Misery was everywhere in France in the summer of 1789. Famine stalked the land, and in the towns and cities the high price of bread caused riots in the streets.
The people received little sympathy from the authorities, the latter's attitude being typified by Queen Marie Antoinette, who famously and naively remarked at the height of the disturbances: Qu'ils mangent de la brioche ("Let them eat cake").
The hungry mob gave its reverberating reply on July 14th, 210 years ago today: La Bastille est prise, et les portes sont ouvertes.
In the forefront of the revolt was one Maximilien Robespierre. He was born in 1758 in the small town of Arras, not too far from Lille in northern France. He trained to be a lawyer in his native region and then, imbued with the egalitarian idealism of the time, he came to Paris as one of the representatives of the Third Estate in 1789.
He espoused the revolutionary cause with great enthusiasm.
At first sight, Robespierre did not cut a very dashing figure. He was small and very thin, with a pock-marked face of almost gree nish pallor; he was nervous, highly strung and bit his nails.
However, he had a passionate appeal which made him irresistible to those with whom he came in contact, and an aura of unbreachable integrity which was encapsulated in Carlyle's description of him as "the seagreen Incorruptible".
In 1793 he was elected to the Committee of Public Safety and it was from there that he masterminded the worst excesses of the revolution as architect of the infamous Reign of Terror.
Some years previously, however, in the spring of 1780 when Robespierre was a young and promising provincial lawyer, he had played a cameo role in the development of meteorology.
Controversy had arisen at the time about a newly invented gadget called a "lightning rod". Some were of the view that a pointed rod, mounted atop a building and connected to the ground, afforded protection from a lightning strike.
Others, however, felt that the apparatus actually attracted lightning and had the effect of causing lightning discharges which might not otherwise have happened.
In France, the controversy reached the courts. M Vissery de Bois had put a lightning conductor on his house at St Omer, but he immediately encountered objections from his neighbours on the grounds that the device would attract lightning and put their own dwellings at risk.
The objections were sustained by the local magistrates, but M de Bois's talented young advocate appealed the case to a higher court - and won.
The successful lawyer was the "sea-green Incorruptible" himself - Maxmilien Robespierre.