Chapo Trap House - Bonus: Matt and Mike Duncan Talk "Revolutions"

Episode Date: May 23, 2018

Matt is joined by the Revolutions Podcast's Mike Duncan to discuss 1848, Louis-Napoleon and his modern-day equivalent, what we can learn from history, and the future of revolutions. Mike's Podcast: http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/ Mike's Book: http://thestormbeforethestorm.com/

Welcome friends, this is Matt with a special Chapo interview episode where I'm going to be talking one-on-one with a fellow podcaster of note, Mike Duncan, known for the history of Rome podcast, his book, The Storm Before the Storm, and more recently his podcast Revolutions, which has covered significant revolutions in world history starting with the English Civil War. He just finished the, amazingly, just finished the revolutions of 1848 and has now begun the Paris Commune. Mike, I just wanted to start off by telling you that when you said that you were going to do the revolutions of 1848, I thought he is insane. What is he doing? That is not necessary. You can just skip that one, because it's just everything

happening in every country in Europe at the exact same time. How do you turn that into a coherent narrative for people to understand? But I was astounded at how well you pulled it off. How did I do? It was great. I was amazed at how coherent it was. Yeah, 1848 was on my original list of revolutions to cover, because it's like, oh yeah, it's the great failed revolutions. It's a very nice pivot in the middle of the 19th century as you move from liberal revolutions to socialist revolutions. Then as I got into the show, I was like, I am not going to do 1848, because that's going to be insane. That was probably my position for a good two years is that I wasn't going to do 1848. Then as I got closer

to it, I was like, oh no, if I don't do it, I'll look back and really, I'll hate myself for flinching, even though it was easily the most complicated. Even talking about the French Revolution, it's the most complicated topic I've ever tried to cover. Yeah. I mean, it is, as you say, necessary because it's such a hinge point in terms of the way that people's understanding of what constituted a revolution changed around that time. Exactly. And if you skip it, it's sort of leaving that transformation off of the narrative and people are going to sort of be like, well, wait a minute, what's going on now? What are these

Communards talking about? Yeah. And so I had to learn how to pronounce Hungarian. Which was great. Yeah. I think the way you made it work is just by concentrating on the geographic areas and then sort of trusting that people will understand that this stuff is vaguely happening around the same time. Right. I mean, that was another big thing was, do you sort of take the French angle through to its end and then go cover Hungary to its end, then go cover Italy to its end or what I wound up doing is kind of going episode by episode moving region. So by the end of like five episodes, we have moved three months or something like forward in time,

which I thought, you know, it made it, I think, a little bit, it makes it a little bit tougher to follow in terms of the narrative. But that's really what history is. And if you're trying to grasp how crazy everything was, if you really want to understand how events in Vienna were impacting events in Northern Italy or impacting things in Budapest, you do kind of have to say like, no, this is happening simultaneously. And you're just going to have to like, buck up and follow along as we skip from region to region. Yeah. And on the Hungarian tip, I definitely sympathize with you as another podcast that must get a ton of people falling over themselves to correct mispronunciations after every episode.

Sure. Sure. Yeah, I'm right there with you. I do the best I can. You know, I mean, this show, this show has gotten me, you know, I've been, I had to learn French eventually. Yeah. Now you have a way better excuse than us because we're mispronouncing English words. Oh, okay. Well, I did that in the English, in the English Civil Wars, I mispronounced, you know, because the English don't know how to pronounce their own language. It's true. They need to work on that. So a thing that I think is interesting for anybody who's really trying to understand history and is certainly trying to explain it to a broader audience is how you balance sort of the constraining forces that sort of limit

the ability of individuals in historical moment to sort of express themselves and do what they want with agency. And I feel like 48 is a really good example of that tension because you just got done wrapping it up. And the impression you really get is that this is a thing that kind of couldn't have gone any other way. Do you think that's true? Um, could 1848 have gone a different way? Yeah, it's one of those things where you would be asking people to behave in ways that don't aren't really compatible with who they are as people, right? So you could have had a thing where, you know, if you're talking about what happened to the the Frankfurt Parliament or what happened in, you know, to the Second

