built in the fourteenth century to defend the city, but as the city grew, it became a state prison, seen as a place of detention for political prisoners.
The mob that stormed it on July 14, 1789, apparently was looking for gunpowder, as well as freeing the inmates. The Governor of the Bastille was the Marquis de Launay, whom the surging mob beheaded, and one of the assailants took his head to the parapets and held it up for the cheering mob to see. Ironically, at the time, the prison held only seven inmates, several of whom were lunatics.
King Louis XVI and the royal family were not in Paris at the time of the assault, as they lived at the Palace of Versailles 12 miles southwest of the city. On July 14, the King went hunting in the royal preserve at Versailles, and as he was unsuccessful in killing any game, that evening he wrote in his diary, “Rien,” the French word for “nothing,” unaware of the turmoil that had erupted in his capital.
Following the storming of the Bastille, the building was razed, but today tourists can see the outline of its dimensions in the unearthed foundation stones in what is a park on the site. In the 1980s in anticipation of the celebration of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, then President Francois Mitterand undertook a massive reworking of the city of Paris.
His projects included building the Arch of Defense, beyond the Arch of Triumph on the Champs Elyse, the construction of the modern art gallery, the Pompidou Center, named for the second president of the Fifth French Republic, and the building of the Opera of the Bastille adjoining the site of the Bastille. Those structures are not in keeping with the traditional design concepts of the city of Paris.
Paris, as we know it today, is essentially the legacy of the Emperor Napoleon III, who ruled first as president of the Second Republic from 1848-1851, and second as emperor from 1852-1870. The nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, he undertook an extensive rebuilding of the capital for both esthetic and security reasons.
He entrusted the work to the Prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, who directed the various projects for the city’s renovation from 1853-1870, when the empire fell following the Franco-Prussian War. Haussmann cut through the ancient neighborhoods of Old Paris to construct broad avenues, not merely to make beautiful cityscapes, but also to allow for easy military responses to potential uprisings. Haussmann wanted no more “stormings of the Bastille.” He built an infrastructure of water and sewer works and laid out many parks across the city.
Among his myriad projects, Haussmann built the Gothic-style steeple over the transept of Notre Dame Cathedral, which fell during the fire in the Cathedral five years ago, and now has been rebuilt to his design. The addition of the steeple, which had not been part of the original construction of the Cathedral, reflected the renewed passion for Gothic architecture that swept across Europe and America in the 19th century.
July 4th and July 14th have little in common. The former represents the start of a limited revolution that was designed to bring about personal and political liberty for the American colonists. The latter began a social revolution that toppled the existing European world order, leading to political upheavals and chaos for a quarter of a century, until peace was achieved at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Such are the oftentimes unfathomable vagaries of history.
