After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The French Revolution's Reign of Terror

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

The French Revolution was famously inspired by ideals such as republicanism and individual liberty. Yet, for all its promises of freedom, the Revolution also descended into what is often considered its darkest chapter... the Reign of Terror.Today's guest is Dr Michael Rapport, a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Glasgow and is author of works including ‘The Napoleonic Wars: A Very Short Introduction’, ‘1848: Year of Revolution’ and most recently ‘City of Light, City of Shadows: Paris in the Belle Epoque’.This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. Produced by Stuart Beckwith and Tom Delargy. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paris 1794. The square is already crowded. Vendors murmur, children cling to their mothers, Revolutionary soldiers hold the line. At the centre stands the guiety, freshly washed, its blade catching the pale morning light. A cart rattles in, carrying the condemned, their names read aloud,

condemned as enemies of the Republic. Some in the crowd cheer, others look away. No one speaks loudly. In Revolutionary France, silence can be a kind of survival. This is the reign of terror. A revolution born in the language of liberty now governs through fear, where justice is swift, public and final, and where the promise of freedom is measured in the fall of a blade. The French Revolution began with the promise of liberty, equality, and a new political dawn for Europe. It shattered a centuries-old monarchy and declared power to be in the hands of the people. But revolution is rarely a straightforward road. As France faced war, hunger and fear,

hope soon gave way to suspicion and paranoia. In the name of virtue and survival, the revolutionary government unleashed the reign of terror, a period defined by mass arrests, public executions, and a state that ruled through fear. This was the moment when the revolution turned its blade inward onto its citizens and eventually its leaders. From the streets of revolutionary Paris, this is after dark. Hello everyone, I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony.

Now, the French Revolution brought about the dramatic collapse of the French monarchy and the birth of the French Republic. Yet, for all its promises of freedom, the revolution also descended into what is often considered its darkest chapter, the reign of terror, a period in which revolutionary ideas were driven to their most extreme conclusions. To help us tackle the topic of today's episode, we welcome Dr. Michael Rippor back on to the show. Now Michael is a reader in modern European history at the University of Glasgow, and is author of works including The Napoleonic Wars, a very short introduction,

and most recently, City of Light, City of Shadows, Paris in the Bellapok. Welcome to After Dark, Michael. Thank you very much having me back. Right. So in our previous episode with Mike, we talked about the Storming of the Bastille, how this becomes a pivotal moment in what we're about to discuss hereafter. We talked about there being growing discontent with the French monarchy, the fact that there was financial crisis. We had inequality on the ground. Hunger was spreading. We talked about enlightenment ideas, which are popularized by the intellectuals throughout Europe, of course, not just in France, but it's certainly taking hold there. And we talked about the success of the American Revolution, which France played a part in where people are calling for republicanism, individual liberty. And then, of course, we came to the pivotal moment, go back and listen to that episode. First, I would suggest, if you haven't heard it, about the fall of the Bastille in 1789, this symbolic beginning of the French Revolution.

And following this, then, we see the abolition of feudalism, as Mike told us in the previous episode, and the declaration of the rights of man is issued. So now, we are at a point where we have a new revolutionary government. They are in charge with figures like rope spear is there, and these are names you might be a little bit familiar about. But how did fear of invasion, betrayal, collapse, shape the revolutionary decision-making that's coming next? Because when we pick up at this point, Mike, before we kind of get into the terror real. France is still in chaos, isn't it? This is just the beginning. Absolutely. There's an effort to actually establish a constitutional monarchy between 1789 and 1792. Without going into the details of that too much,

it fails for a wide variety of reasons, one of which is the outbreak of war in April 1792 between France and Austria. And it doesn't go well. The monarchy is blamed, rightly or wrongly. And then there's a second revolution on the 10th of August 1792, where the people of Paris supported, actually most of the fighting is done by the National Guard from Paris and from provincial units as well who join in on the way, they're marching on the way to the frontiers. They overthrow the monarchy definitively on the 10th of August 792. Louis is captured, imprisoned in Paris, and then eventually tried for treason, les nations, treason against the nation, and executed on the 21st of January 1793. So what you've got by the start of 1793 is a First Republic declared on the 21st of

September, 1792. You've got a decapitated monarch. The Bourbon monarchy is now gone, not forever, but it is gone for now. And you've got a war. And the war expanded quite dramatically in the days after Louis XVI's execution. The French go to war with Britain, the Netherlands. They are already at war with Austria and Prussia joined in. Eventually, in March, 1793, the go towards Spain, and eventually with the Portuguese, two Italian kingdoms, Italy's not united at this point, Piedmont in the north, Naples in the south. And so there is basically this pile on on Republican France in early 1793, and that is a crucial moment of crisis in the French Revolution of hiatus. And nobody knows really for sure what direction things are going to go in.

And the revolutionaries themselves are pretty determined that they want to create this republic and make it work. But how do you do that when you're at war with practically all of Western Europe on the high seas and on every frontier? How do you do that where you've got a severe economic crisis? And there was a severe economic crisis over the winter of 1792, 93. And how do you do that when a lot of the country are really unhappy with the direction things have taken? Now, Mike, it's obviously a time of great violence. We've had violence at street level from the storming of the Bastille onwards, or even certainly before that point in 1789. We now have war breaking out with international enemies.

But there's this idea that violence is also a political tool within France itself, right? And this idea of defending and upholding the Republic through terror comes in. So where does this idea come from? Who is propagating this as a technique? It's an interesting question. And it's an interesting question because this goes to the nub of the debate between historians. Some historians have argued that violence itself is the revolution. It's almost what defines the revolution.

