The tour

This immersive guided tour takes you back to the heart of revolutionary Paris to relive July 14, 1789, hour by hour. I’m Robin, your guide, and I’ll lead you through the streets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and around the Bastille, two key sites of the French Revolution. It was here that Parisians — artisans, cabinetmakers and workers — were among the first to rise up and help write one of the most defining chapters in French history.

To understand this pivotal event, we’ll explore the social, economic and political context of late eighteenth-century France: the influence of the American Revolution, the ideas of the Enlightenment, the rise of printing and newspapers, disastrous harvests and the threat of famine. We’ll wander through the streets and past the buildings where the revolutionary sans-culottes lived and worked. We’ll uncover the early signs of popular unrest by visiting key sites of protest, and examine the Estates-General of 1789 and the events that led to July 14. Step by step, we’ll retrace the course of this decisive day, from growing public anger to the assault on the fortress, and discover how the events of July 14, 1789, transformed Paris and changed the world. Along the way, we’ll bring historical figures such as Camille Desmoulins, Marie Antoinette, Jacques Necker, Napoleon Bonaparte and Louise Reine-Audu back to life, exploring their roles in the events that unfolded. Above all, this tour is a journey through time and history. It is also an opportunity to discover Paris’s architectural heritage, whose silent façades still bear witness to the turmoil unleashed by the revolutionary sans-culottes of 1789.
Finally, it’s a chance to explore one of Paris’s most iconic neighbourhoods — the very streets where the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity took shape.