Taking the Bastille

Where Court Intrigue Meets the Street

The first two novels of the Marie Antoinette cycle unfold largely among aristocrats, cardinals, and courtiers. Taking the Bastille changes the view: its hero, Ange Pitou, is a peasant, and through him Dumas finally brings the reader down into the hungry, restless streets of Paris in the months before the Revolution erupts. Originally published under the French title Ange Pitou, the novel has also long circulated in English under the title used on this site, which points directly to the event at its center: the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789.

Dumas builds his narrative directly around the real timeline of that single, pivotal day — the gathering crowds, the search for weapons, the eventual fall of the fortress-prison that had come to symbolize royal tyranny. Pitou's personal, small-scale story of love and awkward heroism gives Dumas a human thread to follow through one of the largest historical set-pieces in the entire series.

An Edition Built for Speed

As with Joseph Balsamo, the text presented on this site is a popular nineteenth-century English translation condensed to twenty-six chapters, first published as Taking the Bastile; or, Pitou the Peasant. It was, for generations of English-language readers, the standard way to meet Ange Pitou, and it carries Dumas's momentum and detail through the Revolution's opening act at a brisk, readable pace.

History Overtakes the Court

Where the previous novel closed with a scandal that merely damaged the monarchy's reputation, this one shows the monarchy beginning to lose control outright. Real figures and real chaos — bread shortages, the National Guard, the fall of a symbol of absolute royal power — crowd into Pitou's story, setting the stage for the far darker events to come in the series' next volume, The Countess de Charny.

A Hero Unlike the Series' Usual Cast

Ange Pitou is a true departure for this saga. The Marie Antoinette Romances have, until this novel, followed cardinals, court physicians, and noblewomen — characters with real access to power, however precarious. Pitou has none of that. He is an orphaned, awkward, big-hearted young man whose only real skills are decency and an unglamorous kind of persistence, and Dumas uses that ordinariness deliberately. Watching the Bastille's fall through the eyes of someone who barely understands the political forces sweeping him along makes the event feel less like distant history and more like something happening to people, not just among powerful figures debating policy in gilded rooms.

That choice also lets the novel do something the earlier volumes couldn't: show real sympathy for the Revolution's underlying grievances without abandoning the human warmth Dumas extends to his royal characters elsewhere in the saga. Pitou's hunger is real. His friends' anger at bread shortages and royal indifference is treated as entirely legitimate, even as the novel continues to humanize Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in the same pages. Few historical novels manage to hold both perspectives — revolutionary grievance and royal humanity — with equal seriousness, and it's one of the more actually impressive things this frequently overlooked volume accomplishes.

Dr. Gilbert's Continuing Arc

Readers of Joseph Balsamo will recognize Dr. Gilbert, who returns here in a considerably more developed role, now serving as a trusted, if unconventional, adviser navigating the widening gap between the crown and the people it governs. His storyline is the novel's clearest thread connecting the saga's court-focused opening volume to the street-level revolution this book depicts, and his own complicated position — sympathetic to reform, personally loyal to individuals within the royal family — mirrors the novel's larger refusal to reduce 1789 to simple heroes and villains.