A Great Era Had Arrived

The militiamen had little gunpowder to spare, so they couldn't keep wasting it like this. But they had plenty of hot-blooded lives to spend, and losing a few didn't matter. So they decided to brave the garrison's bullets and push the cannon close enough to the Bastille that making a shot miss would require superhuman skill—like a Chinese soccer striker clearing the ball away from the opposing goal line with a mighty kick—then fire and blast down this "fortress of tyranny."

But ideals were always full and plump, while reality was painfully skinny. The cannon had barely been pushed forward twice before the garrison noticed. Some of the defenders were Swiss mountaineers. Along with ordinary muskets, they carried the rifled hunting guns they used back home.

In fact, rifles had appeared in Europe quite early, and their superior accuracy was widely known. But they fired so slowly that it was hard to find a place for them in the army. (In the days when soldiers lined up to shoot each other, after the first volley, thick battlefield fog filled the air in front of them. At that point, they either charged in with bayonets or hurriedly reloaded and fired another round, hoping to hit something. In the first case, long range was of little use; in the second, rate of fire mattered more than accuracy.)

So these weapons were generally useful only where accuracy mattered but a high rate of fire did not—for example, when hunting. As a result, military rifles of this era were mostly smoothbore muskets, while the more expensive hunting guns were often rifled.

Switzerland was full of forests and mountains, so rifled guns were quite common among the Swiss. Swiss mercenaries often brought their own weapons, and they were consequently often equipped with rifled hunting guns.

Several Swiss soldiers with rifled hunting guns immediately opened fire on the militiamen straining to push the cannon forward. The Swiss mercenaries of this era were, it had to be said, quite capable soldiers. Their shots were remarkably effective, knocking down another three or four militiamen in an instant. But rifles took an agonizingly long time to reload—much longer than ordinary smoothbore muskets. So while the Swiss were reloading, the militiamen pushed the cannon farther ahead. Then the rifles cracked again, and several more people fell.

The militiamen showed true fearlessness. Under Swiss fire, they positioned the cannon and loaded it with powder and shot. Operated by trained artillerymen, cannons could actually fire quite a bit faster than rifles; in the hands of the beasts serving in the well-trained Royal Navy, they might even fire faster than smoothbore muskets.

But the cannon was now in the hands of Parisian militiamen who had never handled one before. Most of them had never even touched a cannon in their lives. Naturally, they loaded it very slowly—so slowly that while they prepared a single shot, the Swiss rifles fired three volleys and killed more than ten people. Only then did the militiamen finish loading.

Then, as the cannon fired toward the Bastille, it burst. Hoping to bring down the walls with a single shot, they had packed the barrel with twice the usual amount of powder.

"We need real artillerymen, real artillerymen!" came a chorus of cries from the militiamen. "Has anyone among you served as an artilleryman? Step forward! France needs you to contribute your strength!"

But no one stepped forward. Among the more than ten thousand militiamen surrounding the Bastille, there wasn't a single former artilleryman.

The standoff resumed. The militiamen kept firing wildly at the Bastille from behind the cover of buildings. The guards were steadier: they rarely returned fire, but when they did, their shots were effective. Only the militiamen were getting hit. The defenders remained almost entirely unscathed.

The National Guard in Joseph's neighborhood had not joined the siege of the Bastille. Instead, they had tightened security, while several of their leaders closely followed the progress of the fighting.

"The Bastille isn't that hard to take. The key is that the militiamen lack competent artillerymen. Just a few shells striking the same spot at the base of the wall could bring it down. Once the walls are gone, what can a hundred or so defenders do? It's a pity the militiamen don't have good gunners," said a portly man who looked like a shopkeeper.

"Of course there are good gunners among the militiamen. They're just not in that rabble," Charles said. Though, in theory, everyone belonged to the Third Estate, the people in this neighborhood—including Charles—made no effort to hide their contempt for the militiamen now besieging the Bastille.

