HISTORY OF THE BASTILLE.
Julius Cæsar describes a structure three stories high which his
legionaries used rapidly to erect in front of towns they were besieging.
Such was the remote origin of the "bastides" or "bastilles," as these
movable fortresses were called in the Middle Ages. Froissart, speaking
of a place that was being invested, says that "bastides were stationed
on the roads and in the open country" in such a manner that the town
could get no food supplies. It was not long before the designation was
applied to the fixed towers erected on the ramparts for the defence of
the towns, and more particularly to those which were constructed at the
entrance gates.
In 1356, the chroniclers mention some important works that had been done
on the circumvallations of Paris. These were constructions interrupting
the wall at intervals, and so placed as to protect either an entrance
gate or the wall itself. The special designations of _eschiffles_,
_guérites_, or _barbacanes_ were applied to such of these buildings as
rose between two gates of the city, while the _bastilles_ or _bastides_
were those which defended the gates. The first stone of the edifice
which for more than four centuries was to remain famous under the name
of the Bastille was laid on April 22, 1370, by the mayor of Paris in
person, Hugh Aubriot, the object being to strengthen the defences of the
city against the English. To reproach the king, Charles V., with the
construction of a cruel prison would be almost as reasonable as to
reproach Louis-Philippe with the construction of the fortress of Mont
Valérien. We borrow these details from M. Fernand Bournon's excellent
work on the Bastille in the _Histoire générale de Paris_.
"The Bastille," writes M. Bournon, "at the time of its capture on July
14, 1789, was still identical, except in some trifling particulars, with
the work of the architects of the fourteenth century." The Place de la
Bastille of the present day does not correspond exactly to the site of
the fortress. Mentally to restore that site it is necessary to take away
the last houses of the Rue Saint-Antoine and the Boulevard Henri IV.;
the ground they occupy was then covered with the château and its glacis.
The round towers, however, must have extended considerably in advance of
the line of the houses and have encroached upon the pavement. The plan
reproducing the site exactly is to-day marked by lines of white stones,
by means of which all Parisians may get some notion of it if they go to
the Place de la Bastille.
M. Augé de Lassus, who drew so largely upon the works of M. Bournon and
ourselves for his lecture on the Bastille,[21] will permit us in our
turn to borrow from him the description he gave of the Bastille, so far
as its construction is concerned. Prints of the commonest kind which
have circulated in thousands, the more recent reconstruction which in
1889 gave Paris so much entertainment, have familiarized us with the
aspect of the Bastille, whose eight circular towers, connected by
curtains of equal height, give us the impression of a box all of a
piece, or, if you prefer it, an enormous sarcophagus. The eight towers
all had their names. There were the Corner, the Chapel, and the Well
towers, names readily accounted for by their position or by details of
their construction. Then came the Bertaudière and Bazinière towers,
baptized by the names of two former prisoners. The Treasure tower was so
called because it had received on many occasions, notably under Henri
IV., the custody of the public money. The excellent poet Mathurin
Regnier alludes to this fact in these oft-quoted lines:--
"Now mark these parsons, sons of ill-got gain,
Whose grasping sires for years have stolen amain,
Whose family coffers vaster wealth conceal,
Than fills that royal store-house, the Bastille."
The seventh tower was known as the County tower, owing its name, as M.
Bournon conjectures, to the feudal dignity called the County of Paris.
"The hypothesis," he adds, "derives the greater weight from the fact
that the mayors of Paris were called, up to the end of the _ancien
régime_, mayors of the town and viscounty of Paris." The eighth tower
bore a name which, for the tower of a prison, is very remarkable. It was
called the Tower of Liberty. This odd appellation had come to it from
the circumstance that it had been the part of the Bastille where
prisoners were lodged who enjoyed exceptionally favourable treatment,
those who had the "liberty" of walking during the day in the courtyards
of the château. These prisoners were said to be "in the liberty of the
court"; the officers of the château called them the "prisoners of the
liberty" in contradistinction to the prisoners "in durance"; and that
one of the eight towers in which they were lodged was thus, quite
naturally, called "the Tower of Liberty."
