The Storming of the Tuileries on 10 August 1792 enters the book not as a narrated battle scene but as a historical trace on the palace itself. Cannonball marks on one façade are identified with the event; set beside marks from the July Revolution of 1830, they turn the Tuileries into a visible record of revolutionary change and, in the author’s account, a building claimed by the people rather than the king.

Historical Trace in the Palace

The account of the event appears in a note dated 1 April 1831, written amid concern that the Tuileries might be enlarged, altered, or demolished. It identifies the palace as a masterpiece of sixteenth-century Renaissance art and argues that its value exceeds architectural beauty: the building also preserves a page of nineteenth-century history. The storming is therefore registered through what remained on the palace, not through a description of the assault or its participants.

The note distinguishes two sets of cannonball marks, on opposite façades. One is attributed to 10 August; the other to 29 July, associated in the text with the July Revolution of 1830. Together they make the palace’s exterior a material witness to successive revolutions. The account supplies no further details about the course or immediate outcome of the storming.

The Palace and Political Memory

The Tuileries is presented as more than a royal residence or an architectural work. The marks on its façades embody the passage of political conflict into the fabric of the city: revolutionary events remain legible on a palace formerly associated with royal power. The note’s insistence that the building no longer belongs to the king but to the people gives the storming a continuing consequence in the later dispute over the palace’s fate.

That claim also grounds the author’s opposition to demolition. To destroy the Tuileries, the note argues, would be not merely to remove a Renaissance masterpiece but to erase a public historical record. Its appeal to leave the building intact treats preservation as a civic obligation, because the palace bears evidence of events that altered the relation between monarchy, revolution, and the people.

Narrative Form and Significance

The event is recalled indirectly, through a retrospective architectural note rather than a reconstructed scene. This form limits what can be said about the storming itself while emphasizing its durable aftermath: the cannonball marks remain where the narrative can point to them. The contrast between the palace’s artistic delicacy and its revolutionary scars makes the building both an object of threatened destruction and a record of political struggle.

The storming’s significance in this passage lies in that double inheritance. The Tuileries is described as a work of the sixteenth century and as a page of the nineteenth; its façades connect those histories without supplying a detailed account of the violence between them. By treating the palace as belonging to the people, the note turns the scars of 10 August into an argument for preserving a shared monument rather than returning it to royal ownership or allowing it to be erased.