Events at La Barbe

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On this day in 1789 Parisian revolutionaries and mutinous troops storm and dismantle the Bastille, a royal fortress that had come to symbolise the tyranny of the Bourbon monarchs. This dramatic action signalled the beginning of the French Revolution, a decade of political turmoil and terror in which King Louis XVI was overthrown and tens of thousands of people, including the king and his wife Marie Antoinette, were executed.

The capture of the Bastille symbolised the end of the ancien regime and provided the French revolutionary cause with an irresistible momentum. Joined by four-fifths of the French army, the revolutionaries seized control of Paris and then the French countryside, forcing King Louis XVI to accept a constitutional government. In 1792, the monarchy was abolished and Louis and his wife Marie-Antoinette were sent to the guillotine for treason in 1793.

"Liberte, Egalite et Fraternite"  the first French Republic was born.

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