On July 14, 1789, a crowd of ordinary Parisians stormed the Bastille, the fortress prison where the French monarchy kept its enemies, and began pulling it apart stone by stone. By nightfall the revolution had its first victory, and Paris had a pile of rubble. This week, without quite meaning to, my team followed their method.

First, find something that no longer works.
For the revolutionaries, it was a prison that stood for everything wrong with the world they had inherited. For my team and I, it was a city's worth of retired ceramics, dirty tiles, and shop discards we gathered from across Marseille.

Then, break it.
The Parisians had their storming. We had what we affectionately called a smashing party, an afternoon of gloves, a hammer, and the cheerful destruction of much of our collection into fragments small enough for mosaic work. It turns out there is no wrong way to break a plate, which feels like a strange kind of permission after a lifetime of being told to be careful with the dishes.

Now the important part. Keep the pieces.
The stones of the Bastille were never thrown away. They were carried across the Seine and set into the Pont de la Concorde, where they hold up traffic to this day. The prison became a bridge. The revolutionaries understood that breaking the old world was only half the work. The new one would have to be built from what remained.

Finally, make something that stands.
Our fragments will become a wall. Next week, the residents of Les Jardins d'Haïti will sit down with what we broke and decorate the tiles that form our mosaic. Volunteers from Kipawa, an organization that helps exiled people in France learn French through immersive work, will help run the workshops alongside us. No one better understands how to build something whole from pieces.

Two hundred and thirty-seven years later, I watched the Bastille Day fireworks from the Parc du Pharo, the sky splitting open above the harbor. Around me, the whole city stood besotted with the sky, gasping as each burst scattered into embers over the water.

Some things have to break to hold light.