July 14 in History

Seven prisoners sat inside the Bastille on the morning of July 14, 1789: four forgers, two men judged insane, and a count imprisoned at his family's request. The Parisian crowd that stormed the medieval fortress was not there to free them. They wanted the gunpowder stored inside, and their willingness to die taking it from the king's garrison became the opening act of the French Revolution and the symbolic destruction of royal tyranny. Paris had been on the edge of insurrection for weeks. King Louis XVI dismissed the popular finance minister Jacques Necker on July 11, and rumors spread that royal troops massing around the city would dissolve the newly formed National Assembly. Food prices were catastrophic after two years of crop failures. On July 12, crowds clashed with cavalry in the Tuileries gardens. The next day, mobs looted armories across Paris, seizing 28,000 muskets from the Invalides but finding almost no ammunition. The Bastille held 250 barrels of gunpowder guarded by 82 invalides (veteran soldiers) and 32 Swiss mercenaries under Governor Bernard-René de Launay. A delegation from the new Paris commune entered the fortress to negotiate a peaceful surrender of the powder. While talks dragged on, the crowd in the outer courtyard grew to nearly a thousand. When someone lowered the drawbridge chains, the crowd surged in, and de Launay's garrison opened fire. Nearly a hundred attackers died before a detachment of mutinous Gardes Françaises arrived with cannons. De Launay surrendered at roughly 5:00 p.m. after threatening to ignite the powder magazine and destroy the entire neighborhood. The crowd dragged him through the streets, stabbed him repeatedly, and mounted his head on a pike. The Bastille was systematically demolished over the following months, its stones sold as souvenirs. Louis XVI, told of the fortress's fall, asked "Is it a revolt?" The Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt replied: "No, sire, it is a revolution." July 14 became France's national day, celebrated with the same fervor that Americans reserve for the Fourth of July.

The Sedition Act became law on July 14, 1798, making it a federal crime to write, publish, or utter false or malicious statements about the United States government, the Congress, or the president. The legislation was pushed through by the Federalist Party under President John Adams during a period of acute fear about the French Revolution's influence on American politics. Federalists argued that pro-French newspapers and pamphleteers were undermining national unity at a moment when war with France appeared imminent. The act's real targets were Republican newspaper editors who criticized Adams and the Federalist agenda. At least twenty-five people were arrested under the Sedition Act, and ten were convicted, including Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the Philadelphia Aurora and grandson of Benjamin Franklin, and Vermont Congressman Matthew Lyon, who was jailed for four months for writing a letter criticizing Adams. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison responded by secretly drafting the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which argued that states had the right to nullify federal laws they deemed unconstitutional. The Sedition Act was designed to expire on March 3, 1801, conveniently the last day of Adams's presidential term, ensuring it could not be used against Federalists by a future Republican administration. The backlash against the act contributed directly to Jefferson's victory in the 1800 presidential election and the collapse of the Federalist Party. The act was never tested before the Supreme Court and remains one of the most cited examples of government overreach in American legal history.

Germany's last pretense of democratic governance vanished when the Nazi regime declared itself the only legal political organization in the country, completing a six-month demolition of the Weimar Republic's constitutional order. The Law Against the Establishment of Parties, enacted on July 14, 1933, made the formation or maintenance of any political party other than the NSDAP a criminal offense punishable by up to three years in prison. Democracy in Germany was officially dead. The speed of the Nazi seizure was breathtaking. Hitler had been appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933, leading a coalition government in which Nazis held only three of eleven cabinet seats. Conservative politicians believed they could control him. Within six weeks, the Reichstag fire provided the pretext for emergency decrees suspending civil liberties. The Enabling Act of March 23 gave Hitler the power to enact laws without parliamentary approval. The Social Democrats were the only party to vote against it; the Communists had already been arrested or driven underground. Through April and May, the regime dismantled the remaining parties one by one. Trade unions were dissolved on May 2 and their assets seized. The SPD was banned on June 22 after its leadership fled to Prague. The remaining parties, including the Catholic Centre Party, the German National People's Party, and the Bavarian People's Party, dissolved themselves under pressure during late June and early July, their leaders calculating that voluntary dissolution was safer than forcible suppression. By the time the July 14 law was enacted, no opposition parties existed to ban. The same day's legislation also included a eugenics law authorizing forced sterilization of people with hereditary disabilities and a law stripping citizenship from political emigrants. Taken together, the July 14 laws established the legal architecture of the totalitarian state. Germany would not hold a free election again until 1949. The ease with which a functioning democracy was dismantled from within remains the most studied and cautionary political collapse of the twentieth century.

