The Bastille () was a fortress in Paris, known formally as the Bastille Saint-Antoine.

The Bastille played a key role in the rebellion of the Fronde and the battle of the faubourg Saint-Antoine, which was fought beneath its walls in 1652.

On 14 July the Bastille was stormed by a Revolutionary crowd, primarily residents of the faubourg Saint-Antoine who sought to commandeer the valuable gunpowder held within the fortress.

Historical reconstruction showing the moat below the walls of Paris ( l ), the Bastille and the Porte Saint-Antoine ( r ) in 1420

Charles V chose to live close to the Bastille for his own safety and created a royal complex to the south of the fortress called the Hôtel St. Paul, stretching from the Porte Saint-Paul up to the rue Saint-Antoine.

Parisian defences in 14th century: A – Louvre Palace | the Louvre ; B – Palais de Roi ; C – Hôtel des Tournelles ; D – Porte Saint-Antoine ; E – Hôtel St Paul ; F – the Bastille

In 1418, for example, the future Charles VII took refuge in the Bastille during the Burgundian-led " Massacre of the Armagnacs " in Paris, before successfully fleeing the city through the Porte Saint-Antoine.

A depiction of the Bastille and neighbouring Paris in 1575, showing the new bastion s, the new Porte Saint-Antoine, the Arsenal of Paris | Arsenal complex and the open countryside beyond the city defences

An arms depot was later built above the Porte Saint-Antoine, all making the Bastille part of a major military centre.

Henry entered Paris early on the morning of 23 March through the Porte-Neuve rather than the Saint-Antoine and seized the capital, including the Arsenal complex that neighboured the Bastille.

The Bastille and Porte Saint-Antoine from the north-east, 1715 – 19

Influenced by the events of the Fronde, Louis XIV rebuilt the area around the Bastille, erecting a new archway at the Porte Saint-Antoine in 1660, and then ten years later pulling down the city walls and their supporting fortifications to replace them with an avenue of trees, later called Louis XIV's boulevard, which passed around the Bastille.

The Bastille in 1734, showing the Louis XIV boulevard and the growing " faubourg " beyond the Porte Saint-Antoine

By the late 18th century, the Bastille had come to separate the more aristocratic quarter of Le Marais in the old city from the working class district of the faubourg Saint-Antoine that lay beyond the Louis XIV boulevard.

The Bastille had its own street address, being officially known as No. 232, rue Saint-Antoine.

The Bastille and the Porte Saint-Antoine, seen from the east

Episode of the Fronde at the Faubourg Saint-Antoine by the Walls of the Bastille

At the end of February 1791 a mob of more than a thousand workers from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, encouraged by members of the Cordeliers Club and led by Antoine Joseph Santerre, marched out to the Château, which, rumour had it, was being readied on the part of the Crown for political prisoners, and with crowbars and pickaxes set about demolishing it, as the Bastille had recently been demolished.

They were brought to the place were the Bastille once stood, and went through Saint-Antoine, Saint-Denis and Saint-Honoré streets before crossing the temporary bridge and arriving at the Champ de Mars.

New kitchens and baths were built just outside the main gate to the Bastille in 1786.

The Promenade Plantée was put into place at the same time in order to reuse the rest of the abandoned line between the Bastille and the old Montempoivre gate to the city.

Bastille Day is the name given in English-speaking countries to the French National Day, which is celebrated on the 14th of July each year.

It commemorates the 1790 Fête de la Fédération, held on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 ; the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille fortress-prison was seen as a symbol of the uprising of the modern nation, and of the reconciliation of all the French inside the constitutional monarchy which preceded the First Republic, during the French Revolution.

In the wake of the 11 July dismissal of Jacques Necker, the people of Paris, fearful that they and their representatives would be attacked by the royal military, and seeking to gain ammunition and gunpowder for the general populace, stormed the Bastille, a fortress-prison in Paris which had often held people jailed on the basis of lettres de cachet, arbitrary royal indictments that could not be appealed.

On 14 July, the insurgents set their eyes on the large weapons and ammunition cache inside the Bastille fortress, which was also perceived to be a symbol of royal power.

On 14 July 1789, the insurgents set their eyes on the large weapons and ammunition cache inside the Bastille fortress, which also served as a symbol of royal tyranny.

Paris was besieged by riots at the news, which culminated in the storming of the Bastille on 14 July.

A second trend was a slow shift away from the Bastille's 17th-century role of detaining primarily upper-class prisoners, towards a situation in which the Bastille was essentially a location for imprisoning socially undesirable individuals of all backgrounds – including aristocrats breaking social conventions, criminals, pornographers, thugs – and was used to support police operations, particularly those involving censorship, across Paris.

