Factually! with Adam Conover - Revolutionary History with Mike Duncan

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

No periods in history are more fascinating than those moments when the status quo is overthrown and everything changes. This week, podcaster and author Mike Duncan is on the show to discuss why revolutions happen and what unfolds in their aftermath. You can check out his book, Hero Of Two Worlds, at factuallypod.com/books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

Plus, they throw in a handy guide filled with info about each snack and about Japanese culture. And let me tell you something, you are going to need that guide because this box comes with a lot of snacks. I just got this one today, direct from Bokksu, and look at all of these things. We got some sort of seaweed snack here. We've got a buttercream cookie. We've got a dolce. I don't, I'm going to have to read the guide to figure out what this one is. It looks like some sort of sponge cake. Oh my gosh. This one is, I think it's some kind of maybe fried banana chip. Let's try it out and see. Is that what it is? Nope, it's not banana. Maybe it's a cassava potato chip. I should have read the guide. Ah, here they are. Iburigako smoky chips. Potato

chips made with rice flour, providing a lighter texture and satisfying crunch. Oh my gosh, this is so much fun. You got to get one of these for themselves and get this for the month of March. Bokksu has a limited edition cherry blossom box and 12 month subscribers get a free kimono style robe and get this while you're wearing your new duds, learning fascinating things about your tasty snacks. You can also rest assured that you have helped to support small family run businesses in Japan because Bokksu works with 200 plus small makers to get their snacks delivered straight to your door.

So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way I don't know what to think I don't know what to say Yeah, but that's alright Yeah, that's okay I don't know anything Hello everyone, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again.

It's a joy to have you listen to this podcast. It's a joy to make this podcast. I'm thrilled to be here. I hope you're going to have a great Thanksgiving tomorrow if you celebrate it, if you celebrate it in the United States. If you celebrate it in Canada, I think you've probably already celebrated it because it gets a little colder there earlier. So you have your Harvest Festival earlier. If you were lucky enough to travel to Canada and then back to the United States, you got to have two Thanksgivings. I did that one year. It was incredible. The best year of my life. I got to celebrate my favorite holiday twice. My favorite holiday, despite the horrible history of Thanksgiving, which I've covered extensively on television. But you know what? I still like stuffing, goddammit. And I'm not going to stop eating it just because I know the truth.

Knowing the truth doesn't mean we have to stop being human and eating delicious foods. Okay? Okay. All right. We're on the same page. Let's talk about today's show. You know, I am a student of history. I love learning about history, and I'm drawn, whenever I'm learning about it, to the revolutionary periods in history. You know, that time when the existing order is overthrown by a ragtag group of whoever and an entirely new society comes into being. Now, the first reason I'm drawn to them is because they are fucking exciting. You know, you can't overthrow and establish political, economic, and social order without something happening. And you know, that something is bound to involve chaos, violence, heroism, rousing

speeches, the occasional atrocity, you know, beheading or a thousand. It's exciting stuff. You know, it's good reading is what I'll say. But on a deeper level, revolutionary history is especially intriguing for me because revolutions today seem, well, kind of impossible, right? I mean, I know people in my life whose goal politically is to tear down capitalism and create socialism here in America.

And I've also met people who want to create an anarcho-capitalist utopia where all the roads are owned by billionaires and you have to pay a toll to go to the toilet or whatever. You know, there are a lot of people who want to overthrow the existing order, myself among them at times. But that seems like an impossible goal to us, right? It seems like a far off thing to wonder and dream about, not something that we can actually

do. I mean, our society today is so complex and entrenched. It's hard for me to understand what a revolution would even entail. Like, what would the steps be if I wanted to overthrow capitalism? What do I do first? Do I get on a big megaphone and say, hey, everybody, we got to tear this shit down, and everyone just rises up and starts tearing bricks out of the wall of the New York Stock Exchange? I don't know. It seems like it's something that I can't really do. But the people who were alive during these revolutionary times, they actually did it.

They got together and they said, the system under which we live sucks and we want something radically new. And to do that, we need to tear down the way that we live today. And they fucking did it. It's incredible. And it makes us realize that the same possibility might exist in our current time. But there's a flip side to this because even though revolutions are possible, it doesn't mean they always work out. Things don't always go exactly according to plan. Last time I checked in Russia or France or Haiti or America, where I live today. Well, even though the revolution overthrew an old order, it's not like things are going

amazingly well today. In fact, these are all places where people might say we need another revolution of some sort, even though the world that we live in was formed by those revolutions themselves. Well, look, I could talk about this myself for hours, but I want to bring on our guest today because we have an incredible guest on the show to talk about revolutionary periods in history and one particular historical character who made something of a career of revolutions, of traveling from place to place and participating in seemingly as many revolutions as possible.

But we'll get to that in the second half of the interview. First, let me introduce Mike Duncan. He's the host of a really, really, really good podcast called Revolutions, and most recently, the author of the history book Hero of Two Worlds, the Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution. This was a fascinating interview, and you're going to love it. Please welcome Mike Duncan. Mike Duncan, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you very much for having me here. So you are a well-known historian, podcaster. You have a new book out about the Marquis de Lafayette, which I'd love to talk about. But first, I want to talk about, you're very well known for your podcast on the history of revolutions around the world. Revolutions are a topic I find really interesting that I'm drawn to in the study of history. Why were you drawn to them? I think, you know, my interest in revolutions goes back to just being a teenager who was very interested in history in general. And I grew up like sort of in the late 80s and early 90s. And so the two sort of poles of my love of history initially is like the American Revolution. I'm very drawn to that. I'm very interested in it. And then I was also very drawn and interested in the Russian Revolution. And I

think that's, you know, very normal sort of coming out of the Cold War and a very immediately post-Cold War world. Both of those things remained very, very interesting to me. So doing the Revolutions podcast is a lot of sort of going back to my own personal roots and where my love of history comes from. But also just revolutions in general, I think, are inherently interesting because they are so complicated. And they are the moments when everything that existed breaks down and something entirely new is trying to be born out of it. And that is an incredibly tumultuous process. There are so many things happening simultaneously, so many different personalities in conflict with each other. so many different personalities in conflict with each other that it's just, I think it is just an inherently, it's a bright light that will draw your attention in a way that just some like,

you know, normal run of the mill period in some civilization's history is not maybe going to draw your attention. But a revolution is always a big flash bang on the timeline. And so you're going to look and say like, well, oh, okay, well, what actually happened here? This is pretty important. timeline. And so you're going to look and say like, well, oh, okay, well, what actually happened here? This is pretty important. Well, and it's something that seems in our own world, almost impossible, or like, you know, sort of a North Star, a thing that we push towards, we never expect to get there. You know, like in our own political discourse, for instance, you know, Bernie Sanders during his runs for president says, you know, we're going to have a political revolution in this country. That's what we're going to have. And he says that in order to make the impossible seem possible, right? To say the, you know, the constraints of