Twenty-two grainy photographs transmitted across 134 million miles of space destroyed a century of romantic speculation about Mars and launched the era of planetary exploration. Mariner 4 completed the first successful flyby of Mars on July 14, 1965, returning images that showed a dead, cratered world resembling the Moon rather than the canal-laced civilization that astronomers and science fiction writers had imagined since the 1870s. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory had launched Mariner 4 on November 28, 1964, after the failure of Mariner 3 three weeks earlier. The spacecraft carried a television camera system capable of capturing 200-line images, crude by later standards but revolutionary for interplanetary science. The seven-and-a-half-month cruise to Mars required constant course corrections and precise timing. The spacecraft passed within 6,118 miles of the Martian surface, scanning a narrow strip of terrain as it flew past. Each photograph took roughly eight hours to transmit back to Earth at a data rate of 8.33 bits per second. JPL engineers were so impatient for the first image that they hand-colored a printout of the raw data with pastel crayons before the computer processing was complete, producing a crude but recognizable picture of the Martian limb. The full set of 22 images, covering about one percent of the planet's surface, revealed a landscape dominated by impact craters, with no evidence of water, vegetation, or the famous canals mapped by Percival Lowell. Mariner 4 also detected that Mars had an extremely thin atmosphere, less than one percent the density of Earth's, and no detectable magnetic field. These findings eliminated most scenarios for Martian life as then imagined and forced a fundamental rethinking of planetary science. The mission cost approximately $83 million and operated flawlessly for three years, continuing to return data on the interplanetary environment long after its Mars encounter. Every subsequent Mars mission, from Viking to Curiosity, builds on the foundation Mariner 4 established.

Pat Garrett crept through Pete Maxwell's darkened ranch house at midnight, and the single pistol shot he fired into the shadows ended the life of the American West's most infamous outlaw at twenty-one years old. William H. Bonney, known as Billy the Kid, was killed at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, on July 14, 1881, less than three months after escaping from the Lincoln County courthouse where he was awaiting execution. Billy the Kid's legend far outstripped his actual criminal career, which lasted roughly four years. Born Henry McCarty in New York City around 1859, he drifted west after his mother's death and fell into cattle rustling and petty theft in Arizona Territory. His involvement in New Mexico's Lincoln County War of 1878, a vicious commercial feud between rival factions of ranchers and merchants, transformed him from a minor outlaw into a folk figure. He killed at least four men personally, though dime novels would later inflate the count to twenty-one, one for each year of his life. Garrett, a former friend and gambling companion of Billy's who had been elected Lincoln County sheriff partly on the promise of capturing him, tracked the outlaw to Fort Sumner after receiving a tip. Billy had been hiding among sympathetic Hispanic ranchers in the Pecos Valley, where he was genuinely popular. On the night of July 14, Billy walked into Maxwell's bedroom, saw an unfamiliar figure sitting beside the bed, and whispered "Quién es?" Garrett fired twice. The first bullet struck Billy above the heart, killing him almost instantly. The killing made Garrett famous but not rich. He wrote a ghosted autobiography, "The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid," that sold poorly. Billy's grave at Fort Sumner became a tourist attraction almost immediately, and his legend grew with every retelling. More than 140 years later, Billy the Kid remains one of the most mythologized figures in American frontier history, the subject of over fifty films and an enduring symbol of the lawless West that never quite existed as people imagine it.

A one-eyed Hussite commander and a force of heavily outnumbered religious reformers held a hilltop outside Prague against a Crusader army sent by the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, preserving the radical Czech reformation and humiliating the Catholic military establishment. The Battle of Vítkov Hill on July 14, 1420, was Jan Žižka's first major victory and the opening engagement of the Hussite Wars that would convulse Central Europe for the next sixteen years. The Hussite movement emerged after the execution of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance in 1415. Hus had challenged papal authority, preached in Czech rather than Latin, and demanded that laypeople receive communion in both bread and wine. His burning outraged Bohemia, and within five years, his followers had seized churches, expelled Catholic clergy, and established a revolutionary government in Prague. Pope Martin V declared a crusade, and Emperor Sigismund assembled an international army of German, Hungarian, and Austrian troops to crush the heretics. Sigismund's forces besieged Prague in June 1420, and the city's position appeared desperate. Žižka, a minor Czech nobleman who had already lost one eye in previous fighting, recognized that Vítkov Hill on Prague's eastern flank was the key to the defense. He fortified the hilltop with a small garrison, wooden stockades, and wagons chained together in the formation that would become his signature tactical innovation, the Wagenburg. When Sigismund's cavalry attacked on July 14, they had to charge uphill against prepared defenses. The assault was repulsed with heavy losses. Hussite defenders, including armed women and common laborers, fought with a ferocity that stunned the professional soldiers. Sigismund's army withdrew from Prague shortly afterward, and the first of five papal crusades against the Hussites ended in failure. Žižka would never lose a battle, winning repeatedly against larger and better-equipped forces using his innovative combination of war wagons, handguns, and religious fanaticism. The Hussite Wars ended only through negotiation in 1436, and Bohemia retained its reformed religious practices for two centuries.