The towers of the Chapel and the Treasure, which were the oldest, had
flanked the original gateway, but this was soon walled up, leaving
however in the masonry the outline of its arch, and even the statues of
saints and crowned princes that had been the only ornaments of its bare
walls. "In accordance with custom," says M. Augé de Lassus, "the
entrance to the Bastille was single and double at the same time; the
gate for vehicles, defended by its drawbridge, was flanked by a smaller
gate reserved for foot passengers, and this, too, was only accessible
when a small drawbridge was lowered."
In the first of the two courtyards of the Bastille, D'Argenson had
placed a monumental clock held up by large sculptured figures
representing prisoners in chains. The heavy chains fell in graceful
curves around the clock-face, as a kind of ornamentation. D'Argenson and
his artists had a ferocious taste.
On the morrow of the defeat at St. Quentin,[22] the fear of invasion
decided Henri II., under the advice of Coligny, to strengthen the
Bastille. It was then, accordingly, that there was constructed, in front
of the Saint-Antoine gate, the bastion which was at a later date to be
adorned with a garden for the prisoners to walk in.
Around the massive and forbidding prison, in the course of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, quite a little town sprang up and
flourished, as in the Middle Ages happened around lofty and impressive
cathedrals. Barbers, cobblers, drink-sellers, poulterers, cheesemongers,
and general dealers had their shops there. These new buildings
encroached on the Rue Saint-Antoine, and extended as far as the convent
of the Visitation, the chapel of which, converted into a Protestant
place of worship, still exists.
"In its latter days," writes M. de Lassus, "the Bastille with its
appendages presented an appearance somewhat as follows:--On the Rue
Saint-Antoine, a gateway of considerable size, and, with its trophies of
arms, making some pretensions to a triumphal arch, gave access to a
first court skirted with shops, and open, at least during the day, to
all comers. People might pass through it freely, but were not allowed to
loiter there. Then appeared a second entrance, a double one for horse
and foot traffic, each gate defended by its drawbridge. Admittance
through this was more difficult, and the sentry's instructions more
rigorous; this was the outer guard. As soon as this entrance was passed,
one came to the court of the governor, who received the more or less
voluntary visitor. On the right stretched the quarters of the governor
and his staff, contiguous to the armoury. Then there were the moats,
originally supplied by the waters of the Seine--at that time people
frequently fell in and were drowned, the moats not being protected by
any railing--in later times they were for the most part dry. Then rose
the lofty towers of the citadel, encircled, nearly a hundred feet up, by
their crown of battlements; and then one found the last drawbridge, most
often raised, at any rate before the carriage gate, the door for foot
passengers alone remaining accessible, under still more rigorous
conditions."
These conditions, so rigorous for contemporaries--the Czar Peter the
Great himself found them inflexible--are removed for the historian:
thanks to the numerous memoirs left by prisoners, thanks to the
documents relating to the administration of the Bastille now in the
Arsenal library, and to the correspondence of the lieutenants of police,
we shall penetrate into the interior of these well-fenced precincts and
follow the life of the prisoners day by day.
In its early days, then, the Bastille was not a prison, though it became
such as early as the reign of Charles VI. Yet for two centuries it kept
its character as a military citadel. Sometimes the kings gave lodgment
there to great personages who were passing through Paris. Louis XI. and
Francis I. held brilliant fêtes there, of which the chroniclers speak
with admiration.
It is Richelieu who must be considered the founder of the Bastille--the
Bastille, that is, as a royal prison, the Bastille of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Before him, imprisonment in the old fortress
was merely casual; it is to him that we must trace the conception of the
state prison as an instrument of government. Here we shall be arrested
by the question, what is to be understood by a state prison? The term,
vague and open to discussion, is explained by M. Bournon. "By a state
prison--taking the Bastille as a particular instance--must be understood
a prison for those who have committed a crime or misdemeanour not
provided for by the common law; for those who, rightly or wrongly, have
appeared dangerous to the safety of the state, whether the nation itself
is concerned, or its head, or a body more or less considerable of
citizens, a body sometimes no larger than the family of the suspect. If
we add to this class of prisoners personages too conspicuous to be
punished for a crime at common law on equal terms with the ordinary
malefactor, and for whom it would appear inevitable that an exceptional
prison should be reserved, we shall have passed in review the different
kinds of delinquents who expiated their misdeeds at the Bastille from
the time of Richelieu to the Revolution."
