About 8 o’clock in the morning, the electors at the Hôtel de Ville received some inhabitants of the Suburb Saint-Antoine who came to complain that the district was threatened by the cannon trained on it from the towers of the Bastille. These cannon were used for firing salutes on occasions of public rejoicing, and were so placed that they could do no harm whatever to the adjacent districts. But the electors sent some of their number to the Bastille, where the governor, de Launey, received the deputation with the greatest affability, kept them to lunch, and at their request withdrew the cannon from the embrasures. To this deputation there succeeded another, which, however, was quite unofficial, consisting of three persons, with the advocate Thuriot de la Rosière at the head. They were admitted as their predecessors had been. Thuriot was the eloquent spokesman, “in the name of the nation and the fatherland.” He delivered an ultimatum to the governor and harangued the garrison, consisting of 95 Invalides and 30 Swiss soldiers. Some thousand men were thronging round the Bastille, vociferating wildly. The garrison swore not to fire unless they were attacked. De Launey said that without orders he could do no more than withdraw the cannon from the embrasures, but he went so far as to block up these embrasures with planks. Then Thuriot took his leave and returned to the Hôtel de Ville, the crowd meanwhile becoming more and more threatening.
“The entrance to the first courtyard, that of the barracks, was open,” says M. Fernand Bournon in his admirable account of the events of this day; “but de Launey had ordered the garrison to retire within the enclosure, and to raise the outer drawbridge by which the court of the governor was reached, and which in the ordinary way used to be lowered during the day. Two daring fellows dashed forward and scaled the roof of the guard-house, one of them a soldier named Louis Tournay: the name of the other is unknown. They shattered the chains of the drawbridge with their axes, and it fell.”
It has been said in a recent work, in which defects of judgment and criticism are scarcely masked by a cumbrous parade of erudition, that Tournay and his companion performed their feat under the fire of the garrison. At this moment the garrison did not fire a single shot, contenting themselves with urging the besiegers to retire. “While M. de Launey and his officers contented themselves with threats, these two vigorous champions succeeded in breaking in the doors and in lowering the outer drawbridge; then the horde of brigands advanced in a body and dashed towards the second bridge, which they wished to capture, firing at the troops as they ran. It was then for the first time that M. de Launey, perceiving his error in allowing the operations at the first bridge to be managed so quietly, ordered the soldiers to fire, which caused a disorderly stampede on the part of the rabble, which was more brutal than brave; and it is at this point that the calumnies against the governor begin. Transposing the order of events, it has been asserted that he had sent out a message of peace, that the people had advanced in reliance on his word, and that many citizens were massacred.” This alleged treachery of de Launey, immediately hawked about Paris, was one of the events of the day. It is contradicted not only by all the accounts of the besieged, but by the besiegers themselves, and is now rejected by all historians.
A wine-seller named Cholat, aided by one Baron, nicknamed La Giroflée, had brought into position a piece of ordnance in the long walk of the arsenal. They fired, but the gun’s recoil somewhat seriously wounded the two artillerymen, and they were its only victims. As these means were insufficient to overturn the Bastille, the besiegers set about devising others. A pretty young girl named Mdlle. de Monsigny, daughter of the captain of the company of Invalides at the Bastille, had been encountered in the barrack yard. Some madmen imagined that she was Mdlle. de Launey. They dragged her to the edge of the moat, and gave the garrison to understand by their gestures that they were going to burn her alive if the place was not surrendered. They had thrown the unhappy child, who had fainted, upon a mattress, to which they had already set light. M. de Monsigny saw the hideous spectacle from a window of the towers, and, desperately rushing down to save his child, he was killed by two shots. These were tricks in the siege of strongholds of which Duguesclin would never have dreamed. A soldier named Aubin Bonnemère courageously interposed and succeeded in saving the girl.
