Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [49]
Meanwhile, the mob outside became more frenzied, believing that their representatives inside, lingering over breakfast, had been taken hostage. The mob interpreted the withdrawal of the cannon to mean that the cannon were being loaded, in preparation for firing into the crowd.
As the mob grew larger and angrier, the Bastille’s guards warned them to disperse, shooing them away by waving their caps and threatening to fire. The people interpreted the waving of hats as encouragement to continue the attack.
And so it went, with periodic gunplay interrupted only by De Launay’s repeated attempts to surrender. The mob secured its own cannon and began firing at the prison, hacking at the drawbridge, and scaling walls into the courtyard of the Bastille. Facing tens of thousands of angry citizens, De Launay made a final offer to surrender total control of the Bastille to the mob, provided it be accomplished peacefully. He threatened to blow up the entire city block unless his demand for a bloodless transition was agreed to.
His offer was refused amid angry cries of “No capitulation!” and “Down with the bridge!” De Launay surrendered anyway.
The mob poured in and ransacked the entire fortress, throwing papers and records from the windows, killing some guards, and taking others as prisoners. One captured guard who was marched through the street said there were “masses of people shouting at me and cursing me,” as “women gnashed their teeth and brandished their fists at me.”
De Launay was triumphantly paraded through the streets of Paris with the people cutting him with swords and bayonets until he was finally hacked to death, whereupon the charming Parisians continued to mutilate his dead body. A cook was given the honor of cutting off De Launay’s head, which he accomplished with a pocketknife, kneeling on his hands and knees in the gutter to do it. De Launay’s head, along with the head of a city official, Jacques de Flesselles, who had failed to assist the mob’s search for weapons that day, were stuck on pikes and waltzed through the streets of Paris for more celebratory jeering.2
This is the revolutionary event celebrated by the French—the murderous barbarism of a mob.
Or as Parisians called it, “Tuesday.” The incident at the Bastille was merely a particularly aggressive version of the rampaging and pillaging they had been doing for weeks, all based on this or that rumor.
Apart from the feral viciousness of the attack on the Bastille, the madness of it was that the Third Estate—peasants and the middle class—had already won themselves a Republic. Under the old system, the French people had had a legitimate grievance: The Third Estate, composed of the great mass of citizens, paid all the taxes but got none of the government jobs. Those were reserved for the nontaxpaying nobility and clergy. (It was much like rich Democrats today—Tim Geithner, who failed to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes but was still confirmed as Obama’s treasury secretary; U.S. senator Claire McCaskill [D-Missouri], who failed to pay $287,000 in taxes on a private plane; Tom Daschle, proposed Obama nominee to be Health and Human Services Department secretary, who failed to pay all his taxes; Nancy Killefer, proposed Obama nominee to be White House chief performance officer, who failed to pay all her taxes; Zoë Baird, proposed Clinton nominee as attorney general, who failed to pay all her taxes; and Charlie Rangel, Democratic congressman censured by the House Ethics Committee for failure to pay all his taxes.)
When the Third Estate walked out on the Estates General and formed the new, classless National Assembly, asserting that only it could make laws, and the king recognized this new legislative body, they had won.
Nonetheless, the people decided the utterly pointless attack on the Bastille had been a tremendous success. And