Storming of the Bastille

On 14 July 1789, Parisian crowds seized the Bastille fortress and prison, a royal armory and a symbol of the monarchy's arbitrary power, after a delegation was rebuffed and gunfire broke out. The garrison surrendered by afternoon, several of its defenders were killed by the crowd, and the building was demolished in the months that followed. The assault carried little strategic weight beyond a small store of gunpowder, but it announced that royal authority in the capital had broken, and it became the Revolution's founding symbol, commemorated every year since as France's national day.