The Fourteenth of July and the Taking of the Bastille

On July 14, 1789, a mob stormed the Bastille, Paris’s redoubtable prison. It held only seven inmates, but the Estates-General had achieved political parity with King Louis XVI, and Parisians, fearing a royalist coup, were searching for weapons stored in the Bastille. In a well-written account, Prendergast recounts in detail the events of the day and, as important, those leading up to it, including failed attempts to impose new taxes and the very poor harvest leading to popular unrest. In the book’s second and more interesting half, “Memory,” the author examines how the French have continually refashioned the meaning of the day and of the French Revolution in general. By the bicentennial in 1989, a commemoration of the founding of modern France, the general public had become, by and large, indifferent to political and intellectual debates over the Revolution. Prendergast notes how French political leaders have used history for political and ideological purposes, and how, in our age of short memory, history and celebration increasingly diverge. (June)