Joseph knew what Charles meant. There really were good gunners among the militiamen. Only a few days ago, they had been members of the French royal army. Then, over the past two days, they had been discharged for one reason or another and immediately joined the militia. But although they were militiamen too—just as Charles and the others were members of the Third Estate—they weren't among the militiamen besieging the Bastille. They belonged to the better-organized National Guard.

Joseph also knew who these gunners really answered to. A powerful figure with considerable influence in the army controlled these genuine fighting men of the National Guard. In history, when the assault on the Bastille had bogged down, his men had arrived on the scene towing a cannon, then forced the defenders to surrender with a steady barrage of accurate fire. It was this decisive act that made the powerful figure commander-in-chief of the Paris National Guard and, for a time, one of the most influential men at the start of the Revolution.

That man was the Marquis de Lafayette.

"But this time, it's not certain that the Marquis de Lafayette will get his way. Even without his support, the Duke of Orleans has other options," Joseph thought.

The Duke of Orleans and the Marquis de Lafayette were both powerful nobles who supported a constitutional monarchy. But that didn't make them allies. The Duke of Orleans was a member of the royal family, and the ideal monarch in his vision of a constitutional monarchy was himself. But the Marquis de Lafayette had someone else in mind. Perhaps he didn't particularly admire that locksmith—Louis XVI's hobby was making all sorts of fiendishly complicated locks—but to him, any member of the royal family was a better fit for the French crown than the Duke of Orleans. If the Duke became king, his power and influence would never let him settle for being a rubber stamp.

For that reason, the Marquis de Lafayette had always regarded the Duke of Orleans as "the greatest threat to democracy." In the original course of history, once he gained power, the Marquis de Lafayette had immediately used threats and inducements to send the Duke of Orleans packing to Britain.

But now, unlike in history, the Duke of Orleans had something he hadn't possessed in the original timeline. He had no artillerymen, but he did have a powerful explosive.

With Joseph's help, Lavoisier had mixed nitroglycerin with diatomaceous earth to make a relatively safe explosive. (Of course, it was still nothing like the insensitive explosives of later generations, the kind that wouldn't detonate even if you shot them.) With this stuff, they could make the simplest and most brutal weapon for dealing with fortifications: a satchel charge.

The guns of this era fired slowly, and the Bastille's defenders were few. Their firepower alone was not enough to stop the militiamen from approaching the walls. Ordinarily, militiamen armed only with muskets could do little even if they reached the foot of the wall, which stood thirty meters high and was three meters thick. But the Duke of Orleans's men were different. They had a lethal weapon capable of destroying the wall in a single blast: satchel charges.

Just then, a detachment of the National Guard came past the barricade in Joseph's neighborhood, towing a cannon. Their orderly equipment, their disciplined march, and the well-fed horses pulling the cannon all showed that this was a well-trained force, nothing like the rabble of ordinary militiamen.

"The Marquis de Lafayette has already made his move," Joseph thought. "The Duke of Orleans's men should be about to act."

At that moment, a tremendous boom rang out. The windows around them rattled and shook.

"Has some powder magazine exploded?" someone asked in alarm.

"It sounds like it came from the Bastille. Did they really blow up all the gunpowder?" Charles frowned.

Rumor had it that the Bastille held hundreds of thousands of pounds of gunpowder. Naturally, that was nonsense; the fortress had nowhere near that much. But earlier, when the governor of the Bastille, de Launay, had tried to negotiate with the militiamen besieging it, he had threatened to blow up hundreds of thousands of pounds of gunpowder and take everyone down with him. So now everyone believed the Bastille contained a vast quantity of gunpowder.

"Probably not." Joseph glanced east, then shook his head. "If a powder magazine had exploded, we'd be seeing great billows of smoke by now. The smoke we can see isn't thick enough."

The gunpowder of this era was all black powder, and an explosion produced huge clouds of smoke. So whatever had exploded, it certainly wasn't a powder magazine.

"There wasn't much smoke after the blast, yet it was strong enough to shake houses this far away. The Duke of Orleans's men must have used their powerful explosive. Looks like the Marquis de Lafayette's troops arrived too late. And with a blast this powerful, how much explosive did they pack into that satchel charge?" Joseph thought.