The Rest Is History - 477. The French Revolution: The Violence Begins (Part 3)

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

With seismic antecedents such as the Glorious Revolution in England and the American War of Independence, what was it about the French Revolution that saw it become arguably the most important episode in all early modern political history? And what unique combination of factors converged to unleash this colossal, world-shaking event; the paradigmatic example of a people trying to reshape their society? By the start of the 18th century, France was the largest kingdom in continental Europe, and a powerhouse of agriculture, trade, and military might. But it was also a multilayered and very complex machine, still heavily founded in its ancient hierarchies and the dominion of the ancien régime. The King, Louis XVI, though in no way despotic and in some ways an enlightened man, did not have the strength to fix the creaking system he had inherited. And while the 18th century was an age of enormous dynamism, energy and modernity into which a new discourse of the self had been born, it was also a time of terrible violence in France, long before the revolution. The nation had also been running up stratospheric debts ever since the 1720s, and the poverty of the monarchy - the plight of every 18th century monarch - was exacerbated by its efforts to fund the American War against the British. Finally, the unravelling situation came to a head when, in 1786, Louis XVI was confronted with the news that the looming financial abyss had finally engulfed France, triggering a series of events that, from 1787, would unleash the doom-spiral of the revolution, and lead to his eventual overthrow…   Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the causes behind the French Revolution. From the innovative, enlightened culture of 18th century France, set beside its enduringly hierarchical and deeply violent society, the amiable but feeble Louis XVI with his clueless finance ministers, to the American Revolution, financial cataclysms, and angry mobs.  _______ *The Rest Is History LIVE in the U.S.A.* If you live in the States, we've got some great news: Tom and Dominic will be performing throughout America in November, with shows in San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Boston and New York. *The Rest Is History LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall* Tom and Dominic, accompanied by a live orchestra, take a deep dive into the lives and times of two of history’s greatest composers: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. Tickets on sale now at TheRestIsHistory.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor 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. Human rights did not begin with the French Revolution, and I do not think anyone who knows their religious history or their Greek history would suggest they did. We had 1689, our silent, quiet revolution, where Parliament exerted its will over the King. It was not the sort of revolution that France's was. It was done quietly, without the bloodshed.

Liberty, equality, fraternity. They forgot obligations and duties, I think. And then, of course, it was the fraternity that went missing for a long time. Well, it just did, did it not? It heralded an age of terror. Some of the arguments used, oh, you have to strike these people down because they will be counter-revolutionaries. Oh, what familiar language to my generation. They have to be struck down, murdered, and not just the way the terrors were done, but with people loving to see the torture. Oh, it was an age of terror. It was an age of terror.

So, Dominic, that was top enthusiast for the ideals of the French Revolution. Margaret Thatcher, who was interviewed by Le Monde on the 11th of July, 1989. So just three days before the bicentenary of the fall of the Bastille. And I remember it very well because I was in Paris for the bicentenary and the G7 was being held. So there were interviews with all the leaders of the G7 and Mrs. Thatcher was the only leader who didn't come out with platitudes about how wonderful the French Revolution had been. And I remember when the cavalcades went through the streets, there were great cheers for all the other six leaders and she had the honour of being the only person to be booed. So it's a reminder of the fact that the French Revolution is incredibly controversial, isn't it? Incredibly divisive. Divided opinion back in 1989 still divides opinion today. There

are lots of historians who would agree with Mrs. Thatcher and lots who would violently disagree. And I think what that reflects is... Violently? Yeah, violently. Yes. Terroristically, shall we say. I think the French Revolution is the central political event in modern history. Obviously, there are other things that compete. The Russian Revolution, most obviously. Or the American Revolution. But I agree, neither of those really compare. No.

I think the French Revolution, I'm sure we'll be talking about this in subsequent episodes, but to me, the French Revolution is the paradigmatic example of people trying to reboot a society, to make it again, to make something new. So it's that on the one hand. And then, of course, there are other dimensions to it. It becomes the great crucible of conservatism. It's in response to the French Revolution. Edmund Burke writes the most famous example of literary conservatism in history. It's reflections on the revolution in France. It's the French Revolution that exports the idea of the nation and of modern nationalism across Europe and arguably the world. And its iconography, Tom, we're still so familiar with it.

I mean, obviously it gave France its national anthem. It gave it its flag, the tricolour flag. But the idea of left and right comes from the French Revolution, from where people sat. In the National Assembly, right, isn't it? Exactly. And when you think about all the great writing that's been done on it, even just in English, Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities,

one of the most influential books on our perception of history that has ever been written. Dickens' influence by Carlyle and his great history of the revolution. And of all the history books that have been written in our lifetimes, one of the most influential on the way people write history, I think, is Simon Sharma's book Citizens. Some listeners may not agree with Sharma's take on the revolution. His take is actually not dissimilar from Margaret Thatcher's because he very much emphasises the violence and the costs of the revolution. But the way he did it, the emphasis on narrative and his ability to take unexpected aspects

and to take byroads and to make them so richly fascinating and colourful. Well, that's his great genius as a writer, isn't it? I mean, it's a reflection of the inherent drama and the scale and the sweep of the French Revolution that has inspired such great writers. So there's Hilary Mantel as well. You know, her first great historical novel that's about the French Revolution. Yeah. Actually, it's for me, her best book. Well, one of her, certainly her best historical book. Yeah. And what makes it so interesting is not just the high drama, but obviously the questions. Why did it all happen? And even more than that,

what does it mean? Well, Dominic, we've answered that. It's because of the diamond necklace scandal. Right. So we can stop right now. We've solved it. So what I thought we'd do today is we'd get into the build-up to the revolution, the causes of the revolution. See, I don't think the French Revolution began in July 1789 with the stormy of the Bastille. No, we know when it began. It began in the 11th century, Dominic, but we'll be coming to that. Right, very good. So to be very, very simplistic for a second,

if people are only going to listen to six minutes of this podcast and they want to know why the French Revolution happened, I think there are three ingredients. One is there is a financial and a high political crisis. Effectively, France is running out of money. Number two, a social crisis. There's horrendous weather, freak weather. There's famine.

