The Rest Is History - 481. The French Revolution: The Women's March on Versailles (Part 7)

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

By the summer of 1789 the different sections of the Revolution were at loggerheads, and the recently created National Assembly riven in two. Both factions, the radicals on the left and the more moderate revolutionaries on the right, upheld different interpretations of how the new system of governance, so firmly rooted in the idea of ‘la nation’, should be organised, particularly as concerned the authority of the King and the power of his veto. Tensions mounted, with many opposed to the idea of even a constitutional monarchy, and disgusted by the National Assembly’s willingness to treat with Louis XVI. None more so than the citizens of Paris, who progressively came to embody an amorphous but growing sense of ‘the people’. By July, there was a widespread feeling that some sort of violence would inevitably break out in the city against the royal family, thanks in part to the rising bread prices. The form it took in October of that year would prove more dramatic than any could have foreseen. After a lavish banquet in Versailles, an outcry began building in the marketplaces of Paris, with a swelling contingent of peasant women decrying the hunger of their children, and blaming it upon the Queen and the vampires of the court. Then, in a move that would change the fate of France and particularly Marie Antoinette forever, the army of women marched on and entered the palace… Join Tom and Dominic as they describe one of the most terrifying and savage events of the entire French Revolution: the Women’s March on Versailles, which saw the queen - barefoot and sobbing - hostage to a head-hacking mob that clamoured for her entrails. _______ *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. The King left at noon. The heads of the two bodyguards led the procession on pikes. Following them were 40 to 50 members of the bodyguard on foot and unarmed, escorted by a body of men armed with sabres and pikes. After that came two of the bodyguard wearing high boots with neck wounds, blood-stained shirts and torn garments. Each was held by two men in the national uniform with

drawn swords in their hands. Further back, one could see a group of the bodyguard mounted on horses, some riding pillion and others in the saddle with a member of the national guard riding behind them. They were surrounded by men and women who compelled them to shout Vive la Nation! and to eat and drink with them. A mixed bag of pikemen, Swiss guards, soldiers of the Flanders Regiment, women plastered with cockades and carrying poplar branches, and other women sitting astride on the guns, came before and after the king's coach. Every musket was wreathed in oak leaves in token of the victory, and there was a continual

discharge of musketry as the people cried, We are bringing the baker, Mrs. Baker and the baker's boy, slogans of gross insult to the queen and threats against priests and the nobles. Such was the procession, barbarous and criminal, that surrounded the king, the queen and the royal family on the six-hour drive to the Hôtel de Ville. So that was the Marquis de Ferrières, Charles-Élie de Ferrières, no less, who we met a couple of episodes ago. He was a diplomat, an aristocrat, and a delegate to the Estates General. And this is his account, Tom, of the October days, a truly shocking moment in French monarchical history, certainly a very traumatic moment for Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. It's the moment when they are effectively dragged by a mob from the Palace of Versailles.

Well, Dominic, a mob, or depending on your perspective, revolutionaries burning with a zeal for liberty. Yeah, it sounds like it, doesn't it? All the neck wounds, the people eating and drinking, shouting. But he's an aristocrat. I mean, obviously, this is the whole point. Perspectives on this differ quite radically. They do differ.

And so we're joined by Rob Spier himself, Tom Holland. So, Tom, this is one of the great set piece moments, not just in French history, but in all European history, isn't it? The humiliation of the king and queen by this group, either as you would say, of tenderhearted representatives of the people or slavering beasts from the slums and sewers,

depending of course on the way you frame it. So the baker, Mrs. Baker and the baker's boy, they're the king, the queen, and the dauphin. Who's what, five? Something like that? Yeah, something like that. So they effectively, from this point onwards, they are prisoners of the revolution held in captivity. Yes. You could argue this is the great turning point in the story of the revolution? I think certainly for the king and queen, it's a much more significant turning point than the storming of the Bastille. And it's clearly a massive turning point in the history of the revolution. But you could equally argue that it is drawing a line under a whole series of measures and developments that have been happening over the previous months. It's a kind of logical conclusion to what's been happening. So just to remind listeners of what those developments are,

the Bastille stormed on the 14th of July. And then that August of 1789, you have the revocation of feudal privileges where all the aristocrats and abbots and people stand up and renounce all their various perks. And that's passed on the 11th of August. And then on the 26th of August, approval is given in the National Assembly for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which is what we were talking about in yesterday's episode. But what we kind of briefly touched on, but didn't really explore, is the way that the Declaration of the Rights of Man, just on the ideological level, it raises as many questions as it answers. And there are definitely those in the National Assembly, but also more broadly in Paris, who feel it does not go far enough. So what we didn't talk

about yesterday, which I'm sure lots of our particularly female listeners will have been wondering, is what about the rights of women and the citizeness? And that is a topic that we'll be looking at later. Essentially, there is quite, I think, a misogynist tone to revolutionary zeal. Well, all the stuff about virtue and virility has been laying the ground for that, right? They always talk about the oath of the Horatii, great Romans, but they're always talking about men, never about women. Yes. And although women do play a key part in this story, they tend to be a kind of anonymous mass. That is how they're celebrated, not as individuals. Also, the other kind of burning question, then as now, what about slaves? The French own huge

plantations in the Caribbean. They say liberty for all, but equally they say property rights must be respected. So there is an unresolved tension there, again, that we might explore in due course. But of course, more immediately for the future of France and its constitution, what about the monarchy? Because how is the role of the king to be squared with the declaration and with the ideals of the revolution? So yesterday we were looking at the church, but in a way, the king is an even bigger roadblock to that idea of a single nation, a single patrie. Because as we were saying before, a lot of these revolutionaries are inspired by Montesquieu's ideas about a mixed constitution, a separation of powers, and the idea of the British constitutional monarchy as a model.

