REVOLUTION
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Breaking News
The tumult has spread far and wide, but it is clear that the popular party have complete control of the country, it is thought that the French crown will be removed and the country will declare itself a republic.
Yesterday messages came from despatch riders from Paris describing that 300 000 armed men now roamed Paris threatening anyone who declared allegiance to King Louis.
France in Flames
Panic in Paris
Bastille Burns
News has just come in that various acts of random violence in the streets of Paris have culminated in the party attacking the Bastille which has been broken open. In the rioting that followed all the prisoners there have been set free.
Parisian revolutionaries and mutinous troops storm and dismantle the Bastille, a royal fortress that had come to symbolize the tyranny of the Bourbon monarchs. This dramatic action signaled the beginning of the French Revolution, a decade of political turmoil and terror in which King Louis XVI was overthrown and tens of thousands of people, including the king and his wife Marie Antoinette, were executed.
The Bastille was originally constructed in 1370 as a bastide, or “fortification,” to protect the walled city of Paris from English attack. It was later made into an independent stronghold, and its name–bastide–was corrupted to Bastille. The Bastille was first used as a state prison in the 17th century, and its cells were reserved for upper-class felons, political troublemakers, and spies. Most prisoners there were imprisoned without a trial under direct orders of the king. Standing 100 feet tall and surrounded by a moat more than 80 feet wide, the Bastille was an imposing structure in the Parisian landscape.