Siege of the Bastille (Cholat) Siege of the Bastille (Cholat) La Prise de la Bastille is a gouache painting by Claude Cholat, now in the Carnavalet Museum in Paris, France. Claude Cholat was a wine merchant living in Paris on the rue Noyer at the start of the French Revolution in 1789. On the morning of 14 July a large Revolutionary crowd gathered outside the royal prison called the Bastille and in the afternoon fighting broke out between the crowd and the royal garrison. Cholat fought on the side of the Revolutionaries, manning one of their cannon during the battle. Afterwards, Cholat produced a famous
Historiography of the French Revolution theory that the progress of the French Revolution was considerably influenced by a conspiracy conducted by "the lodges of the German Freemasons and Illuminati". This theory was believed by Winston Churchill, who wrote in 1920: "This conspiracy against civilization dates from the days of Weishaupt ... as a modern historian Mrs. Webster has so ably shown, it played a recognisable role on the French Revolution." A simplified description of the liberal approach to the Revolution was typically to support the achievements of the constitutional monarchy of the National Assembly but disown the later actions of radical violence like the invasion