Taking the Bastille
The peasant, the fortress, and the fall of the old world.
France, 1789. Ange Pitou, an awkward, good-hearted young peasant, arrives in Paris carrying little more than his own decency — and is swept almost immediately into the gathering storm of revolution. As bread runs short and anger spreads through the streets, Dumas follows Pitou from the provinces to the storming of the Bastille itself, weaving an ordinary young man's coming-of-age story into the single most famous day of the French Revolution.
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.
First Published
Originally Ange Pitou, 1853, continuing the Marie Antoinette cycle.
Setting
Villers-Cotterêts and Paris, 1789, culminating in the storming of the Bastille.
Genre
Revolutionary adventure seen through the eyes of an ordinary young man.
Followed By
The Countess de Charny, as the Revolution turns toward its darkest years.