Others are perhaps more subtle and say, well, actually, yes, there is a violent strain within the revolution. But really, it takes the circumstances of war. of economic crisis, of political pressure, and so on, to bring that violent tendency out. And that's why you get the kind of the really positive sides of the revolution. And there is a positive side to the French Revolution, the Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen, reform of the country, touches almost every area, legal rights and so on. That gets kind of not exactly drowned out in this, but that's what gets kind of shelved for a while during the terror because of the these hideous, this hideous combination of circumstances, which we can go in to. But one of the

arguments is that it's partly driven by ideology, that actually once you declare that the nation itself is sovereign, revolutionaries felt that they had to speak for the nation. The problem is, who is the one legitimately speaking for the nation? And if you are claiming to speak for the nation. And if the nation is the only source of legitimacy, that people who speak against you, if you're in government, people who speak against you, the government aren't a legitimate, loyal opposition, but rather actually speaking against the national voice, the will of the nations. What does that make you? That makes you an enemy of the nation, makes you an enemy of the people. And so one of the arguments amongst amongst some historians have made is that, in a sense,

the terror, the violence, the repressive violence. is in a sense scripted within the ideology of the revolution from the start. Not all historians accept that, it has to be said. A lot of historians would rather sort of say, well, we've got to take into account these circumstances, which are also very important as well. So it's a very, very interesting dynamic, which you see in subsequent revolutions as well, of course.

I think this idea of power vacuums and the restructuring of power as society knows it at that time, although a lot of what you're saying now, Mike, we'll be ringing alarm bells for listeners in certain parts of the world right now, I'm sure, as well. Nonetheless, it is, we see it when it comes to the civil war in England. We see a touch of it when we come to 1689, although it looks slightly different.

It looks a little bit more bureaucratic. But we see the setup of individuals or a group of individuals who come to replace absolutism, to whatever extent, with another form of absolutism in a way. And what we get is the, I don't know, is it fair to say, the ironically named Committee of Public Safety? And that is instigated. And that starts to become the idea of power and absolutism and dictatorship in many ways.

Is that fair, Mike, do you think? And just gives it a bit of an idea as to what exactly that is and what it's doing. Yeah, sure. It's part of a package, if you like, of measures. The thing is, is that the terror, first of all, it wasn't called the terror at the time. The term terror was used by the revolutionaries as, I think as Mattie suggested, as an instrument. Terror as, you know, instilling terror. But nobody called it the terror at the time.

And that's partly because of the way it emerges. Each institution of the terror, including the Committee of Public Safety, was formed in response to a particular aspect of the crime. crisis. So the Committee of Public Safety and its fellow committee, the Committee of General Security, were formed in the crisis of the spring of 1793. And it's not just the war. The war is perhaps the most crucial factor in which France is having been quite triumphant at the end of 1792, after the proclamation of the Republic, invades Belgium, conquers the Rhineland, breaks into Italy. All that gets reversed because the war expands to include all these other Western, European countries, and then boom, it gets the French are on the defensive on every single frontier

than it has. So what you have ultimately is the war. The war demands conscription, tragically, and the law on conscription of February 1793 sparks the counter-revolution in Western France, the Vondé and the Schoenery, which is particularly bloody. It's a civil war, which lasts for years. You have an economic crisis, and the economic crisis generates opposition on the streets from the popular movement in Paris again, now called the Saint-Coulot movement. You have political conflict between the Republicans themselves, the Girondins one hand, who have some ideas as to how to proceed, and they're in power at this point, and there's Jacobins, their Jacobin critics on the other, who are saying,

no, you've got to be much more hard line, you've got to be much more radical here, and deal with this in a much more draconian way. And these kind of institutions, the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security emerged from this actually rather toxic environment. The Committee of Public Safety is meant to be responsible for foreign policy, fundamentally war effort. The Committee of General Security is meant to be responsible for internal policing. So keeping watch on suspects, hearing reports about the internal matters of the country and so on and so forth. But these are elected members of the convention. And the convention is the new parliament in France. It's called the convention

because it was elected fundamentally as a constitutional convention to create a new constitution for the new republic. The problem is, is can you have ordinary normal constitutional government at a time of acute internal crisis, civil war and foreign invasion? And the answer, all the revolutionaries came, most of the revolutions came up with was, no, you have to have extraordinary government. And the government itself begins to be called from October 1793 the revolutionary government. And what they meant by that was that a revolution is by definition not constitutional. So the revolutionaries are a lot of them are lawyers. And in a sense, they're too honest to say this is a legitimate form of government. For them, this was an emergency government.

It was a revolutionary government in the crisis, a defense of the revolution, the defense of the republic against its enemies, foreign and domestic. And therefore, once the crisis is over, then we can have a constitution. So there's a constitution produced by the Girondin where they're in power in the first half of 1793 that doesn't go anywhere. Then there's a constitution presented by the Jacobins, which gets passed in a referendum. Not everybody votes in it because France is in chaos, but about a third of the population seemed to have voted for it. And so therefore, that ends up being the Constitution in France. But it gets immediately suspended.

