The Bastille Is Dismantled

However, the tide turned later that afternoon when a detachment of mutinous French Guards arrived. The French Guards, who were permanently stationed in Paris, were known to be sympathetic to the revolutionaries. When they started firing cannons at the Bastille, de Launay, who didn't have enough provisions for a long siege, waved the white flag of surrender.

He was taken prisoner and marched to city hall, where a bloodthirsty mob separated him from his escort and murdered him before cutting off his head, mounting it on a pike, and parading it around the city. A few other royalist soldiers were also slaughtered, foreshadowing the horrifying bloodshed that would occur during and after the French Revolution.

Following the storming of the Bastille, the prison fortress was meticulously destroyed until virtually nothing was left. Louis XVI, who had been held as a de facto prisoner since October 1789, was executed on the guillotine a few years later, and Marie Antoinette was beheaded not long after.