Tension filled the streets of Paris during the summer of 1789. Bread was scarce, anger was rising, and the city buzzed with fear that the king’s soldiers would soon crush the people’s call for change. When King Louis XVI dismissed reform-minded finance minister Jacques Necker and massed royal troops near the capital, Parisians took matters into their own hands.
On the morning of July 14, hundreds marched toward the Bastille, a fortress-prison that had come to represent the monarchy’s unchecked power. Though only seven prisoners were held inside, the Bastille held something more dangerous—gunpowder, and a symbol of oppression.
Demanding arms and justice, the crowd clashed with soldiers. After hours of fighting, the Bastille’s governor, Bernard-René de Launay, surrendered. The gates fell. The prisoners were freed. And history shifted.
The storming of the Bastille was a spontaneous revolt that also became a pivotal moment in the French Revolution, accelerating the fall of the monarchy and the rise of a citizen-led France. In time, it would lead to the execution of the royal family, the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the values that underpin France to this day: liberté, égalité, fraternité.
Now celebrated annually as Bastille Day, July 14 is not simply a national holiday—it is a global symbol of the power people hold to change their world.