Bernard René Jourdan, marquis de Launay (8/9 April 1740 – 14 July 1789) was a French Royal Army officer and nobleman who served as the governor of the Bastille.

[1][2] The thirteen years that he spent in this position were mostly uneventful, but on 19 December 1778, he reportedly made the mistake of failing to fire the cannon of the Bastille as a salute on the birth of a daughter (Madame Royale) to King Louis XVI.

The permanent garrison of the Bastille, under de Launay, consisted of about 82 invalides (veteran military pensioners) no longer considered suitable for regular army service.

Unlike Sombreuil, the governor of the Hôtel des Invalides, who had accepted the revolutionaries' demands earlier that day, de Launay refused to surrender the prison fortress and hand over the arms and the gunpowder stored in the cellars.

[6][7][8][9] The ensuing fighting lasted about four hours and resulted in about 100 casualties among the exposed crowd but only one death and three wounded[10] amongst the well-protected defenders firing from loopholes and battlements.

[14] The officer commanding the Swiss detachment sent to reinforce de Launay, Lieutenant Deflue, subsequently accused his late superior of military incompetence, inexperience and irresolution,[15] which he had allegedly displayed before the siege.

[16] Deflue's report, which was copied into the log book of his regiment and has survived, may not be fair to de Launay, who was put in an impossible position by the failure of the senior officers commanding the Royal troops concentrated in and around Paris to provide him with effective support.

The killing is described graphically in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (Book II, Chapter 21) and also in Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety.