The Rest Is History - 12 Days: Solomon Northup and Albert Camus

Episode Date: January 4, 2022

Tom analyses the historical importance of Solomon Northup's story, made famous by Steve McQueen's '12 Years A Slave'. Then, Dominic delves into the death of French philosopher and author Albert Camus. Tune in to also hear about the travails of Monsieur Sandbrook, the 21-year-old Provence-based English language assistant. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, welcome to The Rest Is History. It is the 4th of January and we are ploughing through the 12 days of Christmas. As you can probably tell, the sheer pressure of recording all these 12 days of Christmas podcasts has led to me partially losing my voice. But that's fine because Tom Holland loves to talk. No, but my voice is going as well

oh no Tom the Jeopardy sexy husk well yes like Margaret Thatcher's voice yes very very like that very like Mrs Thatcher going very very very very very rough voice Tom I think you've been doing splendidly you've been doing wonderfully well

thank you very pleased with you thank you would you give us please your events that happen on this day in history and make it a good one tom yeah so today is um it's the day that solomon northrup regained his freedom january the 4th 1853 and solomon northrup will be familiar to anyone who has seen steve mcqueen's oscar-winning film 12 years a slave so this is um the terrible story of um black man in born in new york state um freeborn um he's a farmer uh he was also a very proficient violinist and this was the

the key to what then happens um he's played by chibetel Ejiofor in the, in the film. Um, and Solomon Northrup, he is, uh, so his mother is freeborn woman. Um, his father is a freed slave. There's absolutely no question about the fact, you know, he's not, he's not in any way a slave. He's completely a free man. Um, he marries, um, a woman called Anne Hampton, who's a kind of mix of of black white native american um she's a cook um so they're they're kind of they're i guess kind of they're kind of lower lower class but they're you know they're not on the breadline at all right um and uh they have they're very happily married um and in 1841, because, as I mentioned, he has this proficiency at the violin,

he's offered us a job as a musician in Washington, D.C. And Washington, D.C., of course, is that much further south than New York. And so, therefore, closer to the line where slavery is where where slaves um where they have big slave markets I think yeah and basically it turns out that um the people who've offered uh Solomon Luthorip this job are they're crooks and that they've ordered him because they want to sell him as a slave so they um they they get him to washington dc under this false prospectus they drug him they kidnap him they sell him and he gets shipped to new orleans uh and you can imagine it's just i mean the most terrible thing to happen uh and in new orleans he is uh bought by benedict cumberbatch right so uh william prince ford who is a baptist minister yeah um and

baptists generally you know certainly in the north they're they're very kind of abolitionists they're very much at the kind of the front line of opposing slavery and um ford is a troubled slave owner i think it would be fair to say. And in due course, when Northrop writes up his memoirs, 12 Years a Slave, he writes of William Ford, in my opinion, there never was a more kind,

noble, candid Christian man than William Ford. The influences and associations that had always surrounded him blinded him to the inherent wrong at the bottom of the system of slavery. It's kind of, from our perspective, an amazing couple of sentences for someone to write gracious yeah yeah but i mean i think it

brings home just how radical and upheaval the kind of the assumptions that come to underpin abolitionism are that people had taken the institution of slavery for granted for so long yeah that it was perfectly possible to accept that a man could be um a kind noble candid christian man and still think that slavery was fine yeah of course yeah i mean it's a huge theme that i think we're going to do an episode on slavery at some point and it won't surprise you to know that i do think that the wellsprings of abolitionism are deeply Christian. Tom, I don't think you're alone in that. I mean, that's hardly, of all your views, that's probably the least controversial.

But obviously, Christian arguments are also used to justify slavery. Yeah. And so this figure, you know, this Baptist minister is kind of an interesting figure for that reason. So what then happens is that Ford gets into financial difficulties. And so he sells Northrop on to this carpenter called John Thibode, who is, he's a wanker. Am I allowed to say, I used that word, didn't I? It's like the guy who stole the turkey out of your car. I think he's probably even worse than that.