our normal political reality are going to change because we're going to have a revolution. And, you know, you could look at it and debate about how successful his political revolution has been, semi-successful perhaps. But then when you look at like, you know, the American revolution, the French revolution, the Russian revolution, maybe the, you know, the rise of the Chinese communist party, I'm not sure whether you'd call that a revolution or not. But those are moments where, Holy shit, it, it did happen. And you did have people saying, wait,

we need to radically remake the world. And they did it. Maybe the results weren't what they intended, but it's like something happened that in our own lives seems, you know, the structures and the systems under which we live seem so permanent. And when you look at these revolutions, you realize that they are not, but it's difficult to see. Then you start to ask yourself, well, what caused the revolution to happen? What created the pinprick that widened into the giant opening that caused everything to change? Yeah, sure. about having a political revolution is a lot of sort of like changing the way campaigns are financed and changing the way that moneyed interests are allowed to influence politics

versus having a more democratic bent to politics, how wealth is distributed inside of the society. But if you take Bernie Sanders and compare him to actual revolutionaries, Bernie Sanders is not a revolutionary. Bernie Sanders himself would not even say, I am a revolutionary. He believes in elections. He believes in the system. He's not talking about overturning the United States Constitution and instituting some entirely new polity in its place. And I think that if Bernie Sanders, like my own personal read on Bernie Sanders, is if a genuine revolutionary movement built up out of his sort of political coalition, that he would be one of the people saying, whoa, guys, that's not,

I didn't actually mean take up arms and go overthrow the government. I just meant we should probably have a better way of financing campaigns, which is, I think, a lot of what that political revolution was about, which there's absolutely laudable goals inside of what Bernie Sanders was trying to do, but it's not revolutionary in anything but the rhetoric that he wanted to use. He's using revolutionary as a synonym for a major change in the way we do electoral politics, as opposed to what Lenin or Mao or Robespierre are talking about when they are talking about revolution, which is literally, we are going to destroy the old state root and branch and build something new in its place. Yeah. Well, before I ask you more about that, let me ask, and I'm sure that this is a question

you've been asked on other podcasts before, but do you feel that there is a movement in America today that has genuinely revolutionary aspirations? I know you spoke about, you know, after the January 6th uprising and, you know, earlier this year, you spoke about that on podcast, but I'm curious, like, if you think there is such a, like, how does it relate to American politics today? It's really hard to get a read on. Like, it really is. Because one of the things that I, that has been a, like a recurring theme of, of every revolution that I have studied, and I'm on the Russian revolution, which is like the 10th revolution in modern times that I've studied. And then if you go back to my work in Roman history, there's, there's a number of sort

of revolutionary events that take place inside of the experience of the Russia, excuse me, the Roman empire over its thousand years. So I've been through this ringer a couple of times. And there are often times in history where there is a great confluence of factors that could potentially produce a revolutionary event, economic upheaval, social upheaval, decline in political legitimacy of the existing regime. I mean, there are many things that come together. Sometimes these things are coalescing and you're like, wow, I think this is going to be a revolution. And then there's never really quite a spark that actually blows it up into a revolution or what's about to coalesce simply dies away. Sometimes I've seen revolutionary events that

are quite literally canceled on account of rain, right? Where people are about to start coming together and there's like a, there's like a major thunderstorm that kind of drives people away and sort of just everything that was rising, sort of get almost literally gets washed away by the rain. Um, other times these things come together and on both sides, the rebel, the people who are in favor of revolution and the people who are like, we don't want to have a revolution are both saying to themselves, well, now is not the time. This is it's not going to break out now. Like this isn't actually the moment. And then all of a sudden it blows up in everybody's faces.

I think that this really happens in, you active revolutionaries in the mix, nobody was able to predict the fall of the Bastille, right? When the February Revolution breaks out in Russia, it breaks out in, if you really dig into the nitty gritty of the details, it breaks out in opposition to some of the direct orders that are coming down from the revolutionary party saying, we would like to hold off until May the 1st. And there were a group of women who ignored the orders that were coming down from the top saying we want to hold off until May the 1st. And they actually just went ahead and got it going in an unexpected way. So to answer your question about what's going on right now in the United States, are there a lot of factors floating around out there that would be if a revolutionary

event of some kind broke out? As a historian, you'd be able to look back and say, well, sure, man, the financial crisis of 2008 was never really overcome by this society. It was something that they continued to deal with a decade later, even though everybody was like, well, unemployment's low, so the economy must be fine, even though there is an enormous amount of economic insecurity that remains that is then blasted by something like a global pandemic that has structural inequalities, racially and economically, that trace back to the roots of the country. We have clearly some kind of anti-constitutional movement that has been born out of the Republican Party that seems very uninterested in sort of paying attention to the results of elections, right? And if they don't

like the result of an election, what are they going to do? They're just going to storm the Capitol and try to overturn it. But does that mean that we're going to have a revolution? Or how is this revolution going to manifest? Is it going to be a black lives matter style uprising in the streets? Is it going to be a tax on maybe state houses, state, uh, uh, state capitals by these MAGA groups? Like who knows, but there is a lot that is floating around out there. I will say that. Yeah. It's, it's difficult to, I mean, Yeah, it's difficult to, I mean, it's fascinating because it's like, it's so easy for us to have the desire to draw a comparison between right now and whatever time we're studying in history. But then the more you read about whatever that time is, you realize how many little inconsequential or seemingly inconsequential factors come together to cause the result that you read about, like how chaotic truly every system is, as you say, whether or not it rained that day, having such an effect. And it makes it really seem like a fool's errand to try to compare

and say X, Y, Z is going to happen because of this happening in history. Or I guess I suppose the more you study, the main effect it has is to make you less confident in any prediction or evaluation you might have about the present, not more. I would say so. I think that we are living in dramatic times, right? I do think that we are living through a moment in American history and a moment in world history, what the result of that will be is anybody's guess. I have my suspicions and they're not great ones, but maybe something good will come out of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, okay. Here's the big question I have about when I think about these revolutions, this is what's sort of driving me towards my own interest and study

in them. And so I'm really curious about your take, even though it's a little bit big picture. Like so many of these revolutions start from almost, you know, utopian origins in terms of, you know, what people, at least the intellectuals, perhaps, you know, wings of the forces that caused them wanted. You know, they like genuinely, it's folks who say, you know, the current system is not serving us. It is hurting people. It's causing inequality, X, Y, Z.

