TODAY IN HISTORY

|The Beginning Of The French Revolution|

On this day in 1789, a mob stormed the Bastille in Paris (a royal fortress and prison that had come to symbolize the tyranny of the Bourbon monarchs) demanding the arms and munitions stored there. When the guards at the Bastille resisted, the mob captured the prison, released all its prisoners and dismantled it. This event signalled the beginning of the French Revolution—a decade of political turmoil and terror in which King Louis XVI of France was overthrown, and tens of thousands of people executed.

The revolution came to an end in 1799 when General Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the revolutionary government and established the French Consulate.