Even worse, my word. Even worse than that um and tibbott is i mean he's an absolute brute he um he almost uh lynches um uh northrop um but they have a fight or something don't they have a fight yeah and uh but fort comes cuts uh cuts northrop down um so he's kind of playing the the good guy there and then Tibbett sells him on to um a plantation owner called Edwin Epps and in the film he's played by Michael Fassbender yeah you know I mean Michael Fassbender always plays the kind of character you don't want to be sold to as a slave yeah he played Mabette didn't he? Yeah, he did. And he played Magneto, I think, in the X-Men. Yeah, I know you're a big superheroes fan, Tom.

So those are the ones that I liked. Those are the ones I saw. Right. So Michael Fassbender plays the young... Who plays the older one? The old Magneto. Is it Ian McKellen or Patrick Stewart? Ian McKellen.

Yes, it's Ian McKellen. Yes, it's Ian McKellen. That's right. So anyway, so this poor guy, Solomon Northrup, he has to work as a slave in Louisiana and 12 years a slave and there he is toiling away 12 years in he meets um a Canadian who's working on the plantation a guy called Samuel Bass and Samuel Bass gets word back to New York Bass is an abolitionist is that right yes right? Yes. And it's a brave thing for him to do because he's breaking Southern law by doing that. Right. Louisiana law. But in New York, the law of the

state provides aid to free New York citizens who've been kidnapped and enslaved. So it's obviously a kind of massive thing that's going on i mean it's yeah it's happening so often that there are state provisions to combat it um and so northrop's family and his wife um anne hampton has stayed true to him solomon northrop has stayed true in his love to anne uh so i mean that's kind of very touching story yeah um his fact so so northrop's family and friends they they enlist the aid of the governor of New York guy called Washington Hunt and Northrop gains his freedom on this day in 1853 and his kidnappers you know nothing happens to them they never get punished they never get caught uh so probably hard to track them down I suppose yeah um later in the year

he gets encouraged to to write up the story of what's happened. Yeah. And so 12 Years a Slave, it becomes very significant text in the abolitionist cause. And Northrop, I mean, he does quite a lot of campaigning on it. And then he just kind of fades from the record. And do we know what happened to him? Not really, no. But I suppose the book is his memorial, isn't it?

The book and the film, because the book is one of those slave narratives. But those sort of narratives play a huge part in kind of rousing the hearts and souls of kind of Northern opinion in the years before the Civil War, don't they? Uncle Tom's Cabin, I mean, Uncle Tom's Cabin is obviously slightly different, but those sort of stories of fugitive slaves and sort of that the horrors and the sort of the injustice of it they bring home probably more than any number of tracts non-political kind of unaffiliated people just the horror of the institution don't you think well i think also

the the particular impact of this is i I mean, obviously most of the narratives, the abolitionist narratives are for white abolitionists, particularly in the North. It's essentially saying, you know, pity the poor black people, the poor black slaves. But they're still, you know, it's very, very difficult for white people in the north to imagine themselves as black slaves yeah but the power of this is that because solomon northrup was a free man yeah in a northern state it therefore becomes much easier for white people in the north to put themselves into his shoes and i think that's the power of it because the shock for northrup isn't that he's been born into slavery or he's been brought from Africa into slavery. He's someone who was born free, who's lived free,

and who then becomes a slave. And I think that, you know, just kind of emotionally perhaps for white readers in the northern states, it makes the horror of what happened to him all the greater. That's a good story. It's a fascinating story. It reminds me a tiny, I mean, I'll tell you a narrative from a century later

that has always stuck in my mind. You may not have read it. It's a book called Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin. Have you ever read that? No, I haven't. So this is, again, a book very powerful with white audiences. But the difference here is it's not that um griffin was free and became a slave it was white and then he he literally blacked up so he decided so it's

