The Bastille Day July 14 -1789 Paris France
The Bastille was a royal fortress in Paris, but revolutionaries gave it an inflated notoriety by declaring it a state prison. On 14 July 1789, militant Parisian workers stormed the fortress and dismantled it. Although they claimed they were releasing prisoners, their real purpose was to acquire weapons. This event triggered a three-year reign of terror and political turmoil in which King Louis XVI was overthrown and 1000 people, including the king and his wife Marie Antoinette, were guillotined. 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 "fort...