The Bastille Stormed — Prison Fortress Falls
Poets involved
What happened
On 14 July 1789, a Paris crowd stormed the Bastille, a royal fortress-prison that had stood since the fourteenth century as a symbol of absolute royal power and arbitrary imprisonment. The Bastille was actually nearly empty of prisoners at the time, but its symbolic weight was immense: as a medieval fortress repurposed as a state prison, it embodied everything the revolutionaries most hated about the ancien régime. Its demolition, which began almost immediately, produced souvenirs sold across Europe.
Literary impact
The storming of the Bastille electrified the Romantic poets of Britain and Europe, inspiring William Wordsworth's rhapsodic memory of being in France in 1790 — 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive' from The Prelude. Blake saw the fortress's fall as a cosmic liberation; Coleridge and Southey's unfinished epic The Fall of Robespierre engaged with the revolutionary energy it released. The prison fortress became a central image in Romantic poetry for the liberation of the human spirit from political tyranny.
Source: Wikipedia
