July 14

On the 14th in 1789 a bunch of possibly irritated, but certainly irritating, French people stormed the Bastille in Paris. The nominal reason for this action was the desire to free those inside who, it was believed, were improperly imprisoned in its massive bulk. In reality, their reasons were somewhat more pragmatic. They wanted to seize the 30,000 pounds of gunpowder stored there. For all the uproar it caused I was rather disappointed to discover that the only prisonersheld in the Bastille at the time were four forgers, two lunatics and one ‘deviant’ aristocrat, Comte de Solages.

The Marquis de Sade had been confined to the Bastille, for a variety of reasons, but he was transferred out of the Bastille a few days prior to its being stormed by the revolutionaries.