Republic in between the February Revolution and the June Revolution, you could say, Oh, well, if the liberals had realized that they needed to make some concessions to, you know, the artisans or the working classes to to sort of address those guys's issues first, then those that group of people, those, you know, those artisans, those workers, those students would not have abandoned the liberals when the conservatives came around to like bulldoze the whole project. But yeah, you're asking, you're asking people to behave in ways that are kind of anathema to their whole worldview. The reason why they didn't do that stuff is because they didn't want to do that stuff. And because it wasn't, it wasn't really

a part of their political program. And it certainly wasn't part of their social program, because you're sort of asking them to give up on some of their core beliefs about, you know, private property. And, you know, you have the beginning of free enterprise being a part of the liberal program in the middle of the 19th century. So it's a thing where if you take, if you take a big step back and just talk about history in general, I'm definitely somebody who believes that you can't escape the sort of the where you are born into, right, the world moment that you're born into, you can't escape that like the stage is set for you. But I also believe that human individual agency actually plays a pretty big role in

how global events wind up working themselves out, how national events work themselves out, that there is there is a difference between sort of good leadership, bad leadership, incompetent leadership, dumb luck mistakes, like all of those things really do play a role in how events unfold. So I'm not I'm definitely not somebody who believes that there is just some blind historical force that's like, oh, like, like say like Tolstoy, right? Okay, so you read, you read Warren Peace. And, and by the end of that, he's like, you know, not only not only does the individual not really matter, but like, if it hadn't been Napoleon, like history would have belched up some other great leader who would have done all the same things

that Napoleon did. So Napoleon is like irrelevant to history. And I don't I don't really think that you know, I was listening to that and his greatest Tolstoy is I think that at least for me it goes too far. I think that Napoleon was sort of unique. And I don't think that history would have just belched up another Napoleon had Napoleon himself not come along. That raises an interesting question then of the stuff that you've looked at here in the revolutions of the modern age. Can you think of any like pivot points where there was a real alternative path that because of the choices made by the people on the ground didn't happen. And we got something else, something that really could have meant a radically different

history for that country or even the world, given the different actors involved essentially. Um, okay, having having given this question, zero foresight, or zero foresight. I think that the one that I would immediately come down to is the decision amongst the Girondins, right, in 17 over the over the winter of 1791 1792, to really go all in on the idea that France should go to war with Austria, which is I think one of the most critical moments of the unfolding of the French Revolution, right, that most of what comes after the declaration of war in April of 1792 is a direct result of the course of the foreign war, really transforms both the course of the revolution and the course of European history. And it kind of

gets back to the fact that a certain sort of set of guys who had a certain number of ideas had got together and decided that the way to really, really grow the revolution and to expand the revolution and to make it great and to make France great was to really go pick a fight with Austria and declare war on them. I think if wrote if at that moment, because Robespierre was against all of this, he warned him, nobody likes an armed mercenary or an armed missionary. Yeah, as we talk about this, I'm hopefully I'm going to kind of assume a certain level of familiarity with with what we're talking about here, rather than trying to explain everything. But yeah, so Robespierre was telling them, don't do this, right? If you go to war, like you can't

take freedom at the end of a bayonet is one of one of the things that he says, that if Robespierre had been able to talk the people in the room into not going to war and sort of pushing back on that the war mongering that was going on amongst the Gironans over that winter, that that was something that would have dramatically changed the course of the revolution. And I don't think that that comes down to just again, world I don't think that it was inevitable that France goes to war with Austria, because in my reading of everything, if you go look at the diplomatic cables that were going around amongst the Habsburgs and amongst the Prussians and amongst the British, like none of them wanted to go to war with France. They were all completely standoffish. They were like,

no, this is great. We're just going to watch the Bourbons burn. Well, we'll sit back. We'll roast marshmallows like while Versailles burns. We don't want to go in and fight a war with these guys. So it really it really took France deciding to go to war to make that happen. Is that an example then of the Gironans basically being one of those forces in history where they had the had the choice of either trying to give their people sort of bread or something else to sort of ratify their leadership? Like was there a way for them to kind of give the the rest of Paris mobs some something to get them less dissatisfied with their leadership short of going to war or was sort of war all they had to offer in the absence of willingness to change property

relations at that time? Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of what they were doing is yes, to give the rest of mob something. It was also something that they just like, I mean, you take a guy like Brasov and that's the thing is that you can call the Girondins like a force, but then you start to try to ask like, okay, well, who were the Girondins? What they didn't even have like, they weren't even really like a political party. They didn't actually even get this label until Robespierre and the other guys in the mountain were getting ready to purge their own personal enemies like a couple of you know, like a year later. So were they a historical force that needed to do this one thing? Or was it that somebody like Brasov who had Brasov is one of these guys, he's he's

such a complex individual actor and all of this, that he had his own universalist vision of what the revolution ought to be that the revolution ought to be exported. I mean, he's one of the guys who found the Society of the Friends of the Black. So he believes in, you know, human liberation, not just for, you know, other Europeans, but for like all of humans. So he has this very unique and peculiar vision of what the revolution ought to be. And the fact that he had, he was a powerful orator, he was a powerful pamphleteer. So if you take Brasov out of the equation, you know, do you have somebody within that same group who has that same kind of, you know, almost maniacal, obsessive drive to drag France off away from its frontiers and into enemy

