The Rest Is History - 48. The French Revolution

Episode Date: May 3, 2021

With France facing economic struggles and rising unemployment revolution was in the air. But who was in charge of the uprising and what did it achieve? Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland storm their own podcasting Bastille. 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. To be born, or at any rate bred in a handbag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. So said Lady Bracknell in Oscar wilde's importance of being earnest an attitude towards the french revolution that has been a very popular one in britain in particular but might perhaps be considered slightly unfair with me is uh stalwart john bull

dominic sandbrook dominic so i Tom, you're Lady Bracknell. Would you agree with Lady Bracknell on that? I think, first of all, rest of history listeners will surely agree with me that you are the great lost Lady Bracknell of our time. Can you do a handbag? Can you say a handbag in that crevice way? A handbag?

Oh, my God. Is it Tom Holland or is it Margaret Thatcher? You decide. Well, so I'm kind of of Holland or is it Margaret Thatcher? You decide. Well, so I'm kind of of the Lady Bracknell school on the French Revolution. I take quite a dim... You stun me. I take a very Burkean view of it. And I think, actually, it slightly bewilders me that people, even in France, don't take a more dim view of it, given the death toll.

I mean, the death toll alone is just, frankly, astounding. You know, when you think how much fuss there is in Britain about the Peterloo massacre, and in France, you're talking about a quarter of a million people, maybe more. But your attitude wouldn't be that you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Well, they didn't make the omelette. I mean, that's the...

They just dropped them all over the floor. Yeah, they just smashed up a load of eggs. Slept up on their arse. This is quality historical punditry, isn't it? It's a shame we're doing this in the beginning of the episode. I presume we have no listeners left. Okay, well, Dominic, let's try and get some quality historical punditry here. Could you, for the benefit of those of us who may not be completely on top of the details

of how the French Revolution begins, just give us a brief kind of account of how it all kicks off? Okay, well, this is a massive topic, so it's going to be very oversimplified. But basically, France has been top nation for about 150 years. It's extremely big by European standards. It's very rich. It's very populous. And then it all kind of goes wrong. We did the Seven Years' War last week with Dan Snow. So people will know that the French lost the first sort of real global conflict to the British. And by the 1780s, France is suffering from a series of interlinked problems. Now, the French Revolution is not one event. It's a process. And it's not something that anybody plans. It's not a protest about inequality,

which people often think. And nor is it an uprising of the poor against the rich. It's none of those things. Where it comes from, I guess, is that France has got three interlinked problems. One is there's a general kind of economic depression, economic discontent. Its population has massively exploded, by far the most populous nation in Europe.

But it's got huge unemployment. There's not enough jobs for everybody. Food prices have gone through the roof. There's not enough food being produced. So in other words, you've got a lot of people, let's say in Paris, you've got a third of the population of Paris. These are kind of young people. So they're in their 20s and 30s.

They don't have a job and they don't have any food and they're cross about it and sort of discontent is rising. So that's the first thing. Second thing is that France is heavily indebted because of all these wars it's been fighting. Now, it's not the only country in Europe with debts, but it finds it's very hard to service its debts. Its tax raising system and its political system is incredibly antiquated and complicated. And the King Louis XVI can't get enough money to pay his debts. So France is basically on the verge of bankruptcy. And the third thing that compounds all that is just bad luck. They have a series of terrible harvests. There's a really, really bad weather, terrible winter in 1788-89. So people are starving on the streets.

So Louis XVI decides he's been in power for, what, 15 years or so. He's not a bad man. He's indecisive. But he's one of these monarchs from the 18th century who's kind of an enlightened figure. He wants a more modern, streamlined system. And to do do that he needs to recall something called the estates general which is this sort of french equivalent of parliament if you like there has come and there are three estates there are three estates there's an ability the clergy and the third estate which is basically everybody else and it hasn't met since 1614 and he says he needs to get them to come back to to come and meet at

versailles and the reason he needs them to meet is he needs them to come back to to come and meet at versailles and the reason he needs them to meet is he needs them to agree on a new system so that he can raise some money and basically stave off france's looming bankruptcy and sort the government out so they they all pitch up and the third estate this is where kind of enlightened ideas and stuff come in the third estate are not content to just be sort of third fiddlers, as it were. As they had been in the 17th century. Yes, they've always been outvoted by the nobility and the clergy.

They don't want to be, they basically are all these sort of lawyers and stuff who with their minds full of kind of enlightened ideas. So trouble. Yeah, so trouble for the king. They're not going to be pushed around. He basically said, you know, they fall out with the other estates. He wants to get rid of them. He thinks this has all been a terrible idea. Actually,

this isn't working out very well at all. So they all go to a tennis court at Versailles, and they swear an oath that they're not going to leave unless they get a constitution and they basically get the new system that they want. Now, that's all very political and dry. But at the same time, in Paris Paris discontent on the streets is reaching a crescendo people are starving people are angry um the Louis tries to get rid of his chief minister and at that point that sort of crowds start rioting they attack the Bastille this prison in the center of Paris that's a symbol of um royalist rule it's basically got nobody in it's got seven prisoners in it most of whom are forgers but it's sort of seen as a symbol of royalist rule. It's basically got nobody in it. It's got seven prisoners in it, most of whom are forgers.

But it's sort of seen as the symbol of royal tyranny. They attack the Bastille. The Bastille falls. There are lynchings. And at that point, even at that very early stage, I would say Louis has kind of lost control of this process that he has set in motion. He wants to reform.

He's a bit of a Mikhail Gorbachev figure, I think. He wants to reform the system and to sort it out and to modernize it. But he's done it at the worst possible time with immense sort of anger and resentment on the streets of Paris. So Paris is this sort of seething cauldron of revolutionary ferment. And at that point, the process begins to spin away from him. And then you get a series of assemblies and clubs and political factions, and the revolution then starts to sort of take its course. And there is this incredible sense throughout the whole process that people assume that it can't go any further.

