Bastille Day had often held people jailed on the basis of "lettres de cachet" (literally "signet letters"), arbitrary royal indictments that could not be appealed and did not indicate the reason for the imprisonment. The Bastille held a large cache of ammunition and gunpowder, and was also known for holding political prisoners whose writings had displeased the royal government, and was thus a symbol of the absolutism of the monarchy. As it happened, at the time of the attack in July 1789 there were only seven inmates, none of great political significance. The crowd was eventually reinforced by mutinous "Gardes Françaises" ("French
Bastille Alboize de Pujol presented the years of the Bastille between 1358 and 1789 as a single, long period of royal tyranny and oppression, epitomised by the fortress; their works featured imaginative 19th-century reconstructions of the medieval torture of prisoners. As living memories of the Revolution faded, the destruction of the Bastille meant that later historians had to rely primarily on memoires and documentary materials in analysing the fortress and the 5,279 prisoners who had come through the Bastille between 1659 and 1789. The Bastille's archives, recording the operation of the prison, had been scattered in the confusion after the seizure;