territory? I don't know. There are, I mean, if you want to get off of the Girondins thing, like is there another time where you can you can talk about these things? Like I wonder how much the Haitian Revolution is really possible without, without Toussaint Louverture, being able to negotiate the politics of it, both domestically and internationally. You know, a lot of the other slave leaders were able to do some of what Toussaint Louverture was able to do, but he sort of was able to embody enough of all sides of it that he was able to pull off something that maybe other people had not been able to do. It's, it's one of those, you know, it's a tough question because it gets back to your labeling things after the fact and

deciding what was, you know, something that could not be helped, something that was inevitable, and something that was really just somebody sitting down making choices in a room. Right. Speaking of Toussaint, that's another one of my personal favorites, sort of what ifs. And I think you even talked about this a little bit on Twitter is what if Napoleon accepts Toussaint as the leader of Haiti and hooks up with him to invade the United States from, from French Louisiana. Oh, sure. Yeah. And I mean, that's a, that's a huge, you know, historical what if that Napoleon himself, like when he was, when he was finally exiled and he's writing his memoirs, it was, you know, Napoleon wasn't much for second guessing himself. He was, that wasn't really his thing.

But he definitely regretted doing what he did in Saint-Domingue because not only did it like, not only did he send off like a huge expeditionary army just to die of malaria and yellow fever, but he really blew the one good chance that he had of setting up French imperial presence in the Caribbean, which yeah, if you, if you, if he had gone over, if he had, if he had sent Leclerc's army over there with instructions to link up with and make the Toussaint's army in Saint-Domingue the backbone of a French military force in the Caribbean, like I don't really know what happens next, but that's, that's going to be huge. That's going to be, that's going to be hugely disruptive because I mean, the Louisiana purchase comes from Napoleon giving up on the idea of

trying to restore French glory on mainland North America, which is something that I mean, Napoleon, all these, all these guys who are part of the empire, they're French nationalists, they still felt the sting of the Seven Years War having been stripped of all their possessions in North America. They were still trying to avenge that. So yeah, that was, that's one little thing, like if Napoleon had just decided like to not to just be like a little less racist, you know, he could have had, he could have had it all. Yeah, I want to talk more broadly about the idea of how you approach individuals because I've noticed from your time recounting all these, that there are certain guys that you sort of get

enamored of, you know, as, as figures, they're compelling. I mean, I know you're going to be writing a biography of Lafayette. True. You're moving to France to write. Yes. Clearly, he's a guy who's kind of sparked your imagination that way. And I was just wondering broadly, based on who you've, who you've covered in the, in the historical areas that you've dealt with to borrow a phrase from Mark Marin, who are your guys? Who are the guys who kind of stand out for you as the most interesting, if not the most admirable? Right. Well, I mean, the other thing is that like I obviously have this sort of infatuation for Talleyrand. I've been pretty, I've been pretty open about that. But Talleyrand falls much, some of it comes from,

you know, in terms of like, I'm writing a narrative, I'm writing stories of history, that's sort of the style that I have. So anytime you get a great character, you know, you kind of as a writer, do become enamored with them. And so, so Talleyrand is of course, like he, he's not burdened by, you know, like morality or scruples, he's not like a good person, he's nobody that I would point my son to and say, you should grow up and be like Talleyrand. But in terms of his abilities as a diplomat, in terms of his ability to see the whole board and to play like a very large game and play it very well, and make it from, make it from the ASEAN regime all the way to the beginning of the July monarchy, and serve all of these different regimes,

always with one eye on what is best for France and France's self-interest and his own self-interest, like all of that is very compelling to me. So he's fun that way. You know, Bizz Bizz Bizz. He's basically a, he's like a prestige TV anti-hero. Yeah, exactly. Or like there was, I found out a couple months ago that there's somebody who listens to revolutions who also is big editor at TV tropes. So a lot of revolutions material has been given the TV tropes treatment. And like, it's really clear like, like Talleyrand is in there as just like the magnificent bastard TV trope, which is exactly what he is. Bizz Mark is a lot the same way, right? Bizz Mark is a magnificent bastard. You can, you can admire his skill set even if you're like, but what you were

doing was could very, very bad a lot of the times. So there is that there's kind of like, who are the guys who are, who are very interesting. The people who I do sort of like in general, like obviously Lafayette is somebody who I enjoy. I've been known to be an apologist for Oliver Cromwell, which is I think gets me run runs me a foul of a number of people, particularly the Irish. But a lot of it comes down to people who had a vision for what the world could be in terms of making it a slightly better place, sticking to it, being flexible in I'm really big on like flexibility. And if you can look at it from the opposite side, like who are the people I don't like, I'm really down on Charles the first, I'm really down in England,