The administration of the Bastille, which, up to the reign of Louis
XIII., was entrusted to great lords, dukes, constables, marshals of
France--the Marshal de Bassompierre, the Constable de Luynes, the
Marshal de Vitry, the Duke of Luxemburg, to mention only the last of
them--was placed by Richelieu in the hands of a real jailer, Leclerc du
Tremblay, brother of Père Joseph.[23]
Documents throwing any light on the Bastille at the time when the Red
Man, as Victor Hugo named Richelieu, was supreme, are however very
rare. An advocate, Maton de la Varenne, published in 1786, in his
_Revolutions of Paris_, a letter which ostensibly had been written on
December 1, 1642, to Richelieu, at that time ill. In it we read: "I,
whom you are causing to rot in the Bastille for having disobeyed your
commandment, which would have brought upon my soul condemnation to
eternal hell, and would have made me appear in eternity with hands
stained with blood----" It is impossible to guarantee the authenticity
of this document. To us it appears suspicious, the text having been
published at a time when many apocryphal documents were produced as
coming from the archives of the Bastille. More worthy of arresting our
attention is the "return of the prisoners who are in the château of the
Bastille," a document of Richelieu's time which M. Bournon discovered in
the archives of the Foreign Office. This catalogue, containing
fifty-three names, is the oldest list of prisoners of the Bastille known
up to the present time. Among the prisoners several are suspected or
convicted of evil designs against "Monsieur le cardinal," some are
accused of an intention to "complot," that is, to conspire against the
throne, or of being spies. There is an "extravagant" priest, a monk who
had "opposed Cluni's election," three hermits, three coiners, the
Marquis d'Assigny, condemned to death, but whose punishment had been
commuted to perpetual imprisonment, a score or so of lords designated as
"madmen, vile scoundrels, evil wretches," or accused of some definite
crime, theft or murder; finally, those whose name is followed by the
simple note, "Queen-mother," or "Monsieur,"[24] whence we may conclude
that the clerk had no exact information about the prisoners of the
cardinal. We shall give later the list of the prisoners in the Bastille
on the day of its capture, July 14, 1789; and the comparison between the
two lists at the two periods, the remotest and the most recent that we
could select, will be instructive. We have also, to assist us in forming
a judgment of the Bastille in Richelieu's time, the memoirs of
Bassompierre and of Laporte, which transport us into a state prison,
elegant, we might almost say luxurious, reserved for prisoners of birth
and breeding, where they lived observing all social usages in their
mutual relations, paying and returning calls. But the Bastille preserved
its military character for many more years, and among the prisoners we
find especially a number of officers punished for breaches of
discipline. Prisoners of war were confined there, and foreign personages
of high rank arrested by way of reprisal, secret agents and spies
employed in France by hostile nations; finally, powerful lords who had
incurred the king's displeasure. The court intrigues under Richelieu and
Mazarin contributed to the diversion of the Bastille from its original
intention: they began to incarcerate there _valets de chambre_ who had
somehow become mixed up in the plots of sovereigns.
Religious persecution was revived by the government of Louis XIV., and
ere long a whole world of gazetteers and "novelists," the journalists of
the period, were seen swarming like flies in the sun. Louis XIV. was not
precisely a stickler for the liberty of the press, but on the other hand
he shrank from cooping up men of letters, Jansenists and Protestants
convinced of the truth of their beliefs, pell-mell with the vagabonds
and thiefs confined at Bicêtre, Saint-Lazare, and the other prisons of
Paris. He threw open to them, too generously no doubt, the portals of
his château in the Suburb Saint-Antoine, where they mixed with young men
of family undergoing a mild course of the Bastille at the request of
their parents, and with quarrelsome nobles whom the marshals of France,
anxious to avoid duels, used to send there to forget their animosities.