So that oath in the tennis court is the 20th of June. And on the 27th of June, there's an Englishman in Paris, a guy called Arthur Young. Oh, yes. I know this quote. It's a great quote. So this is one week after. The whole business now seems over and the revolution complete. Yeah. And basically for the next, what, 10 years, maybe? I mean, you could even say the next two centuries, perhaps. People keep saying that, don't they? They keep saying the revolution is over.

Yeah, they do. And I think one of the things about the French Revolution that makes it so fun to study is that no one's in charge of it. So it's not quite like the Russian Revolution, where when Lenin comes into the story in the Russian Revolution, Lenin is clearly the mastermind and the Bolsheviks have a plan.

And the Russian Revolution is following, you know, they're responding to events the Russian revolution is following, you know, they're responding to events, but it's following, you know, they have a sort of vague sense of a blueprint. In the French revolution, there's never one person or one party that's really in control. There are a series of factions fighting constantly. And that's why the revolution keeps on, as you say, it keeps on rolling. And you think, well, it's not going to go any further, but it always does. And I think partly because war enters the equation. I think it's violent from the beginning,

but once war enters the equation, once France declares war on its neighbours and the war starts to go badly, then everything is under this sort of cloud of paranoia and anxiety and fear and stuff. Would you say that the revolution, in a sense, is a sequence of experiments? Because France has had the Ancien Régime. By definition, it's deeply entrenched. It's absolutely rooted in the fabric of French history. You get rid of it, then you have to try

and replace it with something else. So the summer of 17 of 1789 is basically i mean it's kind of an attempt to put in in process enlightenment ideals and perhaps with a nod to the the model of the the british mixed constitution so uh so you have um the uh the declaration of the rights of man and the citizen which is absolutely kind of rooted in the Enlightenment ideal. If only we follow enlightened process, then everything will be great. You have a meeting of all the nobles who furiously give away all their feudal privileges in a kind of joyous sense that this is, you know, what fun, let's get rid of this. Everything's going to be great. Well, some of them do anyway yeah yeah but the assumption is is that if you do the right thing

then everything will turn out great and then it's it it kind of turns out not to and then over as you say over the the year and a half that follows you start to move towards a republican system because actually like the english civil war it does not begin in any way with, you know, republicanism is a really, really minority interest. Yeah, that's absolutely right. So basically, nobody wants a republic in 1789. I think you're dead right, Tom. Everybody thinks they're going to get a constitutional monarchy.

The problem is Louis XVI, he doesn't really want to be a constitutional monarch. He just wants more money, basically. He wants the system to work better. But also, none of them really bargain for the fact that i think they don't bargain for the war so they don't but they they actually go into the war it's france that declares war on its neighbors but they think they're going to win i mean they they don't they never expect that the war will go against them so that radicalizes everything but also i think what these guys in paris don't get, you know, these are most of the revolutionaries, the sort of standard figures that we all,

you know, everyone's heard of, even if they don't know about the French Revolution, the sort of Robespierre types. These are very high-minded, young, very well-educated lawyers, people from kind of middle class, bourgeois families, and so on. And I think what they don't get is out in the countryside i mean france is a very big place um by european standards front and it's very rural and out in those places people don't actually really want the revolution you know they they they're things like the catholic church the revolutionists want to get rid of they like all that they just want to be better off they don't want to destroy all the world that they've grown up with but isn't it also the case that in in paris that the sans-culottes the you know the the the what i guess um lady bracknell would call the mob the mob yeah um they also are kind of they're another source of pressure and in a sense they are more important than you than what peasants are doing in the Vendee.

Absolutely. Because Paris is where it all matters. And so in a sense, increasingly, although it's the lawyers and so on who are making the running, it's people who are equivalent to people who write in The Guardian who are pushing it. Yeah.

They've kind of got a, you know, they're holding onto a wolf by its ears. Yeah. They are kind, they've kind of got a, you know, they're holding onto a wolf by its ears. Yeah, they are. I think they're, and you say about the sans-culottes, I mean, the sans-culottes are people, you know, without knee bridges. So they're sort of raggedy people. And the pressure that's coming from the streets of Paris is coming

from people who often don't have a job and who are desperate for bread. And food prices are rocketing and they want cheap bread and that's their main priority. But of course, like all, as we know with revolutions, when you have groups of quite young people who don't have a job, who are basically loitering on the streets all the time, there is almost an inbuilt sort of a ratchet,

a kind of radicalising effect. And I think a lot of these politicians are frightened of the mob and are, you know, as you say, they're trying to sort of ride the tiger and they're constantly thinking, you know, what do the mob want? What can we give them? You know, how can we harness this to our advantage? But the mob are also a kind of constant temptation because they, so there are the women who get sent off to Versailles to bring the king and queen back to Paris. So that's a kind of eruption. And then they kind of get suppressed.

And then when the king and the queen decide that they've had enough and they run off to Varennes. Yeah. And then they're brought back in disgrace. Yes. And then essentially to try and stir things up, then the mob are given their head again. Yeah. I mean, that's what the politicians keep doing, is giving the mob their head.

So the Paris Commune, the sections, as they're called, there's these sort of two parallel power structures, I guess. So there's the National Assembly, or then the Convention as it becomes, and then there's the pressure from the Commune. And the National Assembly, that's what the estates had been. So the Third Estate go off to their tennis court, and then the nobles and the priests join them,

and they all become citizens, and they all become, they are the nation in assembly. So you have a series of, I mean, anyone who's listened to this, who's done this at sort of A-level or something will know just how fiendishly complex this all is. But there's a nationalist, there's a legislative, there's a constituent assembly, a legislative assembly, and then a national convention.