You can't return to constitutional government while you have all this chaos and while the country's fighting for its life. So that's what it was meant by revolutionary government, these two executive committees, elected, and their membership is renewed month in, month out, by the convention. Throughout this all, the convention is really in charge. So, you know, and it's about sort of 800 members, you know, elected members from all over France. So, you know, this is, in a sense, legitimized, I'm not saying personally that it is legitimate, but it is legitimized by, it's a quasi or extra constitutional means. and the revolutionaries do acknowledge this. Alongside that, you have a revolutionary tribunal. Again, that word revolutionary meaning, this is not normal civil justice. This is extraordinary

justice, which is established on the 10th of March 1793, to try people accused of treason, of les nations against the republic. You have the establishment of the attempt to impose what was called the maximum, a maximum on prices, which was meant to impose price controls on essential foodstuffs and other essential supplies under Saint-Coulot pressure, under the pressure from the Paris crowd, but it's really unevenly imposed until much later on in the autumn of 1793. But it was imperfectly done. It meant to be price controls, but it's not really seriously imposed by the revolutionary government until September 1793 with the general maximum. And that was price controls to try to ease the pressure in the economy, to try to dampen down popular opposition. And the final thing they do in the spring,

these spring months of March, April 1793, is the convention sends out its own deputies to the various departments of France, representatives on mission, who are invested with the full authority of the nation. So anything they do technically is legal, because the nation is sovereign, and they are responsible for mobilizing the country for the war effort primarily, enforcing the conscription law, and also repressing dissents, or repressing royalism, counter-revolution, people suspected of those things. And some of them are, responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the terror. The vast majority of them are actually just doing their job, but some of them are really, really, some of the areas of infected by counter-revolution

or by opposition from within the Republican movement are responsible for some of the most brutal massacres associated with the terror. I have been smiling away as Mike's been walking us through that because one of the things that really hits me over this is this is where my brain gets very muddy with the details of what's happening in this period of time. And the reason, I've always been like, oh, I'm just not quite grasping up. I'm just not quite grasping it. What am I missing here? What's the link that I'm missing? But actually, the way you're describing it now, Mike, is it's very clear to me that the chaos that I feel around these particular events is because it was chaotic. It was unruly,

it was unwindy, it was, and now you're introducing words like counter-revolution. And you're introducing ideas of there being this kind of pushback now, because why isn't this, working out. Where is the peace and calm and where is the betterment of this nation that we have sought and been promised? And so what starts to happen, if I'm correct, is that this now starts to look within itself. And this is where this idea of fear, which will lead to terror, comes in. Talk to his mic about the law of suspects, September 1793. Even the title alone, the law of suspects is quite foreboding. Yeah. One of the things the revolution should do is they create committees of surveillance. These were originally created spontaneously

by the Parisian insurgents when they overthrew the monarchy in August 1792. They were sometimes referred to as revolutionary committees. And there, they were, the idea being to kind of keep an eye out for people suspected of royalism or monarchism, people sympathetic to the monarchy, keep an eye out, maybe have them arrested if they could. They were formalized in March, 1793, along with all these other institutions in March and April. in the spring of 7193. But the question is, how do you define who is a suspect? And this was defined by the law of suspects of 17th of September, 1793. And the problem with the law of suspects is that it is quite loose. It defines as a suspect people who have not, you know, consistently shown their

commitment to the revolution since 1789. That could be anybody. And includes people those who, by their speeches or by their writings, seem to have kind of been, working to undermine, undermine the Republic. And it's a whole other people, emigres, especially former nobles who have not kind of shown their commitment to the revolution, and a whole range of people. And it's very, very open-ended and very, very dangerous. And what I would also add is that outside the law of suspects, in areas of the country, which are actually an open revolt against the convention, against the revolutionary government in Paris, also in March 793, so rolling back, sorry, go back a few months, my apologies, is the law of au la lois.

So literally the outlaw, the law of outlaws. So anybody found carrying arms against the Republic can be brought before a military commission, which is a military commission of two or three officers who can then summarily condemn them to death. And most of the vixen of the terror actually are killed in the provinces under that law, the Orla Lua. But the law of suspects is much more an attempt to kind of define who could be denounced, who can be arrested during this period. Mike, is it fair to say that the law of suspects is dangerous in that it's open to interpretation and manipulation? I mean, you talk about it being used or brought in at least to try and more specifically define who is an enemy of the revolution. But is this a case of people turning on each other, their own enemies, their neighbors, dobbing people in?

How are people caught up with this law? and what happens once you are accused of being an enemy of the revolution? Yeah. I mean, sometimes committees are actually local revolutionary committees in Paris and elsewhere are actually quite good at ferreting out when somebody has been denounced as a suspect because somebody doesn't like them or because they owe them money or something like that. And it doesn't go much further than that. You also get cases where people get drunk and say things that are not supposed to say. and they said, well, that's all right.

That's the kind of song-a-lot thing to do. You know, you kind of speak frankly and so on. So people are quite, they're quite good at that. Yeah, the way it worked, though, was that fundamentally you were, if you were denounced as a suspect, you were then brought to your local revolutionary committee or to the representative on mission sent up. And then if you were, if they thought right, yeah, definitely this guy has a case to, or this woman has a case to answer.

