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The French Revolution with Prof. David Andress: The Terror (Part 2) · The Smart Cookies podcast

• 0:00
  Ladies and gentlemen, we are back with David Andress, professor of modern history at the
• 0:09
  University of Portsmouth for part two of the fantastic conversation about the French Revolution.
• 0:16
  Professor like a pair of seasoned screenwriters, we concluded the last episode with a massive
• 0:22
  cliffhanger.
• 0:24
  Now the events described during the first part were, dare I say, given the widespread
• 0:32
  injustice and hardship that we talked about at the time, pretty inspiring.
• 0:38
  This is going to be, of course, a gross oversimplification of, but you described how the representatives
• 0:45
  of the third estate made up of mostly educated citizens, but representing all commoners began
• 0:53
  sort of taking and grabbing power from the other two, the aristocracy and the clergy.
• 1:00
  Then things began spiraling and eventually the city of Paris rose up and the king surrendered
• 1:07
  to them.
• 1:08
  So far, so good.
• 1:11
  However, towards the end of our chat, you hinted at some pretty dark clouds gathering
• 1:18
  on the horizon.
• 1:19
  Two important developments that you mentioned were number one, the formation and proliferation
• 1:26
  of the Jacobin clubs.
• 1:28
  So revolutionaries who perceived themselves as the only good patriots, but throughout
• 1:33
  the years began kind of sliding into a bit of a frenzy, seeing more and more counter
• 1:40
  revolutionaries everywhere.
• 1:42
  And number two, externally, you said that at the beginning of the revolution, other
• 1:47
  powers, other monarchies were having a bit of a laugh at France's expense, but quite
• 1:52
  quickly all that sneering turned into saber rattling, especially once Louis 16th was executed.
• 2:02
  You provided a delicious quote by Edmund Burke, who at the time said, I have to read it out,
• 2:08
  the swineish multitudes have destroyed a flourishing hierarchical society.
• 2:14
  I have to start using this in my daily life.
• 2:16
  Anyway, let's maybe continue here with the revolution's ultimate break with the old
• 2:22
  regime, the downfall of the French king, this unfortunate lad who just wouldn't take a mistress.
• 2:30
  How does he get into such a pickle?
• 2:32
  Well, I mean, that's going to be quite a long story.
• 2:38
  One of the things that, again, we need to remember about the French Revolution as a
• 2:43
  historical episode is that, I mean, on the one hand, it evolves very rapidly.
• 2:50
  And on the other hand, it evolves over several years.
• 2:54
  So the sort of political positions and reflections that people are having by 1792 are almost
• 3:01
  completely unimaginable three or four years earlier.
• 3:06
  And it's because of the way that politics has evolved over those years that you end
• 3:10
  up with that situation.
• 3:12
  I think one of the key ways of thinking about what happens in general between 1789 and 1792,
• 3:18
  93 is to say that different dimensions of, as it were, misunderstanding or incomprehension
• 3:26
  or ideological conflict, you've got from the very beginning, a very straightforward conflict
• 3:33
  between people who see themselves as the revolutionaries and people that they see as the counter revolution.
• 3:39
  I mean, as we talked about last time, the storming of the Bastille happens because there
• 3:43
  is a counter revolutionary coup attempted and the Bastille is stormed to defend against
• 3:48
  it.
• 3:49
  So counter revolution is always real.
• 3:54
  One of the king's brothers is already outside France after July 1789.
• 3:59
  And that brother, the Comte de Provence, is constantly agitating to destroy the revolution,
• 4:06
  agitating that his brother, the king, is effectively a prisoner, needs to be rescued, and so on
• 4:11
  and so forth.
• 4:13
  And a lot of people within the social inside France are essentially sympathetic to that
• 4:18
  view.
• 4:19
  So there is always a counter revolution.
• 4:21
  And there is always the patriotic view that this must be fought against, that the French
• 4:27
  have have gained their liberty and that that is something to be defended.
• 4:33
  One of the paradoxes that you'll see throughout is that even a lot of the most radical sentiments
• 4:40
  that evolve over the following years are essentially defensive.
• 4:45
  They're essentially pinned on to the idea that something foundational was achieved in
• 4:51
  1789.
• 4:52
  And it's defending that that really matters.
• 4:57
  What that means in practice, what that means in terms of constructing a future, they're
• 5:01
  much less clear about, but they're very clear on that threat to those foundations.
• 5:07
  And the other dimension, the sort of up down on the map that we might draw as opposed to
• 5:14
  the left right, is that what's actually being built from the summer of 1789 onwards is a
• 5:22
  really quite authoritarian, top down, centralized state that we would like to think of the French
• 5:34
  Revolution as being essentially libertarian.
• 5:37
  You know, liberty, equality, fraternity.
• 5:39
  This is what it's supposed to be about.
• 5:42
  But when we explore what that means in practice, it means that the revolutionaries in the National
• 5:48
  Assembly, the ones who are writing the Constitution, are imagining their country, their fellow citizens
• 5:56
  as people who need to be governed, people who need to be controlled.
• 6:03
  And there's all sorts of levels at which this is perceptible.
• 6:09
  One of the key things that will disturb the revolution throughout these years is a really
• 6:15
  hostile attitude from the political elite to the rural population, to the peasantry
• 6:22
  who are the majority, who've made this sort of spectacular revolution in both words and
• 6:29
  actions in 1789, throwing off the yoke of feudalism.
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  And right through into 1793, the political elite will keep trying to impose new burdens
• 6:41
  of taxation on them, will keep trying to get them to carry on paying their feudal dues
• 6:47
  because that money is an investment.
• 6:49
  Those are middle class savings that they're trying to do away with.
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  And there's a complete lack of comprehension from the center to the periphery about what
• 7:00
  life is actually like and how grateful people should be for their liberation, which often
• 7:08
  doesn't feel like a liberation if you're being ordered to carry on paying money to your feudal
• 7:13
  lord because that's now become as if by magic a capitalist debt.
• 7:19
  There's all sorts of things like that going on.
• 7:21
  And the Constitution that's actually being constructed, although it uses elections to
• 7:29
  fill offices to have village mayors and district councillors and all sorts of public officials,
• 7:36
  it uses elections, but it understands voting and serving in these positions as essentially
• 7:45
  obligations of citizenship rather than rights and entitlements.
• 7:52
  As the revolutionaries write this new constitution, they're writing a vision of citizens taking
• 7:58
  part in voting, not to express political opinions, not to have views, but just to pick the best
• 8:05
  people to do these essentially administrative things.
• 8:10
  And when they write down what is it that a village mayor should be doing, what is it
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  that a district council should be doing, they write down a list of things which are basically
• 8:20
  about controlling the population and making it obedient to the diktats coming down from
• 8:27
  the center.
• 8:28
  A constant stream of administrative requirements starts to flow down from Paris to every village
• 8:37
  in late 1789 and it never really stops.
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  And if we look ahead past the fall of the monarchy into the years of the terror 1793,
• 8:46
  1794, village councils are receiving in some cases, dozens of decrees every week straight
• 8:56
  from the center, printed documents telling them to do things.
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  And this is the whole vision of a constitutional nation that actually comes out in these years,
• 9:09
  1789, 19, 91.
• 9:12
  It's very rigid, it's very controlling.
• 9:17
  And the idea of patriotism, the idea of being good citizens is one of the things that's
• 9:23
  used to ram that message home against the threat of counterrevolution.