We should destroy it and replace it with something better, right? From the French, you know, the French revolution, the Russian revolution, both as far as I know, like really definitely started from that sort of place. And I know people in my own

life who share those aspirations, right? Who say, oh my gosh, and I share a lot of them as well. Capitalism, you know, as a, you know, is controls our government too much, is, you know, resulting in the death of the planet, is hurting people, is killing people. And, you know, ultimately we need to like not just reform, but destroy the system and build something new. And those are, you know, I want to believe that that better world is possible. Right. That's the slogan. A better world is possible. But then when I look at those giant incidents in history, those are people who had the same goal. Hey, we need to destroy this corrupt system and build something new. And guess what? They did it. The system was destroyed and they did build something new. And the thing that they built kind of worked, but it was also kind of a mess and, you know, led to, I don't know, in some cases, civil war or famine or all these other problems. And then it led to the world that we have today. Right. The the if you look at the the Russian Revolution 100 years on, it led to the Russia that we have today. If you look at the French Revolution, you know, centuries out led to the France that we have today. It didn't it you know, it it didn't lead to a world that I would necessarily say is better unequivocally. Right.

necessarily say is better unequivocally, right? And so, that makes me not cynical, but it makes me question the, you know, whether or not that goal is something that works, right? And I'm curious about what your view is on that, having studied so many of these, like the, you know, the limits of our ability as humans to actually create a better system for ourselves. Does humanity, humanity's messiness always get in the way, you know? Well, I do think that a better world is possible. I do, I would fundamentally agree with that assessment that I don't think that anybody should ever stop and look around and say that this is the best that we can do. Because I do think that if you look back 200 years, 300 years ago, when it comes to the status of Africans in the world, when it comes to the status of women in the world, I think you would be very hard pressed to tell a lot of people

today, well, you know, all these revolutionary upheavals, what have they really gotten us? You know, what have they really achieved for us? And the answer is like a lot. And so I think that for a lot of people, it is a better world today than it was a hundred years ago and 200 years ago. And that if we ever stop thinking that we can keep progressing and keep moving and that if we're not aiming for a better world, a hundred years from now or 200 years from now, then what on earth are we even doing? Because there's,

there's lots and lots still left to be done. Now, when it comes to what role revolutions play in this, um, for example, if, if you take the French revolution, the French move ultimately from an absolutist monarchy that

is based on feudalism and based off of these aristocratic structures and moves towards a system that is based off of rights, where there are elections, there's participation in government. It creates a more egalitarian and equal system, at least in the ideal, is that was a revolution necessary to achieve that? Or could they have just reformed their way to the same place? Which is, I think, one of the big questions that's floating around out there is like, they did all of this just to like, get to a place where they if they had just had more intelligent leaders, they could have just done a few reforms and gotten to the same place. The British didn't need to guillotine so many people to get there. Right. So my question, however, and I just to cut to the end of the chase here, I don't really have

an answer to this right now. I have thought about this a lot, but it is so complicated and so messy that I don't really know that I have a great definitive answer to it because the British only get to where they are in terms of sort of slowly but surely reforming the system in order to protect the the elites in the in the period whatever period it is whether it's the 1830s or 1850s or 1880s um the british underwent a gigantic bloody civil war that involved them chopping the head off of their own king in the 17th century they don't usually like to talk about the Stuart era of their history. They usually go like, here's a TV show about the Tudors.

Here's a TV show about Victoria. And they just sort of skip everything in between, not ever talking about the Stuart period of their history, which is the most interesting period to me because it's a gigantic civil war that involves a lot of people getting killed. Sure. So the other question then is, if the French Revolution exists and the Russian Revolution exists as sort of a threat that is looming out there for regimes that do not initiate the kind of reforms that make their society better, more libertarian, more egalitarian,

more responsive to the needs of their people. Do those regimes make those choices to reform absent the very visible threat of something like the Russian Revolution or the French Revolution? Do the British do what the British do if the French aren't rolling out the guillotine? Ah, because they're like, we got to make sure we don't get guillotined. Yeah, they were scared to death of the French Revolution, and they didn't want to have a French Revolution. So absent the historical experience of the French Revolution sitting there, do the British elites do what the British elites do? Do the Scandinavian

elites do what the Scandinavian elites do? Kind of at the same time, because the British, we talk about the British because we're sort of an anglophone country, but the British are doing a lot of what most of the other Scandinavian countries are doing, which is kind of slowly reforming their way through this period in a way that you find the French going through these 20-year cycles of revolution through most of the 18th, 19th century. I don't really have a good answer to, is the revolution necessary? Why couldn't they have just reformed their way to it?

Well, because without a revolution floating around out there, why does anybody want to embark on a reform project? This is, you know, that's just sitting there for all of us to sit with and breathe deeply about and meditate on. This is why people write historical, what is it, like alternate reality history novels. Sure. Yep. floating around that I've heard cropping up more and more places that when we evaluate the American Revolution, that in truth, we, you know, shouldn't view it quite so positively that it was really a rebellion of, you know, wealthy landowners looking after their own interests and, you know, instituting those interests like directly into the Constitution in order to protect, you know, their wealth and their power at the expense of everyone else. And that, you know,

hey, that's probably better than continuing to be a subject of the British empire, but, you know, it's hardly as laudable as, you know, a true like working class revolution, say, you know, I'm curious about, you know, your, your view on that. And you said growing up, you loved the American Revolution. I was a good patriotic boy coming out of the Cold War, you know? So what's a good patriotic boy coming out of the Cold War?

White boy coming out of the Cold War, I should add. Paul Revere and all that. Yeah, man. Has your view of it changed at all? Oh, boy, howdy, has it. Tell me how. Yeah, the. Has your view of it changed at all? Oh, wasn't just shuffling papers around on a desk in terms of what they actually managed to accomplish because it was a world that was defined by monarchy and aristocracy of nobility of the blood as opposed to what the Americans are setting up, which is a participatory republic. But it's also, by far, of all the revolutions that I've covered, it's the most

conservative revolution of all of them. It's emphatically not a social revolution in the sense that it was coming, it was rising from below and trying to overturn the prevailing economic system and social system and political system. It was, in essence, merely a political break between – it was a political divorce between two groups of elites as opposed to anything else. And of course, they do turn around and immediately and make sure that slavery is entrenched. And then, of course, the other thing is one of the causes of the American Revolution is the British trying to hem the colonists in. The British were drawing a line down the Appalachian Mountains and saying, you guys have to stay on the east side of this because on the west side of this,

we have a bunch of indigenous tribes who we, the British Empire, have treaties with. And we're not just going to let you move into their territory and take their land because that's not in our interests. And frankly, we don't want you growing that much bigger anyway. We would like you sticking to the coasts, please. And this is, I think, one of the major instigators of the revolution that a lot of these leaders, guys like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, had invested a lot of time and effort and resources into staking literally land claims like they had titles to this land in the Ohio country that they wanted to sell. It was a part of George Washington's portfolio that was very threatened by what the British were trying to do with the intolerable acts. Wow. Yeah, so those kinds of things, you see them revolting against the idea that their British masters are going to prevent them from doing whatever it is that they want to do, which is ultimately a genocidal land grab across an entire continent. And in the southern colonies, the perpetuation of slavery and perpetuity. So that's not good.

