Siege of the Bastille (Cholat) amateur gouache painting showing the events of the day; produced in primitive, naive style, it combines all the events of the day into a single graphical representation. 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
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution remarks: "He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird". Slavin finds it "regrettable that such a capable historian as Schama [...] should be so prejudiced against the Revolution". Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution is a book by the historian Simon Schama, published in 1989, the bicentenary of the French Revolution. <br>"The terror," declared Schama in the book, "was merely 1789 with a higher body count; violence ... was not just an unfortunate side effect ... it was the Revolution's source of collective energy. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary."