The Bars Fell, the Republic Rose

Imagine it like this: the 14th of July is kind of like France’s version of Independence Day mixed with a national music festival. Back in the day, they stormed the Bastille prison because they were absolutely fed up with rulers who acted like kings of the universe. Now, every year, they celebrate that moment in full style: awesome parades, public parties, and fireworks that light up the Parisian sky in the most aesthetic way.

So it’s not just about history—it’s a whole vibe where the people say, “We fought back then, now we’re free – long live croissants and democracy!”

If Indonesia has the 17th of August, France has Bastille Day. The only difference? Over there, there’s probably more wine and dancing... but the spirit is the same: resist oppression, celebrate freedom.

Bastille Day, celebrated on July 14th in France, commemorates two historically significant events that together shaped the identity of modern France. First and foremost, it marks the storming of the Bastille prison on 14 July 1789, a pivotal moment in the French Revolution. This dramatic uprising was not simply an attack on a fortress, but a powerful symbol of the people’s resistance to monarchical tyranny and their demand for liberty and justice. Though only a few prisoners were actually freed, the fall of the Bastille represented the collapse of absolute royal authority and the rise of the people’s voice.

The day also honours the Fête de la Fédération, which took place exactly one year later, on 14 July 1790. This event was a massive celebration of national unity, held on the Champ de Mars in Paris, where citizens and political leaders gathered to show collective hope for a constitutional monarchy and peaceful transformation. It was a moment filled with optimism, envisioning a new France founded on liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Together, these two events—one revolutionary, one reconciliatory—are commemorated in Bastille Day as a celebration not only of freedom from oppression but also of the shared spirit of a nation striving toward unity and democratic ideals.

The background of Bastille Day is deeply rooted in the political, economic, and social turmoil of late 18th-century France. At the time, France was ruled by an absolute monarchy under King Louis XVI, whose lavish spending, heavy taxation, and failure to reform had led to widespread poverty, hunger, and resentment among the common people. The country was on the brink of collapse—economically drained by years of war and socially divided by class inequality. The nobility and clergy lived in privilege, while the vast majority of the population, known as the Third Estate, bore the weight of taxation and hardship.

Tensions reached a boiling point when the king attempted to suppress political dissent by increasing military presence in Paris. In response, on 14 July 1789, thousands of citizens took to the streets. They saw the Bastille, a medieval fortress and prison in the heart of Paris, as a powerful symbol of royal oppression and absolute authority. By storming the Bastille, the revolutionaries sent a clear message: the people would no longer be silenced or controlled by force. Though the prison itself held only a handful of inmates, its fall was a psychological and political victory that ignited the flames of the French Revolution.

This act of rebellion signified the beginning of a new era. The monarchy would soon fall, and radical changes—such as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—would reshape France into a republic. Bastille Day, therefore, is not merely about a building being attacked; it is about the moment when ordinary citizens stood up against centuries of oppression and declared that power must belong to the people.

The Bastille was originally built in the late 14th century, during the reign of King Charles V, as a fortress to defend the eastern walls of Paris from English invasion during the Hundred Years' War. With its massive stone walls, deep moat, and imposing towers, it was a military stronghold designed to project power and protect the capital. However, over time, its role evolved. By the 17th century, under the rule of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, the Bastille had been converted into a state prison used to detain individuals without trial—often by lettres de cachet, secret royal orders signed by the king himself.

The Bastille became infamous not because of the cruelty of its conditions (though it was far from pleasant), but because it symbolised arbitrary royal authority. It was where political dissidents, writers, critics of the monarchy, and even noblemen who had fallen out of favour could be imprisoned indefinitely, with no legal recourse. The secrecy surrounding its inmates, the mystery of who was inside and why, turned the Bastille into a symbol of fear, injustice, and despotism.

By the time of the French Revolution in 1789, the Bastille was no longer a heavily populated prison—only seven prisoners were held there when it was stormed. Yet that hardly mattered. To the people of Paris, it wasn’t about the number of prisoners—it was about what the Bastille stood for: the suffocating grip of monarchy, censorship, and unaccountable power. When the crowd took it down brick by brick, they weren’t just demolishing a building—they were tearing down centuries of oppression.