• 9:29
  And it's a deep irony that what prevents this essentially authoritarian and monarchical
• 9:38
  vision embedding itself is not resistance from below, but the threat of the counterrevolution.
• 9:47
  All this stuff goes much too far for the counterrevolutionaries, it's much too egalitarian, even though it's
• 9:52
  also authoritarian.
• 9:54
  And so it is the threat of aristocratic resistance, both sort of secular resistance from the nobility
• 10:02
  and also interestingly religious resistance, which is something else we might get on and
• 10:05
  talk about, is this material and cultural threat to what underpins the revolution, which
• 10:11
  actually pushes further conflict into the future.
• 10:17
  You mentioned counterrevolution, was it a legitimate threat throughout these events,
• 10:24
  or was it also a little bit of a mouse conveniently blown up into an elephant in order to mop
• 10:30
  up whoever was becoming a thorn in the side of the revolutionaries?
• 10:35
  Well, I think it is a very serious threat.
• 10:41
  Because it has to be understood in the framework of the revolutionaries, feeling everything
• 10:47
  they're doing to be essentially fragile.
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  That they have pinned their hopes after July and August 1789 on being able to design a
• 10:58
  constitutional monarchy.
• 11:02
  Because not having a monarchy is almost literally unthinkable.
• 11:08
  It would bring instant civil war, it would bring instant foreign invasion, it's just
• 11:14
  unthinkable.
• 11:16
  The country needs a monarchical governmental structure.
• 11:21
  Having committed to that, they're then committed to that being Louis XVI.
• 11:28
  There are conspiracy theorists around who think that the radicals really want to get
• 11:33
  rid of Louis and replace him with the Duke of Orleans, but that is a counterrevolutionary
• 11:38
  conspiracy theory essentially.
• 11:42
  The problem then is if you have Louis, then you have his whole family.
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  You have to acknowledge that his brothers, one of whom is in exile as a counterrevolutionary,
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  are also members of this royal family.
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  You have to acknowledge that the Queen is also there, that there will be a royal court,
• 12:00
  there will be some kind of vaguely aristocratic structure around it.
• 12:07
  You've lumbered yourself with having to deal with all the appurtenances of monarchy and
• 12:15
  design a constitution around it which is different from the old way of doing things.
• 12:21
  The fear always persists that it would only take a little bit of resistance from the King
• 12:27
  and from people around him to make this fall apart.
• 12:31
  They have that fear as early as the autumn of 1789, there's tremendous upheaval during
• 12:39
  September with a very extended debate of whether the King should be able to veto legislation.
• 12:45
  They end up giving in this compromised thing called a suspensive veto, which means they
• 12:51
  have to pass laws three times over six years to override his veto.
• 12:57
  That segues then into a panic at the beginning of October about actual sort of counterrevolutionary
• 13:03
  troops at Versailles and a panic about the food supply, which leads to the very famous
• 13:11
  march on Versailles by the women of Paris, led by the market women and thousands of women
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  and men, the Revolutionary Militia, the National Guard, march from Paris to Versailles and
• 13:23
  basically force the revolutionary leadership to persuade the King to move from Versailles
• 13:30
  back to Paris.
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  The idea that this will force his hand politically and it will also improve the food supply,
• 13:40
  that the King is a sort of totem, a guarantee that Paris can't be starved.
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  Because he's there.
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  There is a suspicion that hunger in Paris, high food prices, these are always suspected
• 13:54
  to be a conspiracy, a plot.
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  And so it goes.
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  So already you've had huge change forced on the revolutionary landscape in late 89 by
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  fear about what's happening around the King, by popular initiative, by the sort of the
• 14:09
  demonstrating power of the crowd.
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  And Louis does move to the Tuileries Palace and the National Assembly moves after him
• 14:17
  and sets itself up so that politics moves from Versailles to Paris, emphatically.
• 14:23
  But then they carry on trying to build the Constitution.
• 14:26
  But it's only a couple of months later when there is another counter revolutionary conspiracy,
• 14:31
  which seems to be an actual plot by a chap called the Marquis de Favreau to rescue the
• 14:38
  King and Queen, to smuggle them out of the city to safety where they can help overthrow
• 14:44
  the revolution.
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  And, you know, this is not a very serious plot.
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  And Favreau is detained and tried and executed for it.
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  But it implicates the King's brother in support for it.
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  So these things are going on all the time.
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  And you then you have then the whole next 12 to 14 months through to early 1791, where
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  the King is just there in Paris nodding along, signing decrees.
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  Whereas hoping that he turns out to be the keystone of the Constitution.
• 15:17
  But all at the same time, lots of things, lots of other things are happening which call
• 15:20
  that into question.
• 15:22
  And this is where perhaps we need to segue to the religious dimension, because this is
• 15:27
  again, fascinatingly important.
• 15:29
  OK, the the sort of enlightened mentality of most of the revolutionary leadership.
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  See sees religion as a social function, basically.
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  It keeps the plebs in their place.
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  It provides basic education.
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  It provides basic health care.
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  It provides for the masses.
• 15:51
  Yeah.
• 15:52
  Well, I mean, that is a classic enlightenment position.
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  You know, I mean, Marx's point, of course, is the masses need opium because they're suffering.
• 16:01
  But that's another dimension to it.
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  So there's a there's a sense that the Catholic Church in particular is a national institution
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  of the country.
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  You know, it was the first estate of the kingdom.
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  So now it has to have some kind of collective characteristic.
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  But what they will end up doing late in 1789 is deciding that the Catholic Church, which
• 16:23
  is extremely wealthy, give or take a tenth of all the land in the country, loads of investments,
• 16:32
  loads of buildings and property portfolios and so on.
• 16:39
  Portfolios not a word I was expecting in relation to the Catholic Church in the 18th century.
• 16:46
  But it is it's an extremely wealthy organization.
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  Hedge fund.
• 16:49
  Yeah.
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  And what I mean, the financial marketplace shenanigans are a whole other just in terms
• 16:57
  of material property.
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  It's extremely wealthy organization.
• 17:01
  And the Godfather Part Three.
• 17:03
  Sorry.
• 17:04
  Yeah, go on.
• 17:05
  But all this is now at the disposal of the nation, according to the National Assembly.
• 17:11
  And that property portfolio is what they intend to use to deal with the national debt, which
• 17:17
  if you remember going right back to this is why there is a revolution in the first place,
• 17:21
  because they couldn't get out of it.
• 17:23
  Yeah.
• 17:24
  National debts.
• 17:26
  So that material debt crisis is always there in the background.
• 17:30
  And the revolution is like they're going to they're going to basically nationalize the
• 17:33
  property of the church, turn the clergy into salaried state employees, and then take that
• 17:38
  property, issue bonds, which are called a senior on the overall value of that property,
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  use those bonds to pay the state's creditors.
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  And then they can use them to buy the land of the church.
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  And so the state's debts gets liquidated into a transfer of property from the church to
• 17:58
  individuals.
• 18:01
  This has several dimensions of trouble.
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  The first is theological, that they will end up deciding that if the clergy are salaried
• 18:12
  state employees, then they should be elected the same way as all these other state employees
• 18:16
  and public officials are elected.
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  So they put the appointment of parish priests and bishops inside this essentially secular
• 18:25
  structure of public election, which would involve people who are not even Catholic being
• 18:32
  able to vote on these things and hence violating the very obvious rules of apostolic succession,
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  particularly for bishops.
• 18:40
  And this is sort of theologically implausible from the point of view of many Catholics.