So somebody like the Comte de Mirabeau, who we've talked about, a great sort of figure in the assembly at this point. He's all about a British style monarchy, isn't he? And they need somebody to play that part. What they're not talking about at this point is a Republican democracy. They have a king shaped hole and they want a patriot king to fill it. They do. So Mirabeau is the hero of the revolution. He's seen as a great patriot, but he is allying himself with kind of nobles who are less motivated by revolutionary fervor. I mean, they are literally a metropolitan elite. These are nobles from Paris who are very rich, very highly educated, and who are fascinated by the British example. So, Anglomanie, the fascination with England as a model model has been a trend running throughout the 18th century,

even as France has been at war with Britain. And so Mirabeau and these kind of metropolitan nobles are proposing in the National Assemblies, they've got a kind of constitutional committee set up to ponder these issues. They're saying that we should model our constitution on British practice, although they are very, very careful to point out that their version will be better than the British one because they will learn from the British example. No such version exists, even in theory. You might think that. So what they are proposing is an elected National Assembly, which would correspond to the House of Commons, a Senate, which would be drawn from the great

and the good and obviously corresponds to the House of Lords. And this Senate, initially, they wanted to be for life. And then there are kind of objections to this. And so they say, well, it could be for six years. So drawing on the American exemplar. And they, as you say, they want the king to play the part that the British king plays. And essentially the British king, with the glorious revolution hanging over his or her head, the sense that a king who doesn't play his part can be kicked out. The British king has the power of veto over all legislation, but essentially is very, very reticent in using it. And I think that is what they want. They want someone who will have the power of veto because that will kind of provide a check on what they would see as excesses of popular fervour. But at the same time, they need a king who will not be

too ready to use it. And the question is, is Louis XVI qualified to play that role? So that's one issue. But the other issue facing the monarciens, as they come to be called, the monarchists, is the fact that there are lots of radical deputies in the assembly who view any prospect of the king having any kind of veto as an absolute outrage. Yeah. One difference between the, as it were, the British revolution, if you want to call it that, which nobody ever does, and the French revolution is in Britain, the idea of the separation of powers, as in the United States, is seen as incredibly healthy and organic and a necessary check and a balance. But in France, you now have this sort of romantic

fervour and the idea of la nation and the assembly reflecting the general will of the nation. So there are lots of people who say, well, why would we divide it up? We've just done away with different orders. Yeah. So the three estates have all been swallowed up into the National Assembly because essentially, if you're having a Senate of the great and the good that means bishops it means aristocrats so you can understand the suspicion so the abbé d'issier who we met early on in the debate around the three estates versailles he describes the whole proposal as a launched against the national will against the entire nation so comparing it to a kind of unjust monarchical repression of liberty. And that idea of the national will, quite a dangerous idea, you might say, in the long run. But also the idea that sovereignty resides in the nation, which is one of the key principles

of the Declaration of Rights. And if that is the case, then how can any individual even the king stand against the sovereignty of the nation and it's a real problem and it results in the national assembly essentially kind of splitting into rival factions and what happens is the monachia the the enthusiasts for the kind of british style constitution start to congregate on the right side of the meeting hall and their opponents those who want a more radical solution on the left and dominic that's a division that we still see stamped on politics to this very day yeah left and right but actually they reach a kind of compromise don't they so this is what september 1789 they reject a second chamber. That's decisively rejected. And the Constitutional Committee, which is full of all these kind of metropolitan elite types, that gets dissolved. So that's clearly a victory for the more radical wing.

But you're right, around the veto, there is a kind of compromise that doesn't really satisfy anyone. So the king is allowed a veto, but it's a suspensive one. So it's a bit like the House of Lords in, was it 1910 or something? And Asquith, it's great to get Asquith back on the show and Asquith's Britain. So yeah, the House of Lords can postpone legislation or sort of block it, but then basically the commons can break the logjam under the Parliament Act. So the king can veto legislation three times. And then basically if they bring it back again. Which I think effectively means two years. Right.

So he has a two year block on legislation. And then if they come back and say, no, we still want it. He then can't resist it. Which actually to me seems quite a good, you know, it's a safety valve. It's a cooling off period. But the right wing don't like it because it makes it impossible to preserve a kind of genuine balance of powers. Yeah. That's very important to them and it doesn't satisfy the radicals because the king can still frustrate the will of the sovereign people yeah so both sides

are kind of cross but there's also i think by this point a sense that what people in the national assembly think is not necessarily decisive because there is also the will of the people as expressed by the inhabitants of Paris. And in Paris, people don't understand the veto at all. They kind of think it's a new tax, lots of them. And even those who don't, they don't really know what it is, but they're against it. That's the bottom line. And this is driven, I think, by, first of all, a kind of growing sense of hostility to the king personally. And this is fostered by the fact that he has been notably silent about the repudiation of feudalism and the declaration of rights yeah and then on the 19th of september he does finally comment on this kind of repudiation

of feudal rights but he hedges it around with so many qualifications that it ends up sounding like he's actually rejecting it the deputies are very upset about this. And in Paris, everyone is absolutely furious. And then on the 4th of October, he voices reservations about the Declaration of Rights. And I suppose the king would say, well, why shouldn't I? I'm the king. I can say what he likes. But in the context of a liberty-loving people with sovereignty, this is dangerous. And I think also there is a sense in Paris that the National Assembly itself is compromised by its willingness to treat with the king. And there's talk that they want to move it from Versailles and the Paris region to tour the city on the Loire, which is famously royalist and would kind of therefore get them out of the

crosshairs of Parisian popular opinion. And they're not in favor of that at all. And the other thing that is happening in August and through into September, which everyone knows is incredibly problematic, both for those who are starving and those who have to keep a lid on things that are bubbling away in France, is the fact that the price of bread is starting to go up again. So it had declined kind of in early August, but it's now going up. And this isn't because there's terrible weather. The weather's very good. The grain is ripening. It's kind of ready to be harvested. But the problem is that the weather is so good that all the mills have been immobilized because there's no water in the rivers. So you start to get bread riots,