I'm really down on Charles the 10th in France, because I don't like these people who won't compromise over anything who are going to be supremely inflexible in their approach to politics and their approach to the world. Because I just think if even from your own perspective, from the person, even if I don't necessarily agree with what you're trying to accomplish, the manner with which you go about it does matter. And you can accomplish these, like it's these people who are kind of their own worst enemies, in terms of they won't compromise with anybody, they won't give up anything to get anything. So those people always, those people always kind of drive me crazy. And then there's Louis Napoleon. Yes. I was wondering

about your take on him. I wondering, I don't want to be too leading, but does he kind of remind you of anyone in any ways? Well, you know, the thing about Louis Napoleon is I know, I know what you want me to say. I don't really think of Louis Napoleon as Donald Trump. I think that I think that that is not actually a particularly apt comparison. I think that there is a very big similarity in the treatment of them, right? So let's just let's just take aside like what you think about Louis Napoleon or what you think about Trump. One thing that is absolutely true is that the entire sort of educated classes of Europe in the middle of the 19th century, and sort of the West today, including commentators in France and Britain and Germany in the United

States, the uniformity of their disgust and derision and mockery of Trump and Louis Napoleon does is very, very similar. Like if you go back to what, you know, Marx is a great example of this, but also, oh, God, Victor Hugo, for example, is the way that they describe Napoleon is with such derisive disgust that you do you do get that feeling is this, you know, this little pygmy Napoleon, this disgusting little runt of a man who's, you know, etc, etc. So I do think that there is that similarity in the sense that they both drove the educated intellectual classes like absolutely to ruin. The difference is between them, though, is that if you go through Louis Napoleon's life, you can be critical of what he got up to and you can be critical of the

fact that he really wasn't, he didn't really measure up to even his own standards. He spent so much of his life like studying political economy. He read all the books. He wrote his own books. He, you know, when he was in prison for six years, he spent almost all of that time studying politics and studying economics because he had this, what had to have been a delusional belief, but somehow he pulled it off this weird delusion that one day he was going to be the emperor of France and he believed in that in order to follow in the footsteps of as much more talented and much more capable uncle that he was going to have to know these things. And so when he comes to power in 1848 and then, you know, after the coup of 1851,

he does sort of unleash, you know, this visionary project of the industrial rehabilitation of France, changing, you know, literally changing the physical face of Paris, doing all of these infrastructure investments. He's, he has all of these things that he is trying to do that he has some understanding of why they ought to be done. And then he follows through on all of it. He really does get it going. I mean, there is, there is a huge industrial expansion. There's a huge expansion in railroads. The houseman reforms are obviously, you know, make what Paris is today. Okay, take all of that stuff. Now look at Donald Trump. Donald Trump has never studied anything in his life. I don't think he's maybe even read a book

all the way through. He has obviously no interest in any of these sort of Bonapartist style infrastructure projects, right? He made a lot of hay about it during the campaign that oh, I'm going to do this and we'll do that and we'll do a trillion dollar investment. Well, he just abandoned that like a week ago. And he was probably he was probably never going to do it was never anything that actually interested him. So you can say in terms of the sort of the pop like a popular right wing authoritarian Bonapartist mentality, it's there for Trump. But the guy, the man himself is so vacant and hollow that nothing is ever going to come. He's never going to he's not going to have anything to like show for his big populist push and big populist appeal.

So I think I think in that sense, I really I think it does an extreme disservice to Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, even if you're even if you're against Bonaparte, even if you don't like anything that he did to say that he is the same as Donald Trump is is kind of insulting. No, I actually agree with that because and I agree mainly on the same plane that Napoleon he tried. Like he was he was he was always an effort poster. He was going for it. He was reading and he was doing failed coup attempts and he was he was climbing the ladder and Trump just stumbled down a hill and into the White House in a giant barrel. I think what I when when I sort of see a consonance between the two, it's not them as personalities so much as it's their appeal to the people of their respective

countries. To me, they both seem to be people who evoked in a large enough percentage of the population a sense of nostalgic return to some former glory of the country that they're in in a in a time when that these people didn't really have any other sense of themselves beyond their sort of vague nationalism. They didn't really have a class consciousness as we don't know as they didn't at that point. And they weren't thinking in terms of those personal interests. And in the absence of that sort of the the different factions who were squabbling for leadership of of the New Republic didn't really have anything to appeal to them. They were they were appealing in sort of abstractions, whereas Napoleon and Trump are

both appealing to something that's much more visceral, which is nostalgia and which is national purpose. I think that's that's where there's a comparison. I agree with you that like personally, the other very very dissimilar. I mean, Trump is genuinely a character who is who is sui generis in that it's almost impossible to imagine any previous society generating someone like that and putting them in a position of total power the way we have. Yeah, I mean, it's like you have to you have to really go back to some of the I mean, you have to go back to either like feudal eras or during you know, like the Roman Empire, where you have where you have systems that produce sons or cousins of the previous leader, who are simply ill equipped for the job,

like completely ill equipped for the job. But even then, like most of those people were raised to with at least some understanding that one day they might be king or might be queen or might be emperor. And Trump never seemed to have any of that. But you're right about, I mean, what what made Bonaparte a thing when he comes back is he's got the name, right? And he's he's literally running as Bonaparte in the last time that I mean, the restoration era France and the July monarchy era France was was really like a long period of France being inert on the world stage kind of purposefully, because they were both stepping back from the Napoleonic sort of war and conquest version of France, because they were trying to just, you know, even Louis

