morning of 13 July, the electors of Paris met and agreed to the recruitment of a "bourgeois militia" of 48,000 men from the sixty voting districts of Paris, to restore order. Their identifying cockades were of blue and red, the colours of Paris. Lafayette was elected commander of this group on 14 July and subsequently changed its name to the National Guard. He added the colour white, the colour of the King, to the cockade on 27 July, to make the famous French tri-colour. Storming the Bastille (14 July 1789) On the morning of 14 July 1789, the city of Paris was in a state of alarm. The partisans of the Third Estate in France, now under the control of the Bourgeois Militia of Paris (soon to become Revolutionary France's National Guard), had earlier stormed the Hôtel des Invalides without meeting significant opposition. Their intention had been to gather the weapons held there (29,000 to 32,000 muskets, but without powder or shot). The commandant at the Invalides had in the previous few days taken the precaution of transferring 250 barrels of gunpowder to the Bastille for safer storage. At this point, the Bastille was nearly empty, housing only seven prisoners: four forgers arrested under warrants issued by the Grand Châtelet court; James F.X. Whyte, an Irish born "lunatic" suspected of spying and imprisoned at the request of his family; Auguste-Claude Tavernier, who had tried to assassinate Louis XV thirty years before; and one "deviant" aristocrat suspected of murder, the Comte de Solages, imprisoned by his father using a lettre de cachet. A previous prisoner the Marquis de Sade had been transferred out ten days earlier, after shouting to passers-by that the prisoners were being massacred. The high cost of maintaining a garrisoned medieval fortress, for what was seen as having a limited purpose, had led to a decision being made shortly before the disturbances began to replace it with an open public space. Amid the tensions of July 1789, the building remained as a symbol of royal tyranny. The regular garrison consisted of 82 invalides (veteran soldiers no longer suitable for service in the field). It had however been reinforced on 7 July by 32 grenadiers of the Swiss Salis-Samade Regiment from the regular troops on the Champ de Mars. The walls mounted 18 eight-pound guns and 12 smaller pieces. The governor was Bernard-René de Launay, son of a previous