Those are not good things. slavery in perpetuity. So that's not good. Those, those are not good things. And, you know, you get into like what, uh, you know, the, the, what if like, what if we had lost the American revolution, what actually changes here? Um, you know, is it better for, is it better for slavery to slavery and earlier, if the Americans are part of the British empire, do we do less genocidal land grabbing if we're a part of the British Empire? And the thing is, the sneaky answer is I have given this a little bit of thought. And I think the answer to both those questions is no, because now if the American colonies are still a part of the British Empire, I do think that that changes the calculations in the British government about their own attitudes

towards slavery, how eager are we to get rid of slavery, and then how much balancing the interests of these white colonists who we have, who would like to continue to expand across the continent and get more natural resources that are good for us, the British Empire, versus these treaties that we have with the indigenous tribes in terms of state interests, which of these is more important? And I think that they would probably have sided with their white Anglo colonists and settlers, as opposed to the indigenous tribes. And you can just look at the British Empire's, you know, conduct in, in Asia and in India. And you can say to yourself, yeah, and you can say to yourself, you know, I'm not really sure that ultimately the British government would have done much to control the instincts and aspirations of the American colonists to

have a genocidal conquest across the continent and perpetuate slavery, you know, indefinitely. Yeah. But what? Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a bummer. It's a bummer. I mean, well, it's a look, I've read a fair amount of the American Revolution, a fair amount of revisionist accounts, but even just the way you put it in terms of George Washington trying to personally, you know, make sure that he can make as much use of his assets as possible. Like that is, I don't know, in five that he can make as much use of his assets as possible. Like that is, I don't know, in five minutes, that's a revolution of my own understanding of the American Revolution. Yeah, there's a really interesting, like one of my own sort of side interests in American history. I don't know if this comes specifically, I'm from the West

Coast originally, like I'm from Seattle and my whole family's from Washington and Oregon and California. So the history of the United States is often a story of North and South, like North versus South. And it is true. This is like the axis of American history. But there has also been an East-West axis of American history that I think is just as interesting, just as important, because North-South gets you the conflict over slavery. East-West gets you the conflict with the eradication of the indigenous tribes and the move West. And then how the people in the West felt about the people in the East is just as important to explaining American history as, as anything that goes on with the North and the South. Yeah. Amazing. I'd never, I'd never heard that account that,

that the colonists wish to push East and we're being prevented from doing so it also makes a connection to me too so much of the time when you know our language around around freedom in america like the more you look at american politics and the you know the history of the last century it looks like a lot of that freedom is freedom to make as much money as i can from my property, right? From my, no one can tell me I can't, you know, knock down this thing I owned and build something that's going to make me a lot of money. And so, like, the connection to that was what the original, you know, leaders of the revolution were trying to do as well. I'm like, oh, that's just part of our DNA. That tracks really well for me. Yeah. And the, I mean, the United States is,

is fundamentally a commercial enterprise. That's how it begins. I mean, there, there is, there are religious dissidents who are, who are fleeing from Britain, who settle up in Massachusetts, but a lot of what's going on here down in Virginia, down in the South and most of the other colonial projects are how do we make money commercially from this new, this quote, unquote, you know, empty continent that we have, that we have arrived at. And I think that that mentality gets laced in from the beginning, it's absolutely a part of the American DNA. And the desire to go forth and stake your own claim and make as much, you know, generate as much wealth for yourself

personally as possible. That's, yeah, that's the story of the United States. I mean, one of the very first guests on the show, Adam Winkler, wrote a book called We, the Corporations, which sort of postulated that like the very first, what charter or like thing that you could say was close to a constitution was like basically a trading company uh setting up in in the united states that like the you know the original colonists like they were they were ruled by a set by a corporate charter not by any other system of laws and so like the the country was literally like colonized initially by like corporations yeah Incredible. Well, do you ever have trouble in your work? Like every single one of these revolutions ends up becoming myth, right? Like here in America,

you know, as you're telling this story, your version of the story, the version that comes from your own scholarship on it, it's immediately bumping up against everything that we were not just taught in school, but absorbed through osmosis in the culture about what the American Revolution is and what it represents. And I even feel myself pushing back against it, right? Pushing back against the, I hear the voice of like Barack Obama over my shoulder

going like, no, the highest ideals expressed in the Federalist Papers or whatever the fuck, right? Like, it's so hard to push back against that. I imagine the same is true if you're in Russia, hearing about the Russian Revolution to some extent. Is it a difficult topic to study because of those myths? You know, does that complicate it at all for you? Well, you know, the nice thing for somebody like me who's, you know, does that complicated at all for you? Well, you know, the nice thing for somebody like me, who's, you know, sitting here in the United States is I have all those, I have that conflicted relationship with the American Revolution. And yeah, I could probably go off 5-10 minutes on the fact that despite everything that we just

talked about, they did lace in also into the DNA of the Constitution, things like liberty and equality as being the highest ideals that we have to aim for. And we have been aiming for those things. And there have been populations and groups and individuals throughout the entirety of American history who have been trying to live up to those ideals, often in opposition to some of those crass commercial and racist instincts that are also laced into the United States, because I can say all of those things too. But if I'm looking at the French Revolution or the wars in the three kingdoms in Britain, or I'm looking at the Russian Revolution or all of, let's say,

Spanish American independence, which I did a big series on, I'm personally coming into those topics not saturated in some culture's myth-making project about those events. And I do feel like because I'm a bit of an outsider looking in on it, there's good and bad to being an outsider looking in on things. things is I feel like you can just sort of weigh events and get a sense of what happened between these people and not feel like, oh, well, what I'm thinking and saying about this is going to challenge some long-held notion or be really offensive to like even members of my own family. I'm not really, I don't really bring those prejudices into what I'm talking about. So, when I talk about, like, take, for example, Simone Bolivar, who is, I think, even more than George Washington, a mythical, liberating, founding figure in Venezuela, in Colombia, in, you know, in Ecuador, in pretty much all of South

