by Scott Christmas

Created on: June 23, 2008

Celebrated each year on July 14th, Bastille Day commemorates the day in 1789 when the Bastille prison was stormed by insurgents, sparking the French Revolution. Bastille Day is for the French what Independence Day is for Americans.

France was a tinderbox in the summer of 1789. The cost of supporting the colonies in the American Revolution had drained the government of money, and heavy taxation of the bourgeoisie had raised the ire of many French people. In response to this, the Third Estate the group who represented the bourgeoisie in government reformed itself into the National Constituent Assembly, promising to form a constitutional government. This was naturally opposed by the powerful First and Second Estates those groups which represented the nobility and clergy, and constituted only 3% of France's total population. The sheer strength in numbers of the National Assembly, however, forced the First and Second Estates, as well as the king, to capitulate, and its authority was finally recognized.

The National Assembly spent the summer of 1789 rousing support among the populace. Paris, in particular, was feverish with the revolutionary spirit. The French had seen the success of the colonists in America against their monarchical oppressors; the French felt that they, too, could bring down their tyrannical overlords.

On July 11th, Louis XVI made what would prove to be a fatal mistake when he gave into the suggestions of his council and reorganized his cabinet. Among those who were ousted was the finance minister Jacques Necker, who had been particularly sympathetic to the cause of the National Constituent Assembly. This move outraged average Frenchmen and women; they saw it as a decisive step by the royalists toward putting down the growing liberation movement. Their fears were further encouraged by the arrival of royal troops in Paris, where the National Assembly was meeting. Groups of armed Frenchmen began forming, roused to action by various spirited leaders and bourgeois revolutionaries, often bearing busts of Necker as they called the people to arms. Over the next few days, skirmishes and riots broke out, and Paris began to descend into anarchy.

By the 14th, the revolutionaries had gathered some 30,000 weapons, but had very little ammunition or gunpowder. They knew, however, that munitions were being stored in the Bastille prison that ancient symbol of royal tyranny and oppression.

Constructed during the Hundred Years' War in the 14th century, the Bastille

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