Further, the reign of Louis XIV. was marked by some great trials which
produced a strange and appalling impression, and threw around the
accused a halo of mystery--trials for magic and sorcery, cases of
poisoning and base coining. The accused parties in these cases were
confined in the Bastille. And here we encounter a fresh departure from
the primitive character of the old fortress; prisoners were sent there
whose cases were tried by the regularly constituted judges. Henceforth
prisoners who appeared before the court of the Arsenal were divided
between the Bastille and the fortress of Vincennes.
This is the grand epoch in the history of the Bastille: it is now a
veritable prison of state. Writers can speak of its "nobleness." It
shows itself to us in colours at once charming and awe-inspiring,
brilliant, majestic, now filled with sounds of merriment, now veiled
with an appalling silence. From the gloomy regions within the massive
walls there come to us the sounds of song and laughter mingled with
cries of despair, with sobs and tears. This is the period of the Iron
Mask: the period when the governor receives mysterious letters from the
court. "I beg you, sir, to see that, if anyone comes to ask for news of
the prisoner whom Desgrez conducted to the Bastille this morning by
order of the king, nothing be said about him, and that, if possible, in
accordance with the intention of His Majesty and the accompanying
instructions, no one may get to know him or even his name." "M. de
Bernaville (the name of one of the governors of the Bastille), having
given orders for the conveyance of an important prisoner to the prison
of my château of the Bastille, I send this letter to inform you of my
intention that you receive him there and keep him closely guarded until
further orders, warning you not to permit him, under any pretext
whatever, to hold communication with any person, either by word of mouth
or in writing." The prisoners surrounded with so absolute a silence
almost all belonged to the same category, namely, distinguished spies,
who seem to have been rather numerous in France at the full tide of
Louis XIV.'s wars, and who were hunted down with an eagerness which grew
in proportion as fortune frowned on the royal armies. We read in the
Journal kept by the King's lieutenant, Du Junca: "On Wednesday,
December 22, about ten o'clock in the morning, M. de la Coste, provost
of the King's armies, came here, bringing and leaving in our custody a
prisoner whom for greater secrecy he caused to enter by our new gate,
which allows us to pass into or out of the garden of the Arsenal at all
hours--the which prisoner, M. d'Estingen by name, a German, but married
in England, was received by the governor by order of the King sent by
the hand of the Marquis de Barbezieux, with explicit instructions to
keep the prisoner's presence a secret and to prevent him from holding
communication with anyone, in speech or writing: the which prisoner is a
widower, without children, a man of intelligence, and doing a brisk
trade in news of what is happening in France, sending his information to
Germany, England, and Holland: a gentlemanly spy." On February 10, 1710,
Pontchartrain wrote to Bernaville, governor of the Bastille: "I cannot
refrain from telling you that you and the Chevalier de la Croix speak a
good deal too much and too openly about the foreign prisoners you have.
Secrecy and mystery is one of your first duties, as I must ask you to
remember. Neither D'Argenson nor any other than those I have apprized
you of should see these prisoners. Give explicit warning to the Abbé
Renaudot and to de la Croix of the necessity of maintaining an
inviolable and impenetrable secrecy."
It happened also at that period that a prisoner remained in complete
ignorance of the reason of his incarceration: "The prisoner at the
Bastille named J. J. du Vacquay," writes Louvois to the governor, "has
complained to the King that he has been kept there for thirteen years
without knowing the reason: be good enough to let me know what minister
signed the warrant under which he is detained, so that I may report to
His Majesty."
As the greater part of the papers relating to the arrest were destroyed
as soon as the incarceration was effected, it sometimes happened that in
certain cases the reasons were not known even in the offices of the
ministers. Thus Seignelay writes to the governor, M. de Besmaus: "The
King has commanded me to write and ask you who is a certain prisoner
named Dumesnil, how long he has been at the Bastille, and for what
reason he was placed there." "The demoiselle de Mirail, a prisoner at
the Bastille, having demanded her liberty of the King, His Majesty has
instructed me to write and ask you the reason of her detention; if you
know it, be good enough to inform me at your earliest convenience."
Again, we find Louvois writing to the same effect: "I am sending you a
letter from M. Coquet, in regard to which the King has commanded me to
ask who signed the warrant under which he was sent to the Bastille, and
whether you know the reason of his being sent there." "Sir, I am writing
a line merely to ask you to let me know who is Piat de la Fontaine, who
has been five years at the Bastille, and whether you do not remember why
he was placed there."
