Why was bastille destroyed

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Read More About Archaeology Travel. Your email address will not be published. One of the platforms of the Bastille Metro station in Paris with the remains of the Bastille uncovered in Outline of the fortress traced in cobblestones.

Causes of the French Revolution Not only were the royal coffers depleted, but two decades of poor harvests, drought, cattle disease and skyrocketing bread prices had kindled unrest among peasants and the urban poor.

How many prisoners were in the Bastille? What are Bastille Day traditions? Who built the Bastille? The Bastille was built between and during the reign of King Charles V as part of the defenses of Paris, the structure was converted into a state prison in the 17th century by Richelieu, who was king Louis XIII's chief minister. What led to the storming of Bastille and therefore to the start of the French Revolution?

What led to the storming of the Bastille, and therefore to the start of the French Revolution? Inequalities between the Third Estate and the other two estates, as well as hunger and poverty, led the Third Estate to attack the nobles and demand a new constitution.

What was significant about the storming of the Bastille? Traditionally, this fortress was used by French kings to imprison subjects that didn't agree with them politically, making the Bastille a representation of the oppressive nature of the monarchy. As the opening of the Estates in May approached, the mood turned apocalyptic. This conflict of words was already matched by one of deeds. Harsh weather and poor harvests had left French peasants impoverished and anxious. The political storm over the Estates-General provoked fears of an aristocratic plot to beat the people into submission.

Meanwhile, urban populations, dependent on the countryside for food, and always suspicious of peasant motivations, increasingly saw such disruption as part of the aristocratic plot itself — for any trouble threatened the fragile supply-lines that brought grain to the cities.

Town-dwellers formed militias, and waited anxiously for news from the men they had sent to the Estates at Versailles. What played out over the summer months of was partly a violent confrontation — nowhere clearer than in the storming of the Bastille on 14 July — but also a strange mixture of dread and euphoria, as even many of the feared aristocrats came to be swept up in the idea of change.

From this euphoric peak, however, the only way was down. War was declared on Austria in April , with Prussia entering the conflict shortly afterwards. Newly-republican French armies rallied to save the country from defeat, but France moved inexorably towards the horrors of civil war and state terror, the revolutionary political class clawing at itself in furious division. Even amid such internal conflict, the spirit of free citizenship and newfound republicanism inspired continued prodigies of military effort.

France went to war with Britain, Spain, the Netherlands and the Italian states from early , plunging Europe into a generation of conflict. The true tragedy of this descent was that it suffocated all the international hopes of Americans found themselves forced to choose sides, with enmity towards either Britain or France a key component of the vicious factional politics reigning in the United States by the later s.

Britain, where Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man had tried to bring the message of the American and French Revolutions home, saw assaults on freedoms such as habeas corpus and public assembly. Real revolt broke out in Ireland in , fomented by exaggerated hopes of French intervention and exacerbated by the brutality of an establishment wedded to a view of the Catholic peasantry as little better than beasts.

Thirty thousand died in months of savage repression. Napoleon Bonaparte , also in , tried to take the war to Britain in the East, and the chaotic failure of his Egyptian expedition did not prevent him from ascending first to dictatorship the next year, and to an imperial throne in It was by far the largest group of people, and quite a number of them were well-educated clerks, lawyers, teachers, and so on.

The philosophical ideas of Cicero and Rousseau fueled the Revolutionary fire. In old Rome, Cicero had promoted the restoration of original Republican values to a state whose nobility seemed cheerfully mired in decadence and corruption. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who died a short time before the French Revolution, argued for a civil society that would be voluntarily formed by its citizens and wholly governed by reference to their general will.

Citizens governed in this way, he believed, would unanimously accept their governing authority. Rousseau proposed that man in his natural state, without the interference of defective laws, was a noble savage whose natural desire was for simple justice. Members of the Third Estate found many examples of laws created simply to enrich the nobility. The nobles of the Second Estate were not entirely happy with the situation, either. They wanted to curtail the King's right to exercise his power, which the royal family believed to come directly from God, hence the expression "the Divine Right of Kings.

On June 17, , the Third Estate, frustrated in its attempts to reform the political order, decided to break from the Estates General and form a new "National Assembly. In the days leading up to the fall of the Bastille, fiery orators stood on street corners calling the crowds to action, including Camille Desmoulins. To the French people, the Bastille represented the corrupt power of the nobility.

Here, political prisoners, as well as ordinary criminals, were left to rot, although it is true that those who had money, such as the Marquis de Sade, could buy a more comfortable existence. At the time of the fall of the Bastille, there were only seven prisoners released from its chambers, but its destruction nevertheless became a symbol of the end of King Louis XVI's power to quash the rising tide of the Third Estate.

The bloody aftermath of July 14 was fueled by generations of rage against the status quo and new leaders from the middle class, idealistic and otherwise, who jockeyed for power.