King Louis XVI’s journal entry when the Bastille was stormed 📝|| 18th century #history #shorts #art

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‘On July 14, 1789, Louis XVI’s journal consisted of the one-word entry “Rien” (Nothing). Historians invariably find this a comic symptom of the King’s hapless remoteness from political reality. But it was nothing of the sort. The journal was less a diary than one of his remorselessly enumerated lists of kills at the hunt. Since his favorite pastime had been more or less permanently interrupted, there could hardly have been a more negatively eloquent utterance on his predicament than “Rien.”

(…) On the evening of the fourteenth, Lafayette’s brother-in-law and fellow revolutionary enthusiast, the Vicomte de Noailles, reported the day’s events in Paris to the National Assembly. In turn the Assembly decided to relay this information to the King, who preempted them by announcing that he had already determined to withdraw troops from the center of Paris to Sèvres and Saint-Cloud. He expressed sadness and disbelief that blood could possibly have been shed as the result of any orders given to the soldiers but did not offer, as the Assembly wanted, to restore Necker. Later that evening two of the Paris electors arrived confirming Noailles’ reports, but it appears that the full gravity of the situation was not yet apparent to the King.

Later that night, around eleven, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, yet another of the Lafayette circle, asked to see the King in his private apartments. A famous, anecdotal, version of the story has the citizen-noble informing Louis, for the first time, of the fall of the Bastille. The King reacts with the question “Is it a revolt?” and Liancourt replies, “No, Sire, it is a revolution.” While Louis already knew of the rising from Noailles and the electors, it is entirely possible that this exchange took place and probable that it was Liancourt’s apparently graphic account of the death of de Launay and de Flesselles that finally persuaded the King of the full enormity of the event. His military power in the capital had collapsed and with it any possible attempt to reverse the authority of the National Assembly by force.”

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