Editing Bastille (section)

==Historiography==
[[File:Losme journal page.jpg|thumb|Journal of Antoine-Jérôme de Losme, the Bastille major, describing the days before the fall of the Bastille in 1789]]

A number of histories of the Bastille were published immediately after July 1789, usually with dramatic titles promising the uncovering of secrets from the prison.<ref name=MuzerelleP170>Muzerelle (2010b), p. 170.</ref> By the 1830s and 1840s, popular histories written by Pierre Joigneaux and by the trio of [[Auguste Maquet]], [[Auguste Arnould]] and [[Jules-Édouard Alboize de Pujol]] presented the years of the Bastille between 1358 and 1789 as a single long period of royal tyranny and oppression, epitomised by the fortress; their works featured imaginative 19th-century reconstructions of the medieval torture of prisoners.<ref>Amalvi, p. 181; Joigneaux (1838); Maquet, Arnould and Alboize Du Pujol (1844).</ref> As living memories of the Revolution faded, the destruction of the Bastille meant that later historians had to rely primarily on memoires and documentary materials in analysing the fortress and the 5,279 prisoners who had come through the Bastille between 1659 and 1789.<ref>Dutray-Lecoin (2010a), p. 136; ''[http://classes.bnf.fr/classes/pages/pdf/Bastille1.pdf La Bastille ou « l’Enfer des vivants »?] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110514183208/http://classes.bnf.fr/classes/pages/pdf/Bastille1.pdf |date=14 May 2011 }}'', [[Bibliothèque nationale de France]], accessed 8 August 2011.</ref> The Bastille's archives, recording the operation of the prison, had been scattered in the confusion after the seizure; with some effort, the Paris Assembly gathered around 600,000 of them in the following weeks, which form the basis of the modern archive.<ref>''[http://classes.bnf.fr/classes/pages/pdf/Bastille1.pdf La Bastille ou « l’Enfer des vivants »?] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110514183208/http://classes.bnf.fr/classes/pages/pdf/Bastille1.pdf |date=14 May 2011 }}'', [[Bibliothèque nationale de France]], accessed 8 August 2011.; Funck-Brentano, pp. 52–4.</ref> After being safely stored and ignored for many years, these archives were rediscovered in 1840 (under the kitchen floor at the Arsenal library) by the French historian François Ravaisson,<ref>Funck-Brentano, Frantz (1932), pp. 12–13.</ref> who catalogued and used them for research between 1866 and 1904.<ref>Funck-Brentano (1899), pp. 55–6; Muzerelle (2010b), p. 170.</ref>

At the end of the 19th century the historian [[Frantz Funck-Brentano]] used the archives to undertake detailed research into the operation of the Bastille, focusing on the upper-class prisoners in the Bastille, disproving many of the 18th-century myths about the institution and portraying the prison in a favourable light.<ref>Muzerelle (2010b), p. 170; Funck-Bretano (1899).</ref> Modern historians today consider Funck-Brentano's work slightly biased by his anti-Republican views, but his histories of the Bastille were highly influential and were largely responsible for establishing that the Bastille was a well-run, relatively benign institution.<ref>Muzerelle (2010b), p. 170; Amalvi, p .183.</ref> Historian Fernand Bournon used the same archive material to produce the ''Histoire de la Bastille'' in 1893, considered by modern historians to be one of the best and most balanced 19th-century histories of the Bastille.<ref>Muzerelle (2010b), p. 170; Bournon (1898).</ref> These works inspired the writing of a sequence of more popular histories of the Bastille in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Auguste Coeuret's anniversary history of the Bastille, which typically focused on a handful of themes and stories involving the more glamorous prisoners from the upper classes of French society.<ref>Muzerelle (2010b), p. 170; Lüsebrink and Reichardt, p. 207; Coeuret (1890).</ref>

One of the major debates on the actual taking of the Bastille in 1789 has been the nature of the crowds that stormed the building. [[Hippolyte Taine]] argued in the late 19th century that the crowd consisted of unemployed vagrants, who acted without real thought; by contrast, the post-war left-wing intellectual [[George Rudé]] argued that the crowd was dominated by relatively prosperous artisan workers.<ref>Kennedy, p. 313; Rudé (1959); Taine (1878).</ref> The matter was reexamined by [[Jacques Godechot]] in the post-war years; Godechot showing convincingly that, in addition to some local artisans and traders, at least half the crowd that gathered that day were, like the inhabitants of the surrounding faubourg, recent immigrants to Paris from the provinces.<ref>Godechot (1965); Schama, p. 762; Kennedy, p. 313.</ref> Godechot used this to characterise the taking of the Bastille as a genuinely national event of wider importance to French society.<ref>Kennedy, p. 313.</ref>

In the 1970s French [[sociology|sociologist]]s, particularly those interested in [[critical theory]], re-examined this historical legacy.<ref name=MuzerelleP170/> The [[Annales School]] conducted extensive research into how order was maintained in pre-revolutionary France, focusing on the operation of the police, concepts of [[deviancy]] and religion.<ref name=MuzerelleP170/> Histories of the Bastille since then have focused on the prison's role in policing, censorship and popular culture, in particular how these impacted on the working classes.<ref name=MuzerelleP170/> Research in West Germany during the 1980s examined the cultural interpretation of the Bastille against the wider context of the French Revolution; Hanse Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt's work, explaining how the Bastille came to be regarded as a symbol of despotism, was among the most prominent.<ref>Crook, pp. 245–6; Lüsebrink and Reichardt (1997).</ref> This body of work influenced English historian [[Simon Schama]]'s 1989 book on the Revolution, which incorporated cultural interpretation of the Bastille with a controversial critique of the violence surrounding the storming of the Bastille.<ref>Colley, pp. 12–3; Schama (2004).</ref> The [[Bibliothèque nationale de France]] held a major exhibition on the legacy of the Bastille between 2010 and 2011, resulting in a substantial edited volume summarising the current academic perspectives on the fortress.<ref>''[http://www.bnf.fr/en/cultural_events/anx_exhibitions/f.bastille_eng.html The "Bastille" or "Living in Hell"] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111112055927/http://www.bnf.fr/en/cultural_events/anx_exhibitions/f.bastille_eng.html |date=12 November 2011 }}'', [[Bibliothèque nationale de France]], accessed 29 August 2011; Dutray-Lecoin and Muzerelle (eds) (2010).</ref>