America. They worship this, officially, South America, they worship this. Officially, I mean, they worship this guy like a god. And if you are to challenge that, then you're running up against an entire school system that has taught you not to ever challenge Bolivar or anything that he stood for. I can see lots of good stuff in Bolivar. I can see lots of bad stuff in Bolivar. I can criticize him. I can praise him. I feel like pretty, in a pretty open way. And I've gotten, you know, I've gotten lots of emails from people in

Venezuela, from people in Colombia who have said, you know, I went through the school system. I've got a university degree. You know, I felt like I was pretty well versed in the history of my own country, but like the things that you were talking about, just like sort of never come up. They never, they're never, never talked about. So I think that's a nice thing about being an outsider. Now, there are also things, you know, the bad thing about being an outsider is then you can say, well, you don't really understand the nuance of what's going on in here. And probably, very possibly, you're projecting things from your own culture onto our culture. And so you're getting some stuff wrong.

And I freely admit that I'm probably getting some things wrong here and there. But I can also, I can also happily talk about guys like Lennon, the good and the bad without feeling like I'm trapped into, into representing one side or another. Well, that's really interesting because, you know, I just read a book called Superpower Interrupted, which is a short history of china and the entire idea was it's trying to tell you the history of china from the chinese perspective right the one like more or less the perspective you would learn if you went to school there minus you know probably some of the state propaganda but you know there's always

that back and forth of you know well so many other histories of that place are written from an American perspective, from the perspective that Americans have with what we think of China, our interactions, you know, Nixon and Nixon went to China, all that kind of thing. If you go to the Barnes and Noble, you'll see a million books like that and you won't see the opposite. And on the other hand, you know, there's there's perhaps, you know, what are the gaps that are coming out of the Chinese perspective or the perspective of a historian writing in that country? What are the presumptions? That makes me wonder. Well, hold on a second. I have never read a an American history written by a non-American. We write so much about our own history and I can't think of one that is coming from an outsider perspective in that way. Is that, is that something you chase after? I, I know I don't actively chase after it necessarily.

I think to get at that stuff, you need to be, you need to be reading in different languages, you know, and that's going to be a part of it because if you read like, if you read like a British account of the United States, you know, and that's going to be a part of it. Because if you read like a British account of the United States, you know, it's always difficult to not just like roll your eyes at whatever it is they're talking about, because you know, they've got like an ax to grind here and there about this and that. So I just lived in Europe for three years, for example. And when I was over there, I was in France. And so I've learned how to read French. And so I've gotten some really good sort of French perspectives on the United States. And I do feel like I got plugged in a little bit to the European takes on the United

States. And I think that it just in the same way that there's really great stuff about them, about their ability to see what's going on in the United States and just be like, you guys are like insane. Like you're an insane country. You're a country full of insane people running into each other. This is a thing about you that is hard to understand if you're living in the United States, because we do have, and I admit to this for myself, an incredibly parochial view of history and of the world. And so like I was in France during COVID and I was in Paris for COVID and I was on a, I was on a 23 hour a day lockdown for three months. It was,

it was actually a pretty intense lockdown period over there. And I, but I would be reading my Twitter feed, which is mostly Americans. And I would be getting these sort of like people who were, who were protesting against the idea that COVID was a big deal and saying, this is just CNN inventing something to get at Trump. And you have to be so myopic about the way that the world, about the whole rest of the world to think that COVID in the spring of 2020 was just being cooked up by American media because they didn't like Trump. And I'm sitting there in lockdown in Paris being like, I promise you, this has got nothing to do with Trump. This has everything to do with the fact that there is a virus that is loose in the world and it is on the front pages of every single newspaper of every single country in the world. But at the same time,

the Europeans love to ding the United States for their racism. And the Europeans will say the Americans are incredibly racist. They're a racist culture and they're doing racist racism. And the Europeans will say the Americans are incredibly racist. They're a racist culture and they're doing racist things. And we can see it very clearly how racist they are. And it's quite insane that there's even a debate in the United States about whether or not racism exists or whether or not racism is one of the most important structural factors of the United States, which of course it is. We can see that clearly. Unlike us, good, enlightened Europeans who aren't saddled with such prejudices. And I'm living in France. Meanwhile, turn those boats back.

Meanwhile, yeah, man, I'm just like, what are you talking about? You guys are just, we learned it from watching you, dad, is basically my attitude towards that. So again, it's great. There are blind spots either way. Yeah. And we do sometimes use other people's bad behavior to make ourselves, to feel good about ourselves. is racist and that only America is a country where, you know, the African or black population is being mistreated and that other societies are enlightened and don't deal with these same kind of prejudices. Talk to black people in France, talk to them in Germany, talk to them in Britain.

They will all tell you exactly the same story. That's not just the United States who is, who's guilty of all this. Go to almost literally any country on earth and you will find, you know, when the borders of that nation were drawn, they were drawn around an ethnic group that ended up a minority, you know? Like, go to, I remember in college visiting Germany and going, oh, Turkish people here are not treated very well. Right. Yeah. And whatever it is and whatever group it is. Yeah.

I think that that's entirely true. But I think that kind of sort of cross cultural, cross political exchange is like really, really good because there are blind spots to every single part of it. And so if you're actually going to get sort of any kind of unified vision of what's actually going on, it is good to try to be an insider, be an outsider, listen to outsiders, listen to insiders, you know, because sometimes the French will comment on the United States and always be like, you guys actually don't know what you're talking about. So that's also true. Well, speaking about cross-cultural connections and the American Revolution and the French, I want to ask you about your book about Marquis de Montpellier. What a segue we just— Isn't that incredible? Man, that was—we lucked into that. We really found our ways there. But we've got to take a really quick break.

We'll be right back with more mike duncan okay we're back with mike duncan um so after you have spent so many episodes uh doing podcasts about revolutions why Why write a book about the Marquis de Lafayette? Lafayette showed up in more revolutions and more episodes of the Revolutions podcast over the years that I spent producing them than really any other figure. I do spend a lot of time in the sort of quote unquote age of democratic revolution between, let's say like 1775 and about 1830 in the Atlantic world with the American Revolution and the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution, Spanish American independence, and then I do the French Revolution of 1830. And Lafayette gets into the American Revolution as this 19 year old kid.