The reason why the Bastille was chosen as the target of the people's rage on 14 July 1789 was deeply symbolic and strategic. Though it was no longer the most important prison in France, the Bastille remained a powerful emblem of royal tyranny and oppression. It represented everything the revolutionaries wanted to dismantle: absolute monarchy, injustice, secrecy, and the silencing of dissent. The mere presence of that grey stone fortress at the heart of Paris reminded citizens daily that the king’s will could overrule law, freedom, and dignity.

At the time, Paris was boiling with tension. The king had dismissed Jacques Necker, a popular finance minister who sympathised with the common people, and had begun amassing troops around the capital, which made citizens fear a royal crackdown. In desperation, the people took up arms. They needed gunpowder—and the Bastille had a large stockpile of it. So the Bastille was not only a symbol of repression, but also a practical target: it held the means to defend the revolution.

Storming the Bastille was therefore both an act of necessity and defiance. It sent a thunderous message to the monarchy: the people were no longer afraid. In toppling its walls, the revolutionaries declared the end of passive obedience and the beginning of active resistance. From that moment forward, the tide of history turned—and it was the people who were steering it.

Throughout history, prisons have often been used not merely as places to detain criminals, but as tools of power by those in authority who deviate from justice. When rulers feel threatened by dissent, they frequently resort to imprisonment to silence opposition, suppress free thought, and instil fear in the population. In such cases, prisons cease to be instruments of law and become instruments of control—spaces where legal processes are bypassed, and punishment is wielded like a political weapon.

This misuse of incarceration transforms the prison from a symbol of justice into a symbol of tyranny. Under corrupt or authoritarian regimes, people are not always jailed for what they’ve done, but for who they are or what they believe. Intellectuals, activists, artists, journalists—even ordinary citizens—have all found themselves behind bars, not because they broke the law, but because they dared to speak truth to power. This is when the prison becomes more than a place—it becomes a warning: “Fall in line, or disappear.”

Such abuse reveals the fragility of freedom when the law is bent by those meant to uphold it. A prison should serve justice—not crush the human spirit. But when it becomes a tool for silencing truth, it tells us that the bars are not just around the prisoners—they are around society itself.

In the opening chapter of Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989, Penguin Books), Simon Schama does not begin with barricades or guillotines, nor with fiery rhetoric in the Assembly or cries from the hungry streets of Paris. Instead, he starts with geography—symbolic geography. The chapter title, “Two Kinds of Places,” is not merely a reference to topography, but to two opposing worlds within the same nation: Versailles and the rest of France. These were not just different in space, but in meaning, in tempo, in belief, and in destiny.

Versailles was not simply a palace—it was a theatre of power, a museum of monarchy, a spectacle of grandeur and control. In Schama’s hands, it becomes almost a character in its own right: glittering, elegant, and utterly detached from the lives of the people whose taxes paid for its gold-leafed splendour. Life there followed rituals, governed by the ceremonial gravity of the ancien régime, and smothered by the weight of tradition.

In contrast, there was France outside the gilded mirrors. Schama brings us into the world of villages, of bustling city quarters, of artisans and lawyers, merchants and peasants—people who lived real lives, with rising frustrations and ambitions. These were not passive victims but active participants in a society straining for change. Here, ideas were fermenting—about justice, about equality, about citizenship.

Bastille Day is far more than a commemoration of a prison break—it is the annual heartbeat of a revolution that reshaped not just France, but the modern world. The fall of the Bastille symbolised the collapse of the monarchy's unchecked power and the rising voice of the people. It remains a powerful reminder that even the mightiest walls can crumble when confronted by a united will for justice, freedom, and dignity.

The birth of the republic was not simply the result of broken bricks and open gates—it was the consequence of a collective awakening. When the people realised they were not mere subjects, but citizens with the right to shape their own destiny, the foundations of republicanism were laid. A republic does not promise perfection, but it demands participation. It is a system that rises or falls on the shoulders of those who believe that power must serve the public, not rule over it.

At its core, a republic is a form of government in which power does not reside in a monarch or a hereditary elite, but rather in the hands of the people and their elected representatives. The very idea of a republic is built on the rejection of absolute rule, inherited privilege, and unaccountable authority. It upholds the principles of liberty, equality, and popular sovereignty—that is, the belief that the legitimacy of government comes from the people themselves, not from divine right or bloodlines.