• 18:46
  And it's also implausible for all kinds of other reasons when they start reorganizing
• 18:52
  the church, because now they want to rationalize its structures.
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  They want to.
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  There are far too many bishops in France.
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  They can get rid of a third of them, at least.
• 19:02
  Geographical rationalization is another thing they're pursuing relentlessly through this
• 19:06
  period.
• 19:08
  So you'll end up with a situation where the clergy as a whole find themselves at odds
• 19:16
  with this process.
• 19:18
  And many of the clergy start to see this as the essential evil of the whole revolution.
• 19:26
  More conservative minded clergy start to talk about the satanic inspiration of all of this.
• 19:35
  And their resistance spreads to their population, to their flocks, to their...
• 19:41
  So they're preaching about it every Sunday.
• 19:43
  They're preaching about it.
• 19:44
  They're preaching about it to their own church.
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  They are forming networks about this.
• 19:48
  And by the end of 1790, this is such a problem for the National Assembly, because the clergy
• 19:54
  are a vital connection between center and periphery.
• 19:59
  The church and weekly services are a part of civic life as well as religious life in
• 20:05
  the village.
• 20:06
  It's where people find things out.
• 20:08
  The clergy read them letters and things.
• 20:11
  This is their long-term role, which is only partly replaced by secular...
• 20:15
  One question.
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  Were most of the peasants literate at that time or no?
• 20:23
  Not most.
• 20:24
  I mean, it's not a sort of society which is mired in mass illiteracy.
• 20:32
  But certainly there are regions where you'd say that the majority of peasants in any particular
• 20:36
  village probably can't read.
• 20:38
  Some can, but some can't.
• 20:41
  It's not one or the other.
• 20:42
  So even in this case, they were dependent on priests to relay information from the center
• 20:47
  to them.
• 20:48
  From the center.
• 20:49
  I mean, this is one of their roles under the old monarchy is to do this.
• 20:51
  Right.
• 20:52
  And it's only been partly replaced by mayors and councils and so on.
• 20:57
  But by the end of 1790, the National Assembly decided they need to shore up this whole system.
• 21:04
  They need to shore up the system of the Asseigneur, which is their currency now.
• 21:08
  They're issuing paper money basically to pay for their everyday needs.
• 21:12
  People are using it as money.
• 21:15
  And the value of that depends on all these transactions with the church going well.
• 21:22
  So they decided that the clergy have to take a loyalty oath at the end of 1790 and into
• 21:28
  1791.
• 21:29
  And what will happen then is that half of the clergy will not take that oath.
• 21:33
  Will refuse it.
• 21:36
  Several tens of thousands of people across the country in areas of the West and the South,
• 21:42
  three quarters or more of the clergy in those areas refuse to take this oath.
• 21:47
  And so there is immediately established a body that one can refer to as the refractory
• 21:53
  clergy.
• 21:54
  There is now a group within society who have refused this oath and often stating very loudly
• 21:59
  and publicly why they're refusing it.
• 22:01
  They don't believe in the revolution.
• 22:03
  They think it's an attack on the natural order of things.
• 22:06
  So on and so forth.
• 22:08
  And many of them taking their own parishioners into resistance with them.
• 22:15
  So that in the Northwest of France, for example, by the end of 1790, there's quite serious
• 22:20
  violence opposing urban authorities to rural crowds over this issue of who controls the
• 22:29
  church.
• 22:30
  And it's also wrapped up with other things like very aggressive tax collecting and a
• 22:34
  general urban sense that the peasants are scum and that having them at the end of a
• 22:39
  musket is the best place to keep them.
• 22:41
  Real kind of nasty, gritty tensions in society there.
• 22:46
  But they are playing out then at this level, which makes this about revolution versus counter
• 22:50
  revolution.
• 22:51
  What's the Pope saying about all this?
• 22:52
  The Pope is very unhappy.
• 22:54
  I can imagine.
• 22:56
  The king, the royal family want papal advice before they decide whether they're signing
• 23:03
  on to all this business.
• 23:04
  And there was a whole episode in early 1791 where the king's maiden aunts try to go on
• 23:12
  a pilgrimage to Rome to ask the Pope what he thinks and are not allowed to leave the
• 23:16
  country.
• 23:18
  When the Pope does opine in writing around about Easter 1791, he again is against this
• 23:25
  naturally because it is it's a flagrant violation of the apostolic succession of bishops and
• 23:30
  a flagrant violation of the institutional independence of the church.
• 23:34
  Of course he's against it.
• 23:37
  He's also against it because like a lot of people, he started thinking it might actually
• 23:40
  be the work of Satan.
• 23:42
  You know, that religious theological sense that what the revolution is doing is so extreme,
• 23:50
  so crazy that it has to be about a kind of devilish inspiration rises over the years
• 24:01
  ahead.
• 24:02
  But what all this means, coming back to the main question, is that Louis the 16th is put
• 24:08
  in an impossible position.
• 24:10
  Again, again, poor line.
• 24:13
  He's really bad at coping with these impossible positions.
• 24:17
  But by early 1791, and we know this from the correspondence, particularly of the Queen,
• 24:23
  the King and the Queen are plotting the overthrow of the revolution.
• 24:28
  They are plotting the overthrow of the revolution through means of an escape from Paris to flee
• 24:35
  towards the eastern frontier to meet up with the loyal senior leadership of the army.
• 24:44
  They also believe, and they're very wrong about this, that the rural population in general
• 24:49
  will be on their side.
• 24:51
  But from about February 1791 through to June, they are actively plotting this escape.
• 24:56
  And then on the night of the 20th, 21st of June, they actually carry out this escape.
• 25:03
  They flee the city in a carriage, which turns out to be much too slow.
• 25:09
  And they end up being stopped at a place called Varennes on the road to the eastern frontier,
• 25:17
  where they're physically confronted with the fact that these urban townspeak, provincial
• 25:24
  townspeople will not let them through.
• 25:29
  Despite the fact that the King, you know, throws off his disguise and is revealed to
• 25:33
  be the King, and they're all very respectful of him as the King.
• 25:36
  So they're wearing disguises in the hope that nobody would recognize them.
• 25:39
  People recognize them?
• 25:40
  The disguise is basically, you know, a false paper.
• 25:43
  A mustache.
• 25:44
  Well, I mean, this is, you know, one of the legends about it is the idea that if the King
• 25:49
  gets recognized because his picture is on the Asinia, the paper money has a picture
• 25:55
  of the King on it.
• 25:56
  So they are circulating through everyone's hands.
• 25:59
  But he's actually been written down on this passport as one of the servants of a lady
• 26:04
  who is traveling here.
• 26:05
  I'm sorry, the King has a passport.
• 26:08
  Like a fake passport.
• 26:09
  No, not a passport as we'd imagine it now.
• 26:15
  But I mean, to travel around in France in general, one needed passports in a generic
• 26:23
  sense, which would be documents of some kind from an authoritative figure.
• 26:29
  And in this case, it's the one of their servants has taken on the role of, I think, a Russian
• 26:36
  noblewoman.
• 26:38
  And then the rest of the royal family are written down in this passport document as
• 26:41
  her companions and servants, to sort of throw everyone off the scent.
• 26:46
  But obviously, that has to be abandoned once the King is physically recognized.
• 26:53
  And then there is this agonizing process whereby he and the royal family are prevented from
• 27:00
  leaving by larger and larger groups of people mobilized in from the countryside to this
• 27:05
  small town at the threat of the King leaving.