They're arrested. And actually, most of the time, it, is. ended there. They spent the terror under arrest. There's actually quite a careful system of filtration, if you like, before they end up at the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris, where they are tried for treason. So the vast majority of people arrested the suspects actually survive because they're just held until the end of the war or actually until the release after the terror at the end of July 1794. But those who are thought to have a case to answer end up the legal food chain through the departments all the way up and get transferred to Paris

where they're held before they get tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal. And a lot of them don't come to trial. They're just held in Paris, in various prisons in Paris. I was in the conciergerie last month and there's writings on the wall there from, you know, scribbles in the walls. And they have some incredible displays once you get into the cell part of the building. It's really worth a visit if you find yourself over there. Right. So we're talking about the mechanisms of what later became known as the terror, Mike. But let's talk about maybe one of the, I don't know, is icons the right word,

but one of the icons of the terror in the French Revolution, that being, of course, the guillotine. How does that come into play now on a wide scale, on a wide scale level? And is it really this symbol of death and fear and destruction and blood during this particular moment in time? It becomes that. You know, people, it gets used in kind of some of the iconography around this, both both in favor of the terror, but also in opposition to it, of course. And so it gains this kind of fearful symbolism, you know, not undeservedly. But the ironic thing is, is that the guillotine itself was developed.

as a humane form of capital punishment. To its great credit, I think, the constituent assembly, you know, back in the 7090s, 1791, when it had a debate about reforming, creating a new legal code for the new France. You know, debated, you know, do we want to keep the death penalty? And a number of people spoke out against it, including somewhat ironically, Maximilian Robsphere.

He said, you know, you don't have. He said, you know, I'd rather let, you know, one guilty man, a hundred guilty men go free, than one innocent man perish on the scaffold. So, you know, there's a real commitment to try to try to make the country better and the legal code better. But in the end, the revolutionaries overwhelmingly voted to retain the death penalty. But they thought, well, first of all, it's got to be equal for everybody. Prior to the revolution, if you were sentenced to death, if you're a nobleman, you had the right to be beheaded, which is meant to be quick and clean.

Well, it wasn't clean. We know that, but it was meant to be quick and relatively painless. If you're a cometer, you're hanged by slow strangulation, which is deeply unpleasant way to die, right? I don't think anybody would argue with that. So the idea was that the decapitation would be available to anybody sentenced to death. And it was a doctor, Joseph Guillotin, who devised it. Now, there have been forerunners to the guillotine. Actually, where I am in Scotland, they had the maiden, which was a forerunner of the guillotine.

it had a straight blade going straight across. Guillotin worked out or people assisting him, and the myth, and it probably is a myth, may not be, was that King Louis XVIth himself, who was very good at this kind of technology, very good at lockmaking, for example, said, look, if you slope the blade, it's a cleaner or painless cut. And so that kind of notorious slanted blade of the guillotine was designed to make it as painless and as quick as possible. You know, I'm not talking about this with any great enthusiasm. I'm myself, you know, opponent of the death penalty, right? But, you know, that is the purpose. And yet, Giotin himself, you know, says when he introduces it into the National Assembly, he says, look, it's great. With this, I can slice your head off in an instant and you don't feel anything. And there's this nervous laughter rippled through the, ripple through the assembled deputies. That's his purpose. And his purpose was not meant. to be spectacular. Earlier executions of highwaymen, for example, were meant to be public, yes, but meant to be done with a certain degree of decorum. One of the reasons the guillotine

takes on such notoriety during the terror is because it becomes theater, the theater of the guillotine. So you get people transferred from the conciergerie, who you referenced Anthony, you talked about Anthony, after being tried by the Revolution Tribunal, and the premises of the Inter of Revolution Tribunal and the Palisiuses are interlocked with the conciergerie. You're found guilty. You get brought back to the conciergerie. Stay there often overnight. Next morning, you're carted out on the guillotine and open cart, tumbrils, across the Cennes, through the city center, but it's now the Place La Concorde, which is then the Place de la Revolution, and that's where the guillotine took in a very, very public place. And people assembled. I've done some research on this

in my own, from my own writing. And there's somebody sets up a cafe, like a street food and selling, serving alcohol on one of the corners of the Place of the Revolution. So there's almost like a, I wouldn't say a carnivalesque atmosphere, but people do gather and watch it. You know, in much of the way people at the same time were watching public executions in London and elsewhere in Britain. There was a theatre to it, and that also helps with its notoriety. I'm really interested in this idea of spectacle and theatre, Mike, that you bring up, because I think it's so strangely contradictory, isn't it? On the one hand, the guillotine is this mechanised way of killing, as you say it's efficient, it's dignified up to a point. Obviously, it requires the person

being executed to get down on their knees and to sort of, you know, take up a subservient position. And, of course, one of the sort of spectacular moments of the executions during this period is that the head will then roll sometimes into a basket, sometimes into the crowd, the blood will go forward. People can go to the scaffold and soak up the blood with a handkerchief or whatever it is. Do you see it as a contradiction in terms of the mechanisation, the efficiency versus the theatre? Is that part of the attraction here? How does that work and how is it upholding the revolutionary state? Yeah, lots of good questions.

There's lots to unpack there. What I'll do is if I could talk about the process in itself first, please do. It's what happened is before you left for the conciergerie is, is, you know, this is in 18th century, so people had long hair, often tied up with a bow at the back. You went through what was called La Toilette, which is an ironic way of calling, you know,

La Toilette was the morning getting ready for women getting ready for the day. But La Toilette was when they'd cut your collar off. They would cut your hair to make, make sure that your neck was exposed. Then your hands would be tied behind your back once you're up in the cart, and then the cart would cart you off through the city center. Once you're at the guillotine, you would go up onto the scaffold one by one, depending on how many people were in the tumbril.

You would then be strapped down to this plank, which would then be lowered, and then thrust forward into beneath the guillotine. And that was ironically called by people who supported the terror as looking through the national window or to kiss the National Razor, and this little round circle, which then held your head firm, and then the guillotine blade fell through a gap in that block, and your head was decaptain,

and then put it into a basket. And as you rightly say, sometimes the executioner, Sanson, guy called Sanson, who was the official executioner of City of Paris, would hold up the head. Louis XVI, that happened. Mary Antoinette, that happened.

It happened with Dantan when he was killed, one of the Jacobins, who fell out with Robspere, and his final words were, show my head to the people, it's worth it, held up the head. And the blood dripping through the platform of the scaffold, yeah, people did collect it. Some memoirs suggest that people did that with Louis XVI, dip their handkerchiefs to keep a blood, some royal blood. So there's that process as well, which I think is important. The question is how far does this, how far does this consolidate? I think the ideology of the revolution, how far is this justified? That's

a big problem. You know, the guillotine on the one hand is meant to be this humane form of execution for people sentenced to death for criminality, but it becomes an instrument of political violence or political repression. And so this is part of that bigger, bigger debate. How far is this, does this actually cement the ideology of the revolution? In many cases, in many perspectives, of course, it discredits it completely. The terror makes things like the Declaration of the Rights a man look incredibly ironic. I think the Scottish comedian, Billy Connolly, made it look like a sick joke.

And so, you know, where does it, you know, where do you go from there? And the big problem the revolutionaries had, ultimately, is that once the terror was over, and it does end, at the end of July 1794, I know we're running away for us, but I think this is hopefully to answer your question, Maddie, is how do you get out of it? How do you detach the revolution?

what is the end game here. How do you detach the revolution, the construction of a new republic and all the good things it can deliver from the terror? And a lot of people's minds, not just in France, but in Europe and elsewhere, the terror is indelibly associated with republicanism right way into the 19th century. I think one of the ways in which we might be able to talk about this, eating itself slightly, is through two pretty prominent examples, the first of which is Marie Antoinette, of course,

and then rope spear. So why do we find these two individuals, these two icons of very different things in many ways? Why are they both on that scaffold, Mike? What has happened in the life of the guillotine to make this come to pass? I think, you know, you put your finger on it. I mean, absolutely, this is incredible.

And when you go to the conciergerie, there's a memorial to rope spear, a plaque, which says he was in here the night before he was gilatined. And then there's a memorial chapel. to Marianneux. These are people who were polar opposites politically, right, but they both end up on the guillotine. Well, Marianne Winette gets guillotined primarily actually as a populist measure. She gets guillotine in October 1793, October the 16th, 1793. And there is, I wouldn't say there's popular demand for it. Why across the country, there almost certainly isn't, I'm guessing,

but there is pressure in this autumn of 1793. The convention and the revolutionary government, the two committees, are under intense pressure. from the Saint-Coulot, from the popular movement in Paris, who are demanding that the maximum on prices get properly enforced, who are demanding greater energy in the war effort, who are demanding greater energy in the chasing down of counter-revolutionaries, and who are also, because by this point, they've kind of captured the Paris government through elections,

have effectively undergo a movement called de-Christianization, which we can talk about, if you wish. It's where they basically close down, the Paris government closes down churches. There's a wave of iconoclasm, street names of change, anything religious is wiped out, and so on. And churches are converted to secular uses and so on. The Revolution government is looking at this thing, you know, we are under pressure. And what's more is the Saint-Colop movement and its leaders are threatening, occasionally threaten an insurrection.

Give us what you want, or we will have another insurrection and we will purge the convention. And they've already done it. They did it on the 2nd of June 1793, where they combined with the Jacobins, who are one wing of the Republicans within the convention, ally with the Jacobins, and they purge the Jacobin's mortal opponents, the Girondin, who 29 of them are purged from the convention, which sparked civil war in the provinces into the autumn of 1793. So it's a great deal of pressure. So the execution of Marrientonet is one of the measures that the government takes to try to kind of easy. that popular pressure saying, look, here's a head. Here's a sacrificial victim you can have, right? Robspstair himself is opposed to it. He's actually, he goes along with it because he's only one of 12 on the Committee of Public Safety. But he himself is really, really kind of sensitive that this is just a populist measure. He was opposed to the execution of the Girondin at the end of October. So just a couple of weeks after Marionette goes there, he said, you know, what's the point of this?

So Robspstere is is villainized. He's the face of the terror, but actually is much, more moderate than people, well, moderate is probably the wrong word, but amongst the radicals, he's one of the more kind of moderate voices from time to time. He's interesting, that's why he's an intriguing, rather enigmatic character. But Barringtonet is basically a sacrificial victim to out of this particular context. Robespierre gets guillotine because the terror ends in the summer of 1794. What happens is that the French start to win the war. Inflation is still there, but it's under control. The Civil War in the Vonde is still there, but it's contained. It's a longer really kind of dangerous threat. It's a festering ulcer in the west of France, which really only gets sorted out

under Napoleon and so on. So things get under control. And by the end of June 1794, there are plenty of members of the Conventioners saying, why is all this necessary? Yet in the last six weeks of the terror are the most intense in terms of the use of the Revolution Tribunal and guillotine. victims. Easily the most intense. The last six weeks, this red-hot summer, and people get fed up. Members of the convention feel targeted by this themselves, not unreasonably. And eventually, on the ninth of Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar, the 27th of July, there's this parliamentary movement fermented overnight, a big vote to basically vote for the arrest of Robespier and his associates within the revolutionary government. And they're all guillotine the next day.