Philippe, you're just trying to fit in. At this point, you're not trying to be a leader. So the fact that a Bonaparte is running for office really does drive people back to that mentality of, you know, the the imperial age, which in 1848 is still, you know, it's a long time ago, it's 40 years ago. But there were lots of people who remembered what it was like, sort of when France was great in the same way that I think that there are a lot of people today, at least like their mentality is that they remember what America was like when America was great, even if America 40 years ago was great for only some people, that's kind of what they're remembering. The other really interesting part that I was just thinking of is that a lot of what made Trump possible is the

fact that he was a famous TV celebrity, that that name recognition, even though he doesn't have the name recognition of like, Oh, I'm Bonaparte. And so I'm, you know, I'm reminding you of what life was like under, you know, Napoleon, but the fact that he had that sort of positive, popular celebrity name recognition that was out there. I mean, there are tons of people, especially through the primaries, who you can go to voters, and they were like, Why'd you vote for him? Or how did you know about him? They're like, Oh, I saw him on TV. So it does get to the very there's a very superficial way that people often cast their ballots that I think do there is there's a lot to be said for that similarity between those two guys. Yeah. And it's so funny because a lot of there were a

bunch of stories about in the aftermath of 2016, democratic super donors deciding well if Trump can get elected, I'm not I'm going to stop bothering with funding the Democrats. I'm going to run. And and they just don't realize it's not the money. I mean, it was the fame. It was that he was famous. It's that he had a brand that people could instantly identify with. Yeah. And wasn't that he had like Steve Forbes ran for president and no one gave a share. Yeah, sure. And it was also very specifically that because he had the character that he played on the apprentice was this like very stern, overlordish, very decisive leader who knew how to like cut, you know, he didn't take shit, and he was going to fire the people who couldn't hack it. And it

it really did bolster his or create an image of him as a very decisive, intelligent, you know, on the ball leader that was in every way, like just a manufactured character, like he never was anything but the guy that we see on the news every day. He's always just been that person. He just played a part on TV. So yeah, that's so yeah, billionaires, if you want to run for office and you're not Michael Bloomberg, you know, get a reality show and have them have them play you was a really great decisive leader. Yeah, I mean, how hard could that be? Just like pay one of the networks to have a show where you go around just giving buckets of money to random people. And then they'll remember you as the guy with the money bucket guy. Sure. All right, so you are now,

as you've talked about on the podcast, and you're now dealing with with the Paris commune, you are moving it from the era of the the political revolution to the era of the social revolution. And that is that's going to be more present, more a significant force as as you go on. And certainly as you get to the Russian revolution. And I'm just wondering, as someone who has mostly for very good reasons in their previous revolutionary narratives dealt with these like coutiers of sort of civic society leaders who who try to reform these cult these countries that are that are in the middle of these revolutionary tides that are trying to chart. They're trying to shape popular opinion, right? They're trying to shape the popular energies that are being

burst forward for 500 different reasons. And they're trying to say, well, everyone's got a reason for this, but we're going to stick to these specific reforms and changes we can make to the government that should be enough to make everybody happy and to allow for the sort of the sort of changing distribution and and political freedoms that everybody can be happy with. But we're entering now an era where people aren't going to really be happy about that or happy with that. They're not going to be satisfied with those sort of relatively cosmetic political changes. And I'm just wondering how is that going to change the way that you focus your narrative? Is there going? Is it going to require a different sort of a different more bottom

bottom up approach where you need to deal more with with people in groups as opposed to the specific leaders of political tendencies? Or do you think you can still sort of personalize the leaders of those movements in a way that makes it clear without having to sort of diffuse the narrative too much outside of characters? Yeah, I think it'll probably wind up being closer to the latter just because of the way the way that I've been telling the stories, the way that these do wind up being historical episodic narratives that you do need more personality. Like I don't think like it's never going to switch to being like large blocks of just sort of like like analyzing general history because it's always going to be

a chronological narrative. It's always going to be a story. But who gets brought into that is certainly like we're going to be moving into a place where you're not necessarily talking so much about like when I get to the Russian Revolution, talking about the Tsar will be important. But talking about the things that were going on around him are going to be probably more important to the story than if you go all the way back to the English Revolution, you know, the very, very specific fights between Charles I and the Long Parliament are a hugely important part of explaining everything. You get you get forward more. And this is the moment right now that I'm dealing with this is the Paris Commune, which is the first time,