• 27:10
  This is understood immediately as a threat to the revolution, as a threat to their safety.
• 27:17
  It cannot be allowed to happen.
• 27:20
  And the really interesting political direction, this is obviously back in Paris, there's been
• 27:24
  hideous panic and recrimination and everyone blaming everyone else what happens.
• 27:30
  But the leadership of the revolution at that point in time, who we could broadly refer
• 27:34
  to as moderate Jacobins in this sense that they're desperately trying to make this centralized
• 27:41
  constitutional monarchy work.
• 27:44
  In order to deal with the fact that the King has left, they are forced to declare that
• 27:52
  he's been kidnapped.
• 27:55
  Because if he hasn't been kidnapped, if he's left of his own free will, they can't make
• 28:01
  him come back.
• 28:02
  They can't hunt him down.
• 28:04
  He's the King.
• 28:05
  Why not?
• 28:06
  They have to.
• 28:07
  Well, because he's the King.
• 28:10
  But provincial urbanites physically stopped the King from leaving.
• 28:16
  Even though he was, I'm the King, they were like, you're not leaving.
• 28:23
  In those immediate terms out in Varennes, this is an emergency.
• 28:27
  This is a confrontation.
• 28:28
  Something strange is happening here.
• 28:30
  Nobody's going anywhere until we get word from higher authority.
• 28:33
  We want to know what the National Assembly thinks.
• 28:36
  It's not, you know, you're the King and we're locking you up.
• 28:41
  It's you're the King, but we need to know what's going on.
• 28:44
  Okay.
• 28:45
  Wow.
• 28:46
  Whereas in Paris, they declare that what's going on is that the King has been kidnapped.
• 28:52
  Because if he's been kidnapped, you can rescue him.
• 28:55
  If he's left of his own free will, then you'd be the one kidnapping him to bring him back.
• 29:00
  And they need him to have been kidnapped so that they can rescue him, so that they can
• 29:06
  figure out a way not to dethrone him.
• 29:10
  Because again, just as in 1789, there is the perception that if you dethrone him, there
• 29:15
  will be civil war and external war instantly.
• 29:19
  So you can't afford to do that.
• 29:22
  And they send out several members of the National Assembly, deputies, to meet the King at Varennes,
• 29:29
  or they meet him just outside Varennes and start traveling back.
• 29:32
  And while they're in the coach together traveling back, one of them, Barnard and Queen Marie
• 29:38
  Antoinette, strike up a friendly slash manipulative relationship, which leads to a series of secret
• 29:46
  negotiations through the rest of the summer to get the King to apparently accept the Constitution,
• 29:54
  which is now nearly finished, which again, they've been working on this thing for two
• 29:58
  years.
• 29:59
  They desperately need it to be finished.
• 30:03
  So you will have this situation where the King, in leaving, has left behind a manifesto,
• 30:10
  which says, I reject everything.
• 30:13
  I made a speech on the 23rd of June 1789, which said, these are my terms.
• 30:19
  This is what I'm prepared to tolerate in terms of reform.
• 30:21
  I have never changed my mind about that.
• 30:24
  All this religious stuff is terrible.
• 30:25
  All these other changes are doing are terrible.
• 30:28
  The formal abolition of nobility in 1790 is terrible.
• 30:31
  I disagree with it all.
• 30:32
  I want to reverse it all.
• 30:35
  They now have to pretend that document doesn't exist.
• 30:39
  And the King, for the safety of his wife and children, is persuaded to agree that he will
• 30:45
  go on being King, that he will accept the Constitution.
• 30:50
  And that's what happens in September and October 1791.
• 30:53
  There are new elections.
• 30:54
  There's a new legislative assembly, and the Constitution starts functioning.
• 30:59
  But it is obviously doomed to fail.
• 31:03
  It is based, you know, it is a throne of lies in contemporary terms.
• 31:08
  You know, the King doesn't believe in what he's doing.
• 31:11
  The Queen is actively plotting with foreign grounds for counterrevolution.
• 31:16
  The revolutionaries don't believe in the King's goodwill.
• 31:19
  They just don't know quite what else to do.
• 31:23
  And the more radical Jacobins in the summer of 1791 had started to demand a referendum
• 31:29
  on whether they needed a King at all.
• 31:32
  But the moderate Jacobins repressed that violently, which is another dimension of conflict that's
• 31:37
  happening.
• 31:39
  So the country is going to become a constitutional monarchy in late 1791.
• 31:46
  And within weeks, the King is going to be forced to use that veto that they gave him
• 31:53
  because the radical Jacobins in the new legislative assembly push forward legislation to punish
• 31:59
  the emigre, to punish the refractory clergy, and the King feels he has no choice but to
• 32:05
  veto it.
• 32:06
  Block it, yeah.
• 32:07
  So within six weeks or so of the new Constitution starting to work, it's already collided with
• 32:14
  what the King wants.
• 32:16
  And for the next six months, the pressure is going to be for there to be actual war.
• 32:24
  That the people, the radical leadership in the legislative assembly, people we call brisotin,
• 32:29
  because they're associated with the journalist, Jacques Pierre Brisseau, are declaring that
• 32:37
  the only way to sort this out is to cleanse the frontiers of the emigrated aristocrats.
• 32:42
  There are by now thousands of nobles, many of whom are military officers, camped outside
• 32:49
  the frontiers, particularly in the Rhineland, supported by local rulers, supported implicitly
• 32:55
  by the Austrian Holy Roman Emperor.
• 32:59
  And the agitation now is for there to be a war to sort this out, or at least to use the
• 33:04
  threat of war to force the dispersal of the emigre, to remove their military threat.
• 33:10
  A war with who exactly?
• 33:13
  Well, I mean, again, the Holy Roman Empire being what it is, there are very many local
• 33:20
  princedoms and so on.
• 33:21
  So one of the things is simply to threaten military action against some of these smaller
• 33:26
  territories where the emigre are actually living.
• 33:31
  But the idea, that idea expands until what they will end up doing in April is declaring
• 33:38
  war on Austria, which is interesting because it creates a northern theatre of war because
• 33:45
  modern day Belgium is Austrian territory at this point.
• 33:49
  It creates an eastern theatre of war because they're invading the allied territory along
• 33:53
  the Rhine to try and disperse the actual emigre.
• 33:58
  And it creates a more general sense that they've gone to war against one of Europe's other
• 34:01
  great powers, which necessarily then involves all the other great powers in thinking about
• 34:06
  what they're going to do.
• 34:09
  So that's part of an escalatory process that started.
• 34:15
  The other interesting thing about the process it brings about war is that after three years
• 34:21
  of revolutionary upheaval, there's an astonishing range of opinion in France who do come around
• 34:29
  to the idea that war is going to sort something out for them.
• 34:33
  They've tried to sort out their internal politics amongst themselves, but somehow they can't
• 34:38
  seem to do this without a resort to force on a wider scale.
• 34:44
  And the craziest vision of this is with Louis and Marie Antoinette themselves, who think
• 34:50
  that what should happen is that a war should be allowed to start and then France should
• 34:55
  lose it.
• 34:56
  And then in losing the war, they will regain power.
• 35:00
  But you also have what we might call sensible centrists, people around the Marquis de Lafayette,
• 35:06
  for example, who's been a very prominent figure in the early years of the revolution.
• 35:11
  People who are actually involved in governmental ministries now, people saying that war would
• 35:17
  bring social discipline back.
