Bastille

a gate tower, an outlying defense, or citadel. The word appears to have meant originally to build. The term is used commonly in describing the castles of the Middle Ages. In French history, the name acquired the meaning of state prison. Many French cities had bastilles. The bastille of history is the Bastille of Paris. It formed a part of the medieval walls of Paris. It formed and defended the gate of St. Antoine. It was a massive building and was preserved when the rest of the walls and fortifications were razed. It was used as a state prison by the French monarchs. The Bastille was begun in 1370. It consisted at first of two round towers 75 feet high, one on each side of the city gate. Afterward a tower was added on each side of these two, and massive walls, ten feet in thickness, strengthened by four more towers, were built within the city, so as to include a quadrangle or inner court 162 feet long and 72 feet wide. Louis XI ordered cages of iron constructed for the confinement of prisoners. There were vaults beneath the tower on a level with the waters in the moat. They were dark, musty, and infested with rats. They were dreaded by prisoners. When completed, the Bastille was a strong, stone castle, with massive walls, surmounted by eight gloomy towers. It could be entered only by a drawbridge crossing a deep moat. The entrance was defended at its inner extremity by stone gates.

During the centuries preceding the Revolution, the French monarch exercised the arbitrary authority of ordering obnoxious persons imprisoned in the Bastille, where they remained sometimes the rest of their lives without trial or communication with the outside world. Any person who had the ill will of an intriguer at court, or who became dangerous by reason of his political influence, was likely to be whisked off and immured in the Bastille beyond all hope of rescue by friends or course of law. In this way the Bastille became a symbol of despotic authority. It was hated particularly by the friends of liberty and fair dealing everywhere. The Bastille stood in the artisan quarter of St. Antoine, the birthplace of the French Revolution. One of the first cries, when the mad populace broke loose, was, "Down with the Bastille." An infuriated mob, strengthened by several companies of soldiers who sided with the people, attacked the castle and forced an entrance. The common soldiers of the guard were spared, but the officials of the prison were taken from the military and were butchered. Seven persons were found in the dungeons. One had been there thirty years without sight of the outside world. Early in the century, a prisoner had written on the walls of his cell, "The Bastille shall one day be demolished, and the people shall dance on the area where it stood," and indeed they did. The Bastille was torn down to the last stone. The material was used in building a bridge across the Seine. The former site is devoted to a public square called the Place de la Bastille, in the center of which rises a marble monument 154 feet in height. The sides of the pedestal bear bronze medallions symbolical of justice, the constitution, strength, and freedom.

The Bastille fell July 14, 1789. Soon after its destruction, Lafayette sent a model of the Bastille and a key to General Washington accompanied by the following: "Give me leave, my dear General, to present you with a picture of the Bastille just as it looked a few days after I ordered its demolition, with the main key of the fortress of despotism. It is a gift which I owe as a son to my adopted father; as aid-de-camp to my general; as a son of liberty to its patriarch." The model, which is two or three feet in length and about half as wide, and the wrought iron key, about seven inches in length, are kept safely at Mt. Vernon. See Lafayette; Paris