The Bastille prison started out in the fourteenth as a fortification consisting of a chatelet and two towers during the reign of French King Charles V. What is now Place de la Bastille was called Saint-Antoine Gate at that time. The fortress was built during the Hundred Years’ War to protect the eastern side of Paris from attacks by the English and the fortress also acted as protection for the king should there be an uprising by the Parisian population. The initial construction was a hasty task with eight towers and two of these were part of the original chatelet. This construction took place during the provostship of Étienne Marcell, the Bastille Sainte-Antoine between 1356 and 1358. By 1367, the fortress was made a complete urban castle by King Charles V of France. Each of the towers had a name, some were named for their purpose like Treasure Tower due to the rotal treasury being housed there or named after a person of interest like Tour de la Bertaudiere after the mason who was killed during construction of the tower.

Occasionally during the reign of King Louis XI (The Eleventh), the Bastille was used as a prison while still housing the royal treasury there (even during the reign of King Henry IV of France). The turmoil ensued by the Wars of Religion saw it house a couple of the kingdom’s most influential figures like Prince de Condé from 1616 until 1619, Francois de Monmorency from 1574 until 1575 and Charles d’Angouleme from 1604 until 1616. In 1717, French enlightment writer and satirist Voltaire was imprisoned there for 11 months for curating poems that critiqued the Duchess of Berry who had retreated to the Chateau de la Muette as her pregnancy came to an end.

The 42 cells of the citadel housed the Bastille, a comparatively luxurious prison for affluent residents and nobility. Royal inmates had a fair amount of freedom to travel around the stronghold, receive visitors, and communicate with the outside world. Only seven inmates were housed in the Bastille in 1789 (one of them was an Irishman named James FX. Whyte), and their terms of confinement were quite lenient. Amid the living conditions, the Bastille was a drain on the finances of King Louis XVI due to the upkeep of staff, the food and the governor’s salary (not helped by the economic crisis created by the French’s support for American independence). In fact, before the prison was broken into by revolutionaries on 14 July 1789, there were talks among the big cheeses for the fortress to be torn down so a pleasant square near the Sainte-Antoine district could be created. The fortress was no longer feared by the people on the eve of the revolution as it had been seen as a symbol of royal deposition that had marked the Parisian landscape. The Bastille Prison was a symbol of royal power in France.

On that faithful 14 July 1789, 114 soldiers were defending the Bastille when the revolutionaries stormed it. The delegates tried and failed to negotiate with Bernard-René Jourdan de Launay and he was later stabbed, shot lynched and beheaded by a butcher after he was taken to the Place de Gréve (now known as Paris’ Hotel de Ville). The Bastille documents, furniture, and tableware were taken by the Revolutionaries, who then dumped some of it in the fortress' ditches. The local officials made an effort to retrieve them starting on July 15. In 1798, the majority of them were moved to the adjacent Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. Letters de cachet, interrogations, appeals to the monarch, police reports, and communication from prisoners are among the 60,000 papers that have been recorded since the nineteenth century.

The following day, a private contractor named Polloy began what later became a 17 year long process of demolishing the Bastille prison with the idea that he could sell the carved stone pieces that resembled a miniature Bastille. These were around 40 cm high, 60cm deep and 100cm long. One of these can be found in the Carnavalet Museum in Paris. There are traces of the Bastille in Paris that are either easy or hard to spot. Some can be found in the Bastille Parish Metro station as well as close to the railway track as the trains pull in and out. Many buildings around Place de la Bastille have plaques mentioning what parts of the fortress once stood where modern structures now stand and even the corner of Rue Saint-Antoine and Place de la Bastille just so happens to have a line of cobblestones that mark the outline of the infamous fortress, whose downfall is celebrated by a military parade, France’s Air Force flying over Paris streaming blue, white and red smoke and firework displays. Many French tourist sites have a much more extensive list of Bastille remnants, all of which are encountered by French people everyday!