In March 1790, the Marquis de La Fayette (1757-1834) sent Mount Vernon, then residence of the first President of the United States George Washington (1732-1799), the key to the Bastille, which fell on July 14, 1789. Symbol of imprisonment or freedom, the key changes value according to the hand which holds it, and one could be saddened that La Fayette preferred to entrust this object of the Revolution to his American friend rather than to his compatriots French.
The key to the Bastille is therefore no longer in France but is not the only one to have gone into exile. Madame Tussaud (1761-1850), the famous wax sculptor, took two to England. The American couple Bill and Linda Grieves own three of them, while the Carnavalet Museum and the National Archives own a total of thirty. These were probably recovered on July 17, 1789 after they were deposited in the Saint-Étienne-du-Mont church.
If the legend retains only one key, it is because the relic does not adapt well to plurality. However, it is the multiplication of relics that will make the storming of the Bastille the symbol of the Revolution. The entrepreneur Pierre-François Palloy (1755-1835) literally builds on the ruins of the Bastille the memory of a popular culture that prefers the palpable truth of “memories” to abstract political concepts.
What he saw on July 14 undoubtedly inspired him: the keys to the Bastille, confiscated or taken from the remains of Governor de Launay (1740-1789), were immediately carried in triumph through the city by the rioters. They represent the end of a reign and the advent of a new world. This is the ambiguity of the key, the simultaneous object of fallen and conquered power.
Otherwise, one may fear being imprisoned, without recourse, on a simple letter of cachet. Ironically, Louis XVI drastically regulated the use of these peremptory missives and had been working since the mid-1780s on the destruction of the Bastille with which they were associated.
Abandoned by the royal power, the fortress nevertheless crystallized resentment and became the key to understanding the Revolution. The annihilation of mystified absolutism passed through its sequestration and the keys of the Bastille signed this reversal of roles. The rioters, still beginners in the handling of power, forgot to release the seven imprisoned prisoners.
We searched for the keys as they were carried all over Paris. We had no choice but to break down the doors to finally recognize the merits of the imprisonment of four of the detainees, who were quickly put back under other locks.
“The keys of the Bastille multiplied, they were sent to all the fools of importance in the four parts of the world”, Chateaubriand grumbled in his Memoirs, a thinly veiled allusion to this key which we consider today as the most iconic of all. In this, she owes everything to La Fayette and shares with him the very French incarnation that opened the doors of the Republic and democracy to America and France.
But she was never the only one. During Heritage Days, the National Archives open the iron cabinet which contains our Constitutions, the Tennis Court Oath, the will of Louis XIV or that of Napoleon and, in box no. 49, twenty-seven keys of the Bastille. Artifacts of the highest historical value, the keys are now well kept, under lock and key…