And he is still he he participates in like like really major historical events in France and in the United States. Then for the next 50 years, he's bouncing in and out of history. And we finally find him as a 70-year-old trying to squeeze back into his old National Guard uniform to go overthrow King Charles X in 1830. So he has this incredibly long career that just so happens to coincide with an incredibly tumultuous and revolutionary period in the history of the Atlantic world. This guy Lafayette, he's died now. He's been around so much. And so what I'd like to do is I'm not going to do a quick retrospective of his life. I really want to do like maybe a standalone episode where we sort of look back at him from the beginning. And that standalone episode more or less became the pitch for the book to my publisher. And then it grew into a 500-page biography.

Cool. Yeah, he's like, oh, God. I'm trying to think of, there's some like fictional character on the tip of my tongue who like shows up in every chapter of the epic story. Well, people say Forrest Gump. There you go.

Would be the one. But the thing is that Lafayette was like also participating in things more than just sort of accidentally showing up. You know, I know that they give some historical, you know, causal, you know, role, you know, in terms of like, where does the, you know, where's the smiley face come from? Like whatever. But Lafayette was more historically important than Forrest Gump was.

Yeah. That's my informed scholarly opinion on that. I mean, this, this, you know, French man is like a, a hero of the American revolution.

There's things named for him all up and down the East coast. So who, who the hell was this guy? You know, succinctly Lafayette was a young, rich, noble teenager in the 1770s who had been sort of, he had been raised to want to go out and have like a glorious career for himself. Like he sort of saw himself as somebody who would have

a great military career and he had been raised to expect that for himself. And then he was also at the same time reading a lot of the Enlightenment era philosophy that was floating around. And these ideals of liberty and equality, the natural rights of humans, as opposed to these old kind of superstitious aristocracies in the old Catholic church, you know, these ideas are really current in the sort of educated salons of France. And he's imbibing all of this as a teenager. in the sort of educated salons of France. And he's, he's imbibing all of this as a teenager. And this coincides with this group of Anglo Protestant farmers who have decided to go into revolt against, um, against the British. And Lafayette is sitting there at the age of 19,

not particularly, he wasn't particularly happy with his home life. And he says, I have a chance to go off and have a crazy adventure, do something kind of on behalf of an idealistic cause. I mean, these guys are fighting. They at least say they're fighting for liberty and equality. And also, you know, I get to kill Englishmen, which every Frenchman wants to do. And so he runs off and joins the Continental Army at the age of 19. He more or less runs away from home. He defies commands from his father-in-law to come back.

He literally defies Louis XVI,-in-law to come back. He literally defies Louis XVI, who was just his old drinking buddy, because all those guys were palling around with each other at Versailles. They were all about the same age. And yeah, so Lafayette runs away and joins the Continental Army. Wow. I mean, you can just show up and join the Continental Army. Hey, give me a hat and a musket. Well, I mean, to a certain degree, yeah, man, if you showed up with a hat and a musket at the Continental Army, they would enroll you into the ranks. They were desperate

for recruits all the time. Sure. But, so what makes Lafayette special, because he secures a commission for himself as a major general, which is not like a middling rank. He wasn't a colonel. He wasn't a major. He's like, excuse me, I'm rich. So give me some medals. Okay. That's part of it. Because he said, I'm not here to make money off of you guys. I'll pay my

own way. Because most of the European officers who were showing up presenting themselves to the Second Continental Congress saying, hey, we want to join your army. They were also saying, give me a million dollars a week and I'll teach you how to actually do war, which, you know, the Congress is like, well, we don't have that. But also Lafayette is a member of the inner circle of the French nobility. He knows Louis XVI. He knows Marie Antoinette. They are the same age. They literally were in the same social scene.

They knew each other. He knows the same age. They literally were in the same social scene. They knew each other. He knows the foreign minister. Everybody in the United States who's leading this rebellion, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, they all know that in. And absent those things, they're probably either never going to be able to finalize the break with the British, or this war is just going to go on for like a generation and it'll just be like a persistent flare up of a guerrilla conflict as opposed to ever having like a really decisive end to it. What Lafayette represents is a direct line back to the inner circle of French decision-making. And they figure if we can, if we can bring this guy in, okay, he's 19 years old. He's never fought in a battle in his life. He wants to be a major general. Great. Let's make him a major general. Let's bring him into George Washington's tent. He can hang around. He can feel

like he's having the adventure. He's, he's apparently shown up to have, we'll have him run around in a battle and then we will send him back to France and have him promote the cause and have him speak directly to the people that he's related to. Because one of the things I didn't mention in that is that his wife, Adrienne, who had recently married before he ran away, was a member of probably the second most powerful family in France. The Noailles were second only to the Bourbons in terms of French politics. powerful family in France. The Noailles were second only to the Bourbons in terms of French politics. So that's what Lafayette represents to the Americans in the beginning, is that French alliance that they are seeking. Lafayette grows into being quite a bit more than that personally, politically, militarily to the Americans going forward. But that's how he gets his foot in the door. Yeah. So what you're describing is this sort of like callow youth who they're humoring because it's good politics.

Absolutely. But he became a hero of the revolution, did he not? Yeah, because he was never a callow youth. He was viewed as such because he's just this rich French teenager who has shown up and been like, ha, ha, ha, I want to join you. But that was apparently my impression of Lafayette I just did. I can tell you spent a lot of time in France because that accent was impeccable. Thank you very much. No, he, Lafayette was not a Cal youth. He was not merely just, he wasn't some dandy who's there to cosplay at being a soldier. He really

believed that he was a soldier. He, and he was, you. And he was. And within a matter of weeks, I think George Washington does start to turn his own impression of Lafayette. Because at first, he's like, God, they've saddled me with this French teenager who I don't really want to have around. But from very early in their relationship, Lafayette does a couple of things that makes Washington go, he might actually be here to do this job of being a soldier, which is actually really important right now. And over the weeks and months, Lafayette sort of endears himself to just about everybody in the higher rungs of the rebellion, both the civilian side in the Second Continental Congress and in the military side inside the sort of the senior staff of the Continental Army. So that by the time you're getting to just the spring of 1778, after he's been there for six months, he is as integral a

part of the rebellion as anybody else. And he's as American as any Frenchman can possibly be, is sort of a remark that's made about him. And then he spends the rest of the war trying to secure this alliance and make sure that when the alliance then happens, that whenever he's with the French, he's always saying good things about the Americans to make the French feel good about the alliance. And whenever he's with the Americans, he's always saying good things about the French to make the Americans feel comfortable with the alliance. He's a diplomat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he saw himself in that role. And I think honestly, he was quite successful.