But basically, you know, it's exactly that. It's kind of a big, you know, it's where we get the idea of left and right from, actually. You know, this sort of big hall, people shouting at each other, the classic kind of parliamentary model, I guess. Yes. Well, OK, so just a couple of questions here, which shows just how influential the French Revolution has been and continues to be. So there's one from Lucius. Why was the French Revolution a horrible mistake? And one from John. Why was the French Revolution the right thing to do?

Oh, there you go. Well, so what you see, I would probably say, I think the mistake is an interesting one because it's a mistake in the sense that nobody gets what they wanted. Nobody gets what they that they thought they were going to have so although in sort of 1790 or 1791 within a year or so of it of it happening of it beginning the process um there is a sort of sense at that point well maybe it's going to be all right you know maybe the national assembly is passing a lot of reforms they're sort of nationalizing

church lands okay well can i just dominic so there's a question here from Brian Williams. Could the French Revolution have been averted in 1789? Well, no, because the process, a French Revolution, was always going to happen because France... Because it had run out of money. It had run out of money. It's bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is the key fact that means that some change is going to have to be introduced.

I think so, because I think, in a way, France was the victim of its own success because it had been so successful for 200 years, basically. They hadn't needed to modernize and come up with all kinds of sort of clever financial instrument and political instruments, as for example, the Dutch Republic or Britain had. Smaller countries that had to kind of innovate to keep up with France. France hadn't needed to do that. It had this very antiquated political and economic and financial system. So they were going to have to change that at some point. The problem they had was that Louis does it and he's not very decisive.

So he doesn't really know what he wants. They're doing it at a point when he can't, you know, he doesn't have much public support because people are hungry and prices are rocketing. They've lost a lot of wars. So he doesn't have that much political capital. Dom, counter view to that i mean it isn't there is a kind of revisionist take and i absolutely not my period so i may be wrong with this but there is a kind of opinion that actually the ancien regime kind of at the at the at certain levels was reforming itself that's simon charmer's take for example very talented very able people were starting to come through and that in a sense the

the tornado of the revolution slightly threw them off course um i mean do you give credibility to that i do give a bit of credibility to that actually i think um it didn't have to unfold as disastrous as it did and the common view the sort of Dickensian view, if you like, which is of... So the view that we have in Britain of the French Revolution is sort of Charles Dickens' view that it's this complete sort of bloodbath preceded by grotesque inequality and exploitation

and all this sort of stuff. And neither of those things is quite true. So the Ancien Regime is, you know, Louis and the people around him are much more thoughtful and, I mean, less sort of ultra-reactionary than we often remember. I mean, Louis is not really a tyrant. He's just trying to do his best in a pretty difficult job. And he loves keys, doesn't he?

Does he? Yeah, keys and locks. Oh, yes, I did know something about this. Because he was having problems consummating his marriage. Yes, he did. That's right, yeah. He had some sort of gynecological issues, if that's not the right word. I think he had a problematic foreskin.

Yeah, I think that's that. To be resolved by surgery. But also Marion Swinette, she gets a dreadful press. Okay, well, Dominic, you have mentioned Simon Sharma, who, of course, Citizens is, it was Anglophone historiography's contribution to the Bicentennial celebrations. And Citizens famously basically said it was violent right from the beginning.

But we have a question from Simon Sharma. That's very gratifying. Which is kind of embarrassing, isn't it? Yeah. No pressure. But he asks, why was the revolution so brutal to women? I guess in a sense, I mean, look at it in the general, but the figure of Marie Antoinette is kind of paradigmatic in this.

Yeah. Well, he writes about this himself. I mean, he knows the answer to this question, I'm sure. But when I thought about it, he's absolutely right. The French Revolution, there are sort of a handful of very famous women associated with it. Marie Antoinette, executed.

Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Marat, executed. Madame Roland, who has this literary salon, executed. Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Marat, executed. Madame Roland, who has this literary salon, executed. And Olly de Gouges, feminist. Yes, who pushes the citizens' death and the rights of women and the citizens' death. Yeah, exactly. Also executed. So basically, if you're a notable woman in the French Revolution,

you're going to end up dead. But these women, and marion toinette they are the victims of intense misogyny so marion toinette has been lampooned in all these pamphlets for sort of 20 years or so really scatological pornography yeah i was about to say really scatological pornographic pamphlets incredibly vicious i mean she's very there's no doubt she's very extravagant and she's very conservative. She's an Austrian princess. But is she? Because based on my viewing of Sofia Coppola's classic starring Kirsten Dunst,

which when my daughters were growing up was their go-to film, it was their favourite film. So Marie Antoinette for them was a kind of real icon and i think oddly that film is kind of true to the sense of marie antoinette as this kind of rousseauist figure that she's all about um leading her life naturally living her own truth while also keeping hold of the uh you know all the privileges of um of monarchy. So there is a slight kind of Meghan quality. Oh, God, that's harsh.

But I think Marion Twinnett deserves better. She wants her cake. And eats it very nicely. Well, she famously doesn't say. She absolutely... Which she didn't say, yes, I know. Howard Rogers says, what kind of cake should we let them eat? But this is Rousseau's line. Rousseau came up with this line.

It says the story that a princess had once said, let them eat cake. But he said that before Maritza and I had even come to France. So she never says that. You are like her, aren't you? She does have this nice little farm in her palace where she goes and pretends to be a milkmaid and stuff. But that's absolutely standard for an 18th century aristocrat. Her little farm is no more extravagant than anybody else's. But I think it is slightly different, because I think that a French queen is expected

to behave in a kind of more formal or austere, certainly subordinate and submissive role. And Marie Antoinette is kind of very, very influenced by the cult of sensibility. So she's hugely into, you know, Rousseau's novels and Richardson and all that kind of stuff. But also, Tom, I think that women queens, you see this so often in history. You see it with, you know, Alexandra, with Nicholas II's wife in Russia. You see it with Henrietta Maria, with Charles I's wife in England in the 1630s and 40s. So often the figure of the foreign queen becomes this kind of lining rod. And people project all this stuff onto the queen. Well, she's Austrian, isn't she?