really in both in the show and I think in the long history of just basically political and social revolutions that like the working classes actually won. This is this is that you if you take this as the fourth of the great French revolutions, you know, the first one is sort of the Jacobins ride the popular wave created by the Sankulot and then the Jacobins sort of suppressed the Sankulot 1830 is riding the wave of the workers and the artisans of Paris to overthrow Charles the 10th but then immediately ditching them 1848 is obviously the same thing the liberals ride the the working classes. Those are the guys who made the barricades and then the liberals are the ones who wind up actually getting into power and the Paris Commune is the first time

that you actually have working class leaders who are kind of done being co-opted by the liberal leadership in large part because of what happened in 1848 and that's like getting back to what we were talking about at the very beginning. You can't really skip 1848 because of how much that sort of permanently ingrained on both the sort of more respectable liberal bourgeois leadership and the working class proto socialist leadership that they really didn't want the same things that they weren't actually on the same side that the political liberals were always going to be interested in just those couple of political reforms but not any kind of turn the world upside down social revolution and the the working classes who wanted that socialist wanted a greater social

revolution knew that they were probably always in the end going to be betrayed if they gave themselves over to these more liberal leaders. So that's a big reason why I talked about 1848 but I mean the basic question is like is this going to fundamentally change how I tell the story? Probably not. It's just going to be focusing on a different segment of society as the revolutionary elements of society because in all the first ones American Revolution, French Revolution, 1830 a lot of that is coming out of the sort of the educated professional classes who were feeling like they didn't have enough political participation. Well, that revolutionary energy has more or less dissipated. All the revolutionary energy is now going to be coming from the lower classes,

the working classes, and then the very specific people who try to teach those working classes that they ought to have revolutionary energy. Yeah, that's how that's how Marx talked about 48. It was the last sort of gasp of the delusional fixation on the romance and language of the original French Revolution that at that point, every class felt this sort of fantasy solidarity because they were all using the same language. They were all referring to the same things about and the glories of the French Revolution. And he says this is when the sort of the veil falls away. This is when the workers like, oh, they're going to keep talking about the liberty, egalitate, fraternity. They're going to talk about that till the end of the time, but they will never

actually act on it in a way that will be meaningful for us, which of course was punctuated with the June days. Exactly. Yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be really interesting. So you're going to be doing the commune and then the Mexican Revolution. Is that next? Yeah, the Mexican Revolution of it's like 1910 to 1920, more or less is the decade that I'll be talking about. I'm really looking forward to that because I've read a bit about it. And it is just an absolutely fascinating and just amazingly under told story that I'm really looking forward to. Yeah, the Mexican Revolution is I got into the Mexican Revolution back when I was still doing the history of Rome. And the Mexican Revolution plays out a lot like just a giant year of the

four emperors, where you just have these sort of peripheral, peripheral armies, abling to sort of temporarily capture Mexico City, be in power for a little bit before they get overthrown by somebody else with added to that sort of the war lording that was really going on that the caudillism of Mexican or of all South American revolutionary history, basically, which is these these war lords running around, has also this huge social component of like, you know, land and freedom of what, you know, the Zapatistas were trying to accomplish of land reform, which is great, because that all that all connects back again, like there's a there's a there's a very sort of Roman thing going on in Mexico, that was one of the first things that really got me like

thinking about, after the history of Rome, I kind of want to do this show that discusses and analyzes and tells the story of some of these great political revolutions. Well, that raises a question about comparisons. So you're talking about how reading about Mexico makes you think about Rome, right? So what are the ways in which you can really draw from a very specific historical moment where you have to, you have to stipulate that, yes, these are things that could not happen in any other time or place because of the specific context, the specific culture that produced it, the specific technological level of innovation. But what are the things that can kind of be pulled from there? What are what are the strands of

sort of dynamic that you can isolate and apply to current time in a way that isn't going to be a historical? Well, I am definitely somebody who believes that part of learning history, and one of the reasons why you should learn history, is to try to take away some lesson from the past, sort of like, this is something that we do just in our normal lives. If you're at a business and you had some, your team had some big project, and then the project is over, and you kind of go back and you look at, okay, what did we do right? What did we do wrong so that next time we can do it a little bit better? And I think that that's a perfectly fair and good use of history. I think that there are a lot of academic historians who, in terms of the rigor