you get demands for higher wages, and you get these familiar accusations, which the Marquis de Sade makes such play with in his novels, that the king and the aristocracy are deliberately trying to starve the revolution to death. It's a useful reminder, isn't it, that there are these two different dimensions to the revolution. So on the one hand, there's the dimension of kind of politics and ideas and everything that's going on in the National Assembly as people are moving into their different factions left and right. None of that would have the salience and it wouldn't be so charged were it not for the fact that outside there are people starving. There is a real anger on the streets, isn't there? And the danger, the huge danger for the authors of the revolution is that they've given people the impression that changes to the political and financial kind of

structure will magically transform the situation on the streets and mean that bread prices fall and all that kind of thing. And actually a lot of them, they're what we would call neoliberals. They have no intention of fixing the price of bread and helping people out and doing all these kinds of things. Yeah, because May's radical could be September's conservative. Exactly. Things are moving so fast. So there's a sense that lots of deputies are kind of running very fast up a down escalator, just trying to kind of avoid themselves being chewed up by the revolution. And this is turbocharged by the fact, of course, that the Declaration of Rights has officially abolished censorship. And that means that there's basically nothing the authorities

can do to restrain expressions of hostility, whether it's to the King or to the National Assembly or whoever. And there is a particular newspaper which is launched on the 12th of September. So against the backdrop of all these events, which really, really demonstrates how potent journalism can now be. And this is a paper, it's not its original name, but its ultimate name is L'Amie du Peuple, so the People's Friend. And its editor is a man called Jean-Paul Marat,

who is basically, he's kind of drifted from job to job. He's someone who's never really held down a secure position. He's a scientist, he's a physician. He's a political theorist. Actually, for a while, a bit like our goal hanger stablemate, Alan Shearer, Dominic. He lived in Newcastle. Yeah.

Except, I mean, Alan Shearer never ended up physician to the bodyguard of the Comte d'Artois, I don't think. Alan Shearer also. I mean, you can say what you like about Alan Shearer, but he's got lovely skin. And Mara has terrible skin. Mara does have absolutely terrible skin. And also, he's never written a paper on the gonorrhea of one of his friends, I think, Alan Shearer.

As far as you know, Tom. You don't know about what he's been up to with Craig Bellamy or Les Ferdinand or any of his Newcastle stablemates. So Marat comes back from St. James's Park to Paris. Yeah. And he's kind of drifting around. He's a bit of a bum. I mean, he's the classic example of the, you know, the underpaid intellectual, the undervalued intellectual is always the great driver of revolutions.

And Marat's the kind of classic example. And he finds in the revolution and the chance to edit this paper, The People's Friend, absolutely everything that he's ever been made for, you know, it's completely his vocation. And essentially, he is brilliant at blaming everything on conspiracies, on plots, on attempts by sinister figures to destroy the people. So he calls his enemies bloodsuckers, very much into the kind of the language of vampirism. While the deputies in the National Assembly are trying to kind of the language of vampirism. While the deputies in the National Assembly are trying to kind of sort the constitution out, he's piling in full kind of

angry person on Twitter. So open your eyes, shake off your lethargy, purge your committees, preserve only the healthy members, sweep away the corrupt, the royal pensioners and the devious aristocrats, intriguers and false patriots. You have nothing to expect from them except servitude, poverty and desolation. Marat is such a familiar figure. He's that person who suddenly sees he's been a loser, basically, and a drifter, as you said. And he's suddenly in the chaos of the revolution, sees his opportunity to make a name for himself by this unbelievably ferocious invective. I mean, we do see people like it today, don't we? I think it's not too much of an anachronism to call them centrists. People who initially had

been in favour of the revolution and now with this kind of ever more radical language are starting to think, oh, hold on. So often these are foreign, foreign admirers of the revolution. So there's an English visitor in Paris who'd come there because he was kind of so excited by what was going on, who is following these kind of attacks on the National Assembly. And he writes, woe be to the legislature that employs a senseless profligate rabble to enforce its laws. Lanterns are arguments in this country. So lanterns, you sling a rope over it and hang your enemies. Yeah, lynching, basically. Basically lynching, yes. And so there you have opposed senses of where sovereignty should lie. Does the people's sovereignty lie on the streets or does it lie in kind of constitutional forms? And this is the great question that the revolution is kind of focusing.

And as in early July, so in September, moving into October, a sense of potential violence in the capital directed now, not just against the royal family, but also against the National Assembly, both of whom, of course, are in Versailles. And even in August, you had had an aristocrat who'd been imprisoned in Charenton, where the Marquis de Sade had been sent. And the kind of the Sadean quality of quite a lot of this is, I just find fascinating. But anyway, this is a Marquis and he had proposed a march on Versailles and that had kind of fizzled out. But in the Palais Royal, which is this kind of great center of free speech owned by the Duke of Orléans, the cousin of Louis XVI, lots of radical circles are saying we should organize a coup. We should march on Versailles. We should get the royal family. And essentially, the city feels that it is poised between further expressions of revolutionary fervour or counter-revolution. And for those who are in

charge of stopping riots breaking out, this is a nightmare because how do you stop it? Well, this is the question, right? Why don't the authorities, I mean, they have money, they have armed men. Why don't they in some way clamp down and try and police this? Well, for starters, as you've said, there's the issue around censorship. They can't control what is now being said. So as in the 1650s in England, revolution has bred freedom of speech, which in turn fosters further revolution activity so that's one part of it but the other thing is is that if you were saying that the structures of power are feudal and expressions of a kind of blood-sucking vampirism very difficult

to take charge of them so all of those have been erased the bastille has gone the letter cachet has gone all of that so essentially in a very kind of Orwellian step, the revolutionaries find that they have to resurrect what they have eliminated. Yeah. And it's interesting they're doing this so early, right? In 1789. So within just a couple of months, really, of the fall of the Bastille, at the end of that summer, in the autumn, they're already thinking we have to bring back, what do they call it, the search committee. So they're opening letters and doing all that kind of thing. Yeah. So Sharma in Citizens describes it as the first organ of a revolutionary police state. And essentially it takes for itself all the powers of the Ancien Régime that everyone had condemned.

