The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom (review)

From the mountain of books about the French Revolution, one might have supposed that the last word had been said about the taking of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. It turns out, however, that a great deal more can be said about the Bastille that is fresh and new. Lüsebrink and Reichardt have produced a fascinating book about the images and representations of the Bastille that have accrued for three centuries.

Early in the seventeenth century, a black legend grew up about the Bastille. The mother lode was a book produced by Constantin de Reneville—a former prisoner, Protestant dissident, and Dutch spy. All subsequent accounts used, embellished, and garnished it. The stories were almost entirely fictional, and the reading public devoured them uncritically: legends of the man in the iron mask, of prisoners buried alive in the infamous oubliettes, of torture chambers with unspeakable and ghastly instruments, and of prisoners spending decades in miserable cold damp cells with only rats for company, and so on. The common feature in most of these lurid sagas is that of outraged innocence—the prisoner unjustly incarcerated by personal enemies, by vindictive officials anxious to cover up misdeeds and corruption, by scheming courtesans, and so on. The sheer volume of this literature must have helped depict the monarchy itself as uncaring, arbitrary, unjust, and cruel.

Nonetheless, the Bastille was attacked on July 14, 1789, not to release the prisoners, but to get the powder that had been stored there the day before. Yet, within a few weeks, this motivation had been replaced by another, more in accordance with the black legend of the Old Regime, namely, that the conquerors of the Bastille (soon to be recognized as such with official titles and uniforms, some of whom were still demanding a pension for their services as late as the reign of Louis-Philippe in the 1830s) assailed the fortress to release the prisoners. This version presented certain problems, however, because there were only seven prisoners inside, none of whom fit the stereotype of outraged innocence. There were no torture chambers, and no skeletons of poor wretches who had been buried alive under stone floors.

Lacking a genuinely sympathetic figure that fit the stereotype, publicists soon invented one out of whole cloth—the comte de Lorges, an entirely fictitious character, imprisoned unjustly, held in solitary confinement for forty years, scratching his name in mildewed walls, only to be released on July 14, stupefied, stunned, and bewildered. In case anyone failed to get the point, he was invariably portrayed with an unbelievably long beard, stretching out his skinny arms in gratitude to his triumphant liberators.

This book cleverly combines innumerable telling anecdotes with a serious historical argument, replete with a quantitative analysis of texts. Every subsequent regime through the Third Republic was uncomfortable with the commemoration of the Bastille. The first Bastille day, for instance, in 1790, was held on the Champ de Mars, not the site of the Bastille, and it commemorated national unity, not popular insurrection. Yet, the Bastille was probably a far more important fête for ordinary people throughout France than the tedious pageants organized by governments throughout the period, with their boring invocations to this or that public virtue or their arid celebrations of faded supreme beings.

One example of the spontaneous popularity of the Bastille story was that within days of the fortress’ surrender, children were acting out the drama, parading about freshly massacred cats’ heads on sticks in place of the officials that the mob had murdered. More important were the spontaneous citizens’ actions in distributing stones from the Bastille all over France—indeed, all over the Western world. In short, this wonderful book shows us a French Revolution teeming with life, with heroism, and, not least, with absurdity.