On June 29, St. Louis attorney Mark McCloskey told a local reporter that he and his wife, Patricia, had brandished guns as Black Lives Matter protesters walked by because he feared that the crowd — or, as he called them, the “mob” — “was Storming the Bastille.”
What McCloskey referenced is one of the most famous events in French revolutionary history, the July 14, 1789, Parisian people’s attack on the royal prison known as the Bastille. In using the “Storming of the Bastille” as shorthand for unpredictable mob violence, McCloskey echoed a historical analogy recently employed in conservative media outlets to delegitimize contemporary Black Lives Matter protests. Especially when protests include destruction of property, such as monuments, some pundits decry protesters as antithetical to the ideals of the American Revolution. Instead, they see protesters “morphing into ‘French Revolution fervor.’ ”
But this distorts the history of both revolutions, and their relationship to one another. The American Revolution was violent and the destruction of property was critical to both American protest and military campaigns during the Revolution. When the storming of the Bastille occurred, Americans viewed it as the hopeful continuation of their founding ideals, the spark of liberty catching flame across the Atlantic. In fact, the key to the Bastille was among George Washington’s prize possessions, and he proudly displayed it when president and later at Mount Vernon, where it still hangs today. The founders understood then what protesters understand today: that building a new political order relies on dismantling the old, which sometimes requires the physical destruction of things such as monuments.
From the Stamp Act Crisis on, American revolutionaries were no strangers to destroying property and tearing down monuments to further their cause. They saw it as an effective political tool to spread revolutionary ideals. In 1765, tax-protesting Americans looted, burned and destroyed offices, warehouses and private homes in Boston, Newport, New York and Annapolis. In 1773, in what we now call the Tea Party, Bostonians stole and destroyed tens of thousands of pounds of East India Company tea. In 1776, Southern patriot soldiers looted and burned the Virginia town of Norfolk, and Northern patriot citizens tore down the gilded lead statue of King George III in Manhattan and melted it into bullets. Throughout the war, in every former colony and west to the Mississippi River, they also ransacked loyalist businesses, farms, churches and homes — kidnapping and displacing enslaved people as well as looting possessions.
And it wasn’t just British supporters and their property who were targets. In 1779, Washington ordered thousands of troops to Iroquoia in Upstate New York with the mission of carrying out “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible” among Haudenosaunee Indians. Patriot soldiers in “Sullivan’s Campaign” destroyed at least 40 villages, looting wooden homes before burning them, robbing graves and desecrating Indian corpses to make souvenirs. The campaign earned Washington the nickname “Town Destroyer” among Indians.
Violence and property damage, in short, were integral to the American revolutionary experience. And so, when Americans heard about the storming, and subsequent destruction, of the Bastille several years after winning their war for independence, the violence and property destruction did not deter them from celebrating the news as a hopeful sign of republicanism’s global spread.
Built in the 14th century to guard the entrance to Paris, the Bastille was a formidable structure, with 100-foot-high stone walls and a moat. It housed arms, royal, governmental and police archives, and prisoners, notably political dissidents. Although by 1789 the Bastille housed only a handful of prisoners, it remained a physical symbol of the monarchy’s unenlightened authoritarian power. On July 14, when the prison governor refused to let Parisians — angry over food shortages and the increasing militarization of their city entrance — seize gunpowder stored there, the people attacked. They freed prisoners, looted archives, seized armament supplies and then decapitated the prison’s governor and lieutenant governor before parading their heads on pikes through the streets.
Thomas Jefferson, then U.S. ambassador to France, described the event in detail, including the decapitations, in a letter to then-secretary of foreign affairs John Jay that was reprinted in American newspapers. The violent details of the storming of the Bastille, in other words, were known both to high-ranking American politicians and the broader American public. In fact, the storming and subsequent destruction of the Bastille became its own popular culture phenomenon, commemorated in events and goods alike, and across America, citizens proudly displayed these violent images. Charleston windows had transparent paintings, lit by candlelight, of its ruins, while Philadelphians bought wallpaper decorated with the “beautiful figure of the destruction of the Bastille.”
Like less-famous Americans, George Washington was swept up in the popular fixation with the storming of the Bastille. In 1790, the Marquis de Lafayette, veteran of the American Revolution and commander of the Paris National Guard, sent Washington a picture of the Bastille and its large iron key. He sent it as a “tribute, which I owe, as a son to my adoptive father, as an Aide-de-Camp to my General, and as a Missionary of liberty to its Patriarch.” Washington showed it off as the newly inaugurated president, and it was traced and its image published in American newspapers.
Washington ensconced the key in the president’s House in Philadelphia, and then near the end of his second term, it was sent to his Virginia home, Mount Vernon. Visitors to Mount Vernon regularly commented on seeing it there in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is one of only a handful of things original to Washington’s ownership that remained in the mansion when the Washington family handed over the estate to the Mount Vernon Ladies Association in 1860, and it remains there today, proudly on display in its original 18th-century, custom-made gilded case, newly restored by conservators to its original beauty.
Yes, eventually Washington and other Americans viewed the growing violence of the French Revolution — and even more particularly, revolution in its colony of Saint-Domingue — with horror. Divided opinions over the radicalism of “The Terror” in France and ensuing European warfare helped fuel the rise of bitter partisan politics in the United States. The Haitian revolution in Saint-Domingue alarmed even the French Revolution’s biggest supporter, Thomas Jefferson, who like most enslavers thought that freedom enslaved people won for themselves, through violence and warfare, carried the egalitarian promise of the American Revolution too far.
But that didn’t take away from the fact that the storming of the Bastille itself remained a hopeful symbol. The storming and destruction of this relic of absolute monarchy continued to represent American revolutionary ideals made manifest — the hope that the foundational ideals of liberty, equality and republican government would spread around the world.
In 1796, American painter Edward Savage finished what became one of the enduring icons of early American art, “Liberty, in the form of the Goddess of Youth at the birth of the nation.” In it, the female figure of Liberty offers a cup to a bald eagle, a liberty cap-surmounted American flag waving in the sky behind them. She also tramples the key to the Bastille underfoot. Jefferson hung a copy in the parlor at Monticello. Schoolgirls embroidered copies of it, and ordinary people made watercolor paintings imitating it.
As the 19th century dawned, the key to the Bastille had emerged just as much a symbol of liberty as the bald eagle and the American flag — proudly on display by American people and leaders. But it was a sanitized symbol, under Liberty’s dainty foot or in a gilded case at Mount Vernon, wiped clean of much of the violence and destruction of the events of July 14, 1789.
Americans have continued to sanitize memories of their own Revolution, choosing to remember its patriots as more rational than radical, and its soldiers as victims of wartime violence by the loyalists, Indians and the British, rather than enactors of it. Whitewashing revolutionary history has long made it easier for those who wish to maintain the status quo to police protests as appropriate only if they are “peaceful.” But since the founding of the United States, political protest has never been entirely peaceful. McCloskey was more right than he knew when he suggested that Black Lives Matter protesters marching against historic injustice and structural inequalities in today’s America were “storming the Bastille.”