The capture of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 was a political earthquake. It saved the National Assembly and gave legitimacy to a sudden change of power. Paris is now controlled by a new municipal government and a militia of citizens (the National Guard), with Bai, the speaker of the National Assembly elected mayor, and the National Guard, made up of bourgeois men, commanded by the Marquis de Lafayette, a French hero who fought in the American Revolutionary War. On the morning of 17 July, Louis XVI's youngest brother, the Count of Artois, and marie Antoinette's confidant, the Duchess of Polignac, fled in disguise and finally left France. A succession of disgruntled court members joined count Artois's exiled court in Turin. But on the same day, after a symbolic defeat on 14 July, Louis XVI accepted the offer to go to Paris, renewing his sovereignty, while at the same time ordering the army to retreat and recalling Jacques Necques. On 17 July, the king received the "most solemn" welcome in front of the town hall, and Bay presented him on behalf of the voters with a tricolour cockade symbolizing the insurgents. Louis XVI put the tricolor emblem on the hat as a sign of solidarity with the people, and the tricolor emblem began to become a symbol of the country. Perhaps it was Lafayette's idea that the white in the tricolor emblem represents the Bourbon royal family, the red and blue represent Paris, and the three colors intertwined represent the revolution, symbolizing the inseparability of the king and the people of Paris.
The capture of the Bastille also put the revolutionaries in trouble. The uprising determined the victory of the Third Estate and the National Assembly, but some fanatical masses took brutal revenge when they captured the Bastille, and the commander of the castle, Launay, and six soldiers were brutally killed. Later that day, the former mayor of Paris, Jacques de Freille, was killed in retaliation for allegedly obstructing the insurgents from arming. He was paraded through the streets along with Launay's head. Some see these acts of public revenge as a righteous act worthy of sympathy, as their decisions have already resulted in the deaths of some 100 insurgents. Others argue that in a violent society in which the masses are merely using the means of the authorities to do the other, the revolution will reform this violent society. Still others find such barbarism inexcusable and that the revolution is responsible for these negative effects.
More things followed. On 22 July, Louis Bettier de Sovigne, who had been governor of the Royal Household of Paris since 1776, was captured while trying to escape Paris. He and his father-in-law, Joseph Fulon (who succeeded him as Treasurer after Necke's dismissal), were beaten to death and beheaded, and their heads were spread throughout Paris, supposedly in retaliation for their plot to prolong the famine of 1788-1789 in Paris. Fulong is said to have said that if the poor are hungry, they should eat straw. Le Revolution Paris was the first new newspaper to cover these unprecedented events, and a young journalist from Bordeaux, Elise Lusdalo, reported on this "frightening and frightening" day, whose horror and despair are remembered by history. After Furlong was beheaded:
A handful of straw was stuffed in his mouth, showing the extreme hatred of this brutal man, the retribution that the angry people deserved! Oh, my God! These barbarians! A man pulled [Bettier's] heart out of his trembling body... What a horrible scene! ...... Citizens, I feel that these scenes of rebellion have tormented your souls, and like you, I have been shocked, but think of the horrors of enslavement... But never forget that these vengeful humanities have been lost and their conscience has been lost.
In the summer and autumn of 1789, from Paris to the smallest villages, the royal state witnessed an unprecedented collapse. In the cities, aristocratic parliamentarians were forced to leave their posts; in the countryside and small towns, the power vacuum was filled by people-elected municipal institutions. The seizure of power was accompanied by a refusal to pay taxes, levies, and tithes from the state, lords, and churches. Because the military, inspired by popular sovereignty, has publicly expressed its solidarity with the people, the judiciary has been unable to enforce the law.
News of the challenge to the power of the state and the nobility quickly spread throughout the countryside, and an atmosphere of expectation, threat and fear pervaded the countryside. Arthur Young, capturing the desperate hopes of the National Assembly, recorded the poverty of her family during a conversation with a peasant woman in Lorraine on 12 July during his third trip to France:
Walking along a long mountain road, while drinking horses, I spoke to a poor woman who was full of complaints about this era, saying that it was a miserable country. According to her, some big people are doing something for the poor right now, but she doesn't know who these people are or what they're going to do, but God is going to make us better because the military service tax and the lord's tax overwhelm us." The woman, who looked sixty or seventy years old from a short distance away, was curved and had rough skin and wrinkled skin on her face due to her labor, but she said she was only 28 years old.
When news of the capture of the Bastille broke, fears of revenge on the nobility replaced those hopes. On the one hand, people who had become destitute as a result of the economic crisis wandered in droves on the country roads, and on the other hand, anxious, hungry peasants waiting for new crops to ripen, and those vagrants became the focus of the peasants' attention: Were they instructed by the resentful nobles to destroy the peasants' crops as punishment for the boldness of the Third Estate? In late July, fearful of external threats, villagers armed the villagers with farm tools as weapons. Hope, fear, and hunger turned the countryside into a powder keg, and the imagination of "robbers" employed by the nobility became the fuse. Suspicious movements of "outsiders" appeared in six sporadic places, which were portrayed as rumors of armed robbers destroying crops, and the resulting panic began to spread. These rumors spread like wildfire from village to village, spreading to all but Brittany and the east. Many local incidents were really just villagers forcing privileged classes or their agents to hand over food and drink, and sometimes two new features emerged: finding and destroying feudal tax books and publicly humiliating lords and their stewards.
