The Bastille was stormed ostensibly to free prisoners, although there were only seven in jail at the time, but mostly to get guns. But the really radical move in the National Assembly came on August 4th, when they abolished most of the Ancien Régime. Feudal rights, tithes, privileges for nobles, unequal taxation, they were all abolished in the name of writing a new constitution. And then on August 26th, the National Assembly proclaimed the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, which laid out a system of rights that applied to every person and made those rights integral to the new constitution. That's quite different from the American Bill of Rights, which was like begrudgingly tacked on at the end and only applied to non-slaves. The DOROMAC, as I called it in high school, declared that everyone had the right to liberty, property, and security, rights that the French Revolution would do an exceptionally poor job of protecting. But as noted last week, the same could be argued for many other supposedly more successful revolutions.