The Bastille Was Empty

A holiday built on the myth of uprising.

I wish we'd actually storm the prisons, but clearly we're never gonna. We're more likely to laugh smugly at rape jokes scattered across our endless police procedural TV shows. (Insert Law and Order noise here.)

Bastille Day is tomorrow, which got me thinking about what we're actually celebrating. I had this nagging feeling that something about the whole story didn't add up. You know how sometimes you hear something so many times that you stop questioning it? That's what happened with this whole "brave revolutionaries storm the prison to free political prisoners" narrative.

Turns out I was right to be suspicious. The Bastille had seven prisoners in it. Seven. Four of them were common criminals. The other three were aristocrats who were basically living in comfortable detention. This wasn't some hellhole packed with political dissidents. It was a nearly empty fortress that the government had already decided to demolish in 1784 because it was too expensive to maintain.

Let me repeat that: the French government was already planning to tear down the Bastille and turn it into a park. The Revolution actually prevented this from happening. If the revolutionaries had just stayed home, they would have gotten their park anyway through normal bureaucratic processes.

Well, they did eventually get a park of sorts. Place de la Bastille exists today, but here's the kicker: the main monument there, the July Column, commemorates the July Revolution of 1830, not the 1789 storming of the Bastille. So we have this beautiful layer of historical confusion where the place is named after the Bastille, but the big visual centerpiece is about a completely different revolution that happened 41 years later. Even the commemoration is confused about what it's commemorating.

The crowd that showed up on July 14, 1789 wasn't there to liberate prisoners. They were there to grab gunpowder for a street fight. They needed weapons to defend against rumored royal troops, and the Bastille happened to be where the gunpowder was stored. The whole prison liberation angle was basically accidental.

This is where it gets really depressing. The symbolic power of the Bastille as this terrible place where political prisoners were thrown was based on its reputation from decades earlier, not its 1789 reality. People like Voltaire had been imprisoned there in the 1700s, and various prison memoirs had created this image of ministerial despotism and political oppression. The crowd storming it had no idea it was nearly empty. They were acting on mythology, not facts.

So the great symbolic victory of the French Revolution was essentially a lie. The dramatic narrative of "freeing the oppressed" was fictional. The crowd was motivated by stories about the place rather than its actual conditions. They conquered a nearly empty fortress that was already doomed, creating one of history's most celebrated symbolic victories out of what was essentially interrupted urban redevelopment.

This pisses me off for reasons that go way beyond historical accuracy. The image of citizens storming a prison to free political prisoners is powerful precisely because it speaks to something we want to believe about justice and solidarity. We want to believe that when the state imprisons people unjustly, ordinary people will rise up and do something about it.

Except that's not what happened. And it's not what happens now either.

We've always been cool with letting atrocity happen in prison. The fact that almost no one knew or cared that the Bastille was nearly empty says everything about how invisible prisoners have always been to the public. At least the Bastille was right there in central Paris where people could see it. Now we build prisons in remote locations, out of sight and out of mind.

Think about Julian Assange. Here's someone many people viewed as a political prisoner in very real, contemporary terms. He spent years in various forms of detention while legal proceedings dragged on. Sure, there were protesters, but they weren't coming with pitchforks. They were coming with strongly worded letters and street fair LARPs. Peaceful demonstrations that felt more like performance art than actual resistance.

The contrast between the mythologized prison break and the reality of how we actually treat people caught up in political prosecutions is stark. We celebrate a fictional prison liberation while organizing ineffective protests for real prisoners.

This pattern keeps repeating. Remember Occupy Wall Street? Massive energy, legitimate grievances, and it all died of impotence. The Iraq War protests were huge, millions of people in the streets worldwide, and they accomplished absolutely nothing. The war happened anyway. Makes me wonder about other celebrated moments of "popular resistance" throughout history. How many of them were actually as toothless as they seem in retrospect? We've turned the Bastille into a national holiday while building the largest prison system in human history.

Maybe that's why the Bastille story persists. It's easier to celebrate a fictional prison break than to confront the actual prison system we live with. The mass incarceration happening today makes the Bastille's seven prisoners look quaint, but there's no symbolic fortress to storm. Just a vast, bureaucratic system that's easy to ignore.

The French Revolution gave us this powerful myth about citizens rising up to free the oppressed. What it actually gave us was a crowd grabbing gunpowder from a nearly empty fortress that was already scheduled for demolition. The real victory was probably the gunpowder they seized, not the prisoners they "liberated."

I'm not saying the French Revolution was meaningless or that symbols don't have power. They do. Sometimes symbols divorced from reality can still change the world. What I'm saying is that we should be honest about what actually happened instead of perpetuating comfortable lies about heroic prison liberations that never occurred.

Because until we're honest about how we actually treat prisoners, we're going to keep celebrating fake victories while real injustices continue right under our noses. The Bastille was empty, and in many ways, so was the gesture of storming it.

Makes you wonder what else is fake about our self-affirming historical narratives.