of the work, don't want to do things like that because they do want to isolate that one moment and say, look, if you get into this whole like, you know, modernist, you're projecting backwards your own contemporary thoughts and concerns onto this historical moment, you're going to you're going to muddy up your own ability to recognize that moment for just what it is on its own terms, which I completely accept. And that's all, that's all good. But if we cut ourselves off from looking at the past, to try to come up with some lesson from it, or some, or some historical comparison, oh, given, given a certain very similar set of parameters, these guys did this, and it all went wrong, or these guys did this, and it all went right, I think that's kind of what

we ought to be doing. And so, like you take, for example, the book that I wrote, which is The Storm Before the Storm, the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic, is in part attempting to kind of marry those two ideas, where the book itself is just a straight up, you know, 50-year narrative history of a particular moment in Roman history between the rise of the Grogai brothers and Sulla being declared dictator for life. That 50-year period is incredibly interesting. I don't get into, like, any analytical comparisons with the 21st century America, the 21st century West. But one of the impetuses for writing the book is that I do think that there are a lot of similarities between what the Roman Republic was dealing with, as it was coming out of the Third Punic War in the

middle of the second century, and what the United States is dealing with, sort of emerging from the Cold War. There are a lot of similarities in the conditions that if you look then, if you say there's a lot of similarities in the conditions of Rome circa 1920, excuse me, circa 120, you know, 110 BC, and the United States at the dawn of the 21st century, well, let's, we have a whole version of their history that plays out. Let's see what happens to those. Let's see what happened to those guys. We see what decisions they made led to what consequences. And if we don't like the consequences, which for the Romans was ultimately the collapse of the Republic, then maybe we should make slightly different decisions given given the same basic set of parameters. So it's one of

those things that can be done. You can do it badly. A lot of historical analogies are so superficial that they that they just don't work. But I think that to just abandon the whole concept is really is really to deny society a huge tool to make our own society better down the road. Right. But seriously, who would win in a fight? Genghis Khan or Julius Caesar? Who would win in a fight between Genghis Khan and Julius Caesar? That's, they're archers were really good. They had really good archers. They also had really good reconnaissance. That's the other thing that the that the Mongols really had going for them. Did you ever watch that ultimate warrior show or whatever it is? No, I don't think I did.

It's really funny. So what they do is they take two historical military figures or historical military formations, and then they say who would win in a fight. And then they use this very arbitrary algorithm to sort of say, well, we did a thousand simulations and this side won the majority of them. So they would have won. So they do like who will win pirates or samurai. It's pretty funny. It's it's not very historically meaningful, but it's very funny show to watch. Just a few questions left. These are kind of ones that I couldn't fit in any place else. This specific one is one that I've always kind of molded over in my head. And I just actually re listened to your series on the American Revolution and

just wanted to get your take. Do you think it should be called the American Revolution or the War of American Independence? What is more accurate? Oh, okay. So it's the whole process between 17, we'll say 1763, right? Because I think it starts at the end of the Seven Years War, but you know, you can mark it at the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 through to the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, right? Or 1788. Maybe that process, you can call that the American Revolution. So embedded inside the American Revolution is this more narrow period, which is called the War of Independence, which lasts from 1775 to 1783. So I think that there is a War of Independence that is embedded inside of a larger American Revolution. So that's my answer.

I think if you're trying to get at sort of the larger question of like, was the American Revolution even a revolution per se? Or was it just some guys breaking away and setting up a Republic in lieu of being a colonial sort of a piece of a larger empire? I think, I think in terms of its revolutionary character, it's by far the most conservative of any of the ones that I've covered. But there were, there were some things that the Americans introduce into the lexicon of politics that does filter back through a lot of the French officers who served in Rochambeau's Army, Rochambeau's Army, who wind up going back and becoming like sort of liberal young the young liberal noble part of the French Revolution, who they did come away with a lot of, you know, liberty

and equality language that probably didn't exist before the American Revolution. But there was certainly no social revolutionary aspect to the American Revolution, like at all. I mean, is not even close. Okay, this is the last question I have. And this is really more just me asking you to give me your take on something I've been thinking about. So from the study of these revolutionary incidents, it really feels like what it comes down to is numbers. If you can get the right amount of people to come out into the streets, right, you can essentially force change on the government. If you can, if you can mobilize a sufficient number of people. And I'm wondering if the growing technological asymmetry basically that exists between state governments and

their citizens is getting to a point where we might be reaching sort of an almost post-revolutionary era, where there's no longer any meaningful way to assert demands on a government outside of official channels in a way that can't be counteracted by the astounding array of technology that is at the hand of the states and not at the end of its citizens. And I'm wondering what you think about that. Well, I think my first thing is that a mass, you know, mass mobilization is, of course, a key part of any successful revolution. But it, so far as I can tell, it always needs to have with it a significant part of what would be called the elite. If it was feudal times, it would be the aristocracy, somebody who was up there in that, what is today, like the billionaire

stratosphere, right? So some of some of these like real new, like these these neo-rober barons who are who are currently like in charge of Amazon or in charge of Facebook or something. Those you need to have somebody participating in the revolutionary movement at that level, or the whole thing is going to ultimately fail. I think you need that. I think you need the money. I think you need the institutional support. And I think that if what you're saying is that, you know, the state has too much technological power, then I think that having some sort of, you then need, again, somebody who's very high up in that sort of in terms of the wealth of the nation and in terms of the technological capacity of the nation to basically be on the side of the revolution.

