Do you see the people paint? Painting the face of angry men.

It is the morning of the 14th of July 1789, A thousand civilians stand before the imposing cold stone walls of a medieval fortress known as the 'Bastille'.

It is not just stone and mortar the people see though, it is the crushing weight of their monarchy, the abuse of authority, and the suffering of the individual, typified by those walls, the prisoners held within, and the cannon atop them.

A delegate of the people enter, they demand the removal of these cannons and disarmament of the fortress. Yet no agreement is reached, the day drags on. Tensions rise.

In time smoke fills the air, sudden musket fire rings out, and the Bastille is stormed beneath the thunder of cannons...

By the end of the day over 100 will lay dead, and in the coming years the Monarchy will lay with them. This is seen by many as the true start of the French revolution, a revolution that was galvanised not just through the actions on the day, but by the way those actions were immortalised and spread through art.

You'd think based on this that the capture of the Bastille must've been of profound strategic importance. Yet you see the Bastille was not a place overflowing with political prisoners, in fact there were just 7 prisoners held there at the time. Nor was it the heart of military might, it didnt hold a garrison from a hated regiment, or some grand store of weapons. It was actually due to be decommissioned and demolished. Storming it achieved little of anything from a tactical or logistical perspective, and of the hundred dead only a handful belonged to the defenders.

But the reason this moment went on to matter so much, is the same reason the people marched on the Bastille to begin with. It became a symbol.

What is fascinating is the way it became such a symbol. It was not in the accurate retelling in newspaper articles, nor a singular masterpiece from a respected painter that contained all the feeling of the day.

It became a symbol through the decentralised production and dissemination of a multitude accessible artworks, by and for the people.

These ranged from copperplate prints to illustrations on playing cards. A mass of voices each expressing different parts of what the conflict represented to the people, spread amongst the people in ways that spoke to them. Through this the dynamics of revolution were defined and taught. In some works the crowd is far larger than it ever was, asserting that this is a revolution of the majority, in others the Bastille looms at twice its actual size, reinforcing the imposition of monarchy and cold hearted rule, further artworks still showed prisoners released en masse, and a battlefield rife with explosions and violence.

The accuracy did not matter, for it was about the representation of an ideal. It was an education in revolution. The mightiest stone fortress cannot stand before the will of the people if they are unified en masse.

An artwork does not need to be a masterpiece to make a difference, its artist does not even need to be known for it to live on in history. It simply needs to be something people understand.