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in C major for flute, 2 clarinets or oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, timpani and strings
The Bastille - prison of conviction
The Bastille (little bastion) had originally been built as a medieval fortress during the hundred years' war between 1370 and 1383. The four and a half-story building located at the eastern main entrance to medieval Paris at the Porte St. Antoine (overlooking the Faubourg St.Antoine of the Marais quarter, a former swamp) had eight towers with a total heigth of app. 23,5 m and outer stone walls with a thickness of 4 - 5 m at the base. Until the 17th century it was both used as a castle and for the keeping of the royal treasure.
In the second half of the 17th century, the cardinal Richelieu converted the royal fortress into a state prison for the upper class - mainly people who committed high treason or some other kind of offense against the king or the state (who were considered to be essentially the same). The very often arbitrary warrant of arrest (lettre de cachet, i. e. letter with the royal seal) made the Bastille fortress one of the darkest symbols of royal despotism, although the conditions of the imprisonment were in general quite comfortable. The prisoners could welcome visitors, bring their servants, their furniture, clothes, and books, and the daily ration paid by the state provided them a luxury cuisine. During the reign of Louis XV. the Bastille accommodated more and more ordinary criminals; but as the protectors of the catholic religion the king's authorities imprisoned also protestants and freethinkers, and Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) was arrested twice during his youth. In the last decades after 1750 many inmates were committed by their own families as insane or because of some shameful carnal deviation. Authors and writers, either of politically offensive treatises or of pornograhic obscene trash, were in any way heroized in the public opinion as the chained martyrs of the free genius.
Among the more prominent convicts of the late 1780s were Latude, a notorious and querulous swindler; the quack and magnetizer Caligostro; the diplomat and general Dumouriez, later to be the hero of the French victory 1792 at Valmy, but finally in 1793 deserting to the Austrian army; the wallpaper manufacturer Reveillion, who was arrested for his own protection after the riots in the Faubourg St. Antoine in April 1789, when the rumour that he intended to cut his workers' salaries claimed more than 300 lifes; and the Marquis de Sade, who however was transferred to the lunatic institution at Charenton on July 4, 1789, after he screetched out from the window of his cell to the neighbourhood that "the prisoners were massacred and one should come to help". The government already planned to close down and demolish the expensive medieval fortress.
On July 14, only seven prisoners were the last inmates of the bastille: four falsifiers of bills arrested in 1787; the Comte de Solages since 1784, committed by his family for his dissolute lifestyle; and two insanes, the Comte Whyte de Malleville, and the accused conspirator Tavernier. But in the enlightened mind of the civilized world the Bastille was the symbol of despotism.
The sumptuous court parasites at Versailles, an economy strangled by royal privileges and regional protectionism, a corrupt administrative system based on the purchase of the post, and not to forget crop failures, had driven France into a scandalous budget deficit and a practically insurmountable economic crisis. So the last hope of the king was to call the general estates (300 representatives of each the clergy, the aristocracy and the Third Estate representing 95 % of the French people) in 1788 for may 5 of the next year. The Third Estate demanded the due political influence by doubling the number of its delegates from 300 to 600, and decided on June 17, 1789, to reassemble in the tennis court of Versailles to form the only legitimate National Assembly representing the entire French Nation. The famous Tennis Court oath was taken on June 20 not to break up until a constitution had been passed.
The National Assembly established itself on the principle of the souvereignty of the people; but the king Louis XVI and many others of his court intended to revert to the previous system of absolutism and divine rights, and concentrated troops in and around Paris; on July 10, the popular minister of finance Necker was dismissed by the king. After a demonstration of 5000 people had been dispersed by force, the prisons of the Conciergerie and La Force were stormed by an outraged crowd to liberate the prisoners. The customs booths surrounding the city installed by the tax collector and chemist Lavoisier were burned down on July 13. People began to search for arms, and in the morning of July 14 they could capture 40000 rifles and some cannons from the Invalides barracks, but without ammunition. The gunpowder had been transferred to the Bastille.