• 35:20
  It would allow them to control these mad radicals.
• 35:25
  Paris is now seen as being full of mad radicals, always agitating.
• 35:28
  What, sort of like a military dictatorship?
• 35:33
  War time conditions would impose social order.
• 35:37
  There would be the smack of firm government and we might be able to put some of these
• 35:40
  people in the army and get them shot.
• 35:43
  A general sense of social discipline could be created by war.
• 35:48
  And then there are the radicals themselves who are looking for further liberation through
• 35:53
  war.
• 35:55
  And then some of them not just about sort of preserving the situation in France, but
• 36:00
  some of them even talk about exporting French values now.
• 36:05
  There was an unsuccessful kind of brother revolution in the Austrian Netherlands in
• 36:10
  late 1790.
• 36:12
  So you now have a lot of sort of Belgian refugees in France, agitating, saying, you know, help
• 36:17
  us, let us go back and liberate our countrymen, let us become like you.
• 36:22
  There is a kind of expansionist edge to some of this thinking as well.
• 36:26
  So all sorts of different forces within France are saying, you know, war is going to get
• 36:31
  us what we want.
• 36:33
  Yeah.
• 36:34
  And again, interestingly, one of the people who stands out against this most strongly
• 36:39
  is Maximilien Robespierre, who's going to be the archpriest of terror in the years ahead.
• 36:45
  But he's someone who's been a forceful Democrat in the National Assembly, always making an
• 36:53
  argument for social equality, political equality.
• 36:57
  And he's now a journalist and he is writing about the threat of war as itself essentially
• 37:02
  a conspiratorial danger, that war is a trap.
• 37:07
  You know, he's intuiting again, the royal position on this, that the powerful people
• 37:12
  want France to go to war.
• 37:14
  They intend France to lose that war and they intend to destroy the revolution.
• 37:18
  Not far off the mark.
• 37:20
  He's not far off the mark.
• 37:21
  But he's very isolated in this view, because most of the other radicals think that, you
• 37:26
  know, France is undefeatable, you know, because it has been liberated, because its citizenry
• 37:34
  have been imbued with patriotic power.
• 37:38
  You know, the fact that a lot of the military officer corps have run away doesn't matter.
• 37:44
  That war will be victorious.
• 37:46
  I mean, just sort of classic pre-war optimistic mongering, right, going on.
• 37:55
  So France will then enter wartime conditions from April of 1792.
• 38:03
  And those wartime conditions then shape everything that happens after that.
• 38:08
  War is disastrous in the short term.
• 38:11
  The French troops are not invincible.
• 38:14
  They are pushed back on the frontiers.
• 38:18
  Blame for all of this is quite reasonably laid at the door of central government and
• 38:22
  the monarchy.
• 38:23
  And over several months of accelerating agitation, the perception that it would be possible to
• 38:32
  have a republic, to simply depose the king and not just have another king or a regent
• 38:38
  or something, that rises up in the most radical patriotic circles.
• 38:45
  In Paris, you have neighbourhood councils that are called sections.
• 38:52
  And they take on a very, very vigorous militant patriotic line, because their organisation
• 38:59
  as national guards, as actual sort of armed battalion of militia is also part of their
• 39:04
  identity.
• 39:05
  So they're both sort of military and militant, always willing to think about an armed solution
• 39:11
  to these problems.
• 39:14
  And as the war continues to go badly and political agitation gets higher and higher, by early
• 39:21
  August, well, France is now also at war with Prussia.
• 39:25
  They've joined in the war and the Austrian and Prussian leadership have explicitly threatened
• 39:33
  the destruction of Paris, as well as various other things, if the revolutionaries don't
• 39:37
  surrender to Louis XVI.
• 39:39
  They've explicitly positioned the war as a war between revolution and counterrevolution
• 39:46
  and threatened mass death to the civilian population if they don't give in.
• 39:52
  So things have got very ideologically crunchy.
• 39:56
  And in the first week of August, there's a very, very widespread agitation in Paris that
• 40:01
  the only way forward is an overthrow of the monarchy, which happens on the 10th of August.
• 40:07
  And is again an intriguingly ambiguous event in its own right, that the King is actually
• 40:13
  persuaded to surrender himself to the Legislative Assembly with his family, before any violence
• 40:21
  occurs.
• 40:22
  There is a march of troops towards the palace, thousands of revolutionarily mobilised National
• 40:29
  Guards.
• 40:31
  There is a military garrison at the palace, particularly the Swiss Guard.
• 40:35
  Before the two even come into contact, the royal family have surrendered.
• 40:39
  They have given up.
• 40:41
  But what they forget to do is to tell the Swiss Guards to stand down.
• 40:46
  And so there will then be a confrontation between these two military forces in which
• 40:49
  several hundred people will be killed, essentially by accident, because it doesn't affect the
• 40:56
  outcome of the day.
• 40:57
  The King has already surrendered.
• 40:59
  The Legislative Assembly is already voting to suspend him and to go forward with new
• 41:04
  elections for a national convention.
• 41:07
  The violence is incidental to all of that.
• 41:11
  But of course, it becomes emblematic.
• 41:14
  The notion that those patriotic soldiers had in fact been attacked by the Swiss Guard on
• 41:19
  the one hand and on the counter-revolutionary side, the notion that there is then a horrible
• 41:23
  massacre.
• 41:25
  There are very vivid accounts of individual Swiss Guards being chased through the streets
• 41:29
  of Paris and hacked to death and their bodies left in the gutter.
• 41:34
  Even in the sort of the real grassroots archival record of the local police, you find this,
• 41:40
  there are just bodies of the Swiss Guard littered around central Paris and people come in and
• 41:46
  they hand in the watches and the handkerchiefs and the snuff boxes they found in these men's
• 41:51
  pockets, they hand them into the local police or they arrest someone for trying to make
• 41:56
  away with the possessions of this corpse.
• 41:59
  So it is a very vivid event, but it requires a legendary status afterwards.
• 42:07
  The monarchy was toppled violently, but the monarchy had already toppled itself before
• 42:12
  the violence.
• 42:13
  I think this is part of the ambiguity of how all these things are made into stories.
• 42:17
  Their story is much better, I have to say.
• 42:21
  And France is then, by September, it has declared itself to be a republic.
• 42:27
  At the same time, as further horrible massacres have happened in the prisons, that the prisons
• 42:32
  are seen as the home of what we call in 20th century terms a fifth column of bandits and
• 42:39
  then imprisoned aristocrats and imprisoned priests.
• 42:43
  So over a thousand of them are killed in early September by another wave of patriotic mobilization,
• 42:50
  following on from news that Verdun has fallen and the enemy troops are advancing on Paris,
• 42:56
  the military situation and political situation all entwined.
• 43:00
  And then the republic is declared at almost the same moment that the French troops triumph
• 43:06
  in the Battle of Valmy, pushing those advancing enemy troops into retreat, securing the future.
• 43:13
  So there's this tremendous moment in late September when the declaration of the republic
• 43:18
  and the physical safety of France are brought together at an emblematic moment.
• 43:23
  And it seems like they're able to make a new start.
• 43:27
  All right, we have to conclude Louis' story, though.
• 43:31
  You said that at the beginning, not having a monarch was unthinkable.
• 43:37
  How does the unthinkable finally happen in the most brutal way possible of not just deposing
• 43:44
  the king, but chopping off his head?
• 43:48
  Yeah.