There is kind of mass hunger in France. So contingency then. So contingency. And then the third thing, which is much more deterministic, is a kind of cultural moment. And I know you'll be talking about this in a subsequent episode. An obsession with progress, with purity, and above all, with virtue. And an idea that you can turn the world off and back on again, and start again with a clean slate, and forget about the record of history. And I think it is the combination of those three things

that makes it different from the two obvious antecedents, which Mrs. Thatcher mentioned, the Glorious Revolution in Britain in 1688-89, and then, of course, the revolution in the American colonies. Although that is important, I think. It is important, but this is qualitatively different. Absolutely. So the question is, why did those three things, how and why did they come together? And for many years, historians looked for big, overarching ideological explanations.

But then, really, especially from the 1980s onwards, and thanks partly to people like Sharma or Robert Danton, another brilliant historian, American historian who's written about this period, historians started to use the French Revolution as the subject to reinvigorate the idea of narrative, to say, actually, events really matter. And the chronology, the series, the chain is enormously important. And people who've listened to our series on the road to the First World War will recognize the parallels with that. Yeah, I was thinking about that. The replacement of the broad sweeping explanations that are couched in terms of ideology or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Or kind of broad Marxist trends and replacing it with the idea of events mattering.

Contingency mattering. Exactly. Exactly. But you ended last time, you did that brilliant episode about the diamond necklace scandal and your point that all the discussion about Marie Antoinette, the sort of the semi-pornographic, or I mean, the literary pornographic pamphlets and the abuse of her, that it reflected an idea that if, as it were, the body of the queen or the king were diseased, that reflected a disease in the body politic. And that's how we ended. But we didn't say why the body politic was diseased. So what is wrong with France? I guess that is the question. And to start with, let's kick off with

the man that you introduced us to, Louis XVI. So you described him as, I think very reasonably, a kind of reasonably likable, but ultimately slightly inconsequential man, mild, affable. He loves his locks, going hunting, but not a man it is easy to hate. So you look at Louis XVI and you don't see a man who millions of people would want to see dragged to the guillotine. He's not a monster. No, he's not a monster at all. He became king when he was 19 years old in 1774. And actually, you might say a young man, but actually that's quite old for a French king. Yeah, because usually they're toddlers, aren't they, when they come to the throne? His grandfather, Louis XV, had been five.

His predecessor, Louis XIV, had been four when he became king. So actually, Louis is not badly placed, and he's been prepared for it. His kingdom, as we discussed before, the biggest kingdom in continental Europe, 28 million people, the world's second largest economic power, really, after Britain, the only European country that has both the serious navy and a serious army. Britain, for example, only really has a navy. Paris, very different from today's Paris. So it's the second biggest city in Europe after London, but it's a city. It's not the kind of grand city of avenues and boulevards. It's a city of slums, but also, you know, it's typically the urban poor and prostitutes and

criminals, but also a city of coffee houses and books and ideas and newspapers and theatres and all these kinds of things. And then beyond it, you have the other big cities of France also doing very well. So France is unusual in having so many provincial centres, prosperous provincial centres, like Bordeaux and Lyon and stuff. And then beyond that, eight out of 10 French people work on the land. In La France Profonde, they are peasants by and large. So France is much, much more agricultural than Britain is. It is, and also much more kind of regionally distinct. Places like Brittany are very distinctive and you saw that when we were talking about the Cardinal

de Rohan, that he has a sense of his distinctiveness because he is Breton. Yeah, absolutely. The funny thing about Louis XVI, Louis XVI would not have been able to understand most of his subjects because they wouldn't have spoken what he would recognize as French. They would have spoken dialects of French, or they'd have spoken Flemish, or Occitan, or Breton, or German, all of these kinds of things. So Louis has been brought up to be king. We think of him as an absolute monarch. And he had copied out as a teenager a text to tell him

that French kings had received from God himself the greatest and most absolute power over other men that has ever been entrusted to one man. But that absolute power is very tightly circumscribed. So first of all, he relies on lots of other people. He relies on judges and nobles and officials. He's got his entendants, they're called the royal officials that they send out to the kingdom. If he loses their support, that's very bad for him.

He needs them. Because he does have a famous exchange, doesn't he? Is it 1787? Where he basically, someone in the parliament was saying, this is illegal. Yeah. And Louis famously says, it's legal because I say it is. Yeah. But that's a mark of weakness, isn't it? Rather than a strength that he has to say that. Right. Because France does have other institutions and constitutional conventions, and they are so complicated that nobody really understands them. So his grandfather, Louis XV, in the 1750s, had said, you know, France is such a kind of multi-layered, complicated machine.

I'd like to get all this written down on paper so I can make sense of it. And he'd commissioned constitutional scholars to make a compilation of documents. And they came back to him eventually and they just said, we're going to give up, it's not possible. It's much too complicated because it's a bit like britain it is a massive patchwork of conventions and customs and laws and precedents and things yeah precedents you compared it to a machine and we talked about how louis xvi is a great one for tinkering in a workshop do you think that this is a frustration to him, that he, as someone who obviously likes contraptions and working out how things function, that the state kind of defies his ability to do that?

I think absolutely. Because I think Louis, like other people of his generation, is a product of the mid-18th century. He comes from a different world from Louis XIV. He's an enlightenment man to some degree. And that doesn't mean he's sitting there reading Voltaire, but it means he's in that context. Things can be solved. Things can be sorted. Yeah. The historian Jeremy Popkin, who wrote a very good general history of the French Revolution called A New World Begins, he says in that, Louis had been brought up to respect reason, as so many people were. He likes the idea of solving problems, Tom, that there is a logical, rational answer to things. He's also been brought up, by the way, to respect what he sees as the

rights of his citizens. I know you're going to be talking a lot about rights in a subsequent episode. And Louis had written down in his kind of exercise book as a boy that the rights of his citizens were life, honour, liberty, and property. Not so dissimilar from the language of the American tax dodgers, Tom. So his regime, the regime that he inherits, the ancien regime, as people say, the old regime. In your sort of Charles Dickens, Taylor Tussauds version of the French Revolution, it's corrupt and cruel, isn't it? There's Marquesses kind of running over paupers in their carriages. Exactly, all of that stuff.

