A Wilderness So Immense by Jon Kukla Page A

hungry families were idle. Outside the mirrored halls and soothing gardens of Versailles, where the Sun King, Louis XIV, had relocated the royal court at a safe distance from Paris in 1682, starving French men and women grew increasingly fearful and angry, armed and organized. 15
    Events moved quickly in the year following the hailstorm of July 13, 1788, as anger spread in the streets of Paris and along the roads of rural France. Censorship was suspended during the election campaigns for seats in the Estates-General, and a flood of pamphlets expressing Enlightenment ideas circulated throughout the country. In May and June 1789 the meeting of the Estates-General gave voice to pent-up grievances—then fell into interminable squabbles between the elected representatives of the Third Estate and the privileged clergy and aristocracy. While the king dithered between conciliation and force—never altogether certain that he could count on the loyalty of his army—orators and journalists called for liberty, equality, and fraternity (and retribution against the enemies of the people) while rioters helped themselves to bread, food, and weapons. One gunsmith reported that Parisians raided his shop thirty times, arming themselves with a total of 150 swords, 576 unfinished blades, 58 hunting knives, 20 pistols, and 8 muskets. 16
    On June 12, a company of royal dragoons found itself outnumbered when sent to disperse an angry crowd at the Place Vendôme. A disorderly skirmish ensued, and by morning the king’s troops had retreated across the Seine, effectively abandoning the old city. Crowds of Parisians began dismantling the ten-foot wall around Paris built by the Farmers-General to enforce its high taxes on salt, flour, and other commodities. They destroyed forty of its fifty-four customhouses, then sacked the monastery of Saint-Lazare, carrying off grain, wine, vinegar, oil, and twenty-five Gruyere cheeses. With royal authority collapsing around them, city officials took charge, expanding their urban militia as a hedge against anarchy and a defense against royalist counterattack. Proper uniforms were an impossibility on short notice, so the militiamen decorated their hats and coats with a red and blue cockade, the colors of Paris. Days later, when he accepted command of the new national guard, the marquis deLafayette interposed a band of white, the king’s color, in a gesture toward national unity.
    Armed at first only with kitchen knives, weaponry stolen from city gunsmiths, and antique halberds and pikes expropriated from a guardhouse near the Tuileries, Lafayette’s militia soon gained thirty thousand muskets and some cannon from the barracks at the Hotel des Invalides. They needed gunpowder—and regardless of General Lafayette’s moderation, they knew where it was stored. 17
    On July 14—one year after the hailstorm—a crowd gathered at the fortress and arsenal of the Bastille. Built in the fourteenth century with walls five feet thick, a seventy-foot moat and drawbridge, and eight stone towers, the Bastille was a notorious symbol of Bourbon absolutism, the dungeon for political prisoners arrested in secret and held without trial, sometimes for months (as with Voltaire) and often for life. By nightfall, after ineffectual negotiations gave way to violence, the Bastille was taken. While the militia confiscated 246 barrels of gunpowder from the arsenal of the Bastille, unruly crowds murdered the commandant and paraded his severed head on a pike through the streets of Paris. 18
    The next day at Versailles, the due de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt informed Louis XVI of the fall of the Bastille.
    “Is it a revolt?” the king asked.
    “No, Sire,” Liancourt replied, “it is a revolution.”
    At first, circumstances allowed Liancourt and responsible moderates like Lafayette and Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, some hope of a peaceful resolution to the nation’s political crisis—replacing Bourbon absolutism with a