Letters of this kind are, it is true, very rare; yet if one compares the
state of things they disclose with the extraordinary comfort and luxury
with which the prisoners were surrounded, they help to characterize the
celebrated prison at this epoch of its history, namely, the seventeenth
century.
In 1667 the office of lieutenant of police had been created. The first
to hold the title was Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, a man of the
greatest worth. It is very important to note that under the _ancien
régime_ the lieutenant of police had a double function, being at the
same time a subordinate of the minister of Paris[25] and a member of the
Châtelet.[26] His duties were thus of a twofold nature, administrative
and judicial. Now the Bastille, as a state prison, was more especially
an administrative institution; but gradually, owing to the character of
the persons brought there as prisoners, it became difficult to avoid
turning it also into a judicial institution, and the minister of Paris
became accustomed to delegate his subordinate, the lieutenant of police,
to conduct the examination of the prisoners at the Bastille. Though La
Reynie took practically the whole responsibility of the administration
of the Bastille, his visits to the prison itself were nevertheless
relatively rare, and on every occasion a permit signed by Louis XIV. or
by Colbert was necessary.
La Reynie was succeeded by D'Argenson. Under him the powers of the
lieutenant of police were very largely extended, and the Bastille was
comprised within his jurisdiction. Henceforth the lieutenant of police
will enter the state prison whenever it seems good to him, as lord and
master, accompanied by his subordinates at the Châtelet, clerks and
inspectors of police; the prisoners will be in direct and constant
communication with him, and he will make an inspection of all the
chambers at least once a year. We find that at every change in the
lieutenancy of police, it sufficed for the minister of Paris to send the
name of the new officer to the governor. Dating from this period, the
prison in the Suburb Saint-Antoine remained under the authority of a
magistrate.
The Regency was a transition period between the reigns of Louis XIV. and
Louis XV., and there was a corresponding transition period in the
history of the Bastille. The incarcerations were less numerous and less
rigorous, but the rule of the prison lost something of that aristocratic
air which had characterized it. The most important episode in the
history of the Bastille during the Regency was the incarceration of
those who were accused of complicity in the Cellamare conspiracy. Among
these was Mdlle de Launay, later to be known as Madame de Staal. She
has left some charming pages about her imprisonment, in which we find,
related with a fluent and subtle pen, the little romance which we
proceed to outline.
Mdlle de Launay was secretary to the Duchess of Maine. She had had some
part in drawing up the scheme of the Cellamare conspiracy, which, if it
had succeeded, would have placed the king of Spain on the throne of
France. On December 10, 1718, the Regent sent her, with several of her
accomplices, to the Bastille, less with the idea of punishing her for
machinations against the state than to obtain from her details of the
conspiracy. At that period of her life she was of but moderate fortune
and rank, and it would not have been strange if she had been treated
with rigour. She found at the Bastille, on the contrary, unexpected
comfort and consideration. In her _Memoirs_, she writes that her sojourn
at the Bastille was the pleasantest time of her life. Her maid, Rondel,
was permitted to live with her. She was installed in a veritable suite
of rooms. She complained of the mice there, and a cat was given her, to
drive out the mice and provide some amusement. By and by there were
kittens, and the sportive tricks of the numerous little family cheered
her wonderfully, she said. Mdlle de Launay was regularly invited to dine
with the governor; she spent her days in writing and card-playing. The
king's lieutenant, Maisonrouge, a man well on in years, who held, after
the governor, the first place in the administration of the château,
conceived a profound and pathetic passion for the fair prisoner. He
declared that nothing would give him greater happiness than to make her
his wife. His apartments happened to be near those of Mdlle de Launay.