The people moved to the fortress, and already at 10 am the peaceful surrender was demanded, but rejected by the governor, de Launay. At 11.30 another delegation led by Thuriot, five years later to be the president of the National Convention and to overthrow Robespierre, inspected the Bastille and its still unloaded cannons, but while they returned to the the City Hall (Hotel de Ville), more and more citizens gathered around the fortress and finally entered the court of the surrounding barracks; at 1.30 pm de Launay gave his veterans and Swiss guards the command to fire at the people.
At 2 pm a mass of citizens armed mainly with pikes, axes, knives and some rifles, moved to the fortess, but the siege was an unequal combat, until soldiers of the later National Guard began to join the crowd. The surrounding barracks were set on fire, but the Swiss guards at the battlement of the fortress shot again and again into the people, killing 97 of the assaillants and injuring some 70. Only after 3 pm, when cannons were brought by the National Guards joining the attackers, the soldiers of the Bastille realized that a real siege was going on, and two sergeants had to prevent de Launay from blowing up the fortress - and its surroundings - with the stored gunpowder; at 5 pm the Bastille surrendered and opened its doors.
The enraged conquerors were astonished to liberate only seven prisoners, they attacked some of the veterans, but first spared the Swiss guards; the gouvernor de Launay had to be protected by two guards from the furor of the people and was escorted to the City Hall, but there he was lynched and stabbed to death. Three other officers and three soldiers were lynched as well, and the president of the city comittee at the City Hall, Flesselles, who had sent a letter to de Launay to endure, was shot with a pistol. Their heads were cut off, spitted on pikes, and carried around in triumph; the ambitious young painter David sketched these impessions.
Immediately after the victory it was decided to demolish the fortress. On August 6 a funeral mass was held for the victims of the Faubourg St. Martin des Champs with the Gossec requiem as the first revolutionary music, performed by the Royal Singing Academy and conducted by Gossec himself. The 863 officially recognized conquerors later got a honorary parchment on June 19, 1790 from the National Assembly, and the patriot, building contractor and entrepreneur Palloy organized the demolition by sending stones of the Bastille into every department, by selling stones with authenticity documents as souvenirs and by the reuse of the main part of the material for the construction of the Seine bridge Pont de la Concorde. On July 14, 1790, he invited to a dancing party on the Bastille's base walls, and in 1791 the demolition was finished. The final plans of 1792 to erect an octogonal column with a model of the Bastille as the base and the statue of of Liberty on its top, and to rebuild the place with new houses could first not be realized during the revolutionary era, but the news of the fallen bastion of despotism was welcomed already in 1789 throughout the enlightened and civilized world.
Liberation of the human spirit
The French Revolution is the key event in the history of humankind, the act of creation separating the light of liberty and reason from the darkness of despotism and deceit. It realized itself from the beginning as aiming to all members of the human race, and defined its principles as natural, universal, and eternal. The declaration of the rights of the man and the citizen of August 26, 1789, passed by the National Assembly, and its extension of June 24, 1793, are without doubt the greatest achievement of human civilization.
The French Revolution could not be an immediate success; illiteracy, religious brainwash of a large part of the people, radicalism of a small minority, the hesitation of the proprietors, very little experience with democracy, the only available models for a republic dating from the ancient Romans, and the threats of war and restoration of the Ancien Regime did not allow the new France to settle, to develop and to prosper. Despite all setbacks during the last two hundred years the final defeat of the powers of darkness and barbarity in our century give us the hope that for us and future generations these principles will be cast as uneradicable in both our mind and our action, as long as there will be humans:
Literature used:
Michelet, J.: Geschichte der Französischen Revolution,
Paris 1847 - 1853, translated into German by R. Kühn and edited by F.
Kircheisen, Vienna 1929/1930
Kircheisen, F.: Die Bastille, Berlin 1927
Rudé G.: Die Massen in der Französischen Revolution, Oxford 1959,
translated into German by A. Hillmayr and R. Bischoff, Vienna 1961
Lüsebrink, H.-J., Reichardt R.: Die Bastille - Zur Symbolgeschichte
von Herrschaft und Freiheit, Frankfurt 1990
The symphony has already been recorded on CD, but without the invaluable information by Dr. Brad Leissa we would not have been able to publish it - read here why...
© July 14, 1999, by Dr. Heinz Anderle. Last updated February 4, 2000.