And Austria is the hereditary enemy. Yeah, exactly. So she's the Austrian whore. And people say of her, you know, she's brought in these Germanic sexual practices, by which they mean lesbianism, which is a complete myth and a complete invention. But they use this as a stick with which to beat her. So I think women do get a generally a very rough ride in the french revolution but all of them so even um so so madame du barry who was louis the 15th's

mistress i mean she gets guillotined uh marie antoinette obviously um and as you say madame roland yeah and all of them get accused of kind of obscene sexual practices they do and even i tell you a terrible thing so marion's best friend is one called the process de lambal oh yeah and the september massacres in 1792 so this is when france is is is losing the war they think um the prussians are going to arrive at any moment in paris so what should we do i know what we'll do we'll go through the prisons and kill everybody but but dominic that's an example isn't it, of basically people within the convention saying, let's unleash hell.

Let's unleash hell. Yeah, no, exactly. And they go through and they drag out the Frances de Lamballe and there are various different accounts. Some of them may be sensationalised. But there's no doubt she was hideously murdered. She's mutilated. Her head is cut off.

They take her head to a barber's and have the barber do the hair they take the head around paris kind of cafes then they stick it on a spike and they hoist it outside marion's window let's look at what we've done to your friend who you are supposedly um been having a lesbian affair with and and you i don't think anyone can hear this story without thinking there is a charge here a really unpleasant charge that there wouldn't be with a man and of course one of the people who uh was kept in the bastille although he's moved a few days before it gets stormed is the marquis de sade and yeah there is a kind of um background to all of this which again feeds into the idea of the aristocrat as as kind of a demonic pervert it's you know there's also Dangerous Liaisons, Le Clos and everything. This image of

scheming aristocrats who view torture and sexual sadism as a source of pleasure is a really powerful part of the kind of swirl of attitudes and assumptions that is making up

the propaganda and the climate is making up the propaganda and the climate of opinion at the time. Isn't there a case, Tom, that the people who are directing the revolution in its bloodiest phase, in the phase known as the Terror, 1793-4, these are young men, very young men. I mean, there are virtually none who are older than their mid 30s so they're very young men they're staying up late they're tanked up on wine they you know there aren't any women around and there's a there's a lot of kind of surging unfocused energy there

which is expressing itself in exceedingly violent you know these are blokes who would be better off settling down with a nice woman. That's my take on the French Revolution. Okay, well, talking of unfocused energy, I wonder whether we shouldn't perhaps just take a break here, draw our breath, and when we come back,

perhaps focus on the terror and Saint-Just and Robespierre, which obviously for English students of the French Revolution is always the kind of the most dramatic and I will love that. Let's do that. 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,

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Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking about the French Revolution and we're arriving at the terror, which of course for fans of Dickens, fans of Carlyle, fans of the Carry On films, is what it's all about. Carlyle and the Carry On films, you don't often hear them in the same breath. We've talked about the execution of the famous women

in the French Revolution revolution of whom marion trinette of course is the most famous we should probably look at um louis the 16th because in a sense his execution kind of removes the prop that has held up the entire system of french government for centuries and centuries and centuries and in a sense it's the removal of the monarchy that then leaves everything open, isn't it? Yeah, it is. And I think once you get the removal of the monarchy, then the focus turns to... I mean, one thing we haven't really talked about

is the nation, the idea of the nation, which I think is really created by the French Revolution. So the nation is in the kind of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Well, it's there in the oath of the tennis court, isn't it? I mean, the very idea of setting up a national assembly for the nation exactly then the nation becomes sovereign not the king i don't want to give you a kind of too much of a gift but obviously this idea of the

nation being sacred um and once you've not going to take that and once you've taken the king out of the equation then the nation which is this big sort of amorphous ideal um becomes the focus and i think you're right that, you know, that also happens when the war is going on. So France is under siege. And at that point, there is this, you get this intense radicalisation, I think, as the search for enemies within to explain why things are going,

scapegoats. So Robespierre, for example, he says, you know, he was against the death penalty. Would you believe Robesp rob spear before the terror is one of his most famous things was he was he was against capital punishment he thought so was so was dr guillotine yeah dr well he just he didn't invent the guillotine he just wants them to do it because he thinks it's cleaner and he didn't want executions at all but he thought that if we've got to have them we might as well have a yeah so and he's the guy who who takes him into who leads them into the tennis court.

Is he? I did not know. That is a good fact. So everything fits together. It's a great conspiracy, right? It's the Freemasons, isn't it? So anyway, Rob Spear, he basically says, Louis must die so that the nation can live.

So, you know, there's almost this sort of great sacrificial moment. But once you've sacrificed one person and it's not working out, then you maybe need to sacrifice some more. And I think this is what happens. They just start feeding people into the more of the guillotine, if the guillotine can be a more. And things don't go well. And so Rob Spear, for example, he thinks, you know,

we want a pure, virtuous, republican France. And so we just need to keep getting rid of people until we find it. Well, there's that famous cartoon, isn't there, of Rose Pierre with guillotines in the background, and he is executing the executioner. And he's executed everybody else in France, guillotining the last person in France. Yes, that's right. Guilting the last person in France. I mean, this is exactly... So, I think this is the thing about the French Revolution that actually makes it linger in the imagination. It's not that they are just executing aristocrats and their enemies

because that's kind of understandable. It's that they're executing each other. And they're not really executing aristocrats, are they? No. I mean, per se... Loads of the aristocrats have fled. They've gone. But there are aristocrats who hang around and you know that's well i mean actually here's a great question um from uh brecht um saval call who asks who is the closest modern equivalent of philippe egalite and why is it prince harry so philip egalitate the former duke of orleans the

cousin of of louis the 16th himself who actually votes i mean he's he's he's a he's a citizen in the and and the trial of louis and votes to have him yeah so he is a terrible man and he is prince harry he um he votes for his own cousin's execution. And he's kind of more Republican than the Republicans. I mean, that's his thing. He changes his name. Imagine changing your name. I mean, we live in a country. Lots of people do.