Unhappily for the king's lieutenant, there was in the neighbourhood a
third suite, occupied by a young and brilliant nobleman, the Chevalier
de Ménil, who also was implicated in the Cellamare affair. The fair
prisoner was not acquainted with him. Maisonrouge impresses us as a man
of great dignity, and rare nobility of character. He spoke to the two
young prisoners about each other, hoping, by bringing them into
communication, to provide them with fresh distractions, more
particularly the lady, whom he loved. The Chevalier de Ménil and Mdlle
de Launay could not see each other; they had never met. They began by
exchanging epistles in verse. Like everything that came from her pen,
the verses of Mdlle de Launay were full of animation and charm. The good
Maisonrouge played post between them, happy to see his little friend's
delight in the diversion she owed to him. It was not long before the
verses carried from one room to the other by Maisonrouge began to speak
of love, and this love--surprising as it may seem, but not difficult to
understand in the sequestered life of the Bastille--ere long became real
in the consciousness of the young people, who saw each other in
imagination under the most charming colours. Maisonrouge was soon
induced to contrive an interview between them. It is a delightful
moment. The two captives had never seen each other, yet loved each
other passionately: what will their mutual impressions be? Mdlle de
Launay's impression, when she saw the gay chevalier, was of unmixed
enthusiasm; the chevalier's, maybe, was more subdued; but if it is true,
as someone has said, that to nuns the gardener represents mankind, to a
prisoner every young woman must be an exquisite creature. The interviews
continued under the benevolent eye of Maisonrouge, who watched the
development of Mdlle de Launay's love for Ménil--the love of the girl
whom he himself loved intensely, but whose happiness he preferred to his
own. There are delightful details which may be found delightfully
described in Mdlle de Launay's _Memoirs_. It is M. Bournon's opinion
that, according to the testimony of Mdlle de Launay herself, this idyll
of the Bastille had "the dénouement that might have been foretold." We
have caught no hint of the sort in the _Memoirs_ of Madame de Staal, but
then, M. Bournon is no doubt the better psychologist. At any rate, the
governor of the Bastille got wind of the diversions of the lovers. He
put his foot down. Ménil was transferred to a distant tower, Mdlle de
Launay shed tears, and, incredible as it seems, Maisonrouge, while
redoubling his efforts to please her, sympathized with her lot to the
point of arranging fresh and more difficult interviews with the sparkish
chevalier. Mdlle de Launay left the prison in the spring of 1720, after
having sent to the Regent a detailed statement of the facts of the
conspiracy, which hitherto she had refused to furnish. Once at liberty,
she vainly implored the Chevalier de Ménil to fulfil his pledges and
make her his wife. Maisonrouge died in the following year, of
disappointment, says the gay coquette, at his failure to get from her,
during her imprisonment, the promise of marriage which now she would
have been glad enough to fulfil.
It seems as though under the Regency everything at the Bastille turned
on love--a reflection of the epoch itself. The young Duke de Richelieu
was locked up there because he did not love his wife. The brilliant
nobleman was kept under lock and key for several weeks, "in solitude and
gloom," he says, when suddenly the door of his room flew open and Madame
de Richelieu appeared, a wonder of grace, brightness and charm: "The
fair angel," writes the duke, "who flew from heaven to earth to set
Peter free was not so radiant."
We have seen how the Bastille had been transformed from a military
citadel into a prison of state. We shall now witness, under the
government of the Duke of Orleans, another transformation, betokened by
an event which is of little apparent importance. The Duke de Richelieu
was imprisoned in the Bastille a second time as the result of a duel: a
judge of the Parlement went there to question him and the Parlement
tried his case. The Parlement[27] at the Bastille, in the prison of the
king! From that moment the fortress continued year by year to grow more
like our modern prisons. "Under the Cardinal de Fleury," writes La
Harpe, "this famous château was inhabited by hardly any but Jansenist
writers: it then became the enforced residence of champions of
philosophy and authors of clandestine satires, and acted as a foil to
their obscurity and shame." It became increasingly the practice to
confine there accused persons whose cases were regularly tried at the
Châtelet or even before the Parlement. By the second half of the
eighteenth century accused persons had come to be incarcerated in the
Bastille by direct order of the Châtelet, which would have seemed
incredible to a contemporary of Louis XIV. The summoning officer would
post himself before the towers, and there, while the prisoner pressed
his head close against the bars of the window, the officer would shout
the terms of the writ at him across the moat. The advocates defending
the accused obtained permission to go and consult their clients, and
they were the only persons who were permitted to interview the prisoners
in private. On the appointed day the prisoner was transferred to the law
courts quietly and by night to avoid the curiosity of the crowd.