I suppose with both Marie Antoinette and Robespier, there's a sort of, there's a theatre of punishment for those individuals specifically where the guillotine and the scaffold becomes the stage in what that plays out. I'm thinking about, you know, the fact that Marie Antoinette is sort of stripped of her royal symbolism. You know, I don't know whether this is actually true, but we have this idea of her going to the guillotine with her greying hair and, you know, sort of stripped of all of her finery. and that she has been under this cloud of, you know, these very highly gendered accusations of sexual immorality, of incest with her own son, of, you know, abuse essentially, of adultery, all of this stuff. And then with Rob Spierre, it's, as you say, the end of the terror,

and it's sort of something that needs to be performed publicly in order for that to end. Mike, tell me a little bit more, though, about the experiences of women beyond the Queen herself during the terror. We spoke a little bit in episode one about how it is possible to place some women within the mob that storms the Bastille, that there was a role for women in that moment at the beginning of the revolution. What is the experience?

And for listeners who have maybe listened to our, I think, multiple episodes on Madame Tussaud, you'll know that there is a lot going on here in terms of women's roles. But give us a sense, Mike, of what women would experience during the terror, were they subject to it in the same way as their male counterparts? What could they expect or fear in this moment? Yeah. Certainly there are plenty of women victims of the terror. There's some famous ones.

Olamte de Guz, who was a feminist, who published Declarational Rights of Women in 1791, but she dedicated to Marionne, which wasn't why she was guillotined. But dedicating your Declaration of Rights of Women to Mariontouinette in 1791, the monarchy is still there, but by that point, the monarchy's image is getting tarnished, and it's probably politically not, it's very brave, but not politically not terribly stupid, but not fatal. What did for Alam de Guz, very sadly, was that during this political crisis in 1793, she proposed a multi, what we today we would call a multi-option referendum on the future of France.

Do you want a constitutional monarchy? Do you want a federal republic like America, or do you want a centralized unitary republic, which is what the Jacobins wanted? And the problem was, at that stage, under law suspects, if you proposed restoration of the monarch in any form, you were suspect. And Alamte de Guz was too high profile to ignore. She was arrested, put on trial and guillotine for that. Another one is Manor Roland, who was the wife, had been the wife of the Girondin Interior Minister, Jean-Marie, Roland, very, very influential.

And she may have been, she almost certainly was the glue who held together the Girondin faction. There are no political parties, organized political parties at this point. She held these regular dinners, these salons, one of the last sort of the Enlightenment salon, where they kind of talk tactics, discuss politics, and often very progressive. And she eventually, her husband fled, but she was arrested, didn't get away, and was arrested and guillotined in early November, 1793. so shortly after Marie Antoinette and the male Girondin. And one of somebody who survives, I think, is Sophie de Condorcet. And Sophie was the husband of the great Marquis de Condorcet.

The Marquis de Condorcet was one of the few revolutionaries who actually openly said that women should have the right to vote. And Sophie was brilliant. She spoke many languages. She was the one who translated Thomas Payne's speeches when Thomas Payne, the British radical was elected to the National Convention. And I think she survives, but her husband has to go into hiding. He's a Girondin and commit suicide when the net starts closing in.

I believe she survives. So these are elite women, right? But the working women of Paris play a crucial role in all this, above all in the war effort. The terror in many ways is perhaps best seen as a state of siege, facing a multi-headed crisis, above all foreign invasion. and many, many buildings around the city and open public spaces were converted for wartime uses. And we're dealing with sort of almost like a prototype of modern total war, where all the resources of society get poured into fighting off these multiple enemies. And women play a crucial role in this. Above all, seamstresses and others who play a part in making uniforms, working in these massive workshops, and play a great, important role.

in the war industries. But they're also political women, women who get involved in the politics of this period. And above all, most famously, there is a society of revolutionary Republican women, which was established in May 1793. And they don't explicitly demand the right to vote. But what appears to have happened is a lot of women when there was the referendum on the Jacobin Constitution of 1793, which was never put into force. But there was a referendum on it. these referendums were held in kind of public assemblies, highly localized level. And women were there. And in many of these localized areas, women, the vote is done by acclamation. So it's very hard when you do vote whether women are shouting yes or no, or whether it's all men. And in the end, these things get passed. So in a sense, women do participate in this referendum. That's been one argument at least. But above all, this revolutionary republic, side of revolutionary Republican women do align themselves with the radical, left, if you like, of the revolutionary movement in 1793, a group called the Orragee, literally the enraged or the madman, because they were very radical. They were very concerned

for the urban poor. Their leaders are a bit fragmented, but they had one of them, a priest, a former priest, what called the Red Priest, Jack Loo goes into the National Convention, says, you know, you guys, you middle class, basically, he doesn't say you middle class, but he says you, you kind of well-heeled revolutionaries, you've got to get up to the garrets, where the poor live, And look at that. Your revolution has got to do something for them. So the women are aligned with that. They want strict price controls. They want draconian measures for people who break those price controls. They want the death penalty for hoarders. They want measures that really prosecute the war to the utmost. I mean, they are fully behind it. They promise, the promise isn't taken up by the convention, but they promise to, you know, some of them pick up pikes and say, we'll go fight for the republic. Very, very militant. But they have these very ordered political meetings in the church. San Yustache near the markets. And that's the problem. It is the market women

who had played such an important role back in 1789 in maintaining the revolutionary momentum feel very threatened by these measures which talk about we want the death penalty for people accused of hoarding. We want the death penalty for people accused of breaking the maximum on prices,

the price controls. So wow, you know, they felt very targeted. And ultimately, the male revolutionaries in charge of the country, the Jacobins in particular, are really hostile to an idea of female political participation. Women are destined for the domestic sphere. They're the nurturers, the caregivers at home. They're not meant to be public people. In fact, in French, a femme public, a public woman, was the word for a prostitute.

