Entitled: "Pillage de la Maison de St. Lazare, le lundi 13 Juillet 1789." Shows a mob of French citizens looting the Maison de St. Lazare at the beginning of the Revolution in 1789. The people of Paris, fearful that they and their representatives would be attacked by the royal military, and seeking to gain ammunition and gunpowder for the general populace, stormed the Bastille, a medieval fortress and prison in Paris. Besides holding a large cache of ammunition and gunpowder, the Bastille had been known for holding political prisoners whose writings had displeased the royal government, and was thus a symbol of the absolutism of the monarchy. The storming became a symbol of the abuses of the monarchy and its fall was the start of the French Revolution, a period of far-reaching social and political upheaval in France that lasted from 1789 until 1799. The Revolution overthrew the monarchy, established a republic, experienced violent periods of political turmoil, and finally culminated in a dictatorship by Napoleon that rapidly brought many of its principles to Western Europe and beyond. Etching by Pierre Gabriel Berthault, 1804.