And very antiquated and reactionary. In reality, that regime is very, very modern and is changing all the time. Nobody says we are living in the ancien regime, we're living in the old regime. They think they're living in an age of enormous change and modernity. And we mentioned already Simon Schama.

In his book, Citizens, he's brilliant at bringing all this out. And he says, you know, wherever you look as a historian, there are signs of great excitement and dynamism and energy. So he mentions, you know, French trade, French industry. It's the home of chemistry, of maths. Lavoisier, who will end up losing his head, won't he, in the revolution? Exactly. The great chemist. Both Sharma and Robert Danton in their books about this emphasize hot air balloons. Ballooning is the AI of the day. It's something that people are

talking about. They don't know what world it will bring. It's tremendously exciting. The first flight was from the Bois de Boulogne in 1783. And people would say, Robert D'Arnton quotes some periodicals, we live in the century of inventions. We're surrounded by miracles. Genius is everywhere, conquering nature and the elements. And that's very enlightenment, isn't it? It's totally enlightenment. So Benjamin Franklin is a great hero in Paris, and he's a great one for these kind of experiments. Absolutely, yeah. Because, of course, the whole American Republic is an experiment, isn't it? So America comes to be identified both with nature and the kind of beauties and simplicity of nature, but also with this idea of kind of progress, of modernity. And to what extent is the existence of the American Republic a kind of standing encouragement to people in France to think, yeah, we could rebuild in that

way? It's a good question. I think people are fascinated by the American experiment. They're curious to see how it works out. People like Benjamin Franklin are very popular in France. But that said, if America didn't exist, the French Revolution would still have happened. Would still have happened, sure. Yeah. So I don't think it's a direct inspiration, but I think there's a commonality of language between the French and American revolutions. And just going on from that, the crown support for the American Revolution obviously will play a key part in its ultimate bankruptcy. But is there also a sense that the fact that a monarch

is going to the assistance of rebels against another monarch, an example of someone sitting on a tree, sitting on a branch, and sawing off the branch? Yeah, I think it is. I mean, there are people in the French regime who are very nervous about the idea of doing this. For that reason? Yeah.

Well, they're more worried about the finances. But I just wondered whether there was a kind of,, well, they're more worried about the finances. But I just wondered whether there was a kind of, you know, an ideological anxiety about it as well. Because Louis XVI seems not particularly to have been worried about that. I don't think they're thinking about the American Republic so closely as that, to be honest with you. Right. I think they're more interested in giving Britain a bloody nose.

Anyway, so all this excitement about change means you have two things. You have a trend of sense of possibility on the one hand. We can do anything. We can conquer nature. So what can't we do? And then the other hand, of course, there are always people who lose out from change. So in this, just to give you a small example, if you're a weaver or an artisan or something, there are new businesses, new industrialized businesses coming up that may put you out of work. And so you would like to blame somebody. And we'll come to that later on. As part of that modernity, I think you also get a new political culture, especially in Paris. This is not created by the French Revolution.

It creates the revolution. Right, because we were talking about that in the context of the pornographic abuse of Marie Antoinette. Exactly. Robert Danton's book, The Revolutionary Temper, is absolutely wonderful on all this. On the coffee houses, on people swapping ideas, people would read pamphlets out on street corners, people would gather to listen to it. There's a new term which we're very familiar with, created in 1750 to describe this, opinion publique, public opinion. That phrase was not used before because it didn't really exist in the same way. So there's that. But also I think there is a really important thing,

which is a new language that people use to discuss politics. So we were saying that Louis, you talked about him and the locks, the idea of tinkering and the world being a machine and improving it. And that's very much a product of the age of reason. But actually, when he becomes king and he's 19 years old, there is a generation emerging, this kind of generation below him, who are much more romantic. They are the people who are loving Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Well, but not entirely, because Marie Antoinette,

who is his generation, I mean, she's part of that. I mean, she is the great embodiment of that in a way. It's definitely younger people who embrace that, but of course it percolates out. So Marie Antoinette is absolutely a classic example of somebody who absorbs this cult of sensibility, nature, simplicity, all of these things, intense feeling, tenderness, friendship,

family. And also the idea that if you obey the impulses of your emotions, that will lead you to truth. So it's kind of bizarre, isn't it? That simultaneously it's an age of reason, but it's also an age of intense feeling. So those things are in tension. Well, there is a tension there, but there seems to be an assumption that there isn't. Well, I think there was a slight generational issue. So I think if you were born in 1740, let's say, you grow up in an age that is polite, witty, ironic, sceptical. Voltaire. Voltaire is very sceptical. They love poking fun. There's always a kind of wry smile at the corner of your mouth, that kind of attitude.

They're basically quite British. And I think if you are a generation later, let's say you're born in 1760, then that scepticism and stuff, you find that a bit desiccated maybe. It leaves you cold. What you're all about is your heart. Living your truth, Tom.

Living your truth, yes. And tears, crying, is really important to these people and is important in the revolution. Tears are seen as a sign of authenticity and honesty. So people are always breaking down in tears in the revolutionary story. And the idea that underpins all of this is the idea of virtue. And I was thinking when I was writing the notes, how virtue in the French Revolution is the diversity of its day. In other words, it is an abstract noun that if you have any decency as a person at all, you're in favour of it. And if you start to poke fun at it or to say, well, I just think it's all overblown. It's the emperor's new clothes. I don't really agree with it.

People say, you're not just old, you're evil. You say virtue. I mean, you might more properly say virtus, is the latin word from which the french word comes and actually has the sense of of manliness right as well and i think one of the dimensions of the french revolution which we will be exploring over the course of this series and the subsequent series on it is the way in which actually the egalite bros are quite sexist yeah of course i mean it is a very very chauvinist movement, I think, the French Revolution. Yeah, I think so. So the man who embodies all this more than anybody else, by the way, I think is Maximilien Robespierre.

And we'll come to him later on. He absolutely drinks deeply of all this stuff. So it's a very politicized world and very passionate. But it is also, I think it's worth emphasizing, even before the revolution, a violent world. In Citizens, Simon Sharma famously wrote that violence was not just a byproduct of politics, but violence was the revolution itself. And I think he's right, but I think it's also worth emphasizing that France was already quite violent. So any history of 18th century France is punctuated by riots, lynchings, looting, people being publicly beheaded, prisoners being broken on the wheel, troops firing into crowds. So in other words, when the revolution starts, and it doesn't start with one thing, it starts with a succession of things, a lot of these things have already happened before.

