Bastille Day passed again this year with plenty of pomp and ceremony and minimal violence. The 14th July celebrates the storming of the Bastille prison, as we explain in our Paris mp3 tour of the sites of revolution (and also romance, since this is Paris) around the city.
The Palais Royal stop on our Paris audio tour,

Paris - civiilised but with a history of violence

on a stiflingly hot day in July 1789 amid the stink of sewage for which eighteenth century Paris was well known, a young political agitator called Camille Désmoulins leapt onto to a table in one of the cafes in what are now the most tranquil and beautiful gardens in Paris, I’d say and delivered an impassioned tirade to a crowd of angry working class Parisians. He persuaded them to riot and to attack Paris’s most hated prison, the Bastille. Roused by Désmoulins’ words, they did just that the very next day, and so began the French Revolution.
Later our mp3cityguides Paris Romance and Revolution tour takes you to the Place Bastille where the notorious prison once stood. It was huge – a solid stone structure with eight towers, each nearly 100 metres high.
When it became a prison in the seventeenth century, the amount of discomfort you suffered as an inmate was largely down to your social status. If you were an aristocrat or a writer such as Voltaire who had a brief stay here, you could expect a room in one of the towers. The Marquis de Sade and the mysterious Man in the Iron Mask were also incarcerated here.
Unlike the Business Class prisoners up in their towers, the lower orders had to survive in the cellars amid rats, human bones and their own excrement. Hardly surprising then, that the Bastille became a focus for popular discontent.
On the morning of July 14th 1789, the day after Camille Démoulins had delivered his impassioned speech to angry Parisians in the gardens of the Palais-Royal a crowd arrived here in this square to demand that the prison be opened. It was already a warm, muggy day as two representatives were invited in by the authorities for talks.
But, by the afternoon, the crowd had become restless and they surged forwards, breaking into the main courtyard. Despite the arrival of reinforcements from the king, the hated Bastille fell and was quickly dismantled.
In fact, there were only seven prisoners in it at the time, most of them either petty criminals or madmen plus the dissolute son of a nobleman who was supposed to be learning a lesson in there. But the storming of the Bastille was more about political principle than practicalities and it went on to precipitate the French Revolution.

The recent spy scandal has plunged us back in to the Cold War, it sometimes seems. In particular the swap of spies between Russia and the US is reminiscent of the international tension that was present throughout so much of the sixties and seventies.
I was interested to note that the swap was made at Vienna airport. It’s not that Vienna airport is particularly nice, in fact it’s rather tacky and dull and anyone arriving for a Vienna city break would be advised to get through it as soon as possible and take the city train into town.
But as we explain in our Vienna audio tours, the city has long been a centre for espionage. Our mp3 tour of Imperial Vienna makes the point that because of its location the city has been used for negotiations – and spying – for both the West and the Soviet Bloc in the past. Orson Wells’ the Third Man brilliantly captures the mood of the fifties and sixties when spies set up in flats in the city and secret agents observed each other in Vienna’s grand cafes.  Doing a Vienna city tour today you can still get a feel of that.
After the Nazis and the Austrians who ended up fighting for them were both defeated Soviet troops marched into Vienna to liberate it – raping and pillaging on the way. As politicians from the wining nations tried to decide what to do with Austria, post war, Vienna was divided up into five sections – one each for the Russians, the British, the Americans and the French plus an international zone. This awkward arrangement continued right up in 1955 until Austria was given its independence.
But even today, over half a century after this independence Vienna is still a centre of espionage – which is partly what makes it such a fascinating city break, as our Vienna mp3 tour shows.