Yeah, well, we live in a country that now has, don't we now have in Birmingham, isn't there sort of equality, close, diversity way and all this kind of thing? It's only a matter of time before Prince Harry renames himself kindness or something, isn't it? But also in this, I mean, you know, I think we're being slightly harsh because you were casting it all as kind of blood and hypocrisy. Yeah. I mean, there are also hugely positive ideals here, perhaps exemplified by the way in which people are looking to the heroism of the Roman past. Well, if you want to go down that road,

I mean, you clearly do. Heroic figures who are ready to sacrifice themselves for the nation, for the patria, for la patrie. Yeah. Do you find that noble? I think that both Saint-Just, who is clearly the coolest and most terrifying of all the French revolutions.

But I mean, kind of rock star glamour to him. Well, he's in his very early 20s, isn't he, when it all kicks off? I mean, he's a very young man. But all the Jacobins are, when they say that they are motivated by virtue, they are motivated by virtue. But that's what makes them terrifying, though, Tom. That they're not corrupt. I was thinking about this with rob sphere when

this morning when i knew we were going to be in the podcast i was thinking what is it about him that makes him such a disturbing figure which i think he is and it is that he's not vladimir putin he's not he's not a corruptible a cold-blooded autocrat he's a cold-blooded high-minded do-gooder and that's what i think people find so resonant about him that he is the paradigmatic example of what happens when you have somebody who basically says i'm going to fix society i'm going to clean terror yeah dominic terror is nothing but prompt severe inflexible justice it is therefore an emanation of virtue is that robespierre that's robespierre yeah yeah he is i mean he is pushing to the limits a sense of how radically can you pull down what you see as being corrupt and evil and how readily can you put something in its place? There's a lesson here for the National Trust.

Well, I mean, because we were talking about culture wars, I mean, in a sense, there is a kind of all that, you know, reminding people that great buildings, you know, there is no monument of civilization that is not also a monument of barbarism yeah uh that that concept i mean the moment you you get rid of the you abolish the monarchy not just because the monarch is inadequate but because the very institution of monarchy is a barbarous legacy of superstition and oppression then you have to you you you have to go flat out not just against the king,

but against the entire institution. So revolutionaries head off to Saint-Denis, which was the kind of Westminster Abbey of French royalty. And they dig up all the bodies of the kings and queens and put them in a lime pit and dissolve them. And I think the only one that got away was Henry IV. Right. I wonder why. So they kept his head because I think he was a bit of a culture hero. And the only other one was some reason the heart of Louis XIV was preserved. And it got taken to England where it got eaten by William Buckland,

who was the Dean of Westminster, who also named the first dinosaur. And he liked to eat everything he could. And he came across this and got told it's the heart of a French king. And he ate it. That's the best fact I think we've ever had on the rest of history. Yeah, well, you're welcome. You're welcome. But it's slightly diverted.

But anyway, so there's an aim to humiliate and downgrade the figure of Louis himself. So he gets shorn on the scaffolding. He gets treated just like anyone else. His body gets taken away, put in a rough coffin. Again, the kind of lime gets put on it so that none of his remains will be left. The same happens to the memorials of the kings. All the statues get pulled down. But you also have the same process happening with the church, which likewise is seen as a bastion of feudalism and superstition so kind of a a kind of

revolutionary equivalent of the dissolution of the monasteries it's exactly that isn't it but it's also it's also tom this this obsession with rationalism and uniformity isn't it because it's not just that they do all that. They're renaming, changing the calendar, you know, moving to sort of, don't they try to move to a 10-day week? But also the metric system. The metric system. Which, of course, you could view as being

perhaps the most enduring act of legislation passed by. I think you can definitely argue that. I think the metric system, the new names for all the months, obviously, which don't catch on, the kind of uh termidor and uh prairie and brumaire and all that sort of thing so it's basically this remaking the world from year zero i mean obviously year one of the revolution year two of the revolution and and i'm you've shown great self-restraint and not mentioning

robs you know where we're going i do do. Rob's there in the Supreme Being. I do. Well, I've hugely resisted the temptation to quote Ernst Bloch's famous comment on the French Revolution that it is the Christian event par excellence because it is invoking all kinds of Christian ideas of new beginnings. So just we date our years from the incarnation. The French revolutionaries wanted to cast their revolution as an event of a kind of similar epical significance. And their attitude towards kind of, you know, an apocalyptic day of judgment, the last being first,

the first being last, it's all kind of, it's all written in there. But you're right. Essentially, what Robespierre wanted to do was to absolutely commit to the idea of reason as being the supreme being. And so Notre Dame is converted into a shrine for the supreme being. And it's a bit like Akhenaten, I guess. I mean, that's the thing that most reminds me of. That's a good comparison. So Akhenaten pulling down the statues of the traditional gods

and enshrining this rather kind of bloodless deity in their place that people emotionally couldn't connect with. And Dominic, this is one for you as a Tolkien fan. Do you know what the image, the favoured image that Rosepear had for the supreme being is it a tree?

no it's a disembodied eye oh wow but that's quite a sort of Freemasonish thing isn't it that's sort of lurking around in the 18th century I mean that festival of the supreme being I can remember, we did the French Revolution

at school when I was about 12, and that was the thing that stuck in my mind that it happens in the middle of the terror. So they basically take a break. Robespierre is signing hundreds of death sentences.