They're not novelties. The revolution is not a storm breaking from an otherwise placid beautiful blue sky it's a one storm cloud among many tom yeah but you mentioned well we talked about tax and finance so money is at the absolute center of it and we should get into some of the money follow the money follow the money exactly we should follow the money so all early modern monarchies suffered massive money problems. I mean, it's the story of the English Civil War. It's the story of the American Revolution. Monarchies trying to raise more funds. And the reason they're doing that is because they're living in a new age with antiquated systems. There's been a military revolution. So they are funding bigger navies and bigger armies than ever before.

But also they're doing it on a global scale, which they weren't doing 200 years earlier. You know, Britain, France, they have to maintain fleets all over the planet. And for France, the fact that Britain has emerged as a rival power and in a larger economy, I mean, is really unsettling because France has not had to face that before. France has always been the largest power. It has. Economically speaking. And so that imposes massive strains, doesn't it? Massive.

And you were talking about the Navy. The Royal Navy is the key to British power. And so the French have to have a Navy. But as you say, I mean, it's just unbelievable strain. It is. So France has been running up massive debts since the 1720s and doesn't have a national bank. Britain has a national bank, but France, for various reasons, doesn't. Oh, and France had had a kind of traumatic experience with a slightly dodgy Scottish financier, hadn't it? John Law.

Yeah. John Law. Exactly. The beginning of the 18th century. It's a kind of tulip mania bust. There'd been a massive stock market bust, and that basically turned them off finance. So they distrust the idea of a national bank. You know, that is when the word millionaire is coined, because so many people become so

rich and then they lose it all. Is that so? Interesting. By the 1760s, so even before the American War, France has already got very, very big debts. It's 2 billion livres in debt, and it's basically spending 60% of its budget servicing that debt, so on interest payments. And this is growing all the time. The interesting thing is that Britain's debt is three times greater, but Britain can always raise new taxes through the House of Commons.

The government needs no more money, the House of Commons votes for it, bang, job done. France can't do that. Not only does it not have a national bank, it doesn't have a regular elected assembly. People do remember that there was once a thing called the Estates General. It last met in 1614, 1615, and nobody can really remember what it was, how it was organised, who voted for it. Is the existence of the British Parliament that is able to raise money, is this something that in the build-up to the French Revolution, people are looking at enviously and saying, why don't we have a system like this? Yes. As we will see, loads of people basically want France to have a lot of the revolutionaries at the beginning, basically want to turn France into Britain. They want a more liberal economy and they want a representative institution or vote tax increases. And they think, bang, that'll magically fix all our problems.

And so that's the Estates General. Exactly. That's their dream. So France is raising tax through a lot of very strange, antiquated things. They've got a property tax that a lot of towns don't pay. They've got a very lucrative tax on salt. But again, that means there's loads of smuggling. And they have internal customs duties. You are a miller in Provence or something. You want to sell your grain in Paris. You have to pay multiple duties to get your grain from A to B. And that obviously is very bad for the internal economy if people are having to pay tax, basically when they step outside their own town to sell things.

And the kind of thing that a workman in his workshop, like Louis XVI, would want to fix. Exactly. So here's the thing. Why don't they fix it? Louis, when he comes in at the age of 19, he's tempted by the idea of fixing it. But the issue is that whenever he comes up against opposition, he almost always backs down. So right at the beginning of his reign, he had a bloke called Thieu Gau, who was a liberal reformer. He was basically slightly Liz Truss. He wanted to go for growth, deregulate the economy, all of this kind of stuff. He liberalized bread prices. Of course, that meant the bread prices went up. There was lots of looting. And Louis eventually basically got rid of him, said, you're pushing too far, too fast.

So, Dominic, your case might be that the problem with Louis isn't that he is too despotic, but that he's not despotic enough. Well, do you know who he should have been, Tom? You did a very, very lovely version of her. If he'd been Margaret Thatcher, I mean, I say this not entirely frivolously. If he'd been a charismatic and sufficiently adept statesman, that he could take a bit of unpopularity and he could persuade the people he needed, and he could show concrete results, and he'd stuck to his guns, he might have been a much,

much more effective king of France. But as it is, what he will do is he will always gesture in the direction of change and then back down when he gets into trouble. So as Sharma says, and I quote, he wanted to be loved. And that is not an ideal thing for a king in a time of tremendous change and challenge. So in the next few years, the problem actually gets a lot worse. And it gets worse, as you said, because they join the American war. So Turgot's eventual successor, a Swiss banker called Necker, Jean-Jacques Necker. Great name. He says, go for that American war.

Let's help the rebels in the American colonies. And he organizes lots more short-term loans to pay for it. Now, it's a naval war, but as we know from the rest of history, nothing is more expensive than an 18th century top-notch navy. So they run up huge debts, one and a half billion livres, on top of their existing debts, 90% of which comes from loans. This will be a brilliant gamble, by the way,

if you get the Caribbean. Because the Caribbean is so rich. Yeah, that's why they really have joined the war. They want to get Jamaica, places like that. But that requires them to inflict a defeat on Britain more total than the ultimate defeat is.

So although the British lose 13 North American colonies, they keep lots of the rest of North America. They don't lose any of the Caribbean, which was their main priority. And so actually, the French have basically run up huge debts and they've got nothing to show for it. And Simon Sharma says, without much exaggeration, it can be said that it was the cost of the war that brought on the terminal crisis of the French monarchy. Should we get to the terminal crisis? Yes. So let's fast forward, just before we come to the break, let's fast forward three years to the year of the diamond necklace trial. So now we're in 1786. The finance minister now is a guy called Charles-Alexandre de Calonne. He's very rich. He's very urbane. He's very

sort of witty. He's a stock market player and therefore everybody hates him for understandable reasons bankers and in august 1786 calon goes to see louis the 16th and he says i've got a bit of a bombshell for you um we are looking into the financial abyss he says our annual deficit every year is 80 million livres, and half of all our revenue is now being spent on paying the interest on our existing loans. And he says, what is worse, NECA's short-term loans that he took out to pay for the war in America are about to fall due, and we don't have any money to pay them back. And he says to Louis,

we have to totally reform the constitution. We just have to sort out this problem with the tax system once and for all and get new taxes because we can't rely on new loans to pay the old loans. So you may say, well, what is this problem? Why don't they just bring in new taxes? And the reason is France is a society based on the idea of hierarchy and privileges. So if you are a nobleman or a clergyman, you don't pay tax. And people don't think of that as a disgraceful exemption. They think that's the essence of our liberties. These are our God-given and our ancestral rights as Frenchmen.