the sort of in the middle of the civil rights movement and he i think it was the 50s 59 he decides he goes to a doctor's friend a doctor friend and a dermatologist and he says basically make me black and they give him um this sort of they give him drugs and he has hours and hours every day under a lamp to sort of darken his skin and then he um he he puts on a stain on top of it and then he basically spends i think something like six weeks um maybe longer uh traveling through the south and describing as a white man what it's like to be treated as a black man yeah and and again it's the kind of story that actually uh because he's not black because

he's white that kind of gives him an in with readers who might have just dismissed the book and not you know um and he just sort of talks about what an unbelievable what an eye-opening so there is a massive there is a massive change in how he's treated it's called colossal yeah of course well he's literally sitting in a different part of the bus and and if he can and his instinctively you know he'll go to the sort of white seats count counters and things like that and people glare at him and he realizes you know he could be it's not plausible that he could be killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time the wrong look at the wrong woman all that kind of thing um so that's a little a very unjolly reading recommendation for the yeah i mean 12 years a

slave have you have you read it tom oh just haven't read it i've seen the film i've seen the film yeah i haven't read the book but i but i quite feel quite inspired by uh by doing you know thinking about this to go and read it well it's obviously a harrowing read yeah i mean unbelievably it's a harrowing story isn't it to go from you know you think you're off to play in a circle in the circus you end up being beaten on a plantation anyway um rather depressing subject yeah sorry about that but it's but it's but it's difficult isn't it i mean you know 12 days christmas ho ho ho jollity jollity but yeah i mean basically things are memorable in history often for terrible reasons they are aren't they so we've had murders and coups and enslavement and all kinds of horrors um and uh more fun and jollity after the break

i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment More fun and jollity after the break. episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest is entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com hello welcome back to uh the rest of history the fourth of january um and dominic you're going to cheer us up by giving your choice for something that happened on this day so it is the fourth of January. We're in 1960. Albert Camus, the French writer, has just been spending New Year in the south of France at his home in the Vaucluse in a village called Lomarin, which I've been to. A very pretty sort of Provençal kind of village.

Because, Tom, did you know that i spent a year living in provence i did peter male style yes i did as a language assistant and uh yeah i was teaching i was i was awful i was totally out of my job you were wonderful no it's terrible i because they gave you no using uh lazy to do your water it was awful tom i my french was so bacon and eggs and so i i'd sort of thought oh i'm terribly good at French. This will be an absolute triumph. And I arrived in France at the age of 21. And I remember going to try and open my bank account

so that I could receive my minimum wage from the French government. And I stood there in front of this bank manager and I realised I didn't know how to say, I'd like to open a bank account. Yeah, because all I'd done is, you know, I've been doing French literature. So I knew how to say, what do you think about... Madame Bovary is unhappy.

Yeah, Madame Bovary. Yeah, but I was utterly out of my depth. I can remember some people, the students used to say to me, you speak quite good French, but why do you speak it with that ludicrous comic English accent? Which I found very insulting. Anyway, so L'Homme Marin, its claim to fame, is that this was the home of the writer Albert Camus.

And Camus, of course, is the sort of, he's a little bit, I don't want to damn him, but he's the teenager's favourite, isn't he? Yeah, he looks very cool with a cigarette. He looks terribly cool with a cigarette. his books about existentialism and so on although he he never defined himself as an existentialist no he didn't he was an absurdist yeah exactly and actually you know what uh particularly when the pandemic hit lots of people went back to their copies of la peste the plague and they said oh gosh this is actually, you know, so it's a genuinely, it's a really, really good book.

And the fact that you read it when you were 18 and you thought it changed your, I mean, that's no reason to sort of curl your lip at it. Yeah, well, I feel a bit the same about Nietzsche, to be honest. Really? I was absolutely mad for Nietzsche when I was 18. And then I kind of thought, oh, I've grown out of that. And now I just thought, he's brilliant.

