Bastille into an open public area, with a tall column at the centre surrounded by fountains, dedicated to Louis XVI as the "restorer of public freedom". The number of prisoners held in the Bastille at any one time declined sharply towards the end of Louis's reign; the prison contained ten prisoners in September 1782 and, despite a mild increase at the beginning of 1788, by July 1789 only seven prisoners remained in custody. Before any official scheme to close the prison could be enacted, however, disturbances across Paris brought a more violent end to the Bastille. By July 1789, revolutionary sentiment
Prisoners of war in the American Revolutionary War and by high-ranking captured British officials to dissuade troops from deserting, but it largely failed. Many of the prisoners who escaped captivity took American women with them and reared families. A large number of Hessians remained in the US after the war was over because they married American women. Between the time of the Siege of Yorktown (1781) and the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783), many of the convention troops, by then mostly Germans, escaped and took up permanent residence in the United States. The American government did not have the means to prevent this. The two other