In the context of the storming of the prison and the rise of the people, the collapse of the prison walls symbolises the end of fear, silence, and arbitrary power. The people, once shackled by oppression and denied a voice, physically dismantled the structure that embodied their subjugation. It was more than just bricks falling; it was a declaration that no authority should imprison truth, justice, or human dignity. From those fallen stones rose a new idea—a society where the people were no longer subjects, but citizens.

The birth of the republic, therefore, is inseparable from the people’s act of resistance. When the prison fell, it wasn’t just the gates that opened—it was the collective imagination of a nation that began to dream of freedom, rights, and representation. A republic is not simply a political system; it is the embodiment of a people’s refusal to be ruled without consent, and their demand to govern themselves with justice and dignity.

By presenting these two symbolic “places”—Versailles and the broader France—Schama sets up the Revolution not as a sudden eruption of chaos, but as the violent collision between two incompatible realities. One was built on display, ritual, and hierarchy. The other on motion, imagination, and a new sense of self. In that tension, the Revolution becomes not just a political event but a psychological and cultural earthquake.

Simon Schama argues, rather controversially, that the French Revolution was not merely accompanied by violence—it was fundamentally shaped by it. The bloodshed was not a by-product of liberty; it was often a performance of it. Revolutionary violence, he insists, was ritualistic, a theatre of purification, a declaration that the old world had to be physically dismantled before the new could be born. The guillotine, in this context, was not a flaw but a feature—a sacrament of the new secular religion.

Schama also introduces the idea that revolutionaries, especially the Jacobins, cultivated a heroic self-image. Figures like Robespierre saw themselves as moral surgeons, slicing away corruption with icy virtue. The revolution was no longer about legal change, but moral cleansing. This belief lent the Revolution a terrifying clarity: only those who were pure enough could belong to the new order, and the rest had to be purged. That clarity, of course, made it murderous.

Schama portrays the fall of the monarchy not as an abrupt break, but as a series of humiliations endured by a monarchy already on life support. He writes vividly of the October Days, when women marched to Versailles not only for bread, but to drag the king back to Paris—to where the people could keep an eye on him. It was not yet the death of kingship, but its demotion.

Later, the flight to Varennes becomes the monarchy’s death rattle. Louis XVI’s failed attempt to flee in disguise shattered any remaining illusion that the king was one with his people. He was caught, like a criminal, by ordinary citizens. At that moment, Schama suggests, the symbolic order of divine kingship collapsed. Louis was no longer “Father of the Nation”—he was just a man in a hat trying to run.

As the Revolution reached its peak, Schama turns to the Reign of Terror—a period when revolutionary ideals devoured their own champions. The Republic of Virtue, as Robespierre imagined it, required constant purification. In order to protect liberty, they had to suspend it. In order to establish equality, they had to silence dissent.Schama is clear-eyed about this paradox. He suggests that the more the Revolution obsessed over purity and unity, the more it fragmented and collapsed under its contradictions. Revolutionaries became consumed by fear—of betrayal, impurity, and hidden enemies. The Revolution, which began with calls for universal brotherhood, ended with brothers killing brothers.

Schama presents The Terror and the Republic of Virtue as the culmination of a tragic contradiction at the heart of the French Revolution, and in many ways, he frames it as a failure—not simply in practical terms, but as a moral and philosophical collapse. He does not deny the Revolution's ambitions or its energy, but he repeatedly emphasises that it ended by consuming its own children, suffocating the very ideals it claimed to defend. The Revolution, Schama suggests, did not lose its way in the Terror; rather, the Terror was a logical outcome of its obsession with moral purity, unity, and the redemptive use of violence.

The pursuit of a perfect republic—an abstract, idealised vision of virtue—became the Revolution’s own undoing. Robespierre and his fellow Jacobins, in trying to build a society free of corruption, turned to paranoia, surveillance, and public execution as tools of purification. In doing so, they sacrificed liberty in the name of liberty. Schama portrays this not as a betrayal of the Revolution, but as its inner logic carried to its brutal conclusion.

Schama sees in The Terror a profound failure—not because the revolutionaries didn’t mean well, but because their means became indistinguishable from tyranny. In the end, their dream of emancipation was drowned in blood. The very republic that was supposed to free men ended up treating suspicion as justice and murder as virtue.

To celebrate Bastille Day, then, is not just to honour the past—it is to recommit to the present. It is to remember that every generation must defend the principles of liberty and accountability anew. The republic is not a finished product, but an ongoing project—one that asks each citizen, then and now: will you build with courage, or will you watch from the sidelines?

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