Yeah. So maybe that's Camus as well. That's sort of what I think about Camus actually because Camus was a I think genuinely a very impressive man much more impressive than Jean-Paul Sartre and he's a terrible man by comparison yeah uh so Camus I'm happy to accept that he's born in Algeria um and he wrestles all his life with the fact that he's the product of a kind of French Pied-Noir settler family in Algeria. So he was neutral in the Algerian war, wasn't he? He was. He was.

And you can absolutely understand why. A lot of his sort of lefty friends in France sort of thought terribly badly of him and disavowed him for this. But his attitude was, which was sort of understandable. I mean, he had this famous line, I love justice, but I love my mother more was which was sort of understandable i mean he had this famous line um i love justice but i love my mother more um which was shocking to the kind of sartrean tendency because they thought abstract nouns were far more important than people yes kind of like i hope i would have the courage to portray my country over my friend exactly reversed so camus he he has been on this kind of intellectual journey so round about the second

world war just after the war he has a good war doesn't he i mean he has been on this kind of intellectual journey. So round about the Second World War, just after the war. And he has a good war, doesn't he? I mean, he has a really good war. So he edits Combat. Exactly. Which is a kind of resistance magazine. I mean, he's incredibly brave. He's one of the sort of intellectual heroes of the resistance.

And afterwards, like so many people in that milieu, he is, so he's this young, very sort of suave, but obviously Algerian, so he's got a bit of an outsider side to him. Very good footballer. Goalkeeper, wasn't he? Goalkeeper, yeah. Where he played at university in Algiers. And he could have been really good, couldn't he?

He got some disease or something. Yeah, you never know whether these things are slightly exaggerated later because he's great. Like Jean-Paul II. Yeah, you never know whether these things are slightly exaggerated later because he's great. Like Jean-Paul II. Yeah, exactly. Jean-Paul II, who almost played in goal for Real Madrid or something, if you just believe some accounts. But actually probably just played goal twice or something.

Anyway, Camus, he's always a bit of an outsider. He never quite fits in. And there's this period in the sort of late 40s where basically if you're a left-bank intellectual, you're very self-consciously left-wing. pro-stalin pro-stalin um camus some people say he's a bit more of an anarchist than a communist but certainly by the 50s he is moving he's sort of he's moving quite strongly in some ways to the center you know he's saying things like you know revolutionary violence is not a good thing so he's kind of of the French George Orwell. Yeah, he is exactly.

He is exactly. I mean, there's lots of differences, so it's not an exact parallel, but you're absolutely right that he occupies that place of being the sort of... Ruff doing with a tremendous backstory like Orwell. Very opposed to Stalinism. Very opposed to Stalinism

and increasingly sort of interested in human detail, I suppose, and the texture of ordinary people's lives rather than grand ideological schemes. Abstractions. Yeah. So he's been given the Nobel Prize, which people see as, they see that as a Cold War thing. You know, they're almost encouraging him to back towards the centre

as a bit of a slap in the face. Well, because you know, the only person younger than him to get the Nobel Prize. Oh, that's a good one. I knew he was one of the youngest.

He was the second youngest. Kipling. I was about to say Kipling. So Kipling must have got it very early then. Kipling got it really early, yeah. But then Camus

was the second youngest. Two top writers. I'm very pleased to see them. I don't imagine they'd have got on, though, do you? No. No. Kipling would have had no time for Camus. No.

All that sort of smoking and lounging around in cafes. Kipling would have been off on doing bushcraft or something. Anyway, so Camus, he's not terribly happy, I think, at the end of the 1950s, although he's got his Nobel Prize for some people in this old intellectual establishment. He's a bit persona non grata. So he's been down at his house in the South for New Year with his family

and with his publisher, who's a man called Michel Gallimard and Gallimard's wife and daughter. And they decide they're going to go back to Paris. So on the 2nd of January, Camus' wife and children go off back to Paris on by train. And Gallimard says to Camus, well, I'll give you a lift. If you stay another couple of days, I'll give you a lift in my very fancy car. Camus, yeah, tremendous.