A detachment of Gardes Françaises, coming up with two pieces of artillery which the Hôtel de Ville had allowed to be removed, gave a more serious aspect to the siege. But the name of Gardes Françaises must not give rise to misapprehension: the soldiers of the regular army under the ancien régime must not be compared with those of the present day. The regiment of Gardes Françaises in particular had fallen into a profound state of disorganization and degradation. The privates were permitted to follow a trade in the city, by this means augmenting their pay. It is certain that in the majority of cases the trade they followed was that of the bully. “Almost all the soldiers in the Guards belong to this class,” we read in the Encyclopédie méthodique, “and many men indeed only enlist in the corps in order to live on the earnings of these unfortunates.” The numerous documents relating to the Gardes Françaises preserved in the archives of the Bastille give the most precise confirmation to this statement. We see, for example, that the relatives of the engraver Nicolas de Larmessin requested a lettre de cachet ordering their son to be locked up in jail, where they would pay for his keep, “because he had threatened to enlist in the Gardes Françaises.”
From the fifteen cannon placed on the towers, not a single shot was fired during the siege. Within the château, three guns loaded with grape defended the inner drawbridge; the governor had only one of them fired, and that only once. Not wishing to massacre the mob, de Launey determined to blow up the Bastille and find his grave among the ruins. The Invalides Ferrand and Béquart flung themselves upon him to prevent him from carrying out his intention. “The Bastille was not captured by main force,” says Elie, whose testimony cannot be suspected of partiality in favour of the defenders; “it surrendered before it was attacked, on my giving my word of honour as a French officer that all should escape unscathed if they submitted.”
We know how this promise was kept, in spite of the heroic efforts of Elie and Hulin, to whom posterity owes enthusiastic homage. Is the mob to be reproached for these atrocious crimes? It was a savage horde, the scum of the population. De Launey, whose confidence and kindness had never faltered, was massacred with every circumstance of horror. “The Abbé Lefèvre,” says Dusaulx, “was an involuntary witness of his last moments: ‘I saw him fall,’ he told me, ‘without being able to help him; he defended himself like a lion, and if only ten men had behaved as he did at the Bastille, it would not have been taken.’” His murderers slowly severed his head from his trunk with a penknife. The operation was performed by a cook’s apprentice named Desnot, “who knew, as he afterwards proudly said, how to manage a joint.” The deposition of this brute should be read. It has been published by M. Guiffrey in the Revue historique. To give himself courage, Desnot had gulped down brandy mixed with gunpowder, and he added that what he had done was done in the hope of obtaining a medal.
“We learnt by-and-by,” continues Dusaulx, “of the death of M. de Losme-Salbray, which all good men deplored.” De Losme had been the good angel of the prisoners during his term of office as major of the Bastille: there are touching details showing to what lengths he carried his kindliness and delicacy of feeling. At the moment when the mob was hacking at him, there happened to pass the Marquis de Pelleport, who had been imprisoned in the Bastille for several years; he sprang forward to save him: “Stop!” he cried, “you are killing the best of men.” But he fell badly wounded, as also did the Chevalier de Jean, who had joined him in the attempt to rescue the unfortunate man from the hands of the mob. The adjutant Miray, Person the lieutenant of the Invalides, and Dumont, one of the Invalides, were massacred. Miray was led to the Grève, where the mob had resolved to execute him. Struck with fists and clubs, stabbed with knives, he crawled along in his death agony. He expired, “done to death with pin-pricks,” before arriving at the place of execution. The Invalides Asselin and Béquart were hanged. It was Béquart who had prevented de Launey from blowing up the Bastille. “He was gashed with two sword-strokes,” we read in the Moniteur, “and a sabre cut had lopped off his wrist. They carried the hand in triumph through the streets of the city—the very hand to which so many citizens owed their safety.” “After I had passed the arcade of the Hôtel de Ville,” says Restif de la Bretonne, who has left so curious a page about the 14th of July, “I came upon some cannibals: one—I saw him with my own eyes—brought home to me the meaning of a horrible word heard so often since: he was carrying at the end of a taille-cime[56] the bleeding entrails of a victim of the mob’s fury, and this horrible top-knot caused no one to turn a hair. Farther on I met the captured Invalides and Swiss: from young and pretty lips—I shudder at it still—came screams of ‘Hang them! Hang them!’”