July 14th is Bastille Day in France. It’s France’s equivalent of our Independence Day, when France and people of French ancestry around the globe celebrate the storming of the notorious Parisian fortress-prison, which set its revolution in motion in 1789. The events of that day, the events of that time, also inspired some of our most enduring classic literature.

Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel place characters in the Bastille. Hugo, Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade were but three of the well-known authors who were imprisoned at some time in the Bastille. During one of his several incarcerations, Sade handwrote the manuscript for The 120 Days of Sodom, considered his crowning achievement and the cornerstone of his thought.

The often recited opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” describes the years leading up to the French Revolution. The English romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelly, described the French revolution as “the master theme of the epoch”. Another English poet, William Blake, wrote the book-length poem The French Revolution. He felt there was a strong connection between the American and French revolutions, that these revolutions had a universal and historical impact.

One of the most famous and mysterious prisoners of The Bastille came to be known as “the man in the iron mask”. Many theories were spun about the identity of the prisoner who went by different names over his 34 years in the custody of the same jailer. Voltaire theorized he was an illegitimate half-brother of King Louis XIV. Alexander Dumas used this theory in his book The Vicomte de Bragelonne, but made the prisoner an identical twin of Louis XIV. This book has served as the basis of the movie The Man in the Iron Mask.

The Fall of the Bastille is credited as having greatly influenced Gothic literature through representations of prisons and imprisonment. Castles and imprisonment also feature prominently in Lord Byron’s Romantic-era The Prisoner of Chillon, a verse narrative inspired by the story of Francois Bonivard, a sixteenth-century Swiss monk imprisoned at the Chateau de Chillon for political activism. Even a children’s book, The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, references the Bastille as a place a child imagines herself to be in as a way to cope with abuses she must endure.

Open that bottle of champagne, enjoy that croissant with a creamy slathering of brie, and sweeten your day with a lovely light crepe. But don’t forget to salute Bastille Day by picking up one of the many books influenced by that day and those times.