National Guard of Paris

The National Guard of Paris was put under the command of the Marquis de Lafayette in the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. In the book’s account, its creation and leadership belong to a wider struggle over who would exercise power as popular mobilization transformed France’s political order.

Formation amid revolutionary escalation

The National Guard of Paris enters the narrative at a moment when political decisions and activity in the streets were intensifying one another. The conservative circles around Louis XVI persuaded him to dismiss the reformist finance minister, Necker; the dismissal further radicalized the streets and helped precipitate the storming of the Bastille. Necker was reinstated after the uprising, while Lafayette was placed in charge of the National Guard of Paris. The sequence presents the body as part of the immediate response to a crisis that had moved beyond debate within royal institutions.

Authority and the struggle over reform

The Guard’s appointment coincided with the National Constituent Assembly’s growing confidence. On August 4, the Assembly abolished feudalism and the special privileges of the First and Second Estates. Yet the revolution’s institutional direction remained contested: nobles fled France, some urged the king to break with the Assembly, and the prospect of intervention by foreign powers heightened fears among revolutionaries that their achievements could be undone. The book records the Guard’s leadership but does not detail its operations or assign it a specific role in these later confrontations.

Place in the book’s account of change

The National Guard of Paris is presented within a broader argument that political transformation arises through conflict and contingent turning points, rather than following an inevitable course. The storming of the Bastille helped bring the revolution into the open; the Assembly’s subsequent reforms attempted to change the foundations of political and economic life. But popular mobilization alone did not settle how power would be distributed. The Guard’s appearance under Lafayette thus marks an effort to give organization and leadership to revolutionary authority at a moment when the old order was under pressure and the revolution’s future remained uncertain.