• 43:49
  Well, this is again the situation that the revolutionary leaderships find themselves
• 43:54
  in, constantly working through situations that were previously thought to be unthinkable
• 43:59
  and having to think their way through to conclusions.
• 44:02
  Having their hands forced or what?
• 44:04
  Having their hands forced in all sorts of ways.
• 44:07
  The old Legislative Assembly in August, it doesn't depose the king, it suspends him.
• 44:12
  Right.
• 44:13
  Spends him from office.
• 44:14
  When the republic is established.
• 44:15
  Yeah, but before the republic.
• 44:18
  So in August, he's suspended from office because that's as far as they can imagine going.
• 44:22
  Then there are new elections, there's a national convention.
• 44:25
  So they're always pushing the limits of their imagination.
• 44:27
  You push the limits, but you push them slightly.
• 44:30
  The new national convention, almost the first thing it does is say, yes, France is now a
• 44:35
  republic.
• 44:36
  Therefore, Louis is no longer king de facto.
• 44:41
  So you've moved from a suspension to the creation of a republic within a few weeks.
• 44:46
  Then they will spend numbers of weeks in September, October, November, debating whether they can
• 44:54
  try Louis.
• 44:58
  Just a second.
• 44:59
  And there's a fascinating period where he's turned into an ordinary citizen, right?
• 45:03
  And given a name or something.
• 45:05
  Well, effectively, I mean, this again, this follows on from 1790 when they abolished nobility.
• 45:11
  They abolished their names.
• 45:15
  So like if you are a noble in France, you are Mr. Something de somewhere.
• 45:21
  You know, you have that second part of your name, like the Marquis de Lafayette, right?
• 45:25
  For example, de Lafayette is a territorial attribution, which from 1790 onwards, you're
• 45:32
  not supposed to use.
• 45:34
  You're supposed to use your family name.
• 45:35
  His family name is Moutier.
• 45:37
  He's supposed to be just plain Mr. Moutier now, though in practice he's too famous for
• 45:42
  people to actually pay any attention to that.
• 45:44
  So when when you depose the king, he is no longer Louis de Bourbon.
• 45:50
  He's not identified with the name of the aristocratic house now.
• 45:53
  So they go all the way back in history to find the last time when the French royal house
• 45:56
  didn't have that kind of name.
• 45:59
  And they come up with Capet, which takes you back again, you know, a thousand years.
• 46:04
  So they call him Louis Capet because that's his real name.
• 46:08
  Monsieur Capet.
• 46:09
  Yes, Monsieur Capet.
• 46:10
  Yes, exactly.
• 46:11
  That is his name now.
• 46:13
  And again, of course, this is this is partly just nonsensical grandstanding.
• 46:19
  I think nobody's actually famous by the aristocratic name was ever called anything else.
• 46:27
  But it but it is trying to make that point that he's not anything special.
• 46:32
  But they have in fact spent weeks debating whether or not he's special in any way that
• 46:37
  under the Constitution, until the declaration of the Republic, the king is inviolable.
• 46:45
  It says so in the Constitution.
• 46:47
  His actions cannot be challenged.
• 46:50
  His person cannot be detained.
• 46:54
  So therefore, that is problematic when you want to put him on trial for things he did
• 46:59
  while the Constitution was in action, because the Constitution says you can't.
• 47:05
  And they're all lawyers and this exercises them tremendously.
• 47:09
  You know, you know, that ex post facto legislation, you know, doing things that to people for
• 47:15
  things that weren't illegal when they did them.
• 47:17
  This is a real, real life issue.
• 47:20
  And they swing in various directions about this from from.
• 47:24
  Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do on the one hand to other people like Robespierre,
• 47:27
  for example, who says that the king is outside the terms of normal civil life.
• 47:34
  He is an outlaw by definition, and therefore we should just execute him.
• 47:39
  We don't need a legal process.
• 47:41
  We can just have an executive one.
• 47:42
  We can just kill him because then he's gone.
• 47:47
  But that is, again, a very extreme position.
• 47:49
  So they decide to have a trial and give him defense and all these kind of things.
• 47:54
  So late December into early January, they rehearse all the things that have happened.
• 48:00
  This is helped by the discovery in the palace of a secret cupboard, the iron cupboard in
• 48:06
  which the king is kept and rigorously documented all the ways he hates the revolution.
• 48:12
  All the things that was real.
• 48:14
  Sorry, that was real.
• 48:16
  That wasn't.
• 48:17
  Yes.
• 48:18
  I mean, it was a tremendous revolution revelation when it happened.
• 48:21
  It's very dramatic, exciting news.
• 48:23
  But yes, authentic documents.
• 48:25
  This was the king's personal archive of what they intended to change back and all the correspondence
• 48:33
  that's been going on with other people.
• 48:35
  So there's no dispute that he's guilty of the things he's essentially charged with.
• 48:43
  The question then becomes, what do you do about that?
• 48:48
  And this is where revolutionary politics, Republican politics, is also itself starting
• 48:54
  to split open.
• 48:57
  These disputes that you had earlier on between moderates and radicals, these are just getting
• 49:01
  worse and worse.
• 49:03
  The radicals, the people around Robespierre, they don't think the moderates, the brisattans
• 49:10
  that they now call gérardin, they don't think that these people really wanted to overthrow
• 49:14
  the monarchy.
• 49:15
  They think they wanted to keep the monarchy because they just got their hands on power.
• 49:20
  The brisattans tend to think that Robespierre and his friends wanted to have them killed
• 49:23
  in September.
• 49:24
  There's the real sense of their lives were at stake in these processes.
• 49:31
  And the convention, this body that's been elected that is doing this, it's evokes unanimously
• 49:37
  that the king is guilty, but then it will split almost down the middle about what to
• 49:41
  do with him.
• 49:44
  Should he be basically sort of held hostage?
• 49:48
  Should his life be threatened to try and get peace, to try and get a settlement?
• 49:53
  Should he be sent into exile?
• 49:56
  Should he be executed now?
• 49:58
  Should he be sentenced to death and that sentence suspended?
• 50:04
  Should all of this then go to a referendum?
• 50:07
  Should there be an appeal to the people about this?
• 50:12
  And this is this frenetic debate about this.
• 50:16
  And what happens in the end is the immediate death penalty is finally voted for.
• 50:24
  And if you tot up the votes of different votes in different ways, you can make it look like
• 50:28
  it was by a one vote majority.
• 50:31
  But the actual vote was by a majority of about 60 out of 700.
• 50:36
  So the convention was radically split, but there was a clear majority.
• 50:42
  For the part of radicals.
• 50:44
  Yeah.
• 50:45
  But all this has revealed just how far apart the two sides of the convention are about
• 50:51
  what to do.
• 50:52
  And Louis goes to his death on the 21st of January.
• 50:56
  There is again, emblematically, yet another royalist attempts to rescue him on the day
• 51:02
  itself.
• 51:03
  The Baron de Batts, who's a famous counter-revolutionary adventurer, tries to stir up the crowd spontaneously
• 51:11
  to sort of rush the scaffold and rescue him, but gets absolutely nowhere and has to run
• 51:15
  away.
• 51:17
  I love these.
• 51:18
  He is executed.
• 51:21
  One of the interesting things you can think about this from the point of view of European
• 51:25
  observers is that they're so cynical.
• 51:30
  The sort of European diplomats watching this happen that you find in their correspondence,
• 51:34
  many of them saying, well, this is a really stupid thing for the French revolutionaries
• 51:38
  to have done.