So they can open letters, they can sponsor spies, they can search houses without warrants. And amazingly, they can even imprison people who are suspected of being in danger to the revolution without trial, which is basically the whole letter to cachet system. So that's one aspect of it. You've got kind of the development of a kind of proto-secret police. But you also have the National Guard, of course, who we talked about before, commanded by Lafayette. And it's his job essentially to maintain order in the capital. But he's finding an increasing struggle. You know, he's coping with a situation that no one has ever had to cope with before. Well, you and I disagree about Lafayette, don't we? I think if he had been a man of greater cold-blooded ruthlessness, he could have seized this opportunity and really made a name for himself. But he's a bit of a ditherer, do you think it's fair to say? No, I look on him much more favorably. I mean, he's an enthusiast for the revolution. He's not a counter-revolutionary and he is struggling with a situation

that no one has really ever had to face before. Well, actually, do you know what, Tom? Somebody has faced this before and later on, as we will see in this episode, people compare him with an English predecessor and if he'd had anything like the backbone and the spirit of that English predecessor, he'd one day have been Lord Protector of France, but it wasn't to be. Possibly. Anyway, so September turns to October, capital's getting ever more ready to kind of blow

up. Price of bread is going up. And then on the 2nd of October, details of a scandal in Versailles arrives in Paris. And again and again, we've been talking about how important the details of a scandal in Versailles arrives in Paris. And again and again, we've been talking about how important the details of royal scandals are in affecting the course of events. And this is seen as an absolute shocker. So Marat is all over it, the people's friend, he loves this. And the story goes that the king has summoned a regiment from the northeast frontier, the Flanders Regiment. They've arrived in Versailles, and his bodyguard have staged a banquet for them. Staging a banquet at a time when people in Paris are starving is seen as being very offensive anyway, but this banquet is supposed to have degenerated into an orgy sponsored by the queen. Most shockingly of all, all the participants in

this banquet are supposed to have taken the revolutionary cascade, so the tricolour, and trampled it underfoot. And the queen is said to have approved of it all. And in Paris, this is seen as a kind of blasphemy. And it turbocharges all the old rumours that the queen of her depravity, of her kind of empiricic qualities her desire to starve the poor of paris to death but it combines two different conspiracy theories really doesn't it one is the thing about marianne so an empty mentioned but the other is all through the summer and the autumn people have been anxious about the arrival of troops from the frontiers yeah german-speaking troops in particular so the flanders regiment for these the idea that these people have turned up they're going to be the vanguard of the counter-revolution. They're in league with the bloodsuckers in the court. I mean, it could not be a better gift to somebody like Marat.

Yeah, and it spreads terror throughout the poorest quarters in Paris. And on the 5th of October, early in the morning, a market woman, she stands up. She addresses all the other women who have started gathering for the day's market. And she harangues them saying that the fact that they can't afford to get bread, that they can't afford to put food on their family's tables, that this is due to the queen, due to the vampires of Versailles, and they should march on the palace and well who knows what but what happens dominic will change the face of france forever what drama tom we're gonna take a break now because we're just too excited i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment

it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of 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. Welcome back to The rest is history the storm clouds have gathered over versailles there are people shouting about the queen being a vampire and the flanges regiment treading down people's cockades it's all happening and yet tom the tragedy in versailles the king and queen are about their simple pleasures in complete obliviousness to what is coming. It's as though the revolution had never happened.

So that morning, Marie Antoinette is in her little model village, the Petit Trianon. She's been feeding her ducks, feeding her goldfish. And then she's been left a bit tired by this. And so she retires to a grotto for a little rest. Oh, that's nice. Bucolic. Her husband, the king, has been out shooting. Normally he would have gone hunting, but he is aware that trouble is brewing in Paris.

And so by going shooting, it means that he can be, it's easier to contact him should developments happen. And he has a very successful day shooting. Yeah. And in his journal, he notes, killed 81 head. A poor show by the standards of Franz Ferdinand and George V. Absolutely. But I think not bad for a morning. Yeah, that's the difference between the Austrians and the French, isn't it?

The Austrians are so ruthless. Well, that's certainly what the mobs in Paris would say when they talk about Marie Antoinette. And of course, both of these activities are absolutely calculated to infuriate virtuous patriots because Marie Antoinette playing with her animals in the Petit Trianon, I mean, this will become, in a way, the defining image of her. The role playing, it's seen as feckless. I mean, we talked about how I think Marie Antoinette sees it as an expression of her sympathy with the poor, but this is not how the poor themselves see it. And the king going shooting, again, this is kind of deliberately offensive because as one of the feudal privileges that have been jettisoned is the right that the

nobility had to go shooting. And so with the abolition of the feudal monopolies on hunting and shooting, basically every bird in France has been wiped out. So you may complain that the king hasn't been shooting enough birds, but I mean, all over France, it's just bang, bang, bang. And our old friend, Arthur Young, the Englishman who's been traveling across France and who's journalists we've been drawing on a lot for this series, he's in Provence when suddenly it becomes legal for everyone to go out shooting. And he says, I've been pestered with all the mob of the country shooting. One would think that every rusty gun in Provence is at work, killing all sorts of birds.

The shot has fallen five or six times in my chase and about my ears so that's something that hasn't changed really in france that's still very much going on but you know dominic this is the last time the king will have the option of choosing whether to go shooting or hunting and it will be the last time that the queen will get to feed her ducks at the petty tree and all the ducks are the real losers and all that don't they because they end up being eaten by son culottes i imagine they'll be shot yes so as louis notes in his journal interrupted by events and that of course is his shooting journal so 10 o'clock in the morning marianne trinette is reposing in her grotto when she is informed that an armed force has left Paris and is marching on Versailles. And brilliantly, she's informed by her hairdresser.

