On this day 219 years ago, the people of Paris stormed the Bastille, a prison often used for political prisoners, although there were only 7 inmates at the time. The Bastille was a symbol of the absolutism of the French monarchy, and 14 July became a symbol of the uprising of the modern French nation. To put events in context, the storming of the Bastille happened just over a year after the first European settlement in Australia in 1788, and just five years after the end of the American War of Independence.
Just over a month after the storming of the Bastille, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was proclaimed. The declaration gave all citizens rights to liberty, ownership of property, security and resistance to oppression. It also included such concepts as equality of all citizens before the law, sovereignty belonging to the people, freedom of speech, and the presumption of innocence and prohibition of duress in criminal cases.
Notwithstanding the idealism behind the events of 1789, only a few years later France was plunged into the darkness of the Reign of Terror, as a result of power struggles in the new political order. There were mass executions of people identified as “enemies of the revolution”. The Reign of Terror came to an end in 1794, but instability remained, allowing Napoleon to take over the government as dictator in 1799.