Jacques Necker is dismissed as France's Finance Minister sparking the Storming of the Bastille.

Jacques Necker was a Genevan banker and statesman who served as finance minister for Louis XVI. He was a reformer, but his innovations sometimes caused great discontent. Necker was a constitutional monarchist, a political economist, and a moralist, who wrote a severe critique of the new principle of equality before the law.

The Storming of the Bastille, which occurred in Paris, France, on 14 July 1789, was an act of political violence by revolutionary insurgents who attempted to storm and seize control of the medieval armoury, fortress, and political prison known as the Bastille. After four hours of fighting and 94 deaths, the insurgents were able to enter the Bastille. The governor of the Bastille, Bernard-René Jourdan de Launay, and several members of the garrison were killed after surrendering. At the time, the Bastille represented royal authority in the centre of Paris. The prison contained only seven inmates at the time of its storming and was already scheduled for demolition but was seen by the revolutionaries as a symbol of the monarchy's abuse of power. Its fall was the flashpoint of the French Revolution.