S12E02

Welcome to Echoes of History, the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. In this sequence, we've already met a key figure in the history of revolutionary France, Napoleon Bonaparte. Today, we're heading to a pivotal location in French history, home to one especially dramatic event. It's the infamous Bastille. What was it about the Bastille that made it a flashpoint for revolution? What was it like inside its notorious dungeons? And would the French Revolution have been different without the storming of the Bastille? It's a mild morning in July 1789. The sky is overcast and warm rain falls upon Paris. It's not a day for venturing forth. It's certainly not a day for excitement. But then that's every day for you. From your room, there is no way to admire the vista of the French capital. The windowsill, if you can call it that, is positioned high up the wall above your head. And in the spaces between the lattice of rusting iron bars, all you can see are small squares of grey cloud. It may be generous to call it a room. That word evokes the comforts of home. Around you, the bare walls, the hard floor, the plain cotton shirt that's fast turning to rags on your shoulders. None of them indicate a life of luxury. At the same time, none of them indicate the true depths of horror your body has experienced in this place that they call a prison. Feel your mouth twitch into a wry smile. Don't hold it for very long. You never can in this place. But the irony is not lost on you that your current home, the Bastille, can be described as a mere jail. It's so much more than that. You rot in this dungeon at the pleasure of the king. Apparently, he's now stationed thousands of soldiers around Paris, turning the whole city into a second, larger prison. You know which one you'd prefer to be in. Suddenly the gentle pitter-patter of rain against the stonework is joined by another sound, a distant murmur that gets louder. And as it grows in volume, it gains in clarity. You can distinguish voices amongst the cacophony of echoes that bounce between the buildings of Paris, lots of voices. It's a crowd. A large crowd. An angry crowd. Alongside the clamour of cries, you can hear the clatter of objects in the hands of the mob. Weapons of the sort. It sounds like there are more kitchen knives than muskets in this rabble. What is this? Is it an army? Has Paris been invaded? Outside the heavy locked door of your room, you hear shouting and running feet echo through the cold hallways of the Bastille. The garrison is panicking. The makeshift army is definitely outside your prison. You try desperately to pull yourself up to the windowsill to drag your eyes above it to see something, anything, of the events outside. Their voices are clear, ringing with passion against the corruption and injustice of the king and his court. They demand the guards of the Bastille withdraw from their battlements. Your fingers manage to grasp at the lowest window bars. With a great effort, you pull yourself up and succeed in peaking at the drama below. You see more than just an army. The whole of Paris seems to be here and the people are furious. The spirit lifts. Could this really be happening? Is this castle of misery and torture about to be cracked open by the people of France? You notice the glint of steel barrels in the crowd. Suddenly a lot of civilians with muskets are aiming at the Bastille. At you. You hastily release the bars and retreat deep into the cell. And expectedly, you find yourself hoping these thick stone walls will prove as solid as they need. Assassin's Creed Unity puts players in the depths of the Bastille and allows us to participate in the dramatic events of that fateful day in July 1789. The game lets us relive the storming of the Bastille and to help me understand the causes and significance of it, I'm joined by Professor David Andres from the University of Portsmouth. Welcome to Echoes of History, David. Thank you very much. I'm very much looking forward to this because I think this is a name. So storming of the Bastille is a phrase that I know. But do I understand what it actually means? What was involved in it? What was going on around it? Probably not. So I'm very keen to understand it better. And I guess lots of people will know the name Bastille. For me, I associate it with the storming of the Bastille and with it being a prison. But that's kind of the limit of what I think I know about it. I don't even know if that's entirely correct. So what can you tell us about what the Bastille is? What do we need to know about the background of the building? So it's straightforwardly in terms of its long term history. It's part of the medieval fortifications of Paris. It's sort of like a keep. It's quite a sort of tall building. It has seven towers. But it's also part of a much larger sort of system of fortifications that have been developed since the 1200s, the 1300s around Paris. And it's incorporated then in the 18th century, in the 17th and 18th centuries, into these kind of things that you see, these sort of star forts with their sort of big pointy, spiky bastions and so on. So it's been kind of kept and modernized as part of that sort of general atmosphere of Paris having fortifications. And while it's been used for that, and it has a military garrison all the way through, it also gets a role in the 17th and 18th century as what they call a state prison. Prisons are quite unusual as concepts prior to the later 18th, 19th century in Europe. It's not normal to sentence people to prison for ordinary crimes. They're much keener on corporal punishment and capital punishment. So the idea of having a prison where you actually keep people for long periods of time is quite unusual and quite sinister. And it pairs up with this other institution that the French state develops, which is called the L'Etré de Caché, which literally means a sealed letter, a piece of paper with the king stamp and the king signature on. And the institution around that is that if someone writes one of these letters with your name in it, it's an order to lock you up, basically indefinitely. And these are very widely used as a kind of instrument of social control. Parents often use them to lock