What Day Was the storming of the Bastille?

About this date

Parisian revolutionaries stormed the Bastille, a fortress and prison in Paris that had become a symbol of royal authority, seeking weapons and gunpowder stored there amid rising tensions with King Louis XVI's government.

The Bastille held only a handful of prisoners at the time, making its capture more symbolically than practically significant, but the event is now widely treated as marking the start of the French Revolution.

The date is celebrated annually in France as Bastille Day, the country's national holiday, commemorated with a major military parade in Paris.

The fortress's governor, Bernard-René de Launay, was killed by the crowd shortly after surrendering, an early sign of the violence that would characterize much of the following years of revolution.

The event is commemorated not only in France but has also influenced revolutionary symbolism internationally, with the phrase "storming the Bastille" still used figuratively to describe popular uprisings against entrenched authority.