And it's a source of aspiration, isn't it? Yeah. For people, because it is possible to enter the clergy or to gain patents of nobility. So it's a kind of incentive

to stick with the system. It is. And also people don't like the idea of a uniform system like a machine. They say that is what will destroy liberty. Liberty lies in difference and in quirks and eccentricities and traditions. And a government

that tries to erase that and just to put the stamp of royal authority and say everybody must pay is a despotic government. And we don't want that. We want people to stand up for our traditions. And the people they want in particular are these institutions called the parlement. Now, confusingly, they're not parliaments. Right. So these are the ones that the parlement of Paris that the Cardinal de Roja opted to be tried by rather than the king in the previous episode. They're courts. They're high courts, basically. Yeah. And around them, so the parlement in Paris employs hundreds of people, clerks and stuff. It's got its own kind of quarter of the city. There's a whole kind of community of lawyers and notaries around it. It's culturally very meaningful. People invest it with a lot of significance. The parlements, these high courts, when the king

introduces an edict, they have to register it. And they have to say, yep, fine. It doesn't contravene the rights of French people that you as a king have sworn to uphold. And what's happened, there's a pattern that basically since the 1750s, Louis XV and Louis XVI have asked the parliament to register new taxes and the parliament has bitterly resisted. And they have said increasingly, the reason we're resisting the new taxes is because we're defending liberty against your despotism. We're defending the nation against your court in Versailles. We're defending the ancient French constitution against your suffocating, joyless absolutism. And does the physical separation of the king in Versailles from the Parlement, say in Paris,

that presumably is enhancing that sense of separation between the monarchy and the sense the Parlement have that they are defending the people's rights. I think so, Tom. I think absolutely. I think it's a real problem actually for Louis XVI. Geography. The fact that Versailles is 12 miles from Paris. He never leaves Versailles or barely ever leaves Versailles. That 12 miles miles most ordinary people can't afford to take an expensive coach to Versailles so he's always slightly sealed off he's always in a bit of a bubble and there's a real resentment of that bubble it creates the idea of a corrupt out of touch court and you know you get the sense that Paris is this kind of place seething with political excitement and theatre and new

ideas and newspapers. And Versailles is this sort of airless world of snobbery and ritual. And I think it's a really good point. I agree with you. I think it's a huge problem for Louis. So anyway, Calonne says to Louis, look, we've got this huge problem. The Parlement are never going to give us what we want. We have to bypass the parliament. We have to go over their heads. I'm going to call an assembly of the greatest men in the kingdom, the notables. If they agree with the idea of the new taxes, then maybe we can basically just ignore the parliament and do what we like. And this idea of an assembly of notables, this is again, something with the ancient president that is being taken out of the lumber box of antiquated traditions.

Yeah, it is. Exactly. And Louis says to Calonne, I'm not sure about this. I mean, this is a very big step to try to bypass the institutions to get this money. And Calonne says, trust me, if you do this, you will go down in history as the man whose courage and foresight solved the financial problems of the French monarchy forever. And historian Jeremy Popkin has a very strong line after this in his book. He says, and so Louis XVI allowed Calonne to set in motion the series of events that would lead to the complete overthrow of his monarchy. Well, cliffhangers don't come more cliffhanging than that. Let's take a break and when we come back we will see

how the doom spiral gets set in train. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain

on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are in Versailles,

specifically in the Salle des Menus Plaisir. It is the 22nd of February 1787. And Dominic, this assembly of the notables has gathered. With what consequence? So basically, Calonne has brought together all the bigwigs in the kingdom, princes, archbishops, judges, dukes, all of these people. And he says he says to them okay here's my plan we're going to abolish all these mad tax privileges we're just going to have one tax on landed property and irrespective of your social status you'll have to pay so he is asking turkeys to vote for christmas basically he is but he's saying that this is in the interest of france come on we've got to do this we don't want to keep losing to the British.

Number two, he says, we're going to lift some of these mad antiquated regulations. Let's have the same, you pay the same duty wherever you are in France. Let's have freer markets so people can sell across France. We can relax some of these rules. So we'll have more competition. We'll have more growth. And number three, he says, I know I'm asking a lot. So we're going to have elected local assemblies regular elected local assemblies and basically you the landowners the bigwigs will dominate them so you'll get your way your privileges will remain

intact it's a very very enlightened scheme it's a very mid-18th century scheme it's rational it's sensible it's rational. It's sensible. It's kind of, let's have a bit of uniformity and sort this thing out. So it's not going to work, in other words. Yeah. And the notables just hate it. They hate it because they don't like, obviously, paying the land tax. They don't like his plan for the assemblies because he says, well, obviously, you'd sit with the commons in your province together in one assembly.

They don't like that at all. They say the commons, which they call the third estate, they have to be separate. We're not sitting with those. Riffraff. Great unwashed. Yeah, riffraff. It's always the game that these different institutions play.

To basically kick the tax increases down the road, they say, you'd have to call the estates general. I mean, no one really knows what that is, because they think it'll never happen, I suspect. They say, call the estates general to call the Estates General. I mean, no one really knows what that is, but they sort of, because they think it'll never happen, I suspect. They say, call the Estates General to approve the taxes. It's like the Aztecs bringing out the owl. It's the ultimate recourse. You know, you need more representation.

Basically, we don't want to carry the can for the tax increases. You have to get a bigger body to do it. Calon is really furious about this. And now he does something that is actually disastrous from the perspective of the French monarchy. He goes public. He seeks to rouse the people. He sends a pamphlet out to every priest in the city in Paris. And he says, you have to read this to your congregation, your Sunday sermons.

