Saturday, August 6, 2016

Searching for the remain of Bastille Fortress/Carlos Pueblo

Searching for the remain of Bastille Fortress/Carlos Pueblo

I saw the traffic sign to Bastille when I got off Chatelet Station on my walk to
Louvre Palace. I reminded myself to come back to visit the site of Bastille Prison
during the great French Revolution. I love history especially its story beyond the
textbook and now I even have had the opportunity to visit the place. The next
morning after the visit of the Avenue Champs-Elysees, I took the subway to Bastille
Station for a visit. I had been informed several times that the Fortress site had been
torn down and built a huge opera house yet I still liked to find the site of small remain
of the Fortress. I didn’t think that the French authority would ignore such historical
significance and I was almost wrong. I found a small Chinese vegetarian restaurant for
lunch and the employees of that restaurant had no idea of what I talked about. During
my school time early in my life, I had to recite this piece of history and answered correctly
in order to pass the schools entrance examinations.

Those of us who love history always like to visit the historical sites such as battlefield and
memorial etc. One day I did pass by Bastille again and I wondered in front of the opera house
for some time and still had no clue of the remain of prison site and I almost gave up searching
idea until one day. I ran into three fellow Taiwanese tourists at the stair of Stalingrad Station
on my way back to the city from Montmartre. One of the lady told me that indeed there was
indeed a small remain site inside a small park near the original site of the Fortress. I went back
to Bastille to locate such small park. A gentleman in a gated office behind the opera house escorting me out of the gate and pointed the opera house and said that was the prison site. I
was still not giving it up. I walked down to the street away from the opera house and tried to
locate such small remain site and I found the famous Promenade Plantee.

There are many restaurants across the Bastille square from the opera house. On my 4th visit of
Bastille, I asked several restaurant waiters about the remains of the old fortress. They pointed
a kiosco magazine owner who was the Bastille native. He told me to ask the subway employee
inside the station. I got the correct answer from a second person referred by the first one. The
memorial site is on the wall of line 5 toward Bobigny-Pablo Picasso Station. I did find the site on
a piece of wall with some stones and illustrations. The Fortress was built to protect Paris from the British invasion and later was converted to a prison for the dissidents. When the riot broke
out, there were only seven prisoners in it. The rioters, or the revolutionary, were mainly for the
the weapons and ammunition. It was on 14th day of July, 1789.

It is the Bastille Day, 07/14, international day of celebration for the start of human right movement. France since then has been tampered so many years with numerous wars until
the end of World War II. I checked on Google France after Napoleon, French people have
been suffered a lot.



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