• 51:39
  They're obviously going to make everything worse for them.
• 51:42
  Therefore, you know, probably the Austrians were paying for it.
• 51:48
  They're saying almost in so many words that only the counter-revolution really wanted
• 51:54
  the king dead.
• 51:56
  Because he's much better for their cause dead than alive.
• 51:59
  He's a martyr then.
• 52:00
  Alive, he's bloody useless.
• 52:03
  He's indecisive and stupid, blah, blah, blah.
• 52:07
  But dead, he's really useful.
• 52:09
  So in diplomatic circles themselves, you have this conspiracy theory raging that it wasn't
• 52:15
  the revolutionaries who really wanted him dead.
• 52:17
  It was someone else.
• 52:18
  But the revolutionaries are very firm that in fact they did want him dead.
• 52:22
  And they're very glad that he's dead.
• 52:23
  And it cements the sort of Republican pact that they've got.
• 52:29
  On the other hand, it's from that point onwards in early 1791 that life for the revolution
• 52:35
  starts to get really, really difficult.
• 52:39
  And everything starts to come apart at the seams.
• 52:43
  Because they find themselves propelled forward into a much wider war.
• 52:50
  Part of their belief system is that everyone is already conspiring against them.
• 52:54
  So they decide they might as well get everything out in the open.
• 52:57
  In February and March 93, they declare war on Britain, on Spain, on the Netherlands,
• 53:05
  on the Dutch Republic, and on Piedmont-Sardinia and the Italian states as well.
• 53:10
  So they've turned what was already a major war into a Europe-wide and indeed global conflict.
• 53:18
  All the colonies in the Caribbean come into play, the African slave trade, and all these
• 53:23
  things now become part of this huge war.
• 53:27
  And to fight this huge war, they realize they need dramatic, extraordinary means.
• 53:35
  And this is when the revolution and the republic starts to move towards the terror.
• 53:40
  Because that absolutely top-down authoritarian sense of power that had been there from 1789
• 53:47
  and been there in the writing of the original constitution, that the state, the nation,
• 53:52
  the republic has the right to tell everyone what to do and to demand obedience, this comes
• 53:58
  flooding out.
• 54:01
  They will send actual members of the national convention out as what they call representatives
• 54:07
  on mission with plenitentiary powers to mobilize people for the war effort, to enforce conscription,
• 54:16
  to enforce obedience, both practically and ideologically.
• 54:20
  Those representatives will be themselves empowered to give powers to other people locally to
• 54:25
  do these things.
• 54:27
  So you set up whole networks of essentially unaccountable power holders whose only recourse
• 54:34
  is to the people above them who put them in that position.
• 54:36
  They have no downward loyalty at all.
• 54:40
  They are trying to impose national conscription, having tried to rely on volunteers to increase
• 54:46
  the size of the army.
• 54:47
  They're now demanding 300,000 new soldiers, which is doubling the size of the army.
• 54:54
  Trying to do that coercively takes us back to the problems they were having with the
• 54:59
  rural population in general, whether it's about money, whether it's about religion,
• 55:05
  disaffected parts of the country, rise up against this demand to send the young men
• 55:12
  off to fight.
• 55:13
  And in the Northwest in particular, in the area around the lower Loire River, by March
• 55:19
  of 1793, this has become itself civil war.
• 55:24
  There is what will call itself the Royal and Catholic Army, forms out of the local rural
• 55:29
  population, becoming what's known to history as the Vendée and Revolt.
• 55:35
  And they will fight a brutal civil war against the forces that the Republic throws at them
• 55:42
  right the way through 1793 until they're virtually exterminated at the end of that year.
• 55:47
  And then early 1794, their home villages were burned to the ground by what are called infernal
• 55:53
  columns.
• 55:54
  And, you know, of everyone that dies in the period of the terror, 90% of them die in the
• 56:01
  Vendée.
• 56:02
  There are at least a quarter of a million people killed, including a very significant
• 56:06
  number of people on the Republican side.
• 56:08
  It's a horrifying conflict.
• 56:12
  And again, its ripples and its echoes shape everything else that's going to happen through
• 56:16
  the terror as the Republican leadership fights with itself more and more about why this tremendous
• 56:24
  mobilization isn't producing a more immediate victory, is causing them to carry on being
• 56:31
  more and more paranoid about who their real enemies are, who their real friends are.
• 56:38
  And the story of the terror will be on the one hand this huge practical mobilization
• 56:42
  for a war effort, which is eventually successful.
• 56:46
  And on the other hand, this decline into real backstabbing paranoia, which ends up completely
• 56:53
  consuming itself.
• 56:55
  So the terror was essentially spurred on by this forced mobilization and conscription.
• 57:00
  I've never heard that before.
• 57:01
  But I wanted to ask something extremely naive here.
• 57:04
  I wanted to ask how bad was the terror really?
• 57:09
  Because a lot of the times this period seems sort of instrumentalized from different sides
• 57:13
  of the political spectrum today.
• 57:16
  People on the left will say there was mainly the fattening parasitic aristocrats who got
• 57:21
  the chop, while folks on the right will claim that ordinary citizens were indiscriminately
• 57:27
  killed left and right and then also tried to paint the entire revolution as basically
• 57:31
  being one big slaughterhouse.
• 57:34
  What's closer to the truth here?
• 57:35
  Now, it's a very complicated situation.
• 57:39
  I mean, one way of thinking about it in terms of, I mean, the focus on death, for example.
• 57:44
  Yeah.
• 57:45
  And the guillotine.
• 57:46
  And the guillotine.
• 57:47
  I mean, there is a rhetoric of death.
• 57:50
  There is a rhetoric of the guillotine that seems to wallow in a lot of this.
• 57:54
  But if you compare it to the American Revolution, which is very much part of the same historical
• 58:00
  situation, I mean, the population of the American colonies is only about a tenth of the population
• 58:05
  of France.
• 58:06
  So it's a very different scale.
• 58:09
  But in terms of the intensity of violence, the intensity of death and persecution and
• 58:13
  political exile relative to those three million people in the American colonies, it was as
• 58:19
  intense as it was to the 28 million people in France.
• 58:23
  Proportionally, there's not a lot of difference.
• 58:26
  It's just that in the American case, a lot of it is dispersed across the frontier.
• 58:31
  A lot of the violence is hard to see.
• 58:34
  And so people have really dug into the record of what eight years of warfare were actually
• 58:38
  like.
• 58:39
  And it doesn't have with it this destructive demonizing rhetoric, which is completely attached
• 58:46
  to what happens in France.
• 58:49
  So as I've already said, at the level of numbers of actual deaths in France, you have some
• 58:54
  really horrific totals.
• 58:55
  Like 250,000 people in the Vendée, probably another 30 or 40,000 people executed for armed
• 59:03
  rebellion elsewhere in the country.
• 59:07
  Over two and a half thousand people formally tried and executed by guillotine for what
• 59:12
  often completely imaginary political crimes.
• 59:16
  But at the root of which there is a real ongoing conflict that the political authorities are
• 59:22
  trying to wrestle with.
• 59:25
  So the large material situation is, as it were, understandable and relative to other
• 59:34
  major civil war type conflicts, not disproportionate.
• 59:40
  But what does distinguish the French Revolutionary Terror is the way it's incapable of not consuming
• 59:47
  itself.
• 59:49
  The level at which paranoia of counter-revolutionary conspiracy translates to a willingness to
• 59:58
  very rapidly get rid of former close political allies is particularly distinctive in the
• 1:00:04
  period.