up children who've been sexually incontinent in one way or another. For example, they're threatening their inheritance, so their parents have them locked up in another country or something. But it's also obviously used by the state to deal with internal subversion, habitual criminals, all kinds of other problems. And the Bastille is the place in Paris where these kind of people are sent, where they are then sort of interrogated by what we can call in a modern sense, the secret police, which makes it sound very sinister. It was quite sinister. But again, the idea of police in the 18th century is really very much one of social control, the idea that good order, discipline in society is constantly threatened from below and outside by nasty people. So you relentlessly pursue any evidence of destabilization. And France in Paris has hundreds of police agents looking out for trouble, looking out for criminal gangs, looking out for political subversion of all kinds. And we have, and it still exists today, the results of these in the Archieve de la Bastille, which is one of the archives of the French state now, the records of hundreds and thousands of people over the centuries who were questioned, interrogated, re-imprisoned, re-questioned for months or years at a time. So by the time we head towards the 1780s, the Bastille has the social and cultural reputation of the place where this kind of thing happens, where if you get snatched off the street in the middle of the day, you're dragged out of your bed at night by state agents, the Bastille is where they'll take you and you'll be locked up there and questioned ruthlessly. And then you might just disappear or you might be flung back onto the streets if they don't think you're worth bothering with. But it has this reputation as a site of repression. So that's the long term history. When we get into the short term of what's going on in 1789. So if I just continue to go over all of that. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, absolutely great. I was only going to say that, you know, as I'm more at home in the medieval world, and absolutely people have this image of the medieval world about being about dungeons with people strung up for the walls in chains and stuff like that. But as you say, prisons just weren't a thing. It wasn't for one thing financially worthwhile to keep people in prison. So the emergence of the idea of prison and being incarcerated on a long term basis for crimes, is something fairly new around the sort of 18th century world, isn't it? It's not something that society is used to and has had around for centuries. Well, I think it's a question of what's normal and what's abnormal. And I think you certainly get emerging by the early 19th century, that sense that if you put people in prison, you can reform them. The reason to lock people up for a long time is to kind of brainwash them into being better. And this is where we get sort of Jerry Bentham's panopticon and all kinds of other ideas. But the reason for putting people in prison before that is because you want to disappear them. You want them to be out of the way and under your control, not just because they've simply been convicted of something. And that's why the idea in the 18th century is particularly sinister, that you're punishing people in a way which keeps them under your thumb, where they're out of sight of other people, where anything might happen to them. And that's the aura that hangs around the Bastille as you move into the 1780s, where in fact, it's largely gone out of use for those purposes. That the reign of Louis XVI, which starts in the mid 1770s, has seen a quite significant relaxation in the paranoia of the French state that was there in the earlier decades. And famously, there are only seven people actually locked up in the Bastille when it is stormed, because they've just moved away from doing things like that. And they've actually very early, very recently before the 1790s, decided to sort of stop using Laetre de Caché, that under the auspices of the Enlightenment, they don't need this anymore. But unfortunately, for the French state, that sense that the state itself wants to reform things is colliding with a view of a lot of people that it's just not going far enough, and that there is a really significant crisis now where action has to be taken. Players of Assassin's Creed Unity can see the Bastille, you know, they can go and visit it. Do we have a strong sense of what it looked like? Does it look like it does in the game a little bit? You know, there's the eight towers, there's these thick walls, there's a moat that surrounds it. Sounds a lot like the Tower of London or something like that to me. Well, it sits there in Eastern Paris very much with that same sense of dominating a neighborhood and a landscape in the way that, as you might say, the Tower of London did for 18th century London. It is this very upright, sort of mid medieval fortification structure, and it does loom over what is otherwise quite a large neighborhood with very low rise buildings. And that's been accentuated as the fortifications and also sort of a small sort of dock and harbor near the river have been elaborated over the years. So the sort of landscape around it has actually been sort of cleared. So it sticks up quite dramatically on the skyline. If you're moving east from the center of Paris, the Bastille is probably the primary landmark you're going to see as you move out of the city. And it is garrisoned, there are soldiers patrolling the battlements, and everyone does know that there are still people locked up in it. So it very much casts the kind of aura of the possibility of state repression over the city. Do we know about the garrison that was inside? Do we know how many people there were, what kinds of soldiers were in there? Well, it's a mixture. The long term garrison is mostly made up of what they call anvalide, which is to say, soldiers who've retired through ill health. The other big military institution inside Paris is the anvalide, which is further to the sort of southwest of the city, which is like a sort of military hospital and retirement home for old soldiers. And some of those old soldiers who are still