So you could be either, as Prudent later said in the 19th century, a housewife or a harlot. you're either a housewife or you were a harlot. That kind of idea of what historians had something called separate spheres, you know, played out here. And eventually, the government gave the Paras City government gave the market woman the nudge, the wink. And in October of 1794, they break into the church of San Yusat and forcibly break up the Society of Revolution Republican Women. And then the decree comes down that women's political activity of that kind was banned. The irony, of course, is that the figure of the sort of revolutionary woman becomes this embodiment of liberty in the Republic, right, in terms of the sort of visual culture of the revolution and that women are seen as, or rather this particular idealised version of a woman, is seen at the forefront of the fight for justice. And yet, behind the scenes, they are being sort of dissuaded and mistrusted. One woman, Mike, who I can't leave off having an honorary mention is Charlotte, who. Corday, who, of course, is an assassin amongst many other things. Just tell me quickly about

her, because I think most people will be able to hopefully picture a very famous painting of Jean-Paul Morat in his bathtub with his throat cut. And she plays a pretty crucial role in that, doesn't she? Absolutely. Charlotte Corday was a young woman from Normandy, from the town of C-A-E-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-Rondie. And Normandy was a Giron-D-S stronghold. And so what happens is on the set, after that coup d'et-tie, talked about on 2nd of June 1793, the Gendarndan were overthrown, or the leading Gendarndon were. And a few weeks later in July, Corday, who blamed Jean-Paul Marat, who's one of the kind of the more militant Jacobin voices in the convention. He's actually, his power base is on the left bank of the city in a club called the Cordelia Club, near not too far from the Sorbonne these days.

Anyway, so she blames him. She blames him. And he is indeed very, his rhetoric is blood-curdily bloodthirsty. She blames him for a lot of the carnage that's been going on. She blames him for the chaos. She blames him above all for the downfall, the Girondins. And she thinks that to save the revolution, to save the republic, she has to assassinate him. And so she bought, she traveled to Paris, stayed in the hotel not near the, not far from the Place de Victoire, on the right bank.

walk to the Palais Royal, a place with lots of cafes and shops where she bought a knife. And then she wrote a note saying, you know, I'm really unhappy, you know, I know you can help me, kind of thing. And then she gets access to Mara. And Mara suffered from a horrible skin condition. And he was sitting in his bath. His bath was full of all these chemicals, these salts, to try to ease the itching, to ease the pain. And so he spent a lot of his work there. He had like a plank of wood on top of the bath.

where he wrote papers and read decrees and wrote reports and things like this. And he receives Charlotte Corday. And Charlotte Corday says, look, I can give you some names. Apparently, the story goes, I can give you some names of people you might be interested in. And he says, and again, apparently the story goes, he says, excellent. Within short, I shall have them all guillotined in Paris. And at that point, she lunges forward and stabs. The Jacques-Louis-David painting shows him as a martyr.

And it very much owes its inspiration to Michael Angel's Pieta in Rome. He's lying back. And it's meant to be a point. David himself, the artist, was a Jacobin. He was a member of the Committee of General Security. He's in the Revolutionary government. So it's very much a piece of propaganda. But in fact, what happened when Charlotte Corday's knife severed his artery, there was a jet of blood, apparently, across the room. Malo lives for long enough to shout for help. And she gets Charlotte Corday gets bundled out, arrested, and then guillotined. And because she killed a member of the convention, she was forced to wear a red shirt on the way, the red shirt of parasite. If you killed a parent, you were forced to go to the guillotine wearing a red shirt. And she did that. And then she was guillotine.

But interesting enough, before she died, she wrote a letter to her father. And she quoted a 17th century French author who said, it is the crime and not the scaffold that is the shame. In other words, you know, don't be ashamed of me. Don't be ashamed of me because I was guillotined as a criminal because what I did was right. Very brave, you know, depending upon your perspective on the revolution, a very brave young woman, I think. I'm intrigued to know in terms of the terror specifically, Mike, we talked about in the previous episode what the legacy of the storming of the Bastille was and how how it's remembered and how France has come to incorporate that into its national holiday and all that kind of thing. The terror is a different thing in many ways. It means something else. It's come

to symbolize something else. And its legacy is a different thing. What, in its aftermath, over the, hundred years after the terror, what did it come to mean? And what do you think it means today? Oh, gosh, good questions. In a hundred years afterwards, so it was always something to be avoided. So in 1848, when France has this great revolution, there's a wave of revolutions across Europe, you know, all kinds of uprisings. And France has one. You get the Second Republic proclaimed. And the Republicans themselves who take power in nature for it were acutely aware that they have a legacy to deal with. And they did two things. The provisional government of the Second Republic said, first of all, declaration of peace to Europe. We are not going to go to war this time, promise. And secondly, they abolish the government. the death penalty for political offenses. So they said there would be no, they want to make it absolutely clear there'll be no return to terror. In the end, there was a lot of violence, but that was the intention. Okay. But the Republicans subsequently had a really difficult