Is that right? Monsieur Léonard. Monsieur Léonard, who is the sort of the metrosexual friend of Marie Antoinette, isn't he? Yes, well, that's what he later says. It has to be said that this is uncorroborated by anyone else. But yes, absolutely. Coming to the rescue of his diva friend. Trickier to get in touch with Louis XVI because he's out shooting.

But they find him and he is back by three o'clock in the afternoon. And there's a meeting of the Royal Council and they don't know what to do. And there is discussion that perhaps the king and queen should, I don't know, head for the frontier, head for somewhere secure. But what's fascinating is that even at this stage, the king is thinking in terms of a factional court politics because he blames the Duke of Orléans, who owns the Palais Royal, where all these kind of radicals are meeting. It's as though he still hasn't got the hang of the fact that this is no longer about dukes conspiring against their cousins, but about something much profounder. But here's the interesting thing, I guess. He is so ill-travelled, he's only ever been out of the Versailles kind of bubble really twice, hasn't he?

He went for his coronation and he went to Cherbourg to inspect some defences. So he's very poorly, I mean, he's been to his palace in Paris, the Tuileries, but he doesn't have any sense of what is going on. So how could he understand, I guess, the anger on the streets and all of that kind of thing? It would take a profound political imagination to grasp that, and he is a very unimaginative man. And Marie Antoinette, I think, is the same,

that for her, crowds are a kind of background for the display of her own magnificence. And she simply has no comprehension of what they might be feeling, what the kind of individual components of those crowds might be like. So for both of them, it's really difficult. And even for the members of the National Assembly, they don't know what is coming. They're not sure what to expect. Who is coming from Paris? Why? What do they want? And it takes time for them to kind of properly appreciate what's going on. So to that question, who is coming? There are basically three groups of people. There is the market women of Paris, the fishwives. And there

it's been escalating very quickly since the one woman stood up and said, we should march on Versailles. One of the women gets hold of a drum and she starts beating it. And then they get the bells of a nearby church to start ringing. So it kind of talks in ringing out. Huge crowd forms. They start to march on the Hotel de Ville. They are chanting the title of a particularly popular pamphlet, When Will We Have Bread? They start reaching for cudgels, for sticks, for knives, any kind of weapon that they can get. By the time these various groups converge on the Hotel de Ville, there are about 6,000 or 7,000 of them, and they absolutely ransack it, seizing it for muskets, for rifles, for whatever they can get. They even find two cannon.

So this is, again, kind of quite like the Bastille, a huge mob looking for weapons. By this point, it is pouring down with rain. And normally rain is, you know, rain is what stops revolutions, but not in this case. Despite the rain, the women with their two cannon and all their weapons and their cudgels and things start heading off for Versailles. Can I just interrupt at this point, Tom? So the interesting thing about them heading to Versilles so these women the sort of fishwise market women they were known as poissard and they would go to versailles every year anyway they used

to go to versailles on the 25th of august the feast of saint louis and they would give flowers to the queen so it was a kind of ritual and so she was used to seeing them and she actually you know you were saying about the thing with the petit trianon and pretending feeding the ducks and pretending you know to be an ordinary farm girl and stuff yeah they would do plays of versailles where they would affect the dialect of the fish wives and these were very common in france the fish wives they were stock figures they were laughing stock i guess and marie an Antoinette herself had kind of got people to try and teach her their lingo and stuff. So there is a dreadful irony at the back of all this. There is. And that is exactly the tension between Marie Antoinette's understanding of what a crowd should be and what a crowd might actually be is part of what makes the whole experience that is

coming so completely traumatic for her. And I don't think there's any ambivalence in the attitude of the women towards the queen. I think they are pretty universally hostile to her for all the reasons that we've been discussing. Attitudes to Louis is a slightly more ambivalent. So they're calling him Le Bon Papa, the good father, and they want him to give them bread. And it's unclear whether they are calling him Le Bon Papa out of hostility, kind of sense of irony, or whether they genuinely mean it. And it may be that there's a kind of gray area where they can't quite decide whether he is the enemy or their friend. But definitely, they are also saying that if he is Le Bon Papa, he should be with his children in

Paris, not stuck out in Versailles. And this increasingly becomes part of what they're talking about as they head out to the palace. And as they go, they start picking up large numbers of men as well. And on their way, they meet with a contingent of the Flanders Regiment. And they're nervous about this because the Flanders Regiment is seen as the great defenders of the monarchy, but the Flanders Regiment, they're all in favor of it. These are the people who have been accused of trampling the placade, but actually they turn out to be great enthusiasts for the revolution and they greet the marchers and they say, brilliant, we're with you. Hooray, let's crack on to Versailles. And this is an expression of a familiar problem that the king can't trust his own troops. Well, because troops are people too.

They're hungry. They're impatient with authority. And they're like, yeah, why not? Actually, this is great fun let's all go to versailles you know and troops have been disobeying their officers since the very beginning of the revolution for months yeah and i think the fact that it is fun if you're subject to kind of brutal discipline as dragoons are or if you're starving and hungry and you can't feed your children as so many of the women are quite aside from anything else the chance to have a kind of expedition to versailles even if it's pissing down with rain, it's something exciting. It's so important in all revolutions and riots, actually, Tom, and something that I think

historians sometimes underplay is exactly this point, that one of the key things I always think in the momentum of any uprising, any rebellion, any riot, is the sense of the carnivalesque, I guess, of it being a tremendous laugh. And actually, yeah, let's go for it. And the momentum and the giddiness of it all. And you really get that sense, don't you? The closer they get to Versailles, more and more people are joining them because this is a tremendous occasion.

