Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Place de la Bastille
- 1 ‘What's that poor creature doing here?’: the area and the fortress before the Revolution of 1789
- 2 ‘Thought blew the Bastille apart’: the fall of the fortress and the revolutionary years, 1789–1815
- 3 ‘The strategy of the generals of Africa shattered’: the Restoration, Orleanist and Second Republic Years, 1815–1851
- 4 ‘Where is the noise of the storm that I love?’: The Second Empire from Haussmann to the Commune
- 5 ‘Satan's bagpipes’: La Belle Époque's forty-three years of peace
- 6 ‘Villains, stars and everybody in between’: The First War and the entre-deux-guerres
- 7 ‘Slicked hair and splendid sideburns’: Occupation and Liberation
- 8 ‘Let's have some sun!’: post-Gaullism and the Mitterrand years
- 9 ‘A building, not a monument’: the construction of the Bastille Opéra
- 10 ‘A real earthquake’: the impact of the Opéra on the quartier.
- 11 Flânerie in the archive: the Faubourg/Bastille today
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - ‘Thought blew the Bastille apart’: the fall of the fortress and the revolutionary years, 1789–1815
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Place de la Bastille
- 1 ‘What's that poor creature doing here?’: the area and the fortress before the Revolution of 1789
- 2 ‘Thought blew the Bastille apart’: the fall of the fortress and the revolutionary years, 1789–1815
- 3 ‘The strategy of the generals of Africa shattered’: the Restoration, Orleanist and Second Republic Years, 1815–1851
- 4 ‘Where is the noise of the storm that I love?’: The Second Empire from Haussmann to the Commune
- 5 ‘Satan's bagpipes’: La Belle Époque's forty-three years of peace
- 6 ‘Villains, stars and everybody in between’: The First War and the entre-deux-guerres
- 7 ‘Slicked hair and splendid sideburns’: Occupation and Liberation
- 8 ‘Let's have some sun!’: post-Gaullism and the Mitterrand years
- 9 ‘A building, not a monument’: the construction of the Bastille Opéra
- 10 ‘A real earthquake’: the impact of the Opéra on the quartier.
- 11 Flânerie in the archive: the Faubourg/Bastille today
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
By the late 1780s the Bastille had become so unpopular, and so costly to maintain, that plans were afoot to transfer all its inmates to Vincennes. Flysheets were circulating demanding its closure, along with attacks on the lettre de cachet. The country was deep in an economic crisis whose details were exposed in 1781 by the director-general of finances, Jacques Necker, in his Compte rendu au roi – an act of open government which earned him great popularity but also contributed to his dismissal later that year. Brought back amid worsening financial turmoil in 1788, he helped to convene the Estates-General – an assembly of representatives of the nobility, the Church and the tiers état or common people – in an attempt to stave off growing popular discontent. It was to be too little, too late; in June 1789 the tiers état representatives transformed themselves into the National Assembly. The beginnings of a parliamentary democratic structure were in place. Necker's dismissal, for a second time, on 11 July was received with fury by the majority of the population. The unpopularity of the fortress was increasingly mirrored by that of the regime it represented – nowhere more so than in the Faubourg, which before the revolution represented some ten per cent of the total area of Paris. Louis-Sébastien Mercier's observation, only a few years before the Bastille was to fall, now reads ironically:
La Bastille […] a l'air de tenir bon, de vouloir épouvanter sans cesse nos regards de son hideuse figure. Sur ces fossés, témoins des jeux sanglants de la Fronde, s’élèvent des bâtiments qui feront douter s'il y eût jamais là des remparts que le boulet a frappés.
The Bastille seems to hold its ground, as if wanting always to shock our gaze with its hideous form. Above these ditches, which witnessed the bloodthirsty games of the Fronde, rise buildings which give leave to doubt whether there were really once there ramparts struck by cannonballs.
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- Information
- The Place de la BastilleThe Story of a Quartier, pp. 31 - 43Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011