Under Louis XVI. the judges of the Parlement visited the Bastille as
they visited the other prisons; at length the minister Breteuil sent
instructions to the officials informing them that no more _lettres de
cachet_ would be issued without stating the duration of the penalty to
which the guilty person was condemned and the grounds for his
punishment. The Bastille was now merely a prison like the others,
except that the prisoners were better treated there.
In 1713 Voysin, the Secretary of State, wrote to D'Argenson:
"Beaumanielle is not sufficiently deserving of consideration to warrant
his removal from the Châtelet to the Bastille." La Harpe has well
described the transformation which from this time came over the great
state prison by saying that, from the beginning of the century, none of
the prisoners who had been placed there "had merited the honour." His
remark receives corroboration from Linguet: "It is not, in these latter
days especially, for criminals of state that the Bastille is reserved:
it has become in some sort the antichambre of the conciergerie."
If the glories of the Bastille paled as it grew older, on the other hand
torture, which, it is true, had never been applied except by order of
the courts, had completely disappeared. From the beginning of the
eighteenth century, the cells and chains were merely a temporary
punishment reserved for insubordinate prisoners: from the accession of
Louis XVI. they had fallen into disuse. Breteuil forbade any person
whatever to be placed in the cells, which were the rooms on the lowest
floor of each tower, a sort of damp and gloomy vaults. On September 11,
1775, Malesherbes writes: "No prisoner should be refused material for
reading and writing. The abuse it is pretended that they may make of it
cannot be dangerous, confined so closely as they are. Nor should any
refusal be made to the desire of such as may wish to devote themselves
to other occupations, provided they do not require you to leave in their
hands tools of which they might avail themselves to effect their escape.
If any of them should wish to write to his family and his friends, he
must be permitted to receive replies, and to send replies to their
letters after having read them. In all this you must be guided by your
prudence and your humanity." The reading of the gazettes, formerly
rigidly forbidden, was now authorised.
It must further be remarked that the number of prisoners confined in the
Bastille was not so large as might be thought. During the whole reign of
Louis XVI. the Bastille received no more than two hundred and forty
prisoners, an average of sixteen a year; while it had room for forty-two
in separate apartments.
Under Louis XIV., at the period when the government was most liberal in
dispensing its _lettres de cachet_, an average of only thirty prisoners
a year entered the château, and their captivity was for the most part of
short duration. Dumouriez informs us in his _Memoirs_ that during his
detention he had never more than eighteen fellow prisoners, and that
more than once he had only six. M. Alfred Bégis has drawn up a list of
the prisoners detained in the Bastille from 1781 to 1789. In May, 1788,
it contained twenty-seven prisoners, the highest figure reached during
these eight year; in September, 1782, it contained ten; in April, 1783,
seven; in June of the same year, seven; in December, 1788, nine; in
February, 1789, nine; at the time of its capture, July 14, 1789, there
were seven.
True, not only men were locked up in the Bastille, but also books when
they appeared dangerous. The royal warrant under which they were
incarcerated was even drawn up on the model of the _lettres de cachet_.
M. Bournon has published a specimen of these. The books were shut up in
a closet between the towers of the Treasure and the County, over an old
passage communicating with the bastion. In 1733 the lieutenant of police
instructed the governor of the Bastille to receive at the château "all
the apparatus of a clandestine printing-press which had been seized in a
chamber of the Saint-Victor abbey: the which you will be good enough to
have placed in the store room of the Bastille." When the books ceased to
appear dangerous, they were set at liberty. In this way the
_Encyclopædia_[28] was liberated after a detention of some years.