Yeah. What other revolutions does he show up in? Well, he immediately leaves the American Revolution and goes back to France and joins the reform movements, the sort of liberal reform movements of the 1780s, trying to reform what is in every way a completely broken regime in France. The monarchy in France in the 1770s and 1780s was just a broken, grinding mess of – it was just a mess. And so him and everybody else in – him and a lot of these other liberal nobles are trying to reform the French monarchy. these other liberal nobles are trying to reform the French monarchy. This barrels directly into what becomes the French Revolution. And Lafayette by 1789 is a major player in the French Revolution. He's in the Estates General. After the fall of the Bastille, they give him control of what this

institution called the National Guard, which is a citizen militia that is sort of tasked with keeping order in Paris during these revolutionary tumults, which vests him with enormous power and enormous influence. And so all through 1789, 1790, 1791, and really up through 1792, he's one of the most important figures in the French Revolution, and then becomes emblematic of the group of sort of idealistic liberal nobles and, and, you know, sort of liberal bourgeoisie who entered into the French Revolution believing that they were going after a constitutional monarchy and then running into a more radicalized faction that had been produced by the revolution

that overthrows them along with the old regime. And so Lafayette gets pitched out the other side and actually winds up spending five years in an Austin swapping between Austrian and Prussian dungeons before he, before he's released five years later. So then you go forward and, you know, he, he kind of sits out a lot of the Napoleonic empire. I don't want to go through the whole book, but if you read the book, he's got, he's got a whole fascinating relationship with Bonaparte whom he kind of detests. fascinating relationship with Bonaparte, whom he kind of detests. After the fall of Napoleon, Lafayette gets involved in secret underground liberal conspiracies to overthrow King Louis XVIII, who was at that moment leading a sort of restored Bourbon regime that was a part of a wider reactionary blanket that was settling in on europe after this generation of upheaval which

is the french revolution the french revolutionary wars and the napoleonic wars the the answer to that in the next generation was a very repressive and reactionary blanket that was being put down everywhere and lafayette burrowed down and started joining conspiracies to overthrow all of that he's now in his he's now in his 50s and 60s when he's doing this wow and then if you if you advance another 10 years um charles the 10th king char King Charles X, a new king, Louis Philippe, who's the citizen king and who is supposed to be the embodiment of this constitutional monarchy that Lafayette had been fighting for his whole life. So at age of 19, he's in the American Revolution. Age of 70, he's in the Revolution of 1830. And so he was, you know, probably four solid revolutionary moments that he was very influential in.

Did he feel that at the end of this, because you're, you know, the story that you tell of him in relation to French history is being a part of sort of not failed revolution, but, you know, it's like two steps forward, two steps back, one step back, two steps forward is what it sounds like, you know, that the, that you go from, you know, the French revolution, which, you know, I'm sure began with a lot of optimism to God. Now we've got this guy, Napoleon, then he's overthrown. Now we have the reactionary Kings. We're like back in the situation we were before, but worse. And did he die feeling like I finally done it with this final game or, or no, he was, he was immediately disappointed. And I, and I, and I think with good reason, because Lafayette's whole worldview is he's a reformer and he's a progressive and he's a liberal. he he comes out of that enlightenment

mentality that what we should do is look at how things are running whether it's the whether it's economically or whether it's socially or politically like whatever or even scientific he wasn't much of a scientist um but this also plays into like the scientific fear sphere is we should look at how things are and we should analyze how to improve them. And then we should improve them because we should never sit back and think that life is perfect and unimprovable. So Lafayette is somebody who always wanted to improve things. And for example, you know, like one of the nice things about him, if you're writing about him from the perspective of the 21st century, is that very early on he becomes an abolitionist. And in the early 1780s, he's writing letters back to his

closest friend, George Washington, saying, if the American Revolution is going to actually succeed in this project of liberty and equality that I kind of thought was the reason you went into revolt in the first place, then if it's going to mean anything, then we need to emancipate the slaves and you should do that. And this is something that he harps on for the rest of his life. But Lafayette thinks that these things ought to be going in a reformist way in that we should have legislatures, we should have elections, we should have people participating in politics, we should have declared rights of citizens so that governments can't just do whatever they want to people. And once that system is in place, then further reforms that will inevitably need to be enacted should go through those legislatures and should go through those constitutional governments.

And Lafayette, we find Lafayette going into revolution when he thinks that those kind of constitutional systems are not in place. If there's not a declared declaration of rights, if there's not a constitution, if there aren't elections, then in Lafayette's mind, this is an illegitimate regime and it's time to go into revolution. If those things do exist, then he thinks that this is the moment, this is the system that we can use to further the reforms that I think will be needed. And I think that Lafayette, you know, had a theory of permanent reform where we would always be improving things. And so his ultimate disappointment with Louis Philippe and what's called the July monarchy is that these things were put in place. The constitution was put into place. There was a declaration of rights that was enacted,

but then the government didn't want to do any more reforms. They just wanted to sit right there and not make another move forward. And so Lafayette and his friends in what becomes known as the party of movement, as opposed to the party of resistance, these are the two political parties that exist under the July monarchy. He is very frustrated because he thinks that all, he thinks the revolution of 1830 was supposed to be the beginning of something. And all of these other people in the government thought, no, no, no, that was the end of it. That's as far as we ever wanted to go. And so, yeah, he dies ultimately frustrated with the regime that he helped put into place. But he was always hopeful that maybe tomorrow would be a better day. He was an optimistic guy.

Yeah. It seems so emblematic of the issue with these revolutions generally, that, you know, one has such high hopes and they always, to some extent, founder on the rocks of reality, you know, making, hopefully making things somewhat better, or that's the optimistic view you could take of them. But there's always a degree to which, you know, they never quite seem to live up to their promise, even as they are moving things forward. Yeah. And I do think, you know, if you look at it from a certain perspective, that a lot of these revolutions are two steps forward or even five steps forward and then four steps back or three steps back. But there does seem to be steps forward that are taken. And so, like, if you get to the post-Napoleonic Europe, which is – there is this repressive blanket reactionary regime

that's going into place. In France especially, it never goes back to, say, 1788. It never goes back to the way it was before the revolution. There were things that even the restored Bourbon monarchy had to take into account because the French people having achieved a lot in the revolution in terms of citizenship and in terms of rights, in terms of like the peasantry, the way the peasantry felt that they should be treated in the way they could be treated. You couldn't undo a lot of that. And this, you know, getting back to our question, when is, when is revolution necessary? Were they, was it a good thing? could you have achieved these things without a revolution i don't know that you could have uh because you do sometimes need to really crack a system and

shatter a system in order to build something new in its place that is going to advance the cause of i think what everybody is is after here which is liberty and equality and fraternity. But the problem is you can never predict once you've cracked the system exactly how things are going to evolve, right? Oh, never. Oh, no. You know, take the, and I've only studied it a little bit over, you know, over the last few months. And so my knowledge is very cursory, but take, you know, again, the rise of the Chinese Communist