fit to sort of stand guard are sent to places like the Bastille, where they make up part of the garrison. But that garrison's been reinforced during the crisis of 1789 by some of the king's more overtly military guards. So there is again, there is a sense that looking from outside of that, looking at more soldiers and more visibly kind of professionally dangerous soldiers moving into the Bastille is another reason for the Parisians to be increasingly anxious about it in the period we're talking about. And she mentioned so the Bastille is kind of falling out of use in terms of what it had been, although you say there's still seven people in there. Are there any famous prisoners that people will know of who may have been held in the Bastille over its lifetime? Well, there are lots of people that come in and out of it. It doesn't tend to be used, for example, for sort of prisoners of high social status, because it is frankly not very nice inside. And again, there is a very hierarchical society. So if you have reasonably high social status and they're going to lock you up, they'll send you to a different place like the Chateau de Vincennes, which is a bit further to the east out of Paris, which is a little bit more salubrious when they're wanting to keep people who've got a bit of clout locked up. I think the Marquis de Sade passes through the Bastille at various points. And he's obviously very famous. But it's one of those things where the myths and the legends that accrue around it are much more significant in a sense than any kind of particular history. Lots of anecdotal histories get written about it. But the stories are very formulaic about imprisonment, agony, starvation, and so on and so forth. Was it a generally effective prison? Do we see people escaping from the Bastille? I think there are one or two accounts of people getting out. But I mean, it's a medieval castle, which is difficult to get both into and out of if people don't want you. You know, it's tall towers, narrow, arrow-slit windows, all these kind of things. So as a prison, it's pretty effective in that sense, especially when people are actually being sort of locked into cells. But again, it's quite unusual for people to have individual cells in the way that France generally thinks of prisons. I mean, you're going to see during the revolution, lots of people herded into monasteries and other buildings and basically locked up 30 to 40 to a room. So again, that sense of isolation, the sort of legendary idea of a dungeon into which you just put people and disappear, is again echoing through the perception of the Bastille. Yeah. And what do we know about conditions inside? Because there are stories, I think, that it was it was particularly grim to find yourself in a dungeon in the Bastille. Yeah. Well, it's near the river. The foundations are very old. It's going to be damp. It's going to be smelly. And again, as is normally the case throughout this period in any country in Europe, if you don't personally pay for better conditions like a bed, you don't get one. You know, they'll just throw some straw on the floor and leave you to it. So it can be exceptionally grim, certainly exceptionally unhealthy for anyone who's put in there over the long term. It's in that sense, again, if you don't pay to improve your conditions, it's about as grim as you can imagine. And thinking about 1789 as we get close to the storming of the Bastille, if there is a slight relaxation in the use of these more draconian measures, why then is the Bastille kind of a target for the revolutionaries? If there's only seven people there and people aren't being thrown in there as often as they were, is it more about what the Bastille has come to represent than what it actually is in 1789? I mean, I think on the one hand, I shall shortly launch into a slightly longer exposition of what's going on. But I mean, the point just to answer you there directly is that the actual reason it's stormed is exceptionally practical. And I'll come back to that in a minute. It's not cultural at all. It's practical. But what's going on by the summer of 1789 is this massive multidimensional crisis in governance and in society that for reasons which are essentially to do with the unsustainability of government finance, the crown has been forced to call this thing called an Estates General, which is a medieval institution, hasn't met since the 1600s, early 1600s, is a national consultative assembly to whom people are elected, deputies are elected, and a whole electoral process has gone on throughout the country in the late winter and early spring of 1789. Making this sense that France is being asked what it wants to change about itself, what it wants to change about government, taxation, state finances in general, the way social privilege and inequality bear down on the mass of the population. People have been told to present their grievances to the crown and something will be done. And this results in the Estates General gathering at Versailles in early May of 1789 in a context where there is also a huge social crisis because there is terrible poor harvest the year before, there is a terrible harsh winter through 1788, 89, and that the price of bread is extremely elevated, it's rising to unprecedented levels in the summer of 1789. There is a genuine fear of starvation amongst the general population. And this then connects to the Estates General because the Estates General has become deadlocked between the representatives of the nobility, the top privileged 1% in the country, and particularly the representatives of what's called the third estate, everyone else, apart from the clergy who are also in there, they're the first estate. So the representatives of common people, the representatives of the nobility have essentially deadlocked the Estates General for over a month by mid-June 1789. And there's a strong sense leaking out and in pamphlets and newspapers and rumors and all sorts of other forms of circulation that these privileged people, these rich powerful people want to prevent necessary change because it threatens their position. And there's also a strong sense leaking out that one of the ways they're doing this is through the rising