It is said that when the news of the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 reached Immanuel Kant in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), the philosopher, every daily walk was so invariably accurate that the city's residents checked their watches by it, for the first time of the year breaking their punctual daily rhythm. Such episodes sometimes say more about the spirit of an era than piles of archives and historical documents. On that July day, not a fortress was taken, but the direction of historical time changed. Tomorrow is July 14 - another anniversary of this significant event. The date that has long since left the national borders of France and has become a universal symbol of the will to freedom.
In fact, the Bastille was never the most important fortress in France. Its military significance by the end of the 18th century was almost exhausted. On the day of its capture, there were only seven prisoners inside - four forgers, two mentally ill and one aristocrat accused of incest. From a purely practical point of view, the event seems disproportionate to the enormous historical resonance it evokes. But History is driven not only by material facts, but also by symbols. Every fortress represents much more than its stone walls, because it embodies an entire political system. The Bastille was a material image of monarchical arbitrariness. People were imprisoned there not after a fair trial, but by virtue of royal lettres de cachet - royal orders that decreed imprisonment without charge, without motive, without the right to defense and without a sentence.
Because of the fall of the Bastille, it embodies the destruction of a political principle: that the state is above the law.
Who actually took the Bastille?
The notable French historian Jacques Godchot is one of those researchers who provide an answer with scrupulously researched facts, not with pathetic generalizations. In June 1790, the National Assembly honored 954 people with the initial title of “victors of the Bastille“. Of the latter, your profession is known, the vast majority are small-time workers from the working-class suburb of Saint-Antoine - carpenters, furniture makers, locksmiths, woodcarvers. These are not professional revolutionaries, but people of labor. Their ages range from the eight-year-old boy, followed by the first on the ramparts, to a 72-year-old Parisian citizen.
Among the participants are Italians, Germans, Belgians, Swiss, as well as volunteers who participated in the American War of Independence. It is this international composition that leads Godchot to consider July 14 as part of the much broader process of the Atlantic Revolutions - the historical wave that began with the American struggle for independence and swept through Europe to lay the foundations of modern constitutionalism, popular sovereignty and civil rights.
Of course, the history of the French Revolution is not unambiguous. Soon after the rapture comes the Jacobin Terror, the revolutionary tribunals and the guillotine. In the name of freedom, crimes against freedom itself begin to be committed.
That is why the French Revolution does not leave a double legacy, which shows both the greatness of liberation and the danger that every revolution can turn into a new form of despotism. This lesson is especially relevant today. For freedom cannot be protected by destroying freedom. Democracy is not measured by extraordinary measures turned into permanent rules. Nor by the concentration of power, no matter how noble the chosen intentions may seem. More than two centuries later, there are no royal prisons and arbitrary arrests in the Free World. This does not mean that the danger has disappeared, only that it has changed its appearance. Today's "Bastille" does not erect stone walls. Everyone is an algorithm that determines who is heard and who remains invisible. Everyone is a law, accepted supposedly in the name of security or the fight-with-something that narrows the space of freedom. each is public apathy - the quietest and perhaps most dangerous form of civil capitulation to power.
The history of the twentieth century has repeatedly shown how easily free societies can voluntarily give up freedom in exchange for promises of security, order, or national greatness.
That is why Benjamin Franklin's warning that those who are willing to sacrifice freedom for temporary security risk losing both still rings surprisingly contemporary.
The real question, added in 1789, was not only who is governed, but to what extent society is willing to tolerate arbitrariness before defending its own dignity. This is also the big question that every generation is obliged to ask again and again. Because every generation has its own Bastille: for some it was absolute monarchy; for others - the totalitarian state; for still others - corruption, bureaucratic arbitrariness, social engineering, digital control or the fear of expressing a free opinion.
The walls of the Bastille were demolished in the autumn of 1789. Some of the stones were turned into miniature models of the fortress itself and sent as souvenirs to the newly created departments of revolutionary France. Another part was used in the construction of the bridge that today connects the Place de la Concorde with the National Assembly building. Today, all that remains of the fortress itself is its outline, placed on the pavement of the Place de la Bastille, and above it rises the July Column - a monument to another revolution, the one of 1830. But it is precisely the absence of the building itself that is the strongest monument. Because the real Bastille was never an architectural object, but a political metaphor. Its fall is one of the last rare historical moments when the people's fear of power is replaced by the fear of power of the people.
That is why July 14 is more of a testament to each succeeding generation: freedom is never finally conquered. Democracy is never a finished project. The rule of law is never an irreversible achievement.
They are that fragile balance that is maintained only by people ready to defend the truth, even when it is dangerous. Each generation inherits not a ready-made temple of freedom, but a construction that must prevent its strengthening and completion, stone by stone; right after right; institution after institution. This is the true meaning of the memory of July 14 and the fall of an old Parisian fortress. And we must remember it when the 35th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution of the Republic of Bulgaria is marked, with which the “Bastille“ of the totalitarian communist regime was finally destroyed.