Paris and Its Military Commander Lafayette Officially Thank the Men Who Took the Bastille Just a Few Weeks Earlier

The storming of the Bastille started the French Revolution, which was one of the most important events in world history. It is commemorated every year on July 14, Bastille Day, and with our 4th of July, celebrates the two events that set off a democratic revolution whose reverberations are still felt.

As a key figure in securing American liberty, Lafayette was a French national hero, and also a voice for the 3rd estate in France (those not represented by the clergy or nobility).  He became a leader of the liberal aristocrats and an outspoken advocate of religious toleration and the abolition of the slave trade. He called for the re-instatement of the States General, where the people would have a say in elected government.  He was elected as a representative of the nobility to the States General that convened in May 1789, and Lafayette supported the manoeuvres by which the bourgeois deputies of the Third Estate gained control and converted it into a revolutionary National Assembly. On July 11 he presented to the Assembly his draft of a Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Meanwhile, France faced a looming financial crisis, one which tested the French political system and angered the under class.  When Louis XVI dismissed Necker, the finance minister sympathetic to the people, the city erupted.  On July 14, to deal with the unrest, the Paris Militia (also known as the National Guard, or  “Garde Nationale,” a phrase Lafayette coined), was mobilized; Lafayette was then presiding over the National Assembly.  In Versailles, Jean Sylvain Bailly, President of the 3rd Estate, lobbied the King to pull his royal troops out of Paris, and thereby avoid a clash between them, the mobs, and the Garde Nationale. The Bastille was a notorious prison holding weapons and gunpowder, and the people gathered below it. The Bastille’s cannons were aimed at the people, and when the defenders of the Bastille shot a cannon into the crowd that killed three people, the population erupted in fury. It was at that crucial moment that members of the Garde Nationale made their famous decisive intervention, leading the successful storming of the Bastille.  The next day Lafayette was named to lead the Garde Nationale. 

On August 5, with Bailly now serving as Mayor of Paris, and just weeks after the storming of the Bastille, Lafayette demanded that the National Assembly give special commendation to members of the Garde Nationale who had participated in the storming of the Bastille.  Previously, the Assembly had decreed that all who had served could be given leave of further military service, a decree known as the “Cartouche de Conge Absolu.”  Lafayette felt that they should go farther, and wanted each heroic participant to be given a formal document testifying to the gratitude of the nation.  These had the same thought behind them as the documents that George Washington handed out at the end of the Revolution, releasing troops from further service and thanking them for their role in winning the war.  This is one of those original documents, given by Lafayette and a grateful Paris to one of the men who took the Bastille and whose name is listed on a monument standing where the Bastille once stood.  

Document signed, August 30, 1789, to a member of the Garde Nationale (and one-time farmer from Dammarie-Sur-Saulx), Charles Giraudot, who was 33 at the time, countersigned by Paris Mayor Jean-Sylvain Bailly. “We, the Mayor of Paris, & we the commander-general of the Paris National Guard, having presented the Cartouche given by the Commander of the French Guard to Charles Giraudot, grenadier of the company A of St. Blancard, but beyond that desiring to give him, in the name of the city of Paris, a testimony of esteem and gratitude for his good conduct in the Revolution, have delivered the present certificate bearing our signatures and the arms of the city.  This Certificate should stand as a Monument of the services that he has rendered to the Nation, as well as of the justice of a free city towards a patriotic soldier.” Is signed by both Bailly and Lafayette.

Lafayette popularized the term “National Guard” in America during a return visit in 1824 by applying it to all organized militia units in America. New York, by state statute,  adopted the term National Guard for its militia during the Civil War. Many states followed New York’s lead after the Civil War by renaming their militias “National Guard.” The term was not recognized as the militia’s formal title by federal legislation until the 1916 National Defense Act.