prices, through the shortage of food, there is what's called a famine plot, which is something the French are terrified of on a long term basis. They're very frightened about the security of the food supply. It's taken for granted that if the food supply is threatened, some private interest is involved, someone is profiteering from it. This is just a fact of cultural life in the 18th century. So as you move through June into early July 1789, these things are colliding. Parisians are terrified of starving. They're paying a huge proportion of their wages just to have a bit of bread. And meanwhile, the political crisis is deadlocked. And then on the 11th of July, the king and his family and his advisors around him tried to break that deadlock with violence, essentially. There is a coup d'etat from above. The sort of reforming minister, Jacques Necker, is sacked and told to go into exile. Troops have been gathering around the city of Paris and around Versailles for weeks, making people very anxious about this. The third estate in the Estates General has declared itself to be a national assembly, has declared that it's going to write a constitution, whether the king likes it or not. So this massive political confrontation is happening. And the king's answer has been violence, to threaten further violence. And when the news of Necker's dismissal reaches Paris, Paris rises up. There is a massive insurrection in support of the idea that they have to defend themselves against this. They are literally threatened with annihilation. And there's rioting in the center of Paris against elements of the military garrison. There's a tax on the wall that surrounds Paris, which is actually a customs barrier that's been built in the last few years. But you have to go through these gates and pay tolls on everything to leave and enter the city. Many of those gates are burned down, a sense that prisons are liberating their city from this physical constraint. And as this crisis goes on into a second and a third day, the 12th, the 13th towards the 14th, more and more rumors spread that there are thousands of troops converging on the city and that the city must arm itself in its own defense. And a new municipal government forms in the city hall, the Hotel de Ville in the center of town, made up of people who've taken part in the electoral process for the Estates General a few months earlier. And the message goes out from this central revolutionary organization effectively to form a militia, to arm themselves, to organize themselves. And they start by raiding gun shops and other places where individual weapons might be found. They move on the 13th to the Yainvalid that I mentioned earlier to this sort of military hospital complex, where there is also a large stock of muskets. So hundreds and hundreds of people are able to arm themselves with these muskets on the 13th. But what they don't have is any gunpowder. And that gunpowder is in the Bastille. It's been moved there from other warehouses on the dockside near there for security by royal order over the previous days and weeks. So it's known to be there. People have watched it going in, which sparks all kinds of other conspiratorial thinking is that maybe they're going to blow it up. Maybe they'll blow it up and it'll destroy the city, blah, blah, blah. But on the 14th, there is a massive organized movement to get that gunpowder from the Bastille in order to arm the city in order to defend itself. And that's the essential logic of what's taking place. And there will then be a sort of complex, episodic siege of the Bastille until those aims are accomplished. That's fascinating. So it sounds like we've got something of a perfect storm going on in French politics and society that there is famine, political deadlock. And that may be the tipping point if there is one specific thing is the king kind of responding with violence to this deadlock and increasing fears. So the storming of the Bastille is not some kind of romantic freeing the prisoners, releasing the government's grip on French society. This is about getting gunpowder to further the aims of what are becoming the revolutionaries. Exactly. And I think it's really interesting to understand that through the months of sort of political deadlock that have gone on before this, people in the general population of Paris and people much more broadly across France have moved to the position where in order to have sort of peace, safety, security, prosperity in the future, they all basically think that the government needs to be overthrown, that it needs to be changed. And they don't mean the king. They don't want a republic. They don't want to cut the king's head off. They want the king to stay in charge, but they want to get rid of all the people around him making government accountable. There's a lot of stuff in the grievances that come in with the Estates Chez Malabao, ministers being unaccountable, being corrupt, having dragged the country down for decades. So there's a very, very widespread sense that this is about real concrete political change in the short term. It's not about sort of building a new utopia. It's about fixing things. It's very reformist revolution in that sense. But the only way they're going to get anywhere against these forces from above is by physically challenging them because the forces from above are dedicated to using violence against them. So it is a sense that there is going to be, there has to be a confrontation. I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack or Julius Caesar or our very own Billy Shakespeare? You wouldn't believe the details I'm able to uncover here on Betwixt the Sheets, a podcast by History Hit. The sexuality explored through a historical lens can reveal a surprising amount about the human experience, what's an all, if you'll excuse the pun. And we don't just stop at sex. Expect outrageous scandals throughout the centuries as well as probing into everyday issues the nitty gritty of human life that really connects us to all people throughout history. Join me, Kate Lister, every Tuesday and Friday on Betwixt the Sheets to find out more. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Right. Time to slide out here and avoid the bedpan. I think it's interesting we've covered the American Revolution a little bit earlier in the sequences. So we're not a million miles away from the similar things that happened in America. And it's striking, I think, with that as well, how much these were very kind of conservative in their beginnings. They weren't looking to overthrow and change the entire system. It's somehow that a conservative evolution becomes a revolution because that elite are so protective of what they've got that they lock everything down to the point where there is almost no option but to turn it into a revolution. And you kind of wonder whether if that 1% that elite had been willing to give just a little bit, they might have kept everything else that they'd had. Well, that's the point that's been debated many, many times afterwards. I mean, I think the largest way to reflect on how that gets incorporated into history is that after the revolution, after the Napoleonic Wars, what emerges really is the ideology of conservatism as it exists in the 19th century. I mean, in the 21st century, it's a very strange thing, the ideology of conservatism. But in the 19th century, the ideology of conservatism is precisely that sense of being willing to contemplate some change in order to prevent the revolutionary change that you've been threatened with. The generation of people like the Duke of Wellington or Metternich or any of these other great European statesmen of the 19th century, they are willing to embrace change. Because they understand that if they don't, it will run out of control. It will be wrong. They're not reactionaries. Reactionaries are the people who are there in 1789 saying, no, just stamp on them, crush everyone. The past was fine. Revolution gives birth to conservatism in that sense of people who now realize that you might have to change something in order to stay in control. But it is only the revolutionary experience that brings that into existence. I wonder if you could talk us through the actual events of the 14th of July. So the actual storming of the Bastille. Do we know, for example, how many people end up attacking it? And does this turn into a siege or a battle or is there less of a confrontation than that? It's a kind of short siege, if you like. I mean, it evolves in several stages over the day. There is an initial period where the outer gates of the Bastille are opened at the demand of the crowd by the garrison inside. People flood into the courtyard thinking that the castle has surrendered to them. And then the governor, a chap called Delaunay, who manages this situation very badly, has them fired on inside the confines of the castle. There is cannon fire and that's followed up with some musket fire. And it's at that point that most of the casualties are actually incurred. There's probably over 100 people killed in that early sort of chaotic confrontation. Obviously, many more wounded. So there's blood everywhere. There's people running through the streets screaming. As a consequence of that, the crowds are pushed out of the confines. The outer gates are closed and it's much more of a sense than the fortress being under siege by a crowd of thousands and thousands of people now armed with some of the weapons they took from the Anvalid, lots of other kinds of weapons also being joined over the course of the morning and the day by more organized contingents from across the city. Behind all of this is the idea of forming an organized militia. So units of that militia, what are later going to become the National Guard, start moving towards the Bastille area. Units of what are called the French Guards, which is a regular army regiment, which is part of the garrison of Paris. They have mutinied and joined the insurrection. And some of them start moving towards the Bastille and they bring cannon with them, which obviously you're not going to get very far against the castle if you don't have some cannon. And at the same time, the municipality that set itself up in the Ottertiville is also sending delegations down towards the Bastille, trying to negotiate a peaceful surrender, because they do actually want to get hold of this gunpowder. They don't want someone to blow it up. And there's two or three different episodes where delegations of sort of municipal worthies come down and wave white flags, try and talk to people. And various episodes where then firing breaks out either from one side or another and they have to scuttle back into cover. And there's a sense that the possibility of talking these things out goes down and down through the day. And you get heroic individual episodes. These cannon that have been brought, they are taken apart in the other wheels, the carriages, the barrels and so on. And then a group of people, including some military officers and sergeants from the French Guards, basically sort of hoist these cannon over the outer walls and reassemble them, facing the main gates. At the same time, there's been other incidents. There's a point in time where some of the outer gates, some of the people besieging them, climb up on them and they cut through the chains. And then this drawbridge falls down and it falls down on some other people and kills a few people. And then that enrages other sections of the crowd and keeps the agitation going, keeps the shots being fired. And you will end up with a situation where again, very famously, some somebody steps out on a plank, which has been sort of pushed out over the moat and pokes a sort of surrender demand through a crack in the gates. And what actually happens then after that is within the garrison itself, that the regular officers and the governor are not inclined to surrender because military honor is now at stake. And they certainly can't surrender a royal castle to a gang of random plebs hanging around outside threatening them. But particularly the Anvalide, the old soldiers are starting to think that they're not going to come out of this with their skin intact unless something changes. There is a moment allegedly where the governor, Delaunay, threatens to stick a burning brand into the gunpowder magazine and just blow them up. And where allegedly some of the Anvalide have to stop him