Bernard - René de Launay 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 " ) . Early life . 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 honorary 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 reportedly made the faux pas 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 . Role on 14 July 1789 . 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 . He promised that he would not fire unless attacked and tried to negotiate with two delegates from the Hotel de Ville , but the discussions drew out . A part of the impatient crowd started to enter the outer courtyard of the fortress after a small group broke the chains securing the drawbridge . After shouting warnings the garrison opened fire . The besiegers interpreted this as treachery on the part of de Launay . The ensuing fighting lasted about four hours , resulting in about 100 casualties among the crowd and one dead defender . 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 . 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 bayonet s 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 . Character . The history writer Simon Schama describes de Launay as a " reasonably conscientious if somewhat dour " functionary who treated prisoners more humanely than his predecessors had done . The Marquis de Sade who had been transferred from the Bastille to another prison shortly before 14 July , commented that de Launay was " a so - called marquis whose grandfather was a servant " . 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 , subsequently accused his late superior of military incompetence , inexperience , irresoluteness and outright cowardice , which he had allegedly displayed before the siege . 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 " . 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 ) and also in Hilary Mantel ' s " A Place of Greater Safety " .