I think he signed something like 600, between 500 and 600. And he basically takes a day off in the middle of this to go and inaugurate this festival of this sort of

slightly made-up god god in which he's wearing this special new sky blue coat that he's very proud of and he's got a sash and actually a lot of his colleagues are laughing at him and they're they're sort of muttering behind their hands at him you know this you know he's loving this he's gone a bit mad and it's one of those moments where actually although it's his apotheosis the the mood is kind of slipping away from him a bit there because he looks ridiculous to some of the others they don't go along i'm not sure that i mean i i think that um kind of lurking behind it is is and forgive me for saying this but it's the kind of the the book of revelation the idea that an end time has come where sheep and the goats are being divided, great spectacles of blood, but also of building a new Jerusalem.

And that's essentially what, in secular terms, in rational terms, Robespierre is trying to do. But he's also doing it, though, Tom, at a time when you can't forget they're doing it at a time when the Prussians are almost at the gates. They're coming closer all the time. So it's not just that he thinks he's building New Jerusalem, but he thinks that the people who surround him. So he thinks a lot of his colleagues are actually secret British agents who are working for William Pitt. So there's this sort of weird paranoia.

That's not just a kind of religious paranoia, but it's also they know that. A genuine paranoia. Yeah. Well, they know that thereia yeah yeah well they know that there are lots of thousands of men out to kill them you know a couple of hundred miles away yeah okay well here's a question from fergal o'shea who asked why did rose pierre unlike stalin lose control of his purge both purge left a bear kamenev zinoviev and right danton bukarin but rose pierre ended up purged himself. Oh, Stalin is a much more

potent political figure than Robespierre is. I mean, Stalin plans everything very cold-bloodedly and is very pragmatic and knows exactly what he's doing. Robespierre I don't think quite knows what he's doing. Robespierre is suffused with this idea of virtue, but also Robespierre makes a series of hideous tactical mistakes.

So he does this thing just before they get rid of him, where he basically goes to the convention. He gives a speech saying he's going to clamp down on his new set of enemies, but he doesn't say who they are. So everybody thinks, well, is it me? Could be me, yeah. Yeah, I think we should get rid of him because it's probably going to be me. And that's just a mad...

I mean, I think at the end, Rob Spear was... He'd lost... He's working 23-hour days or something. They've completely lost... These are guys who five years earlier were just provincial lawyers who are suddenly faced with this collapsing economy, this country in revolution, large parts of the country rising up against them.

He's trying to bring in a new religion. He's trying to rename the calendar. He's trying to control prices and fight a war. And it's all just too much. But as David Nielsen reminds us with his comment, could the role of alcohol be said to be critical in the revolution, not simply among the people, but in the Committee of Public Safety? I've heard their bar bill was shocking.

So they're all off their faces. I mean, they're pissed off their heads. Yeah, I think they probably are. Although it's weird. So, Danton is the most sort of, the biggest sort of gourmand. He eats and drinks, you know, for France. Well, he's played by Gérard Depardieu in the great film. Brilliantly, by Gérard Depardieu.

And there's a scene where he and Robespierre go for a meal, a reconciliation meal, and Robespierre is horrified by Danton stuffing himself with pies and oysters or something. And Danton is saying, he's saying, mange, Maxime, mange, trying to encourage him to eat. And Robespierre won't do it. But in reality, the Montagnard,

so Robespierre and his crowd, held Danton's overeating against him. They thought it was counter-revolutionary and unpatriotic and a sign of his sort of, that he must be working for William Pitt. Yes, he was shoveling him British beef. Yeah. On the side. Yeah, and they called the mountain, aren't they?

Because they're on the top. Top benches. The top seats, the top benches. Yeah, yeah. I always distrust people who sit at the top in a lecture theatre because I think they probably have dangerously... Revolutionary terrorist tendencies. Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so the story of how Robespierre falls, I mean, it's a horrible one, isn't it? Because it involves a hanging jaw. So his jaw, yeah, horrible histories has a lot of fun with this. So they turn against Robespierre. He gives this disastrous speech. He's heckled in the convention. A lot of the other deputies,

and it's not just a right-wing reaction. There's a lot of people on the left. There are actually people who are bigger on the terror than he is, who think he's, you know, I've got to get him before he gets me. So there's this sort of turn against him. They go to arrest him. He decides he's never used a gun before in his life.

I mean, he's basically, you know, he's such a kind of guardian reading type he's never handled a firearm he doesn't but he's he doesn't know what he's doing he tries to blow his head off he kind of it's unclear what happens but he basically blows half his jaw off and it's hanging it has to be bandaged on and so that when they take him be beheaded, the executioner pulls off the bandage and his jaw kind of falls off and he gives this terrible animal shriek before they behead him. And then they behead him and then that's the end of him.

But you know, the weird thing, Tom, is that for most of the 20th century, the main chair in French Revolution history, the Sorbonne, was occupied by people who were Robespierre fans. So French historiography in the 20th century, a lot of it was a kind of defense of Robespierre and the Jacquemin and the terror. And actually, it was only in the 1980s that people really started to fight against that and say, well, actually, maybe the terror was a bad business. Well, there's another question here from Chet Archbold, who has sent in a question before. What do you make of the view, which I guess is the Simon Sharma view, that the violence

was inherent to the revolution right from the beginning? So that's a key question, isn't it, really? Yeah. Was it always going to end up with guillotines? This is your Margaret Thatcher versus François Mitterrand question, isn't it? So I thought we talked about this in a previous episode about how when they have the big Span-Bicentenary,

everybody else turns up and talks about human rights. And she turns up and she gives Mitterrand, did she give him a leather-bound copy of A Tale of Two Cities? Yes, she did. She did. But you know, equally what Mitterrand said about the revolution in in

1989 was that he admired it because it was still feared wow that's like you talking about tony blair yes um um no no no i mean so but but you know and and still in french politics now there because in 1793 it's legislated that the the French people have not just the right, but kind of the responsibility to launch insurrections if the revolution is being portrayed. And you will still, you know, in the Gilets Jaunes, people were citing that as a justification for what they're doing. It's remembered completely differently in France, weirdly, despite the fact that it was so traumatic and that so many tens and hundreds of thousands of people died, it's remembered, you know, there are more French Revolution partisans in France than in Britain. So in Britain, the tendency has been to emphasize the violence.