doing that. And eventually again, it is those Anvalide who drop the drawbridge, allow the crowds to flood in for a second time, surrender to them and for the most part are fairly well treated. The actual fall of the Bastille is not associated with a massacre, although Delaunay and one two of the other leading figures are not going to survive the day. But that's a slightly separate story. It sounds like absolute chaos through the whole day. Like those could have been the events of a month long siege of backwards and forwards and to cram all of that into a day in the center of Paris with an angry mob and an increasingly isolated garrison inside who don't want to surrender to the people. It sounds like absolutely chaos. Is that how it's eventually brought to the end that the Anvalide let people in and essentially they're then able to take control? I mean, they very much kind of stuff this for a game of soldiers from those people who are old soldiers and are not, you know, and they know there's no water, you know, there's no food. They can't survive an actual siege and they've seen what's happened to people. They've seen that a lot of people have been killed and they know that as it goes on, more people will be killed and everything will get more embittered and problematic. And of course, the traditions of warfare concerning besieged places, you know, very, very kind of black and white. If you surrender, you get rights. You might even get the rights to march out under arms. If you don't surrender, if the place is stormed, your life is forfeit. The traditional laws of war say that you can be slaughtered indiscriminately, not least because it's impossible to stop a besieging force slaughtering people when they've had to fight their way in. So those guys are thinking to themselves, you know, there is only one way we survive this and that is to give up, to surrender. And that's eventually what they do. And in a large part, they are right. They do survive this and they just sort of fade into the background, you know, pretend they were never there. Yeah, sounds like a sensible thing to do. Absolutely, you know, very sensible. And it's the more famous people are obviously going to bear the consequences of what's been seen to happen. And are there so famously then seven prisoners left at the Bastille? Are they actually set free as part of this? Is this kind of just a side effect of what happens? Yeah, I mean, once the sort of the sort of first wave of people have gone into the castle and basically sort of taken possession of the garrison and of the place, then it's really sort of just flung open. So there's a sort of great sort of celebratory moments when these people are discovered, lodged in various cells around the building and brought out and cheering crowds and so on. When some of the archives are found, people start rummaging through them. One of the sort of bizarre, interesting, longer term consequences of this is there's really quite a large stock of anti-royal pornography locked up in the Bastille. Rude stories about the queen's sex life, the king's sex life, things like this, which for a long time, historians assumed had been in circulation before the revolution. But, you know, recently kind of reevaluated that to say, well, now, actually, these things were literally confiscated or bought up and locked away. But in 1789, they found and they kind of put back on the open market. You know, these things have a market value now. People take them, they sell them. And so a sort of lot of pornographic legends about Ramy marion to a net immediately go into circulation as actual sort of physical material where they'd only been kind of verbal rumors before. That's one of the strange little wrinkles of what happens. But the place is basically thrown open and people ransack it for anything they can find. I'm interested now in how sure we are that they were actually after gunpowder and not that they were just after someone else's stash. Nobody really knew it was there. I mean, that's the interesting thing. It's one of these secrets of history that I mean, historians have only really worked out in the last couple of decades what actually happened there. I say if you read stuff that was written 30, 40 years ago, a lot of these pamphlets were assumed to actually be in circulation. But that's actually kind of retrospective. And now we've got a clearer picture that the state was actually really quite effective at censoring them. But it left them with this huge stock of stuff that really if they'd had any brains, they would have burned it. But it was just locked away to Mulder and then, you know, terrible things happened. Yeah, the government forgot to delete their browser history. They made their way into it. That would be one way of putting it, yes. I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack or Julius Caesar or our very own Billy Shakespeare? You wouldn't believe the details I'm able to uncover here on Betwixt the Sheets, a podcast by History Hit because sexuality explored through a historical lens can reveal a surprising amount about the human experience. What's an all, if you'll excuse the pun. And we don't just stop at sex. Expect outrageous scandals throughout the centuries, as well as probing into everyday issues, the nitty gritty of human life that really connects us to all people throughout history. Join me, Kate Lister, every Tuesday and Friday on Betwixt the Sheets to find out more. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Right. Time to slide out here and avoid the bedpan. And what is the immediate aftermath of the events of the 14th of the storming of the Bastille? How does the king and the government react? Paralysing terror. I mean, what's been going on? And again, I think it's interesting to point this out. So the members of the National Assembly are obviously in Versailles, you know, half a day's journey from from Paris. So they are getting kind of news of this kind of drift up and down the road between Versailles and Paris ever since the 11th and 12th. When they learn about NECA being dismissed, they go into emergency permanent session, which means by the 14th, some of them have literally been in that room for three days sleeping on the benches. Because they're terrified that if they leave, they'll be picked off individually, murdered, thrown in prison, whatever. So so they literally sort of huddle together for their own safety. And meantime, they're really not sure what's happening in Paris. They're not sure whether it's for them or against them. You know, and this this is another kind of wrinkle in the sort of paranoia of the age, because a lot of the reports of kind of what sound like random crowd violence, that's exactly the kind of thing that they might suspect had been stirred up against them by wicked actors, by rich people paying the mob to cause trouble. They don't know that there's been a kind of pro revolutionary insurrection kind of until the victory of the 14th itself until people they send a delegation to Paris, which finds out what's going on and hurries back to Versailles and announces that the city has actually risen up and triumphed in their name. And the joy is so manifesting. One of them actually has a stroke and drops dead. You know, they're just so stressed, so horrified by what might happen. So relieved, he just keels over. And then what will happen, what is what is again quite remarkable, is that the king will admit that what has happened has has been a failed attempt to take over. The king comes to the Assembly's meeting hall on the 15th, almost alone, without any great panoply of guards and heralds and so on. Just just I think with with one of his brothers and a few other members of his close honjuraj. And really, not quite in so many words, surrenders to the National Assembly. He says, you know, I OK, guys, I'm going to work with you now. You know, you're my people now. You know, let's work this out. I was always on your side, guys. You know, those are the blokes that were keeping me. Well, this is what they want to believe. And one of his brothers, his his his youngest brother, the Comme d'Artois, has already legged it. And the guy who was appointed as chief minister in place of Necker has already legged it. They're heading for north for what was then the Austrian Netherlands, what's now Belgium. So there are convenience scapegoats available to say this was never the king's idea. And again, the interesting thing is that people choose to believe that. It's less hard to believe because the king is known to be extremely impressionable. Louis XVI is not a strong willed individual, and this is going to dog the last few years of his life in various ways. So the king basically allies himself with the National Assembly on the 15th and on the 17th, the royal family that King, the queen, everybody else makes a pilgrimage to central Paris to meet the new municipality, to be saluted by thousands of these national guards. Looking dangerously scruffy and really, again, you know, in geopolitical terms, to surrender to the city, you know, to be welcomed back as their monarch rather than the monarch who's tried to repress them. So so the result of all this in that short term, you know, within the space of a week is from an attempted coup d'etat on the 11th to total capitulation on the 17th that the king now has no choice but to work with authorities which have made a revolution if he wants to keep his head on his shoulders. And if he wants to keep France on an even keel. And what happens to the building of the Bastille? It is it is taken down a sort of building contract to his name is Palois. And then they always call him the Patriot Palois because he's a massive self-publicist and very good at putting himself forward. He's given a contract basically by the city to demolish it as quickly as possible. And, you know, within days or weeks after the storming, you know, it starts to just come down. There are work and swarming all over it, basically knocking it down one stone at a time. And Palois then has a nice little earner turning it into a range of souvenirs, which range from taking some of the really, really big stones that make it up and having them carved into literal solid reproductions of the Bastille itself. And these things are two or three feet long when they're finished. And then sort of making gifts of these to all the cities of France, all the areas of France. And you see them carried in parades for years afterwards, this kind of physical mementos of what was done. And obviously knocking out these in smaller versions for retail sale and commemorative medallions and things made out of the chains that were found in the dungeons. You know, there's a whole kind of merchandising effort, which is tremendously modern in that. I was going to say, it sounds like a, you know, a new film franchise that's thought very carefully about the merchandise they can associate with it. It sounds like this guy was well ahead of his time. It was very, very interesting character. Yeah. So basically, I mean, the Bastille is just taken down to ground level within a year and then it becomes known as the terrain of the Bastille. And they have sort of public dances and celebrations on there over the following years. And eventually you get to the Napoleonic era where they try and turn it back into sort of ceremonial public space. And you very famously get the Papier-Maché elephant, which is erected there, which appears in the Rémiserable, you know, famous scenes of the street kids hiding out inside this elephant, which is a giant statue on the site. And what would you say is the longer term legacy of the storming of the Bastille? I think we often associate it with being the beginning of the French Revolution. We, I mean, Bastille Day is still, is it a public holiday in France? Is that the right term for this? It's a public holiday in France. So is it a real turning point? So despite this apparent ending of the confrontation between the king and the country, is it really in the longer term a big, major turning point? Well, it's going to put France on a course towards definitively trying to have a new constitution, definitively trying to abandon everything that's associated with what they start to call the old regime or the former regime. So the fact that the storming of the Bastille is part of this victory over the king, victory over reactionaries who want to stay in the past, means