We have just seen that during the reign of Louis XVI. the Bastille did
not receive more than sixteen prisoners a year, on an average. Several
of these were only detained for a few days. From 1783 to 1789 the
Bastille remained almost empty, and would have been absolutely empty if
it had not been decided to place there prisoners who should properly
have been elsewhere. As early as February, 1784, the fortress of
Vincennes, which served as a sort of overflow pipe to the Bastille, had
been shut for lack of prisoners. The system of _lettres de cachet_ was
slipping away into the past. On the other hand, the Bastille was a
source of great expense to the King. The governor alone received 60,000
livres annually. When you add the salaries and board of the officers of
the garrison, the turnkeys, the physicians, the surgeon, the apothecary,
the chaplains; when you add the food--this alone in 1774 came to 67,000
livres--and the clothing of the prisoners, and the upkeep of the
buildings, the total will appear outrageous, for the figures given above
must be tripled to represent the value of the present day. So Necker,
seeing that the Bastille was of no further utility, thought of
suppressing it "for economy's sake,"[29] and he was not the only one in
high places to speak of this suppression. The Carnavalet[30] museum
possesses a scheme drawn up in 1784 by Corbet, the superintending
architect to the city of Paris, whence the project has an official
character: it is a scheme for a "Place Louis XVI." to be opened up on
the site of the old fortress. We learn from Millin that other artists
"were occupied with a scheme for erecting a monument on the site of the
Bastille." One of these schemes deserves special mention. Seven of the
eight towers were to be destroyed, the eighth to remain standing, but in
a significant state of dilapidation: on the site of the demolished
towers a monument was to be erected to the glory of Louis XVI. This
monument was to consist of a pedestal formed by piling up chains and
bolts taken from the state prison, above which would rise a statue of
the king, one hand extended towards the ruined tower with the gesture of
a deliverer. It is to be regretted, if not for the beauty, at least, for
the picturesqueness of Paris, that this scheme was never put into
execution. Davy de Chavigné, king's counsellor and auditor to the
treasury, was allowed to present to the Royal Academy of Architecture,
at its sitting on June 8, 1789, "a plan for a monument on the site of
the Bastille, to be decreed by the States General to Louis XVI. as the
restorer of the public liberty." On this subject the famous sculptor
Houdon wrote to Chavigné: "I am very anxious for the plan to be adopted.
The idea of erecting a monument to liberty on the very spot where
slavery has reigned up to the present, appears to me particularly well
conceived, and well calculated to inspire genius. I shall think myself
only too fortunate to be among the artists who will celebrate the epoch
of the regeneration of France."
We have seen prints, long anterior to 1789--one of them the frontispiece
of the edition of Linguet's _Memoirs_ that appeared in 1783--representing
Louis XVI. extending his hand towards the lofty towers, which workmen
are in the act of demolishing.
Among the archives of the Bastille are preserved two reports drawn up in
1788 by the king's lieutenant, Puget, the most important personage in
the fortress after the governor. He proposes the suppression of the
state prison, the demolition of the old château, and the sale of the
ground for the benefit of the crown. It may be said of these schemes, as
of the plan of the architect Corbet, that they would not have been
propounded if they had not been approved in high places.
Further, in the year 1784, an ardent supporter of the old state of
things cried: "Oh! if our young monarch ever committed a fault so great,
if he so far belied the most ancient usages of this government, if it
were possible that one day he could be tempted to destroy you" (the
author is apostrophizing the Bastille) "to raise on your ruins a
monument to the liberator-king...." The demolition of the Bastille was
decided on; and it would have been accomplished as a government
undertaking but for the outbreak of the Revolution.
From January 1 to July 14, 1789, that is to say for more than six
months, only one solitary prisoner entered the Bastille; and what a
prisoner!--Réveillon, the paper manufacturer of the Suburb
Saint-Antoine, who was shut up on May 1 at his own request, in order to
escape the fury of the mob. The same year, the lieutenant of police, de
Crosne, made an inspection of the Bastille, accompanied by a judge of
the Parlement; their object was to arrange officially about the
destruction of the state prison.
Thus, on the eve of the Revolution, the Bastille no longer existed,
though its towers were still standing.
The victors of the 14th of July set free seven prisoners: four forgers
whose arrest had been ordered by the Châtelet, whose case had been
regularly tried, and whose proper place was an ordinary prison; two
madmen who ought to have been at Charenton; and the Comte de Solages, a
young nobleman who had been guilty of a monstrous crime over which it
was desired to throw a veil out of regard for his family; he was
maintained on a pension paid by his father. The conquerors of the
Bastille destroyed an old fortified castle: the state prison no longer
existed. They "broke in an open door." That was said of them even in
1789.