France's crisis had been building for years. The crown was effectively bankrupt, drained by the cost of supporting the American Revolution and by a tax system that exempted the nobility and clergy. Poor harvests in the late 1780s pushed bread prices to crisis levels. When Louis XVI convened the Estates General in May 1789, the Third Estate -- representing commoners who made up over 97 percent of the population -- broke away to form the National Assembly, declaring itself the legitimate voice of the French people. The king initially resisted, then appeared to capitulate, then massed troops around Paris and Versailles. On July 11, he dismissed Jacques Necker, the popular finance minister, sending Paris into open revolt. The Palais-Royal became a site of continuous political agitation. Demonstrators broke into prisons to free sympathetic guards, and clashes with German cavalry units in the streets convinced many Parisians that a military crackdown was imminent.

The crowd that converged on the Bastille on the morning of July 14 was not driven by ideology but by practical need: they wanted weapons. The previous day, rioters had seized around 30,000 muskets and some cannons from the Invalides, but they lacked gunpowder. The Bastille, as a royal armory, was believed to hold substantial reserves. Its governor, Bernard-Rene Jourdan de Launay, commanded a garrison of about 80 retired soldiers and 30 Swiss guards. The fortress's eight towers, thick walls, and drawbridges made it formidable, but de Launay knew he could not hold out indefinitely. He had already transferred most of the gunpowder from the Bastille's magazines, and his provisions could sustain the garrison for only two days.

Negotiations began in the morning, with delegations from the newly formed city government requesting that the Bastille's cannons be withdrawn from the towers. De Launay agreed and invited the delegates to lunch. But the crowd outside grew impatient. Around 1:30 in the afternoon, a group broke through the outer courtyard's undefended gate. When they pressed toward the inner courtyard, the garrison opened fire. The attackers believed they had been lured into a trap and fought back with muskets and cannons dragged from the Invalides. The battle raged for nearly four hours. Ninety-four attackers and one defender were killed. De Launay, his position hopeless, threatened to ignite the fortress's remaining powder magazine -- a bluff his own men refused to support. He surrendered shortly after five o'clock.

De Launay was promised safe passage but never received it. Dragged through the streets, he was stabbed repeatedly and eventually beheaded, his head fixed on a pike and paraded through Paris. Several garrison members met similar fates. Jacques de Flesselles, the provost of the merchants' guild who was suspected of siding with the crown, was shot on the steps of the Hotel de Ville. The seven prisoners were freed to general jubilation, though their stories were hardly revolutionary -- the most notable among them, the Marquis de Sade, had been transferred to another prison just ten days earlier. Within hours, the National Assembly had established a citizens' militia -- soon renamed the National Guard -- under the Marquis de Lafayette. When the king was told of the Bastille's fall, he reportedly asked, "Is this a revolt?" The Duke de La Rochefoucauld answered: "No, sire. It is a revolution."

Demolition of the Bastille began the next day, carried out by an entrepreneur named Pierre-Francois Palloy, who turned the destruction into both a civic spectacle and a profitable business. He employed hundreds of workers and sold carved stones as mementos to all eighty-three departments of France. Within a year, almost nothing remained of the fortress. Today the Place de la Bastille, with its July Column commemorating a later revolution in 1830, occupies the site. The outline of the fortress's foundations can be traced in the paving stones. Each July 14, France celebrates its national holiday -- not the anniversary of the storming itself, strictly speaking, but also the Fete de la Federation of 1790, which marked the first anniversary of the event. The distinction is a polite fiction. What France commemorates is the day ordinary Parisians challenged the crown by force and won.