Legends of the Bastille

by Frantz Funck-Brentano

The immediate neighbourhood of Paris was plunged in terror. The batches of letters, still unpublished, preserved in the National Archives throw the most vivid light on this point. Bands of armed vagabonds scoured the country districts, pillaging the villages and plundering the crops. These were the “Brigands,” a term which constantly recurs in the documents, and more and more frequently as we approach the 14th of July. These armed bands numbered three, four, five hundred men. At Cosne, at Orleans, at Rambouillet, it was the same story of raids on the corn. In different localities of the environs of Paris, the people organized themselves on a military basis. Armed burghers patrolled the streets against the “brigands.” From all sides the people rained on the king demands for troops to protect them. Towns like Versailles, in dread of an invasion by these ruffians, implored the king for protection: the letters of the municipal council preserved in the National Archives are in the highest degree instructive.

At this moment there had collected in the outskirts of Paris those troops whose presence was in the sequel so skilfully turned to account by the orators of the Palais-Royal. True, the presence of the troops made them uneasy. So far were the soldiers from having designs against the Parisians that in the secret correspondence of Villedeuil we find the court constantly urging that they should be reserved for the safeguarding of the adjoining districts, which were every day exposed to attack, and for the safe conduct of the convoys of corn coming up to Versailles and Paris. Bands mustered around the capital. In the first weeks of May, near Villejuif, a troop of from five to six hundred ruffians met intending to storm Bicêtre and march on Saint-Cloud. They came from distances of thirty, forty, and fifty leagues, and the whole mass surged around Paris and was swallowed up there as into a sewer. During the last days of April the shopmen saw streaming through the barriers “a terrific number of men, ill clad and of sinister aspect.” By the first days of May, it was noticed that the appearance of the mob had altogether changed. There was now mingled with it “a number of strangers from all the country parts, most of them in rags, and armed with huge clubs, the mere aspect of them showing what was to be feared.” In the words of a contemporary, “one met such physiognomies as one never remembered having seen in the light of day.” To provide occupation for a part of these ill-favoured unemployed, whose presence everybody felt to be disquieting, workshops were constructed at Montmartre, where from seventeen to eighteen thousand men were employed on improvised tasks at twenty sous a day.

Meanwhile the electors chosen to nominate deputies to the National Assembly had been collecting. On April 22, 1789, Thiroux de Crosne, the lieutenant of police, speaking of the tranquillity with which the elections were being carried on, added: “But I constantly have my eye on the bakers.”

On April 23, de Crosne referred to the irritation which was showing itself among certain groups of workmen in the Suburb Saint-Antoine against two manufacturers, Dominique Henriot, the saltpetre-maker, and Réveillon, the manufacturer of wall-papers. Henriot was known, not only for his intelligence, but for his kindliness; in years of distress he had sacrificed a portion of his fortune for the support of the workmen; as to Réveillon, he was at this date one of the most remarkable representatives of Parisian industry. A simple workman to begin with, he was in 1789 paying 200,000 livres a year in salaries to 300 workers; shortly before, he had carried off the prize founded by Necker for the encouragement of useful arts. Henriot and Réveillon were said to have made offensive remarks against the workmen in the course of the recent electoral assemblies. They both denied, however, having uttered the remarks attributed to them, and there is every reason to believe that their denials were genuine.

During the night of April 27 and the next day, howling mobs attacked the establishments of Henriot and Réveillon, which were thoroughly plundered. Commissary Gueullette, in his report of May 3, notes that a wild and systematic devastation was perpetrated. Only the walls were left standing. What was not stolen was smashed into atoms. The “brigands”—the expression used by the Commissary—threw a part of the plant out of the windows into the street, where the mob made bonfires of it. Part of the crowd were drunk; nevertheless they flung themselves into the cellars, and the casks were stove in. When casks and bottles were empty, the rioters attacked the flasks containing colouring matter; this they absorbed in vast quantities, and reeled about with fearful contortions, poisoned. When these cellars were entered next day, they presented a horrible spectacle, for the wretches had come to quarrelling and cutting each other’s throats. “The people got on to the roofs,” writes Thiroux de Crosne, “whence they rained down upon the troops a perfect hailstorm of tiles, stones, &c.; they even set rolling down fragments of chimneys and bits of timber; and although they were fired upon several times and some persons were killed, it was quite impossible to master them.”

The riot was not quelled by the troops until 10 o’clock that night; more than a hundred persons were left dead in the street. M. Alexandre Tuetey has devoted some remarkable pages to Réveillon’s affair; he has carefully studied the interrogatories of rioters who were arrested. The majority, he says, had been drunk all day. Réveillon, as is well known, only found safety by taking refuge in the Bastille. He was the only prisoner whom the Bastille received throughout the year 1789.

In the night following these bacchanalian orgies, the agents of the Marquis du Châtelet, colonel of the Gardes Françaises, having crept along one of the moats, “saw a crowd of brigands” collected on the further side of the Trône gate. Their leader was mounted on a table, haranguing them.

We come upon them again in the report of Commissary Vauglenne, quoted by M. Alexandre Tuetey. “On April 29, Vauglenne took the depositions of bakers, confectioners, and pork butchers of the Marais, who had been robbed by veritable bands of highwaymen, who proceed by burglary and violence; they may possibly be starving men, but they look and act uncommonly like gentlemen of the road.”

Meanwhile, in the garden of the Palais-Royal, Camille Desmoulins was haranguing groups of the unemployed and ravenous outcasts, who were pressing round him with wide glaring eyes. Desmoulins vociferates: “The beast is in the trap; now to finish him!... Never a richer prey has ever been offered to conquerors! Forty thousand palaces, mansions, châteaux, two-fifths of the wealth of France will be the prize of valour. Those who have set up as our masters will be mastered in their turn, the nation will be purged!” It is easy to understand that in Paris the alarm had become as acute as in the country; everyone was in terror of the “brigands.” On June 25 it was decided to form a citizen militia for the protection of property. “The notoriety of these disorders,” we read in the minutes of the electors, “and the excesses committed by several mobs have decided the general assembly to re-establish without delay the militia of Paris.” But a certain time was necessary for the organization of this civil guard. On June 30, the doors of the Abbaye, where some Gardes Françaises had been locked up, some for desertion, others for theft, were broken in by blows from hatchets and hammers. The prisoners were led in triumph to the Palais-Royal, where they were fêted in the garden. The extent of the disorders was already so great that the government, powerless to repress them, had perforce to grant a general pardon. From that day there was no longer any need to capture the Bastille, the ancien régime was lost.

The disturbances at the Palais-Royal, the rendezvous of idlers, light women, and hot-headed fools, were becoming ever more violent. They began to talk of setting fire to the place. If some honest citizen plucked up courage to protest he was publicly whipped, thrown into the ponds, and rolled in the mud.