This unprecedented panic, and its aftermath, was known as the "Great Panic" of the summer of 1789. The situation is typical in the village of Cirimuertien, 32 km northeast of Paris. From 1771 onwards, Pierre-Louis Nicolas De Lahay was a school teacher and parish priest, and his diary recorded "major novel events" in the village, which also included the tragic scenes of the harsh winter of 1788-1789. At the end of July 1789, he wrote: "We are in the midst of terrible catastrophe, and everywhere we hear of rebellions and massacres. Grain is nowhere to be found. "The harvest of 1789 would curb famine. After the news of the capture of the Bastille on 14 July, in an atmosphere of anxiety and anticipation, the villagers reacted to rumors that disgruntled nobles were trying to sabotage the harvest: "The alarm bell sounded, and the priests gathered all the men and boys in the village, and all took up arms, a few with guns, and the rest with iron forks, shovels, axes and pitchforks where they could find, led by priests wearing tricolor emblems. "After the drafting of the letter of love, this is the second major revolutionary action in which most of the rural people participated.
At the meeting at which the confessions were drafted, the protests of the clergy nominally loyal to the king hid their radical claims, but this time they were at the forefront of the attack on feudalism, and they were well aware of the consequences of doing so. In the mountain villages of Bresse and Biège, east of Lyon, the Château des Lords was threatened, and news of the capture of the Bastille reached the local capital of Burgchan on 19 July. As soon as the aristocracy for revenge passed, many peasants in the villages of Breth found and burned the feudal tax books, claiming that "all who have titles are lords". The region has become a source of fear and rumors across the country. The most notable incident occurred on July 25, when more than 800 farmers from 12 villages attacked the Monastery of St. Ciurbis near Burg, forcing the monks to burn the account books and looting the monastery's cellars. The next day, they erected a gallows in the center of the monastery and threatened to hang the monks, who eventually fled into the nearby forest in panic before the rebels set fire to the houses.
At the end of July, castles in the Thorn Valley were looted and burned, including the Château de Xenozan by the Marquis of Tarelang (who at that time was bishop of Autan and was already an important figure in the National Assembly). The rebellious peasants collected food, wine and money from the rich and clergy and burned the feudal ledgers. The Cluny Abbey, with its large tracts of land and various feudal powers, became the target of public criticism. About 160 "robbers" (including brewers, laborers, village craftsmen, beggars) were later arrested. Most insisted that they were simply "drawn in" by the crowd and had no intention of wreaking havoc; a few admitted that their aim was to "loot and burn the monasteries," "destroy monasteries and cities," or ensure that "tithes and lordly taxes are no longer levied." The "patriots", shocked and determined to re-establish order, did justice by setting up emergency committees: in the end, 27 people were hanged in Cluny, Macon and Tourny.
In some places, the Great Panic sparked retaliation against other groups. In Alsace, Jewish families in several villages were robbed. In the north, on the eastern border of the province of Lorraine, the people of Sargmina celebrated the fall of the Bastille at Mass on July 22, and the tax collectors were forced to flee on July 28. The tense rivalry over taxes, especially the salt tax, lasted for months, and a pamphlet called "The Founding Father of the French People We United" wanted Louis XVI to abolish the tax collection station. In the Norman town of Mortanieopeche, near Alençon, François Lambertier led a group of men, women and children into the collection station, where they found and burned the books and then introduced a "civilian tax" to reduce the price of grain, tobacco and salt. Local governments have been unable to resist these threats for days, but they will not forget them.
Just as some of the villages once "believed" that their refusal to pay taxes in the winter of 1788-1789 was following the king's wishes. In July 1789, some found a new basis for rebellion. According to the description of an official in the Province of Brittany in the Ploemelle region:
In my jurisdiction and its vicinity, all peasants generally refuse to pay their prescribed share to tithes, and they openly declare that they will shed blood if they want to levy taxes. Their reasoning was that, now that the request to repeal these tithes had been written into the love letter, the repeal measures were now in effect.
The collapse of authority prompted the peasants to abandon the concealment and deception tactics they had used to oppose authority, and they began to express their dissatisfaction directly. In particular, they use the discourse of the third level of rebellion to achieve their goals. The Duke of Montmorency, whose domain was located in Montmartín, north-east of Paris, wrote to him on 2 August, "About 300 robbers from all over the land were in collusion with the servants of the Duchess of Langaunet, who stole the lease deeds and the allowances of the territory, and destroyed her pigeon loft"; they triumphantly left an IOU after the theft, which read "State".