Analysis Of The Storming Of The Bastille

The crowd which stormed the Bastille was not made up of the upper class of the Third Estate, nor did it consist of vagrants or vagabonds or other so called undesirables, the crowd was in large part composed of the ‘urban working class,’ artisans, petty tradesmen, shopkeepers, and militiamen(Rudé PAGE). The attack on the Bastille was not simply mob violence, but it was not an organized politically calculated strike against the monarchy either. At its core the storming of the Bastille was a defensive action taken by Parisians fearful that foreign troops would enter the city to kill them and to dissolve the National Assembly. Crowds through out Paris had been raiding church and government buildings in the days and weeks leading up 14 July 1789. …show more content…
The aristocrat governor de Launay is alleged to have said, “torn by remorse, ‘I have betrayed my fatherland!’ and his voice is choked with sobs”(Dwyer&McPhee 18). The fatherland, it is clear that nation itself, that he had betrayed is the Third Estate, the people whom he ordered his men to fire upon. The article makes the claim that the nation is the Third Estate; or that the state would be stronger if it was made up only of the Third. A claim similar to one made earlier in 1789 by the Jesuit Father Emmanuel Sieyès, “If the privileged orders were removed, the nation would not be worse off for it, but better. So, what is the Third? Everything, but a fettered and oppressed everything. What would it be without the privileged order? Everything, but a free and flourishing everything. Nothing can happen without it; everything would be infinitely better without the others,”(Dwyer&McPhee …show more content…
The reaction to, and interpretation of the violence of the Parisian Crowd legitimized the Third Estate and the National Assembly as political agents. The event vested those entities with a degree of political authority. Following the Storming of the Bastille Louis XVI entered Paris and met with the victors. For his visit the king even wore the tricolor cockade of the revolution(Rudé 59-60). The king also reinstated Necker and recognized the National Assembly as a part of the French government. Also as a result of the political violence Parisian government was passed to the hands of the Third Estate who began a City Council to replace their aristocratic governors(ibid). The violence of the Paris Crowd granted political legitimacy to the Third