And if you can do that, then I think that any any system can be can be toppled. If you don't have that, then yeah, I think I think the history of the world is is littered with, you know, what are what would be like peasant revolts that can that can blow hot for three months, six months, even nine months, but are ultimately going to fail if they don't have somebody who is a part of the ruling class who wants to remove all of his or her fellows in the in the ruling class from whatever whatever had been going on before and make a change to it. So, you know, and I mean, let me let me ask you this, like, is one of the things that you're saying that like control of physical spaces is no longer enough to because like a lot of these

things that we've that I've talked about in revolutions is like, you know, tens of thousands of people literally mobbing into the legislative assembly or into the national convention and forcing the the legislators there to do things is so is maybe one of your questions that that kind of control of physical space isn't going to be as effective anymore. I mean, not it could be less effective, but also could be rendered impossible. I mean, you're looking at look at what's happening now. You've got these new weapons. There's a new pain gun that is now being miniaturized where it just fires. I think some sort of some sort of sonic wave that just causes intense pain and people that it hits. And in Gaza,

we're seeing the deployment of drone operated tear gas, where you could clear physical spaces with a very small number of people. So it wouldn't even at a certain point, you wouldn't even need to worry about people occupying physical space because you could clear it with a very modern very, very low level of of personnel doing it. You don't need the rows and rows of troops, so you have to worry are going to switch to the other side. And also you have the worrying phenomenon of of those troops of the forces of the state sort of over time being separated culturally from the people that they're supposed to be part of. Whereas they they're no longer really even seeing their fellow citizens as such. They're seeing them as sort of inferior

because they're not serving. I mean, we've been we've been cultivating that particular mindset in the US since since Vietnam. But yeah, I mean, that's kind of what I'm talking about is just how how that sort of physical space taking at a certain point becomes sort of of unimpossible or beside the point. If if if if power is decentralized essentially away from capitals and into the hands of a very small number of people who could be anywhere, including increasingly maybe in space, because a lot of the people we're talking about these the the wealthiest the people who are doing the most hyper hyper exploitation and hyper accumulation are doing it specifically. And they've said it publicly, like Jeff Bezos, with the aim of being able to

escape from any kind of human accountability by not being on earth anymore. Yeah, that's very troubling. You know, when I mean, I think you actually might have said this on on Twitter, that it's just like it's really obvious they're just hatching an escape plan at this point. That's what it like, like he can't think of anything else to do with like $130 billion than like, build a spaceship that'll fly him off the earth. Like there's, there's lots of things that could like, I don't know if nobody's given him like a list of the things that could be possibly solved with $130 billion or whatever it is. Yeah, it I haven't really I haven't really thought about it. Because I'm obviously I'm still stuck in the 19th century. But or before that,

like ancient Rome. So is is physical is physical mobilization and is physically capturing a space going to ever be enough, like maybe not. But if it's all being transferred over to sort of technological digital spaces, then I think that there's plenty that could be done to disrupt those very same networks of mass communication that would cripple the politicians. Because one thing that I do think is is worth taking into account is that I'm not particularly impressed with the political leadership of the United States at present. It doesn't seem like like the actual like literal people were in charge and you get you get this with say like the way that they were asking questions of of Mark Zuckerberg, right when he was brought in to testify about, you know,

the role that Facebook may or may not have played or played in the dissemination of fake news in the 2016 election. I mean, you can just see the way that these guys are asking questions that they don't really understand the world that they live in anymore. So I don't think it would take much to really throw off at least the political leadership in such a way that they they would find themselves helpless and unable to respond to any kind of coordinated crisis. Because I mean, they barely know how to use email. If you take away their email, they're going to be like, well, the email doesn't work anymore. How do I communicate with anybody anymore? And I think they would just kind of be lost. But again, it really does come back. And do we have to put a stipulation that's

like, I'm not recommending any of this, like not recommending this. What I'm recommending is that we do a better job running our society. So these kinds of things aren't necessary. But you would need somebody who had a big hand in the technological and wealth of the society deciding to go on the course of revolution, then I think it could work. All right. Well, thank you very much, Mike. This was an awesome talk. This is Mike Duncan, host of the Revolutions podcast. If you're not listening to it, you really should. It's one of the absolute best history podcasts and just podcasts out there. Mike, thank you for talking to us today. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you.