The Bastille and the French Revolution: Reading an Icon

The fall of the Bastille is widely regarded as a decisive event in world history, and by the end of the eighteenth century, it had become more than a prison – it was a towering symbol of arbitrary and despotic power, signifying all that was obsolete and feudal about the old regime. The chapter begins by outlining the different, competing interpretations of the French Revolution before describing how the Revolution itself was a struggle over representation and then explores the fate of the Bastille before and after 14 July 1789. However sensational the uprising was, there is no doubt that the Bastille became much more significant in its ‘afterlife’ than it ever had been as a state prison. The case study presented here provides a key site for understanding the moral and affective economies of state power and resistance. It is not just that this insurrectionary event, the storming of the Bastille, is celebrated as a national holiday every year, but that this decisive rupture tells us something fundamental about the invention of symbols and rituals.