And I don't want to, who knows what's going to happen? Let's pile in kind of all this. More women. There's a woman who looks amazing on a kind of what's her name yeah so the amazon and again there's a kind of sense of cosplay there i think she's wearing a plumed hat she's got a red riding coat she's got loads of pistols in her belt she's got swords she's cuts a tremendous dash on her horse and she will always be kind of remembered as the emblematic figure of this march of the women even though though she is not a fishwife. I mean, she's got a horse for starters.

But the sense that there is a slightly carnivalesque quality to what is happening. I think that if it was just the women marching and even members of the Flanders Regiment, it wouldn't be quite as alarming as it turns out to be for the National Assembly and for the King, because the other group of people who end up marching on Versailles is the National Guard. So under Lafayette, who was supposed to be keeping order in Paris, and they are marching on Versailles five hours behind the market women. This is not Lafayette's doing. He's basically appalled that his men want to go out and join the women on the March on Versailles, because he immediately understands that this is an altogether different

quality of insurrection to a bunch of fishwives going out to Paris. To have the officially mandated guard in Paris do that, I mean, that is very, very kind of menacing revolutionary activity, an expression of hostility to the constitution and to the monarchy which lafayette is sufficiently a centrist dad not to want to be involved in but basically he has very little choice because i think he has the feeling that if he doesn't go along with his men they'll either desert or murder him or you know nothing good will come of it yeah so rather than morosely he gets onto his horse and kind of rides out of their head and it's still driving rain. He's got 15,000 of the guard behind him. So that's an enormous number

of people. And he heads off and one witness describes him as the prisoner of his own troops, which effectively is what he is. So you now have two groups of people. You have the women and you have the National Guard, both descending on Paris. So the women arrive first. They try and break into the Palace of Versailles itself, but the king's bodyguards and the Swiss Guard turn them back. So then they march on the National Assembly and they invade it and they demand to see the king. There are amazing descriptions of them in the National Assembly, by the way, because they're sodden. Absolutely drenched, kind of smelly.

They're literally like steaming as they come in. And you said the metropolitan elite kind of delegates, which basically they all are, they're all lawyers and stuff, aren't they? Are sitting there kind of incredibly awkward and frightened and disturbed, a lot of them, as this great mob of people breaks into the Assembly and people start like messing around with the deputies' stuff and all that kind of shouting in their ears. I mean, they're like a kind of, you know, walking holiday in the Lake District. They've all kind of burst in, absolutely drenched and steaming. So the deputies send a messenger to the king who's back now and they say, look, would you receive a delegation of the women? And he says, yes, of course. So the women choose the perfect person

to speak to him, which is a 17-year-old flower girl called Pierrette Chabris. She's very shy, very pretty, very virtuous looking, which is very important. And she doesn't speak like a fishwife. She is renowned for her kind of genteel language. So she has chosen the spokeswoman. She goes forward, she looks at the king and she's so overwhelmed that she faints and the king then fetches her smelling salts helps her to her feet it's all tremendous pr he then explains to the women that he's given orders for any grain that has been held up on the roads leading into paris to be delivered as a matter of absolute urgency that he'll do his best to source them more grain

and the women are kind of mollified but louis knows even so that you know he is staring down a barrel here and so that evening unsurprisingly he finally accepts both the abolition of feudalism and the declaration of rights without any qualification whatsoever and it is said that as he you know he signs his approval he does so with tears in his eyes. But Tom, this is just the first group. It is. Because 15,000 men are also on their way. Yeah.

And they're not really, I mean, Lafayette is now basically their trophy rather than their commander. And they are a much more terrifying prospect than the market women are, aren't they? They are. And they are absolutely set on bringing the king and queen back. And when Lafayette arrives, he goes the national assembly he explains this to them and he then demands an audience with the king who has retreated to the palace and the king sends a messenger out says yeah you can come in but you have to be unarmed and lafayette agrees to this and so a courtier

comes that you know chamberlain comes and him, and he is led into the palace. And Dominic, you referenced this in the end of the first half. As he goes in, a courtier sees Lafayette walking into the palace and says, there goes Oliver Cromwell. And Lafayette turns around and says, Cromwell would not have come unarmed. So you may feel that that proves what you're saying. But this is, I think it's worth just stopping a second. Lafayette does have a tremendous opportunity here. He is a hero of the American war.

He is arguably one of the two or three most famous men in France. He has under his command tens of thousands of men, potentially. A different man, a Napoleon or a Cromwell, could have turned that into a power base, a really ruthless, hard-nosed political operator and actually lafayette doesn't i think it's to his credit that he doesn't of course you do of course you think that but i mean i don't i think that he's he's a centrist dad and he is trying to ensure that the center holds and he's doing his best but we know that that is not going to succeed but i think it's to his credit that he as it were sticks to his guns even though he will end up with not many guns by the end of the day effectively yeah he

doesn't stick to his guns he lets other people take them and anyway tell us what happens when he gets in to see the king so he like the women is you know he's drenched he's spattered with mud he's an absolute picture he comes into the into louis presence and you know takes off his hat sweeps all this kind of thing. And he declares in ringing tones, I have come to die at the feet of your majesty. Obviously pre-prepared. Again, I imagine that this will confirm you in your sense of contempt for him. I like it. I like a man who prepares a melodramatic statement. No, I mean, you've got to prepare. Anyway, go on. So Lafayette then kind of, he reiterates to the king, look, you've got to get so anyway go on so lafayette then kind of he reiterates to the king look you've got

to get as much grain to the capital as you possibly can and your majesty i'm afraid that you have to come with with me and the national guard back to paris the national guard are not going to have it any other way he agrees to the first request i mean he's you know he's already given orders that all the grain that can possibly be found be sent to paris as soon as possible but he does stonewall the second and he says look i'm going to have to consult with the queen. And Marie Antoinette has already gone to bed. So we'll have to be left to the morning. And on these terms, Lafayette and the king part. So the king goes to bed about two o'clock. Lafayette stays there. He wants to make sure that there's not going to be any trouble. But by about five o'clock, he feels,

okay, so the night's passed. It's just before dawn. I could probably go and grab a few a few winks. So he is married to a member of the Noye family. Remember? I do. They have a big house in Versailles. So he goes off there and he finds a sofa and curls up and has a sleep.

