Revolutions
New York Public Library Digital Collections
The NYPL Digital Collection provides access to over 755,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities, including illuminated manuscripts, vintage posters, illustrated books, and printed ephemera.
Royalists Desecrate the Revolutionary Cockade (3 October 1789)
Military officers in several regiments of the royal army favored a military strike to dispel the National Assembly, but by the fall of 1789 they saw clearly that this order would not be given.
Victims on Display
Meaningless violence was precisely how the Duchess of Gontaut viewed the events of July 14th, especially the murder of the military governor of the Bastille and of the mayor of Paris, whose heads were placed on pikes and paraded around the city.
A Defender of the Bastille Explains His Role
The soldiers stationed at the fortress did not see themselves as resisting the Revolution so much as keeping watch on a rather insignificant outpost that had nothing at all to do with the major events transpiring in Versailles.
A Conqueror of the Bastille Speaks
Having assembled at the traditional protest place in front of the City Hall, known as place des grèves (meaning sandbar, which it was, but which has come to mean "strike"), the crowd set off in search of ammunition.
Parisian Riots on 14 July
As demonstrations spread across Paris on the morning of 14 July, Pierre–Victor Besenval, commander of the royal soldiers stationed in the capital, contemplated ordering his men to suppress the protests.
Desmoulins on His Own Role
Camille Desmoulins, an aspiring journalist and author of an anti–aristocratic pamphlet, had been closely following political events.
Street Demonstrations of Support for Necker (12 July 1789)
Gouverneur Morris, an American in Paris, wrote about the street protests that followed the King’s dismissal of the royal minister of finance, the popular Jacques Necker. Many Parisians considered Necker the man most able to enact reforms that might solve France’s fiscal and economic problems.
Fears for the Bastille: A General’s Concern
In this excerpt from a letter of 5 July 1789, the Marshal de Broglie, head of the royal army who led a conservative faction at court, expresses his fears that amid the current unrest, the royal garrison and prison at the Bastille might come under attack.
The Réveillon Riot (28 April 1789)
The "manufactory" owned by Jean–Baptiste Réveillon in the Saint–Antoine neighborhood of Paris made decorative wallpaper, a lucrative luxury item that required highly skilled (and generally well–paid) workers.