Party and, you know, everything that happened in Chinese history over the last, you know, century is like very far removed from what people thought they were doing at the outset. You know, when the people who joined that revolution and said, oh, you know, and were true believers in the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution, a lot of them were like, wait, what the fuck is going on? You destroying something and what arises in its place is sort of beyond our ability to to predict to a certain extent which is not necessarily a bad thing but it does mean that you know we we sort of i feel like a lot of these figures you know set out to say once we destroy the old regime we will put XYZ in its place. When in fact, it's almost impossible to make a prediction of what is going to arise to replace it. And even when they try,

they fail. Sometimes they try and they succeed, but it winds up getting swamped by other things. One of the things that we do know historically about revolutions is that after several years of revolutionary chaos, you often have some kind of authoritarian regime that is coming in that is specifically made possible by the years of revolutionary tumult, whether it is a Napoleon or whether it's a Stalin. And like you said, I'm doing right now, I'm doing a series on the Russian revolution. And I'm in October of 1917, like the episode I'm writing this week is about the couple of days in late October, what on the new style calendars, November of 1917,

when the Bolsheviks take power. And a lot of the people who are staging this revolution inside the Bolshevik party, if you go to say their Wikipedia page, or you go to some glossary of people who have participated in the Bolshevik Revolution, almost all of them end with killed by Stalin and the purges, killed by Stalin and the purges, killed by Stalin and the purges, killed by Stalin, because there literally was a purge of the old Bolsheviks to get rid of all the people who originated the revolution in the first place, who were going to be able to challenge Stalin's legitimacy as the embodiment of what the Soviet revolution was about. legitimacy as the embodiment of what the Soviet revolution was about.

Yeah. And that wasn't, that wasn't what they set out to do, you know, when they were, when they were planning their revolution and their coffee houses, they weren't like, Hey, in two decades, I'm going to be shot in the head. Yeah. They were not. And they certainly were not doing it on behalf of this Georgian dude who sure was a pretty good fighter and was a half decent editor of Pravda, but nobody went into it saying like, this is so we can make Stalin a dictator. But it sounds like just return to Lafayette, like, you know, this is a guy who participated in these revolutions very optimistically. And, you know, I'm often, I think we have too much of a history in American history of like glorifying, you know, the great men of history.

But it sounds like this is someone whose involvement in these revolutions you you admire and you admire their spirit in which he went into it. That's what I'm that's what it sounds like hearing you talk about it. Yeah, sure. I mean, I'm enormously sympathetic to Lafayette. And, you know, the book is not a hagiography. I'm not I'm not here to just do nothing but sing his praises. Like, the guy had also a lot of faults that I'm happy to talk about. But when people say, like, okay, you've written one of these sort of, like, dad history biographies of an American revolutionary figure. Did you write a great man biography?

And my answer to that question is, like, it's really kind of twofold. Writing a great man history involves giving your subject, giving the great man, like this intense amount of causal influence on history, where everything that happens in world history needs to sort of run through your great genius of history. Somebody like Napoleon or somebody like Julius Caesar, you know, and even to a certain degree, when we talk about American history, you know, we talk a lot about how Washington's character, Washington's actions define how American history unfolds. And this is not really true for Lafayette. He was there. He was a participant. Sometimes I find him intervening in sort of the

historical course of events in a way that had Lafayette not intervened, things might have gone differently. You know, the revolution of 1830 being a prime example of this. But a lot of the other times I find him just, you know, being tossed by the waves of history. You know, he's being carried this way and that by forces that are far beyond his control. And I think that that's far more of a realistic and accurate and frankly relatable account of a person's life that, you know, sometimes I have a role to play here.

Other times forces far beyond my control are acting on me. So I don't think that anybody can sell a thesis of Lafayette as being the most important person who's ever lived in history. And I certainly am not going to make that claim. And then the other bit of this just being, in order to be a great man in history, one of the things that all great men of history have in common is a kind of sociopathic disregard for other human beings. These guys have body counts in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions, a pile of dead bodies that they are scrambling to the top of and then proclaiming myself a great man of history. Most of them are great

military leaders and it involves a lot of slaughter and a lot of genocide. And Lafayette didn't really have that sociopathic ability to just completely disregard the lives of other people. And so he was, I think, you know, people say, did you write a great man biography? And I kind of feel like I wrote a good man biography. I think he was a pretty good guy who was trying to do the right thing. I think he mostly succeeded at what he was trying to accomplish. And I think he generally made the world around him a better place. And that's what he was trying to do. And so all of that I find quite admirable, despite whatever his faults were as a human

being, which we all have our faults. Yeah. I mean, if we're not going to not gonna unless you're gonna slaughter tens of millions um that really is the position all of us are in in history of like just trying to bend the arc a little bit and otherwise being a witness to it saying like holy shit like a bunch of people stormed the capitol building and i don't really know what i could have done about that but i guess maybe i'll keep showing up to city council meetings or whatever it is to to try to help out and make,

do my bits. Right. Yeah. And also, and also just like in general, I mean, just to play on that is like the great man of history thesis in terms of explaining global events is,

is complete bullshit. And we all know that, that all of these historical events are actually done by a million, billion, little participatory actions by regular people who some, yeah, like the people who were there, they tore down the Bastille. That was the one thing that they did. And then later they were just sort of around or they, they were just like had a cold the day of the insurrection of August 10th. So they weren't there for that. It was something

that happened down the street. And that's, that's very relatable. That's the way we all live our lives. Amazing. Mike, this is, this has been an awesome hour. Thank you so much for coming on to talk to us about this. You've really expanded my, my understanding of what a revolution and of the American revolution and the book sounds incredible. I hope folks check it out. And if you want to check it out, just a reminder, you can go to our special bookshop at factually pod.com slash books.

Yeah. Yeah. Buy my book, please. Thank you so much for being here, Mike. I really appreciate it.com slash books. Yeah. Yeah, buy my book, please. Thank you so much for being here, Mike. I really appreciate it. Thanks very much. Well, thank you once again to Mike Duncan for coming on the show.

If you love that interview as much as I did, check out his book, Hero of Two Worlds at factuallypod.com slash books. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Rodman, our engineer, Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode for you on. Check them out at falcon-nw.com.

You can find me online at Adam Conover or adamconover.net. If you want to send me an email, send it to factually at AdamConover.net. I do read your emails and I do love to get them. And until next week, we'll see you on Factually. Thank you so much for listening.

That was a HeadGum Podcast.