Bernard René Jourdan, marquis de Launay (1740–1789) was the French governor of the Bastille, the son of a previous governor, and commander of its garrison when it was stormed on 14 July 1789 (see Storming of the Bastille).
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The marquis Bernard-René Jordan de Launay was born on the night of 8/9 April 1740 in the Bastille where his father was governor. At the age of eight he was appointed to an honourary position in the King's Musketeers (mousquetaires du roi). He subsequently entered the French Guards (gardes-françaises), a regiment permanently stationed in Paris except in time of war.
In 1776 de Launay succeeded M. de Jumilhac as Governor of the Bastille. The thirteen years that he spent in this position were uneventful, though on 19 December 1778 he made the serious mistake of failing to fire the cannon of the Bastille as a salute on the birth of a daughter (Madame Royale) to King Louis XVI. Until 1777 he was Seigneur of Bretonnière in Normandy.
Unlike Sombreuil, the governor of Hôtel des Invalides, who had accepted the revolutionaries' demands earlier that day, de Launay refused to surrender the prison and hand over the arms and the gunpowder in it.[1] He promised that he would not shoot unless attacked and tried to negotiate with revolutionary representatives, but the negotiations drew out. As parts of the crowd, impatient, started entering the courtyard of the fortress (on some accounts, this had been made possible by soldiers lowering the drawbridge[2]), the garrison opened fire[1][2][3][4][5][6] - according to some accounts, on de Launay's orders,[3][4][5][6] resulting in about 100 casualties among the crowd and one killed defender. The besiegers interpreted this as treachery on the part of de Launay. Eventually de Launay decided to capitulate on the condition that nobody from within the fortress would be killed, and threatened that he would blow up the entire fortress and the surrounding district if these conditions were rejected.[7] His conditions were rejected, but he nevertheless capitulated.
De Launay was then seized and was supposed to be escorted to the Hôtel de Ville by one of the leaders of the insurrection, soldier (future general) Pierre-Augustin Hulin, but on the way there, the furious crowd assaulted him, beat him and eventually lynched him by stabbing him repeatedly with their bayonets and shooting him once. The actual killing was reported to have been unleashed by the fact that de Launay, desperate and abused by the crowd, kicked an unemployed cook named Desnot in the groin. After the killing, his head was sawn off by Mathieu Jouve Jourdan, a butcher. It was fixed on a pike to be carried through the streets. Several other defenders of the Bastille were also lynched.[5]
A detachment of thirty Swiss grenadiers from the Salis-Samade Regiment had been sent to reinforce de Launay's small garrison of Invalides (military pensioners) shortly before the attack on the Bastille. Their officer Lieutenant Deflue, who was besieged together with him, later commented on the events and accused his late superior of military incompetence, inexperience, irresoluteness and outright cowardice, which he had allegedly displayed before the siege.[8] Deflue's report, which was copied into the log book of his regiment and has survived, may not be fair to de Launay, who was put in an impossible position by the failure of the senior officers commanding the Royal troops concentrated in and around Paris to provide him with effective support. The Marshal de Broglie, who as Minister of War was in overall charge of the abortive efforts to suppress the disturbances of 1789, had however written on 5 July that "there are two sources of anxiety concerning the Bastille; the person of the commandant (de Launay) and the nature of the garrison there".[9]
De Launay had three daughters by two wives. Some of de Launay's descendants settled in Russia, see Boris Delaunay and Vadim Delaunay for details. His killing is described graphically in Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" (Book II, Chapter 21).