And Simon Sharma in his book Citizens, one reason a lot of people in France hated it was because Sharma said violence was the motor of the revolution. The revolution was violent from day one. And I think he's completely right. And I think Chet Archibald is right. So the Stormy of the Bastille, you know, a lot of people die in the Stormy of the Bastille. And the governor of the Bastille,

who's basically this completely inoffensive, mid-ranking officer. You're defending the governor of the Bastille. What, Governor Delaney? You're such a counter-revolutionary, Dominic. Honestly, when the guillotine gets set up in Trafalgar Square. There are only seven people in the Bastille, so they drag him out,

and everybody's stabbing him and punching him and stuff. He's basically being lynched by this crowd, and he lashes out and he kicks a pastry cook in the groin. Then the pastry cook stabs him to death, and a butcher comes along and uses a knife to sort of saw his head off, and the crowd are all cheering and whooping and stuff. I mean,

robust political discourse, Dominic. By any standards, you wouldn't see this in the streets of Northampton, Tom, and you know it. Well, chipping Norton,

perhaps. Okay. Well, here's another counter-revolutionary question from Thoughtfully Detached, who I think is definitely a counter-revolutionary. The inheritors of the revolution have done their best to wipe the events in the Vendée out of the record books. Do both the brutality of the assault against the Vendéeans and their subsequent erasure

from history reveal essential truths about the French revolutionary project? So the Vendée is this kind of murderous civil war that's going along on in the Atlantic seaboard. Yes, in the West Front, the rural Catholic royalist. Yes, yes. And the repression is very, very, I mean, it's very brutal. It's basically near genocidal. I mean, there's no doubt about that.

I mean, just try and think of an analogy, Tom. Take your beloved Wiltshire. I mean, imagine, you know, there would have been some revolution like that in Britain and that then London has sent out troops to go and pacify Wiltshire and Dorset and they said oh basically

they're not really signed up to the project so I think we should just kill them all I mean that's effectively what happens in the Vendee so the people still argue about the death toll

but you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people and somewhere like Nantes people are being I mean they have mass drownings

not even mass shootings in the Loire don't they in the Loire yeah put them in cages and drop them in I mean really they have mass drownings. Yeah. Not even mass shootings. In the Loire, don't they? In the Loire, yeah. Put them in cages and drop them in. I mean, really horrific stuff. And actually, you know, for all the talk of the sort of the rights of man stuff, I mean, if your rights of man stuff is predicated on the fact you're going to have to drown a lot of people in cages, I mean. Okay, but so the fall of Rose Pierre and the crushing of the Vendée, I mean, that's not the end of the revolutionary process.

No, it keeps going. I mean, in 1795, so that's the year after the fall of Rose Pierre, there is talk of restoring the monarchy. Yeah, they're always royalist plots. Yeah, but it's not just that. I mean, because they've got Louis XVII. So this poor boy who's the son of Louis and Marie Antoinette, who's been brought up by an illiterate cobbler. And they're thinking, well, we could make him king because then he'd be a kind of, you know,

that's basically what they want, isn't it? They want a cipher. They want to kind of puppet on the throne. You know, that would be an ideal constitutional monarch. And then you build everything around it. But then he dies and they're stuck with the guy who become louis the 18th who's this huge reactionary yeah yeah stuffing his face in gilford isn't it or something yeah he's i mean he's a man who basically says let's turn back the clock to 1500 or something i mean not an not not an

inspiring model of what reaction might be he's a a sort of Daily Telegraph columnist figure, I think. So you've got the reactionaries, you've got the counter-revolutionaries, you've got the royalists. They're a part of the mix. You've also got, in 1797, a guy who's been described as perhaps the first communist, who's a man known as Babouf. Oh, yeah, Babouf, yeah. But you know, he was originally called François Noël yeah but you know his his he was originally called froswan

noel but you know what he changed his name to oh so good i've been so tempted to do this myself he changed his name to camillus gaius gracchus wow well that's the gracchi the gracchi were were kind of famous roman aristocrats who um were murdered by the roman elite for basically trying to stick up for the people so that you have this this journalist who's identifying himself with um with with dead roman aristocrats but who essentially is calling for a communist revolution yeah he's he's he's saying everything must be held in common and i think i mean no one's going to back he's never going to get any no of course not but but i mean it's it's a it's a sign of just how many points of view how many ideologies how many um people are involved in the kind of swirl of ideas and how much how how kind of plastic it is

how moldable it still is and i guess right right the way up to i mean the guy we haven't talked about but who who's whose shadow increasingly stretches over this conversation as we move forwards, which is that of Napoleon. Yeah. So Napoleon is a revolutionary officer. He suppresses a royalist plot, a royalist uprising with the famous whiff of great shot. He sort of comes to the fore in the late 1790s

as a sort of leading the Republican armies in Italyaly and so on um and it's clear i think that you know maybe the analogy is sort of 1990s russia or something that the modern yeah that he's he's a guy who's been thrown up but who but in the sort of the course of events is great becomes a great hero because of his military conquest but there is a craving for stability but you know there's another But there's another more obvious historical parallel. But it's going to be a Roman one. It is a Roman one because the whole history, you know, the story of Rome is that you have a king, you expel the king, you establish a republic. The republic implodes amid blood and anarchy.