He has it reprinted in gazettes. He has it read out on street corners and read aloud to the crowds in Les Halles in the big markets. And this thing, he tells people, France is at a crossroads. Finances are in a total mess. Either we have total change or total collapse. And in this pamphlet, he uses a lot of the language that anticipates the revolution. So he's using terms like the national will, patriotism. He says, the privilege will be sacrificed. Yes, when justice requires it and need demands it, would it be better to tax again the

unprivileged, the people? And that kind of language, people haven't heard that from royal finance ministers before. He's anticipating a lot of the terms that will be used in the revolution. Now, when the heat comes out with all this, the notables go absolutely ballistic. You know, how dare you rouse the people against us? And so they complain to Louis about him. So they complain to Louis, and Louis, as is always the way, Louis sacks him. Sorry mate, you've got to go. People don't like it. The notables don't like it. The notables don't like it. As Sharma says

in Citizens, by taking his case to the public, Calon had made politics a matter of national attention. Once Pandora's box had been opened in this way, it proved impossible to close the lid. After Calon, anything was possible. We love a Pandora's box.

I like the fact that Sharma's gone for Pandora's box there. So the Pandora's box has been opened and the storm clouds of revolution are gathering. Definitely they are. So the debate has started, a public debate. People are talking about this in cafes, on street corners and things. And as amazing as it may sound to many listeners,

most people take the notable side, the side of the very privileged people who don't want to pay more taxes. So Robert D'Ar side, the side of the very privileged people who don't want to pay more taxes. So Robert D'Arnton quotes journalists of the day, our notables, which were thought to be puppets or courtiers, are for the most part well-informed patriots who know the true interests of the nation. Because the one thing that people are really worried about is not the fact that nobles don't pay taxes, it is they have a dread of an overweening autocratic monarchy. The nobles are very good at posing as the defenders of the French people's liberties

and people believe it. People are roused by it. But they're kind of riding a crocodile, right? They are. Oh, totally. Yeah. The notables are in for a shock. They're in for a shock.

So now Louis has to find a new finance minister and he says, well, what I'll do is I'll get one of the notables to do it. I mean, that's quite a canny idea. He gets a guy who's the Archbishop of Toulouse, who'd been a very outspoken notable, who's called Étienne Charles de Lomény de Brienne. He's a magnificent figure, isn't he? Because he's one of those kind of classic late 18th century French bishops who don't

really believe in God yeah exactly but that's the thing nonsense there was talk of making him

Archbishop of Paris and Louis had apparently said surely as Archbishop he should believe in God shouldn't he

isn't that a good idea and Brienne also entertainingly there's a lot of skin disease in this series there really is

isn't there so Brienne I read he suffered from a skin disease that left his face quote a mass of peeling scabs and tissue and yet he was thought of as a in this series. There really is, isn't there? So Brienne, I read, he suffered from a skin disease that left his face, quote, a mass of peeling scabs and tissue.

And yet he was thought of as a personable and congenial man. So that says a lot for his personality. It does. Well, so we've had Louis XV who died with his face covered in pustules. And we're going to be meeting

Marat, aren't we? Yeah. And well, Mirabeau, the ugliest man in France. Mirabeau, yes. Yes, his face. Well, yes. So lots of victims

with unpleasant skin complaints. So Brienne had been an opposition figure and he had said, like a lot of the notables, I think Callan's stuff about the deficit is boulderdash.

I don't think there really is a deficit. Let's have a look in the books and just check. There'll be loads of money. And he looks at the books and he says, oh my God.

Well, it's true. Callan wasn't telling the truth about the deficit because he wasn't. It's not 80 million. It's 140 million. Oh, God. And so actually, Brienne then has to go back with his skin complaint to his old chums in the notables. And he says, actually, we do need new taxes. He wants a land tax and a stamp tax.

What could possibly go wrong with a stamp tax tom always very successful wheeze and the notables say yet again no we don't either so you know you will have to call the estates general if you want new taxes whatever it is you have to call it so they scrap the assembly of the notables so we're in 1787 and um louis is very very depressed by all this so there are accounts of him saying, you know, he's basically spent all his time now going hunting and drinking and eating. Well, I mean, it's amazing that he can go hunting because he's by this point got incredibly obese.

Yeah. So you pity the horse that has to carry him. Yeah. He's getting very fat. He is very fat, but it's a sad fat, Tom, not a jolly fat. Oh, definitely. He's not a jolly man. No.

He's a sad fat man. He's a sad fat man because I think he can see that this is going to be really difficult. Because what options does he have? I mean, every option is bad. So Brienne and Louis get together and they, what are we going to do? They have two options. One is they could just do what everyone says and call this a states general. But the issue with that is once you open that box, one of Simon Sharma's boxes, where's it going to lead?

Will they demand more power? Will you basically be reduced to being a British constitutional monarch? And Louis doesn't really want that for obvious reasons. I mean, why would you? You'd want to keep as much power as possible. The other thing they could do is they could go back to the old traditional thing of going through these courts, these parlement, and somehow persuade or bully them into approving the new taxes. And Brienne says, look, I'll do that. So he goes to the Paris parlement, summer of 1787. How about a stamp and tax? How about a land tax, lads? And the parlement of Paris say, no way. And they reject them in groundbreaking language. They say, the days when

kings just ask for taxes are gone. Absolutism is over and the king must be governed by the law. The nation must give its consent to new taxes with regular meetings of the Estates General. And for the first time, they use a word to describe their fellow Frenchmen that had not been used before by such institutions. They don't call them subjects to the king. They call them citoyens, citizens. But the thing that's amazing about this is that it's in defense of nobles and clergy not paying tax. Yeah, it is. All this kind of language that will be used in the revolution that consumes both the church and the nobility is first being used to defend the privileges of the church and the

nobility. It is. It's bonkers, isn't it? And I think there's two things there. One is that there's a degree of self-interest, obviously. The idea that all the nobility. It is bonkers, isn't it? And I think there's two things there. One is that there's a degree of self-interest, obviously. The idea that all the nobility are like this sort of Dickensian vicomtes who are like whipping their peasants and forcing themselves on poor women and stuff. A lot of these people are actually quite liberal. They have absorbed the language of the Americans, of the American colonists, and they genuinely believe in the Estates General. They actually do like the idea of a British constitutional monarchy.

And we talked about one of them in the previous episode, Philippe, the Duke of Orléans, whose Palais Real in the centre of Paris is the great centre of free speech of the pamphlets and will be the centre for the Jacopo. Yeah, exactly. So there are people who genuinely, it's partly self-interest, but there are people, I mean, let's not pretend that there aren't people who genuinely

believe this and really do think that making a huge fuss about these taxes is a great way to get what they want in the long run, which is basically the British system, the system that had been advocated by the great Enlightenment writer Montesquieu. Let's have that in France, separation of powers, a proper legislature, prime ministers, all of that kind of stuff. Anyway, Brienne is outraged that the parliament has rejected his plan. And he now does a couple of very, very drastic things. First of all, the parliament is exiled to Troyes in August. And literally, it is sealed off by the Swiss guard, by an elite unit of the French army, and they're all basically kicked out. And the reaction to that in Paris is total bedlam.

So if you had a time machine, you went to Paris in 1787 and you got out, you would think you got the settings wrong. You got the settings wrong. Because you'd think, whoa, this is the French Revolution. Because there is rioting by the clerks. People who are giving out royal edicts are attacked by the crowd and two of them almost beaten to death a suspected police agent is beaten to death by the crowd and the government eventually has to send in infantry units to secure the streets of the capital and they end up shutting down loads of clubs and societies they even shut down chess

clubs because they don't want subversive ideas to spread and there's the real sense from 1787 from this point that the capital is dare i say a tinderbox tom i mean is it more than a tinderbox has it already slipped royal control i think to some degree it has slipped royal control actually and i think from 1787 all the way through to 1789 it's a question of trying to regain royal control and there are troops on the streets pretty much all the time. There was the queen being forbidden by the king to go into Paris. Exactly. So that's against this backdrop, isn't it?

The hostility to Marie Antoinette. So the months pass very uneasily, and then in April 1788, Brienne unveils a new plan to try and break the deadlock. And it's quite clever in a way. What he does is he will strip these courts, the parliament, of their ability to kind of police royal edicts. He will beef up the powers of the courts below them, the lower courts. They'll take over a lot of the

parliament's power. And there'll be a new court set up, a plenary court, which will approve royal taxes. And obviously he will stuff that court with his people. And the parliament will just be reduced to basically arbitrating disputes among the nobility, which is a pretty pitiful kind of thing for them to be doing. And again, there are massive riots in Paris. There's great outpouring of rage. But the interesting thing here, so much of the French Revolution story is told about Paris. And you just assume the rest of the country is being dragged along in Paris's wake. But that's not the case because the worst riots about the Brienne's Parliament plan are in places like Lyon and Aix and Dijon. So provincial capitals where having a high court

was very important to them. Yeah. I mean, it's not surprising, is it? Because we talked about how France is a much more geographically diffuse country than, say, Britain. Yeah. Well, actually, you know, I mean, it's a bit like Scotland defending its distinctiveness against London, that what makes you distinctive is incredibly important to you. Yes. Imagine the government trying to scrap the courts in Scotland and saying, let's have just one British court. I mean, imagine that, how controversial it would be. You know, or the church or whatever. Exactly.

This brings us to the city where the French Revolution begins. And it's an unexpected place, isn't it? It is. So I don't think the French Revolution begins in 1789. I think it begins in 1788. And I think it begins in Grenoble. Yeah. So justify that, Dominic. So Grenoble, city in the foothills

of the Alps, southeastern France. It calls itself the cradle of the revolution. That's how Grenoble brands itself to this day. It's a very ordinary place, which you might think

makes it a weird place for the revolution to have begun. But no, the ordinariness is the point. That is precisely why the revolution

begins in Grenoble. Grenoble is basically the capital of the province of Dauphine, a long way from Paris. Its regional distinctiveness matters to it. And there's a parliament in Dauphine, and there are loads of people associated with it, lawyers, journalists, useless writers, all of this kind of thing.

The kind of people you get on Twitter. Yeah, exactly that. People who spend all day sitting behind their computers firing off angry messages. They owe their livelihoods to that court. If it is downgraded or removed, they will lose that. Also, Grenoble is a glove-making centre. And they're very good at making gloves.

They export them all over the world to America, to Russia. But the glove-making business is in real trouble because all of these woes have led to an economic downturn and lots of people have been put out of work. So there's a lot of anger. So on Saturday, the 7th of June, 1788, the day the French Revolution begins, Brienne has his edict read out in the marketplace. It's market day. And he has troops go to basically take the parliament leaders out of Grenoble, which is what he's trying to do across the kingdom, to take them out of their centres. And the law clerks come out and they start haranguing people and shouting at people in the marketplace. This is what's happening.

Isn't this terrible? And it basically escalates from a protest to a general strike and then a huge riot. They close the city gates. They lay siege to the governor's house. The authorities send in soldiers, but not enough. People go up to the roofs of their houses and they get these tiles and they start bombarding the soldiers with tiles.

So it goes down in history as the Day of the Tiles. The soldiers, as is so predictable, they lose their cool. They start shooting. They kill a 12-year-old boy and they kill a hatter. And then the crowd go ballistic. They're parading the blooded clothes of these people around they start ringing the bells to summon peasants in from the countryside because of course because it's market day a lot of people have come in from the countryside already so they're sent sailing to

the peasants your relatives are under attack from the soldiers come and defend them quickly so people are pouring into the city. Basically, the crowd seizes. The mob seizes the city. They sack the governor's house. Tom, you'll be gutted about this. They ransacked the governor's natural history cabinet. I saw that.

And they took the stuffed eagle. Stuffed eagle. That's terrible. Yeah. I suppose you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Well, of course, as famously as has been remarked on this podcast, they do not actually make the omelette. So basically there is an intra-elite attempt to kind of grab the levers of power. But essentially that fight between the kind of rival sections of the elite has been overtaken by a mass uprising.

Yeah, it has. And actually, Simon Sharma is absolutely brilliant on this. It's one of the many, many fantastic insights in his book. And we shouldn't make this the Sharma fan cast, but he points out the judges are carried aloft by the crowd, the parliament judges. But he says it's not clear at this point. They're not the leaders of the riot.