time actually trying to kind of dissociate themselves from the terror in public discourse, in public debate. But they do succeed. That's why the third republic, when it gets established in 1871 and the Republicans finally triumph in the late 1870s, elections and secure, it's shaky, but they secure the Third Republic, make a great deal of emphasis on 1789. But if you're a radical, socialists, when they emerged in the 1880s, tended to actually focus on the terror, not as the terror itself, but in 1793, 1794, in the revolutionary calendar called the year two, the year two of the republic, they saw some positives within it, not because it was a terror, but because under the Jacob and government,

there was a real effort to deliver some forms of social justice as well. It's in this period that slavery was abolished, for example. There is an attempt decrees to lay down to kind of to make bread cheaper and more accessible to all. There's a kind of a revolutionary bread recipe, which is done to kind of make it more accessible, to make sure that everybody gets fed. There are plans amongst some of the more radical wing of the Jacobus to redistribute property amongst poorer peasants. And so, you know, left-leading people in the later 19th, early 20th century, began to see this period, not the terror itself. They have to detach that violence from some of the more kind of social experiments of that period.

There are actually some really very interesting proposals for universal education, including for women laid down in this period. It's in this period that the Louvre becomes a museum, a public museum, that the natural history. that the Natural History Museum in Paris, which is still there, gets found. It's kind of a strange period in that respect. We think of the terror is horrible, and we're right to think of it. But weirdly, there's all this other stuff going on. So I'm making it sound like this was a great period. No, it's not.

As you rightly say, it's the dark chapter of the revolution. But the way it remembers really dependent upon your political perspective. But now, now it's remembered in two kinds of ways, I think. First of all, with the revolutions of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe with the overthrow of communism, many historians and political scientists saw that as a break between what they saw as the cycle, the kind of revolutionary cycle of the French Revolution, Jacobinism, terror, leading ultimately to Bolshevism, terror, right? They see this as a break as Europe kind of turning back to the kind of the more 1789 element,

the nation building, the constitution making, the emphasis on rights and civil equality and all that, that kind of rupture of the kind of, if you like, the Jacob and Lennonist cycle of revolutions. That's one way of looking at it. The other way of dealing with it is okay, right? And this came out also in 1989 in the Bicentere of the French Revolution. This is what we're still debating about now. It's okay, right? Many of the things the revolution does, many people nowadays wouldn't argue against.

You know, mostly wouldn't argue about a declaration of rights of some sort or another. other, right? Most people wouldn't argue that, you know, we have to have, you know, sort of some kind of social justice or something like that. The question is you can debate with a democratic framework about how you deliver social justice, right? So long as you have that democratic framework. But the really, the thing that haunts us all is how do you go from that to the terror? And so the terror is the big kind of blue bottle squirming in the ointment of modern political democracy. How do you avoid that? How do you go from a state which tries to create, which has all these great ideas, enlightened ideas, how do you prevent it from happening again? And that's something that haunts kind of democracies, you know, confronted by populism and all these other things now. I think that's why the French Revolution has lessons for all of us today. Mike, this has been the most, to pardon the pun, enlightening conversation around this.

And I think the takeaway for me from this conversation is just how far-reaching and long that legacy of the terror is actually. And this period more generally, but how the terror sits within that. And as you say, the lessons that we can learn from that and how we have to understand that within the context of its own time, but within the context that has come in the 200 years afterwards. Mike, if people are new to the French Revolution as a history and they've listened to these episodes and they're completely captivated as we have been from everything that you've been saying, where is a good place to start to learn about this period? Beyond your own excellent books, where can people go to discover this history? Good point. Go to Paris. That's harsh. But, you know, of course, the revolution doesn't just happen in Paris. which are you looking for I could recommend a couple of books absolutely yeah please do I recommend three one is William Doyle the Oxford history of the French Revolution the other is Peter McPhee Liberty or Death the French Revolution and the third is Jeremy Popkin a new world begins which is most recent of those three all three are great narratives really easy to read and you know cracking really good detail I recommend all three of those and actually read them all together because you can never get enough of the French Revolution. But also, there's a very good app. If you're interested in hearing anything, I, you know,

we talked about Paris quite a lot here. There's a very good app maintained actually by the city of Paris called Parcour Revolution, P-A-R-C-O-U-R-S, Revolution. And it's an app which allows you to trace sites of the revolution around Paris. So even if you don't visit Paris, you can go there virtually. and it's a really fun thing to explore. It's not just an app, there's also a website, so I would do that. And do have a look at the website of the music Carnivali. And there's loads. I could talk for another whole podcast about places to look on the French Revolution.

And there's some good movies as well. I can't remember the name of the director, but there's a movie called One Nation One King, which came out a few years ago, which follows the revolution from 789 to the Execution of the 16th in 1793. And there is an iconic movie by the Post. director, Andre Weida, Dantan, which is about one of the kind of the darker moments of the terror where Robespier and Dantan, former friends in the Jackal Club have fallen out. Dantan wants to end the terror, or at least mitigate it somewhat.

And Robespier decides, along with the Committee of Public Safety, that he has to go. And there is amazing courtroom, it's amazing political drama, very dark. And Dantan and his colleagues go to the guillotine. And at the very end, Robespier is in his bed sweating. and you have this moment and say, what have we become? It's one of these, what have we become moments? Kind of one of the questions

we've been discussing today. Well, there you have it, listener. That's your homework for the weekend. I know what I'm going to be doing this weekend. I'm just sitting and consuming all of that. Mike, this has been absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much. And, listener, if you want to hear more

about the French Revolution, about revolutionary history, about 18th century history, which, you know, Anthony and I are always especially happy to talk about, then you can get in touch with us with episode suggestions at afterdark at historyhit.com. See you next time.

Thank you.