I mean, that is Lafayette to a T, right? That is absolutely textbook. I'm in Versailles with a huge mob of 15,000 men who are kind of totally out of control. I think I'll just go for a little nap now and have a lie down. What could go wrong? As a man who likes to sleep, I have nothing but sympathy, but you are right that this turns out not to have been a brilliant move because about half an hour after Lafayette has gone it's dawn it's a kind of misty morning a portion of the crowd which is kind of intermingled fish wives and soldiers of the national guard finally break into the royal palace yeah and the first thing they say is where are the apartments of the queen they're saying we want to make a cocade out of her intestines. And others are

saying, we want to decapitate her. We want to fry up her heart and liver, eat them. And we want to do even worse. What's worse? Who knows? Who knows? So they descend on the queen's apartments. There are two bodyguards standing outside. They get cut down, killed, decapitated. These are the heads that will appear on the pikes that are mentioned in the reading that we began this episode with. There's a third bodyguard. He manages to alert a lady-in-waiting who rushes off to wake up the queen. He is then cut down and left for dead, although amazingly, actually, he survives. Marie Antoinette, meanwhile, she's been got out of bed, she's barefoot, and it seems like she's stuck in her apartment, but amazingly and fortuitously for her, way back in 1775, she had ordered the construction of a secret tunnel that would go from her

appointments to the King's apartments because this was a time when she was anxious to establish her influence over Louis. And so she is able to use that and the passageway is kind of concealed in the panelling. so it shuts behind her and she goes rushing off as she reaches the king's quarters knocks on the door and there's no answer and she's in her nightgown and she's barefoot yeah and she's sobbing with terror the most unbelievable scene and meanwhile back in her bedroom the people who've broken in are absolutely infuriated that she's not there and so they start slashing at her mattress with their swords. And all the while, Marie Antoinette is hammering on the door saying, please, please let me in. And finally, someone hears and opens the door and she stumbles in. And it's said that

the terror of this experience is so great that her hair, which previously had been blonde, from this point on, the bottoms go white at the temples. Right. So a couple of things on this. One you described that scene of the the two bodyguards in a way we just sort of went through that in a sentence but that is a horrendous scene right i mean a mob basically grabbing these two guys hacking them to death with knives and then sawing off their heads with the knives i mean again a really horrific scene yeah and so i think it could absolutely have have spiraled hideously out of control if they'd got marianoinette, she'd be dead. There's no question about that.

Do you not think? Yes, they would have made cockades out of her entrails. They would have butchered her. And I remember when I was a boy seeing a documentary about the French Revolution, a sort of dramatised documentary or something like that. And this scene was at the centre of it. And you could argue this scene is, in a way, the centre of, dare I say, the conservative imagination. It's a classic trope, isn't it?

The out-of-control mob and the woman in tears fleeing for her life and they are going to butcher her. I mean, that's very Burkean, I guess, that image, isn't it? It absolutely is, which is why he situates Marie Antoinette in the way he does in his Jeremiah against the revolution. But it doesn't explode in that way. She doesn't end up dead. She is reunited with Louis. And again, I think a lot of the credit for this can be given to Lafayette, who has been alerted to what's happening. Yeah. Who's been asleep. He's smashed half an hour of sleep, Dominic. He's woken up. He doesn't go, oh, leave me alone. I need to catch up on my sleep. He comes rushing out. Oh, what a hero. Comes into the courtyard and he sees these heads of the royal bodyguards on sticks kind of bobbing around and he calms everybody down. I mean, he manages to

say, you know, guys, just, you know, chill. And then he goes, we're the people's bodyguard. And then he goes in and is very Tony Blair and the queen. He tells the king and queen, look, we've got to calm the situation down. And Louis is saying all this stuff about, you know, the guard trampling on the cocaine. It never happened. And Laferte says, yeah, fine. Okay. What we've got to do is you've got to go out on the balcony and you have got to address the people outside. I've done my best to calm them down, but ultimately it's best coming from you. So Louis then goes out onto the balcony and he addresses the crowd and he says, yes, I will come with you to Paris. Again, he insists that his bodyguards are innocent, that they hadn't

trampled on the cockade. Lafayette is with him and he's very, very good at the PR. What he does is he takes a tricolour cockade and he embraces an officer of the bodyguard and he pins the cockade to the bodyguard's hat. And by doing that, he's essentially folding the bodyguard into the warm embrace of the revolution. I think that's, I mean, you may say it's very Tony Blair. I don't necessarily see that as a criticism, Dominic. I think he's done very well.

In a horrific situation, which could easily have ended with the king, the queen, and Lafayette himself being butchered with kitchen knives. He's actually played, I mean, falling asleep, I think, is madness. But actually, the stuff with the cockade is a brilliant bit of political theatre. And there's more to come, isn't there, with the queen? Well, there is, because there is still the question of the queen, who the mob will hate. And so Lafayette says look you've got to go out onto the balcony as well and she's terrified i mean entirely understandably she's

heard what they were shouting about her so but lafayette says no you must and so she goes out onto the balcony with her children but the people out in the courtyard start baying at this and saying she has to stand there alone so she sends the children back in. She steps out onto the balcony facing the crowd who only half an hour before were wanting to rip out her intestines. And again, Lafayette joins her and he bows low before her and he kisses her hand. And there's a kind of silence and it's not clear what the reaction of the crowd is going to be. And then they start shouting, long live the queen. And again, Lafayette has kind of ridden the wave of emotion and turned it,

turned the tide. And so Marie Antoinette goes back inside, but of course she's still completely traumatized. And I think she sees perhaps even more clearly than Louis, the scale of the horrors that clearly now face them. So she goes back in and she speaks to a lady in waiting and she says, they want to force us, the king and me, to go to Paris with the heads of our bodyguards carried before us at the end of their pikes. And this is exactly what happens. And it takes them seven hours to travel in their carriage from Versailles to Paris. The whole way, Louis doesn't utter a single word. You have people kind of shouting slogans and just

