Simon Schama is famous both as a great scholar and as one of the UK's greatest popularizers of history, whose books and TV series have enthralled huge audiences through their gripping storytelling. Citizens, his award-winning account of the French Revolution, has continued to be one of Penguin's most popular history titles since it was first published in 1989. This extract takes us into the heart of the revolution's ferment as the angry crowd storms the Bastille prison.

Their first munitions did not do much for the dignity of the new militia, though these did provide yet more theatrical colour. Ransacking the royal garde-meuble near the Tuileries, they extracted antique halberds and pikes, a sword said to have belonged to their folk hero Henri IV and a cannon inlaid with silver that had been presented to Louis XIV by the King of Siam. More serious equipment was harder to lay hands on. Powder had been moved from the Arsenal to the Bastille on Besenval's orders a few days earlier. When the royal prévôt des marchands, de Flesselles, was told to hand over weapons from the Hôtel de Ville he could come up with only three muskets. Alternative suggestions proposed by him - the Carthusian monastery by the Luxembourg and the gun factory at Charleville - turned out to be wild-goose chases, so that by the end of the day de Flesselles' own credibility was deeply compromised. He agreed to ask the commandant of the garrison at the Invalides, de Sombreuil, to hand over the thirty thousand muskets at his disposal, but he too procrastinated, replying that he had first to seek permission from Versailles.

Finally, thirty-five casks of powder were produced from a barge at the Port Saint-Nicolas and enough weapons and powder were distributed for patrols that night, the thirteenth. In contrast with the night before, bourgeois sympathizers with the Revolution felt safe enough to go on the streets as they saw the worker-sorties disarmed by the militia. There were even exemplary hangings of looters, and candles and oil-lamps once again illuminated houses and streets.

It was early the next morning, with low clouds hanging over Paris, that the battle was won. Dissatisfied with the answer they had received the previous evening, and immense crowd, estimated by some to be eighty thousand strong, converged on the Invalides. Some days before, eighty of their comrades in the Invalides had already jumped the camp and the rest responded with a paralyzing slowdown action to de Sombreuil's order to sabotage the thirty thousand muskets in his barracks. The twenty invalides veterans assigned to this job may not have been in their prime but they could probably have done better than unscrewing twenty muskets in six hours had not patriotic enthusiasm caught up with them too.

Buy this book, or buy the boxed set

If you like this book, you may also like these:

The Assault on Jerusalem - Steven Runciman
1914: Why the World Went to War - Niall Ferguson
The Aristocratic Adventurer - David Cannadine