it is a turning point in history. And so when you have, you then have a major European power, a major global imperial power, trying to rewrite itself. And you know, when you compare that to the American situation, for example, where you start out in the American case with like 13 states, none of which has a very big population. And then the US Constitution being put on top of that, but really still only dealing with a population of two or three million people. Population of France is 10 times that. You know, its wealth is staggering. It's just been unable to leverage that wealth in effective ways. It's a really significant player in geopolitics. But of course, as everyone knows, that process of trying to reconstruct everything on a solid basis goes hideously wrong for four years ahead. The continued resistance of the counter revolution as it eventually comes out leads to war, leads to a collapse of the monarchy in position of a republic, leads to what we call the terror, which is a very, very complicated period, but which has hundreds of thousands of casualties and leads eventually to another military dictatorship. And Napoleon and a royal restoration of Louis the Sixteenth Brothers, both of them end up on the throne in the 1810s and 1820s. So it's hugely significant moment that makes all these other things possible. It's the point in time at which Paris cannot be defeated. Therefore, the National Assembly cannot be defeated. Therefore, something else has to happen. It makes it necessary that there is going to be something else, that things are going to go on, they're not going to stop and they go on in massively significant ways for years ahead. Yeah, it sounds it sounds to me almost like the storming of the Bastille is a moment that happens in Paris that is really about what's going on at Versailles half a day away. And the storming of the Bastille really isn't about freeing prisoners, not necessarily about getting lots of gun power, it's about breaking that political deadlock in favour of the third estate so that ultimately they can get rolling in the direction that they want to go. Does that sound fair? Yes, it's a culminating moment in that confrontation, which is either the third estate are going to go forward, either the National Assembly remains a meaningful concept or it's all wiped away as if it never happened. And it goes forward. And it does also go forward at a national level. As news of what's been happening spreads across the country over the days and weeks ahead, there is very much a national sentiment that this is the right thing to do. That the people in the large cities of France, Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, in the medium sized cities, the smaller towns and out into the countryside, they also take on this framing that there is us and there is the aristocrats. And that we have to resist them in order to go forward together. The writing of their grievances earlier in the year, the formation of the estates general. This is all about that nation having a voice, being able to have a say and needing to hold on to that forcibly against threats, against conspiracies. And initially, there is this tremendous optimistic sense that they can make this all work. And that sadly turns out not to be true, that huge problems and divisions will insert themselves into this early idea that the revolution is something which is accomplished in 789. But without that kind of turning point, the European history in general would have been completely different for the century ahead. Yeah, fascinating. I'm also I'm asking everybody, obviously, Assassin's Creed gives players the chance to get into the animus to go back in time and to witness lots of these events. If you could step into your own animus and relive maybe any of those moments in 1789 that we've been talking about, where would you like to be a fly on the wall? Well, I mean, the first thing to say is I didn't guarantee I was going to get out safely. Yeah, I'll give you that guarantee. But I mean, it would have been fascinating to watch the storming of the Bastille from a safe distance to see these individuals performing these acts of genuine physical heroism. The guys who carried those cannon over the walls and reassembled them under the guns of the castle, threatening to blow the gates open in their faces. I mean, that's real physical heroism. A lot of people would later claim to have been at the storming of the Bastille, who not necessarily were. But a lot of people were there and were putting their lives on the line. And I think that's something you've got to you've got to respect and to have borne witness to it would have been absolutely fascinating. Yeah, I think, again, with the similar assurance of safety, it would have been quite interesting to be in the room when the the the Anvilide inside are trying to convince the commanders that we don't have any choice here. You know, we've been through all this plenty of times before, and we're here to tell you we can't win. Just to see that conversation going on between the people who who realized what they were in and the people whose honor wasn't allowing them to realize what they were in and how that conversation played out would have been interesting, I think. And I think that's one of those things where you think about any kind of place that's under siege, under the cultural assumptions of what that means. And the tremendous knife edge that people live on in those circumstances. Well, thank you so much for joining us, David. It's been an absolute pleasure to get to understand this idea of the storming of the Bastille a lot better to put it into its context and to understand what was happening all around it and what it was really about. It's been really surprising for me, but I've really enjoyed it. Thank you. My pleasure. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. In the next episode, we're taking a long trip through history as we pay a visit to the world's most iconic cathedral, Notre Dame de Paris. Don't forget to subscribe and follow Echoes of History wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're enjoying it, you can leave us a review, too. I'll see you next time among the Echoes of History.