Governor of the Bastille nine years after his birth. He was a Black Musketeer of the King, officer in the Gardes Françaises until 1763-1764, then captain of a cavalry regiment. During the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, De Launay was arrested and escorted to the town hall by one of the leaders of the Revolution, Pierre-Augustin Hulin. In the Place de Greve the furious crowd attacked the escort, assaulting and eventually beheading Governor Launay. After the capture of the fortress, Prosper Soulès assumed the interim duties of acting commander. Governor of the Bastille The Bastille or Bastille Saint-Antoine was completed in
Historiography of the French Revolution in general, claiming that it was "not the unfortunate by-product of revolution, [but] the source of its energy." Lynn Hunt, though often characterized as a feminist interpreter of the Revolution, is a historian working in the wake of the revisionists. Her major works include "Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution" (1984), and "The Family Romance of the French Revolution" (1992), both interpretative works. The former focuses on the creation of a new democratic political culture from scratch, assigning the Revolution's greatest meaning here, in a political culture. In the latter study she works with a somewhat Freudian interpretation,