Keys to the Bastille Cells

Forged in iron, these keys once locked the cells of the Bastille, Paris’s dreaded state prison. On 14 July 1789, revolutionaries seized them during the storming of the fortress, transforming instruments of oppression into relics of liberation. Preserved at the Archives nationales, they embody the fall of absolute monarchy and the symbolic birth of the French Revolution, remembered worldwide as Bastille Day.