And then an imperial, you know, a warlord a caesarist comes in and establishes his rule and then he ends up losing to barbarians who've crossed the rhine and that essentially is the story from 1789 to 1815 yeah germanic barbarians very nice yeah wow the whole span of roman history is compressed into it but of course that's how they thought of it themselves tom of course it is i mean they are they're basically sort of roman republic reenactors who absolutely and that's that's the kind of amazing thing so you wonder you know to what extent is this obeying some kind of natural rhythm of history and to what extent is it all one enormous bloody cosplay it's it's a kind of really interesting question well of course marx thought there was a law of history didn't he thought bonapartism was bound to emerge from this sort of bourgeois

revolution um but i think uh the one thing about napoleon is not i think it's a mistake to think napoleon turning the clock back from the revolution because of course a lot of those sort of things about rationalism about uniformity about a kind of liberalism. Napoleon incarnates those things. And he is exporting revolutionary ideals across Europe. Just he's doing it in quite an authoritarian and corrupt way. Yes. And also, of course, there is one obvious major moral blot on this scoochingon as a a kind of liberal reformer which is cited by ollie nichols um who mentions events in haiti yes yeah so yeah that's and actually a part of the french revolution i think will become even you know become bigger and bigger in the next few decades

because we're much more conscious of this side of the story so you're right the haitian revolution breaks out in the 1790s in response to what's been happening in France. And Napoleon, have you read that book Black Spartacus about Toussaint Louverture, one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution? And I remember this quote from that stuck in my mind. Napoleon says the sort of blacks are rising up against the whites. I'm against the blacks because I'm white. I mean mean it's completely sort of unashamed about it yeah and one of the things

that the revolution the french revolution generally disrupts actually is france's is france's kind of imperial project so france loses you know the the french ports sort of bordeaux and so on they had traded in slaves they had traded in sugar and coffee and rum and things like that. And actually Napoleon goes to visit them after he becomes emperor. And he's horrified at how quiet the keys are because they're not trading in them anymore because of the Caribbean uprising and so on. And he wants to turn the clock back. He wants to rebuild France.

And that's why he wants to get rid of the Haitian revolutionaries. Although when he then escapes from Elba and comes back while all the various plenipotentiaries are in Vienna trying to draw up their new plan and Lord Castlereagh is pushing for abolitionism there, Napoleon suddenly comes out as an abolitionist as well. So I think on the issue of slavery, he is very shameless. I always think, I don't know what you think about this, Tom. I don't think we should have a separate one on Napoleon, but I think people who like Napoleon are like people who like Frank Sinatra's My Way. Okay, well. Don't you? No, I don't think.

I think they're people who look in the mirror and say to themselves, one day I shall be world king. You know who I'm thinking of. Listen, yes, I do. I think, however, that to look at the French Revolution in the global context. Yeah. So we've got a question from Diego Morgado, who's an enthusiast for the French Revolution. One of the most important events in world history.

I mean, yes, I think. Definitely. Don't you? Yeah, I suppose so. I suppose so. Yeah. yeah from left to right divide declaration of human rights rejection of monarchy and ability and religion there was a before and after even influenced places like Persia and China am I right I think he is right I think he is absolutely right and I think that the impact of the French revolution isn't just about the terror

and kind of bloody warnings it is also about um enshrining ideas of human rights. It is about republicanism. It's about the idea that hidebound ideas can be banished with the light of progress and reason. And that these ideas, although the French Revolution kind of serves as a warning, and I think that the French Revolution definitely cranks up the fires of reaction to it. It does also serve as an inspiration. And that in that sense, what you talked about left and right being on either side of the president of the assembly, the French Revolution serves to set the political contours of not just European politics, but global politics for the centuries that have followed it. And that

is what makes it so seismically important. Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth in that. I mean, obviously, one reason why people love it so much is it's just a great melodrama. I mean, it's a fantastic story. But I also think, I mean, I think you could argue though, Tom, I mean, to sort of make my expected contribution, I think you could argue the French Revolution retards progress, because it tarnishes the idea of progress. And it certainly does in Britain and in the sort of English-speaking world. There is this, I mean, British reactionaries use it

throughout the whole 19th century as this sort of terrible... I think in Europe as well. Well, I think it's got so much traction in Britain because of Burke. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, which is this colossal... I mean, it's the foundational text of conservatism. But basically, if you start messing with the system as it exists,

you will end up in a complete nightmare of... And the thing that makes it so powerful is that Burke wrote that before the terror. So he was right. He was proved right. And people have taken that ever since as the ultimate justification of conservatism. But I think there's an interesting parallel with the Reformation, where the Reformation obviously gives birth to Protestantism.

But there is also an argument for saying that it gives birth to Catholicism in the sense that we understand it today. And in the same way, conservatism, royalism, reaction, after 1789, is a very different beast to the Ancien Régime. It exists as a reaction to the revolution, just as much as the politics on the left is a kind of natural progression from it. So in that sense, I think the French Revolution absolutely deserves its reputation as the great event of modern history. Do you think more than the, because we had a few questions, I can't, oh yes, Joseph Ruiz, he says, is it more important than the American Revolution?

Yes, massively. I mean, it's much more important than the American Revolution, isn't it? Absolutely. I've got a quote here from David Bell. Astonishingly, not once in the early years of the French Revolution does a single political figure seem to have quoted the American Declaration of Independence. Yeah, but that's because I think the American Revolution wasn't seen beyond America as a revolution. It was seen as a breakaway, but it's not a revolution in the same way, is it? I don't think so. It's a debate among Anglophones about Anglophone traditions,

whereas the French one, French revolution really does go kind of global. Anyway, I think that we have talked, well, we haven't talked enough about the French revolution. We could, we could talk about it for hours.

I know. I'm looking at all the questions we haven't handled. I feel ashamed. I feel ashamed of myself. Yeah. Many apologies. I mean, maybe we can come back to it.

There's so much more to, to talk about. God knows. I mean, we can come back to it in 2037 or something. I'm so optimistic about the future of the podcast. That's great. Yeah, of course.

Year zero. So many thanks for listening. Having talked about the French Revolution in this podcast, our next podcast will be on the subject of british food which is kind of hurrah the roast beef would approve but yeah so many thanks for listening and we will see you then i hope bye-bye au revoir Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community,

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