So on the 4th of January, they set off. And basically no one really knows what happens but they're not that far from Paris um when the car goes off the road and hits a plane tree and um Gallimard's wife and daughter escape unscathed uh Camus is killed instantaneously and Gallimard dies a few days later. And in the car is the 144-page manuscript of what Camus has written so far, the novel that he thinks will be his masterpiece, which is called Le Premier Homme, The First Man. And this is going to be his first really autobiographical novel

about growing up in Algeria. So a very profound kind of subject, given that the Franco-Algerian war is absolutely in full swing. And he's going to be writing quite lyrically about the experience of growing up in Algeria. And of course that book is never finished, isn't published until I think something like 30 years later, Camus was killed.

And at the time, lots of people say, it must be a conspiracy. He must have been murdered by the KGB because of his move back towards the kind of political center. But almost certainly that's not the case. It was just sort of Gallimard's bad driving or whatever. I mean, who knows? Not Prince Philip.

No. Well, Prince Philip obviously has form with Gaelic car crashes. Yes. But in this case, no, he wasn't involved at all, as far as I know. So I studied French at school, a play by a cameo called Les Justes. Oh, yeah. I remember Les Justes. Revolutionaries, Russian revolutionaries.

Yes. And the plot of that, they have to blow up a Russian prince or something in a car. That's it. In a carriage. So kind of death on roads is an eerie prefiguring. And he wrote a play about Caligula. He did, yeah.

Which I can remember doing at A-level. And it ends, Caligula was killed, and the last line is, he shouts, I'm still alive, as he's been killed. And the last line is, he shouts, I'm still alive as he's been killed. And then the play ends. Very profound. I have to say, I find all those 50s French plays, which I studied a lot, I find them terrible. And indeed acted in.

Yeah, well, the Jean-Henri. I mean, I'm always happy to mention that. I think the listeners have probably heard enough about that for the time being. But I think they're just, so all those Soitre plays, Les M plays les moussales and stuff dirty hands they're basically people just standing and talking to each other endlessly what is violence you know all this they're dramatically utterly inert um i think but i think camus novels and he wrote a and the myth of sisyphus yes i must think that sisyphus is happy yeah uh i, that's a kind of memorable tagline. Yeah, it's a good image.

I mean, that's his sort of statement of the absurd, isn't it? He also wrote some very interesting short stories called Exile in the Kingdom. A lot of them set in Algeria, which are kind of quite weird. And they've been attacked by critics as a bit orientalizing. But that's kind of inevitable, I suppose, if you're growing up as part of that sort of settler community surrounded by North African Muslims. You know what?

The very first piece of research I ever did, Tom, was on French colonial Algeria. Yes, you've mentioned this. You have mentioned this. A pogrom in the city of Constantine in 1934. And, well, we're going to do it. We're going to do the Algerian War. That'd be a great subject.

It's really fascinating. And, of course, people who came to our live show will know we are great fans of the Battle of Algiers. So lots to look forward to on that front. We've got more Gallic conduct tomorrow, actually. Yes, we have, yes. And a stunning rebuke for people who've sometimes said there's not enough French history on this podcast.

We're absolutely wallowing in French history. Yeah. We've actually got two French themed topics tomorrow, but we mustn't reveal what they are. We need the tension cranked up. But tomorrow is obviously the most important day of the year, 5th of January, because it's my birthday.

Tom Holland's birthday. What a great moment. So of course it's not, you get two birthdays, don't you? You're like the queen. Because you have your real birthday and then you have your official Twitter birthday where people, teenagers in America. Yes, probably. Send you.

Tell them they want to marry me, which is lovely. You know, though Sadie doesn't really. Always comes as a shock to her when she finds it. Yeah. What are all these messages? 22-year-old in Rioaneiro is offering herself to me i just want to say no none of that nonsense yeah right we'll see you tomorrow goodbye bye thanks for listening to the rest is history. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening,

and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.