sticulating the queen as the carriage rides along. Behind the royal carriage, there are wagons loaded with all the flour that had been taken from the stores at Versailles. And on their arrival in Paris, they're forced to appear again on a balcony, this time at the Hotel de Ville. And then finally, by 8 p.m., they are able to kind of collapse into the palace that's been allocated to them, the Tuileries. And unbelievably, the person who is there to greet them is Axel von Fersen, the dashing Swedish diplomat who everyone thinks has been having an affair with Marie Antoinette. I mean, it's just madness that he's there. And so an aide to the Queen says,

look, get out of here. You're going to be torn to pieces if people find you here. So he does that. They're obviously very, very depressed. And no one is more depressed than the Dauphin, who complains that his room is very ugly. Although it has to be said, he will come to no worse, Dominic. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?

Because some listeners might well say, well, this is terribly biased. You know, I don't feel sorry for them at all. They're pampered and privileged and all that kind of thing. And they're living in the gilded splendor of Versailles when people are hungry. They had it coming, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Personally, I think on a human level, especially Marianne Toinette and the misogyny directed at her, I think it's quite hard to take that view. I agree. I mean, it's a directed at her. I think it's quite hard to take that view. I agree. I mean, it's a terrible ordeal and I think a terrible story.

But to counterpoint that, what we haven't given in this account is the narrative of a woman whose children are starving to death. Of course. No, I totally agree with you. So that is the counterpoint to it. So I think there's always the story of the great and the glamorous, because we know the details, always kind of blaze more brightly. We don't have the account of someone who has been driven by despair to march on Versailles, and that is the counterpoint. French people always say the British in particular love telling the story from Burke onwards,

Carlyle, Dickens. They love to tell the story through the eyes, you know, with a sense of horror, fascinated horror at the revolution. And they particularly through the eyes of the great and the good and Marie Antoinette more than anybody. You mentioned in the very first episode in the series, the Kirsten Dunst film, when that came out, French critics said, oh, typical Anglo-Saxons. They always tell the story through the eyes of Marie Antoinette. Well, I think the French revolution is a great and still enduringly controversial subject They always tell the story through the eyes of Maritza Nett. I mean, this still structures attitudes to the revolution to this day. And we can see that now. But of course, in the aftermath of the transportation of the king and queen from Versailles to the Tuileries, there are still two obvious problems that have not been solved.

And in fact, the bringing of the king and queen to Paris, in a way, has only made more glaring. So firstly, how is the monarchy to be squared with the revolution? And in the wake of the October days, as they're called, all the events we've been describing, there's a determined effort on behalf of the Constitutional Committee and the National Assembly to remove any prospect of despotism as they see it coming back. So the king loses all his rights to propose laws. It's decreed that his income will be determined by a vote in the National Assembly.

He has to allow that his ministers will be impeached if it is judged that they're betraying the revolution. So essentially, all the struts upholding his power have been completely knocked away. And the question is, how will Louis adapt to this? How will he cope with being neutered in this way, becoming a mere constitutional cipher. So that's an open question. But the other open question is, will the National Assembly be able to preserve its role as the voice of the nation? Because it has been upstaged just as the King and Queen have been upstaged. Well, the National Assembly thought sovereignty lies with us. It now appears that sovereignty lies with these crowds on the streets of Paris. With the people. So it's unsurprising

that in mid-October, the National Assembly follows the King and Queen from Versailles to Paris. And they are living with the consciousness of two massive risks. The first is that they will fragment into factions, as has already begun to happen, the fragmenting into left and right, but also the ongoing risk of interventions from people who are not part of the assembly. And, you know, with the concurrent risk of violence, the threat of what will happen to the deputies if they do not legislate in accordance with the wishes of the people is now a Damocles sword hanging over every deputy in the National Assembly. A sword of Damocles.

We've had the storm clouds of revolution and now we have the sword of Damocles. We've had the storm clouds of revolution, and now we have the sword of Damocles. Brilliant. And this is a development that is obviously very, very pregnant with implications for the future. So back in Versailles, some of the more radical deputies had joined a club that had originally been set up by the deputies from Brittany. And now they've moved to Paris. They are looking for a new place to meet. So they rent a meeting room that is conveniently located near the new hall where the National Assembly are meeting. And initially membership of this club is limited to deputies. But as the months go by, it starts to be opened up to ordinary citizens. I mean, citizens who, you know, they have to pay a

membership fee, but otherwise they can all kind of join it. And this club, they call themselves Les Amis de la Constitution, the Friends of the Constitution. But increasingly, Dominic, they come to be known by another name. And it's a name that derives from the fact that they have rented their meeting room from the order of the Dominicans. And in Paris, the Dominicans have a very distinctive nickname. And it derives from the fact that the very first Dominican monastery in Paris, way back in the middle ages, had been on the Rue Saint-Jacques. And so they come to be called Jacobins. And this is the nickname that comes to be given to the most radical of the clubs

in paris and the existence of the jacobin as events will prove spells nothing good for the royal family well you know what ben kenobi said about the jacobin club tom you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. And on that bombshell, thank you so much for this terrifying story or inspirational story. We will be back tomorrow with the final episode for now of the French Revolution series, when we will be talking about how the royal family tried to make a break for it in disguise. Probably the most extraordinary scene in French history if not european history the king and queen of europe's largest country in disguise fleeing through france pursued by agents of the revolution desperate to get to the frontier before they can be stopped and accompanied by the

hairdresser and yeah well the hairdresser an important part of their ménage so the flight to varennes will be tomorrow's final episode of this part of the series the rest of the series we will be pursuing I think in the autumn is that right Tom? that's right so you've got that to look forward to

but Tom merci beaucoup et au revoir au revoir 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

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