They're kind of its trophies, a bit like the stuffed eagle, but they're also kind of its prisoners. Right. And this is something that will happen again and again. So, I mean, looking ahead, it's an experience that the royal family will soon be experiencing. Yeah. And some of the older judges are very anxious about this and end up actually leaving the city. They don't want to be associated with this. But there's a younger generation who are enthused and actually see in the disorder and the collapse of royal authority a chance to lead, to profit. And the classic example of this is a guy who I think you can argue is the first true French revolutionary leader. So he's a young judge from Grenoble and he's called Jean-Joseph Meunier. And he is just such a perfect example of a French revolutionary leader.

He's the son of a cloth merchant. He's upwardly mobile. He's 29, so he's young, as so many of them were. And he's a lawyer. They're all lawyers. They're all young lawyers. And he's really ambitious. They're basically like Athelstan members, Tom.

They're young lawyers of the Restless History Club. French revolutionaries in waiting. So he has bought the office of a royal judge and he has actually become a very, very, he's on the lowest possible rank of the nobility. And isn't that always the way, classically, in a revolution? It's not the poor, it's always the uply mobile who haven't got quite uply mobile enough. Exactly. And he sees this as a chance to jump up the ladder and to turn the ladder into his ladder. So he convenes a huge meeting on the 21st of July, 1788, outside Grenoble at the Chateau de Vizelle. The Chateau de Vizelle, if you go there today, it is the world's only museum of the French Revolution. And there's a reason for that.

Because you can argue, again, this is one of the absolute places where the French Revolution began. Well, particularly if you were the Grenoble Tourist Board. If you're the Grenoble Tourist Board, exactly. And at this meeting, he says, listen, we want free elections. We want the Estates General of Dauphine, each province to have its own Estates General. And when that meets, the third estate, the Commons, should have the same numbers as the other two estates, the Lords and the Clergy, put together. And they should all sit in one chamber, not multiple chambers like they have in Britain, lords and commons, or one chamber so that

the commons can dominate. In other words, majority rule, the general will, will dominate over the privileges of the old order. And a lot of historians say that is so groundbreaking and seismic that that is the true kickoff point for the revolution, the chain of events that will lead to the revolution. There's two other things that I think are really revealing about that meeting at Wiesel. First of all is the language is so 1793. It's all about patriotic fire, sacrifices. The law should be the expression of the general will. But the other thing is there is a darker side to it. So for the first time, these people say, we are patriots, but our opponents are traitors to the patrie and they should be treated accordingly.

Because there's a kind of incipiently totalitarian quality to saying that you are the embodiment of the nation. Definitely there is, Tom. Because if you are the embodiment of the nation, your enemies therefore aren't, and by definition are traitors. Yeah, I totally agree with you. Now, of course, you can say there's a great irony here, that actually even Meunier and his friends have not really understood what happened in Grenoble that riotous day. They think, because they've been chaired aloft by the crowd, they think they're going to control it. And they are, of course, dead wrong. And some of these people are going to end up dead, literally dead.

But I think what makes it so revealing is that it is indicative of this change in the language and the sentiment that is happening in 1788. Previously, all that stuff was about the old liberties of the French, that the government, a modernising government, is trying to squash. But in 1788, you can see that language changing, and people are now saying, let's actually do something new. Who cares about the past? We can use this opportunity to draw up a new constitution charmer gives a brilliant example of a lawyer called volney who wrote a journal

called the sentinel of the people what does it matter to us what our fathers have done or how and why they have done it the essential rights of man his natural relations to his fellows in the state of society these are the basis of any form of government. So in other words, they're going to take that, the idea of starting again, and they take the passion, the idea of virtue, all of that. And that gives them, you could argue, what Robert Danton calls a radically simplified view of politics. Well, and also, I mean, it's very contrary to the way that the constitution has evolved in Britain, where the whole point of the relationship of the monarchy to the House of Lords and the House of Commons has evolved over time and is rooted in the deep past. And so therefore, you can already

see that Britain is starting to fade as a model for the more radical proponents of a new constitution. But also what is so interesting is it is also different from the American constitution makers because the American constitution makers are slightly trapped within the British mindset. So there it's about the separation of powers. They want to ensure against a kind of mob democracy. They want to ensure against somebody having too much power. Their constitution is hedged about with kind of nuances and qualifications. The French revolutionists have no time for that.

Sharma quotes a guy who was a friend of Rousseau's called the Comte d'Entregue, who said, The people is the state itself. By the immutable laws of nature, the people is everything. Everything should be subordinated to the people. That is not how British Whig politicians spoke. It's not really how American colonists spoke. This sense of, it's very simple. There's us, the side of virtue and patriotism and liberty.

And then there's them, despotism and depredations and corruption and all of that. And traitors. And traitors. So right there, even before the fall of the Bastille, you've got the lines being drawn very starkly. Now, meanwhile, Mr. Brienne, with his pustules, the archbishop is sitting there in Versailles thinking, what on earth am I going to do?

And clearly everything is all kicked off. His plan hasn't really worked. And he says to Louis, listen, we do have to call the Estates General. We're going to have to do this. And Louis says to him, what archbishop? You must think we are lost. They might overturn the state and the monarchy. And Brienne says, I'm afraid we have no choice at all.

So in the second week of August 1788, they go public and they say, we're going to call the Estates General. We'll figure out how it will work in due course. We don't really know what the rules will be, how it will be elected, but we will call it all the same. What could possibly go wrong and then against this background a massive development on the 16th of august brienne announces they have run out of money they have been surviving all this time on loans but the royal treasury is virtually empty from now on people will be paid in ious in paper money which they don't really believe exists which they hate in other words france is bankrupt well dominic what a cliffhanger so in the next episode the estates general will be meeting the revolution will be beginning or if you accept that it's already begun in grenoble it will be continuing and if you just can't wait

to find out what happens you can hear it right now by joining the Restless History Club at therestlesshistory.com alternatively the next episode will be coming very soon

either way we'll see you then bye bye bye bye I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment It's your weekly fix

of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works We have just launched

our Members Club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com