Early in the French Revolution, the Paris militia, which played a prominent role in the storming of the Bastille, wore a cockade of blue and red, the city's traditional colours.

Charles V was also a builder king, and he created or rebuilt several significant buildings in the late 14th century style including the Bastille, the Louvre, Château de Vincennes, and Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which were widely copied by the nobility of the day.

He was prosecuted in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace which involved Marie Antoinette and Prince Louis de Rohan, and was held in the Bastille for nine months but finally acquitted, when no evidence could be found connecting him to the affair.

Rush's Led Zeppelin influence is still prominent on this record, most obviously in the song " Bastille Day " ( which discusses the storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution ), though it is apparent on all three of the shorter songs on the album.

His most notable works were a smart pamphlet in answer to Charles Palissot's scurrilous play Les Philosophes ( which procured him a short stay in the Bastille for an alleged libel on Palissot's patroness, the princesse de Robecq ), and a reply to Ferdinando Galiani's Commerce des blés ( 1770 ).

He retired when Necker was dismissed on July 12, 1789, but on Necker's recall after the storming of the Bastille again resumed his office, which he continued to hold till October 1791.

This included Bastille Day, which is a French holiday, and then Sunday, which many of the American athletes protested.

In 1779 he was named the Bernese bailiff of Saanen or Gessenay ( here he wrote his Lettres pastorales sur une contrie de la Suisse, published in German in 1781 ), and in 1787 was transferred in a similar capacity to Nyon, from which post he had to retire after taking part ( 1791 ) in a festival to celebrate the destruction of the Bastille.

The name also resembles Mount Athos, which is referred to in chapter 13 of The Three Musketeers in which a Bastille guard says, " But that is not a man's name ; that is the name of a mountain.

To the west lies the Place de la République, which is linked to the Place de la Bastille, in the east, by the sweeping, tree-lined Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, with its large markets and children's parks.

Prise de la Bastille by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel

When the crowd — eventually reinforced by mutinous gardes françaises — proved a fair match for the fort's defenders, Governor de Launay, the commander of the Bastille, capitulated and opened the gates to avoid a mutual massacre.

:* Liège celebrates the Bastille Day each year since the end of the First World War, as Liège was decorated by the Légion d ' Honneur for its unexpected resistance during the Battle of Liège.

:* New York City has numerous Bastille Day celebrations each July, including Bastille Day on 60th Street hosted by the French Institute Alliance Française between Fifth and Lexington Avenues on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Bastille Day on Smith Street in Brooklyn, and Bastille Day in Tribeca.

* Bastille Day 2011 — slideshow by Life magazine

* The 2011 Bastille Day Military Parade, video broadcast by the French Minstry of Defence

The attack on the Bastille in the French Revolution-though afterwards remembered mainly for the release of the handful of prisoners incarcerated there-was to considerable degree motivated by the structure being a Royal citadel in the midst of revolutionary Paris.

This type of cap was worn by revolutionaries at the fall of the Bastille.

Thus the ceremony held at the site of the demolished Bastille, organized by the foremost artistic director of the Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, in August 1793 to mark the inauguration of the new republican constitution, an event coming shortly after the final abolition of all forms of feudal privilege, featured a cantata based on Rousseau's democratic pantheistic deism as expounded in the celebrated " Profession de foi d ' un vicaire savoyard " in Book Four of Émile.

Lettre de cachet ordering Jean-François Marmontel's detention at the Bastille, signed by Louis XV of France | Louis XV in 1759

This was an early conception, and in early times the order in question was simply verbal ; some letters patent of Henry III of France in 1576 state that François de Montmorency was " prisoner in our castle of the Bastille in Paris by verbal command " of the late king Charles IX.

* Dr. Manette, in Dickens ' A Tale of Two Cities, was thrown into the Bastille prison by means of a lettre de cachet.

On 14 July 2002, during Bastille Day celebrations, Chirac survived an assassination attempt by a lone gunman with a rifle hidden in a guitar case.

The Bastille fortress was transformed between 1824 and 1848 by general Haxo and took on its present-day aspect.

The first cable transport system, installed on the Bastille in 1875, was built by the world-famous Porte de France Cement Company.

The performance was held in the open air on July 28, conducted by Berlioz himself, at the Place de la Bastille.

Pankhurst felt connected to the storming of the Bastille, depicted here in a 1789 painting by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel, since she believed her birthday to be 14 July.

On 14 July 1789 it was stormed by Parisian rioters who seized the cannons and muskets stored in its cellars to use against the Bastille later the same day.

It was stormed by a crowd on 14 July 1789 in the French Revolution, becoming an important symbol for the French Republican movement, and was later demolished and replaced by the Place de la Bastille.