• 1:00:06
  You don't see that in the American context.
• 1:00:08
  They have a few of famous traitors, people like Benedict Arnold, but they're not conducting
• 1:00:13
  sort of political witch hunts on a weekly basis.
• 1:00:16
  Purges.
• 1:00:17
  Purges.
• 1:00:18
  So this is what you have in France from the end of 1793, very explicitly using that precise
• 1:00:26
  language.
• 1:00:27
  I mean, they talk about épuration, which is purification, but it's also purge.
• 1:00:34
  It is the vocabulary that came down to us through the sort of Leninist left.
• 1:00:41
  They've already decided from the summer and autumn of 1793 that their own structures,
• 1:00:47
  their own political societies, their own political are riddled with counter-revolution.
• 1:00:54
  Because obviously if they weren't, everything would be going better.
• 1:00:58
  I mean, this is the paranoia.
• 1:01:00
  It just works it through.
• 1:01:02
  Month after month, they are finding reasons to treat disagreement of one kind about political
• 1:01:09
  tactics, military tactics, strategy, to treat disagreement as evidence of latent counter-revolution.
• 1:01:17
  And to pursue people for that and to imprison them and to put them on trial so that, you
• 1:01:22
  know, by the end of 1793, they've locked up a significant proportion of the officer
• 1:01:27
  corps, for example, and they're starting to think that actually the rot goes all the way
• 1:01:32
  into the heart of the political class.
• 1:01:34
  By the spring of 1794, you have this infamous period where factional disputes by kind of
• 1:01:43
  ultra leftists on the one hand and moderates-ish on the other become an excuse for the leadership
• 1:01:50
  between them to destroy both groups.
• 1:01:54
  Those groups are dissenting from correct behavior in different ways, but both ways are objectively
• 1:02:03
  counter-revolutionary.
• 1:02:05
  And so they are wrapped up in what are fundamentally absurd charges of conspiracy with foreign
• 1:02:13
  enemies, literally fabricated conspiracies.
• 1:02:17
  Is there a trial for these people or do they go straight to the guillotine?
• 1:02:23
  The process of trial before what they've now got this revolutionary tribunal, the process
• 1:02:29
  of trial is that of articulating these absurd conspiratorial allegations.
• 1:02:36
  And then people who've been handpicked to make up the jury agree that it's guillotining
• 1:02:43
  time and off they go.
• 1:02:47
  It is brutally absurd.
• 1:02:51
  And increasingly as you go through these years, through these months really, the first seven
• 1:02:55
  months of 1794, you're looking at a political culture which is living with a threat of death,
• 1:03:04
  which is absurd.
• 1:03:07
  The things for which you can be arrested, the things for which you can be suspected
• 1:03:10
  are absurd.
• 1:03:13
  The degree to which there's no telling from week to week whether you'll get a fair hearing
• 1:03:20
  in a public political setting in the Jacobin Club or in the convention, you might get a
• 1:03:27
  fair hearing, you might get an applauded speech, you might get agreement, or you might literally
• 1:03:32
  be arrested.
• 1:03:33
  So taken off in the middle of the night.
• 1:03:36
  What were some of the absurd things that you could get arrested for at that time?
• 1:03:41
  Well I think, I mean it's all absurd.
• 1:03:45
  It's all hinging on the idea that the things that people did were evidence that they were
• 1:03:50
  counter revolutionary conspirators.
• 1:03:53
  And therefore anything you did could be turned into evidence.
• 1:03:59
  Even you know, not agreeing forcefully enough with something stupid that someone else said
• 1:04:07
  could be turned into evidence that you were a secret counter revolutionary.
• 1:04:12
  The Parisian authorities come up with a list earlier on the end of the previous summer,
• 1:04:17
  the September 1793, they come up with a list of things which would mark people out as unworthy
• 1:04:23
  citizens to whom they like, what they call, like sort of political passports would not
• 1:04:32
  be issued to this list of people.
• 1:04:35
  And it's a list of people which includes things like being too pessimistic, being too worried
• 1:04:44
  about how the war was going.
• 1:04:45
  I'm sorry Professor, a bit of dark humour there I have to say.
• 1:04:49
  Not being enthusiastic enough in public assemblies.
• 1:04:52
  I would be a goner.
• 1:04:54
  Not speaking up, you know, claiming that you had nothing to say.
• 1:04:58
  This was itself evidence that you were secretly a counter revolutionary.
• 1:05:02
  You have to stand there and you have to make, you know, what Orwell talks about Soviet communism,
• 1:05:07
  these people are half gangster, half gramophone.
• 1:05:09
  You're supposed to just turn out improved slogans at the approved moment, at the approved
• 1:05:15
  volume or else.
• 1:05:19
  So the deeper absurdity of all of this is it's always already breaking down.
• 1:05:24
  It's not like Soviet communism.
• 1:05:25
  They can't keep it going for decades.
• 1:05:29
  It breaks down by June and July 1794.
• 1:05:33
  Just one quick question.
• 1:05:34
  Was anybody at the time at the top going like, hey, fellas, I think we're overdoing this
• 1:05:41
  a little bit.
• 1:05:42
  I think this is getting a little bit absurd or would this kind of articulation already
• 1:05:46
  mark you out for persecution and death?
• 1:05:49
  This is exactly how it ends.
• 1:05:51
  I mean, it ends because Maximilian Robespierre in particular, this kind of prophet of purity
• 1:05:58
  has backed himself into a corner by July 1794 where the only way he can be consistent to
• 1:06:07
  what he already believes, to what he sees around him is to start saying that almost
• 1:06:13
  literally everyone except him and a tiny circle of true believers are objectively counterrevolutionary.
• 1:06:22
  And by late July, he is saying this publicly that the people and the convention need to
• 1:06:28
  get together and somehow purge themselves of what in some light looks like the majority
• 1:06:34
  of everyone.
• 1:06:37
  And other individual political leaders who've seen other factions go to the guillotine,
• 1:06:43
  who know that they personally have annoyed Robespierre and his friends, they are able
• 1:06:49
  finally to say, you know, look, fellas, we're next, hang together or hang separately.
• 1:06:55
  We have to do something about this.
• 1:06:57
  And the final ultimate absurdity is that what they do, what happens on the night for Thermidor
• 1:07:04
  and particularly in the days afterwards after Robespierre is safely dead, is that they will
• 1:07:09
  accuse him of being that thing that everyone else was accused of being.
• 1:07:15
  Robespierre will be publicly declared to have been intending to crown himself King of France
• 1:07:22
  and to marry the former King's daughter and to make peace with the crowned heads of Europe
• 1:07:27
  over the top of the bodies of the French.
• 1:07:30
  He will be declared to be the arch counterrevolutionary and that will justify the extermination of
• 1:07:36
  him and all his friends.
• 1:07:39
  And then they will spend the next several months just figuring out how big a sigh of
• 1:07:42
  relief they can take, how dangerous things still are.
• 1:07:48
  The irony being that the military situation has now improved to the point where France
• 1:07:53
  is really dominant on the battlefield by 1794 and 1795.
• 1:07:59
  The military threat has been crushed, but it also involved the crushing of this paranoid
• 1:08:06
  political leadership.
• 1:08:09
  A bit of a digression, Professor, but going back to Robespierre, what was the cult of
• 1:08:15
  the supreme being that he was advocating for?
• 1:08:19
  Right.
• 1:08:20
  Well, this again, the whole religious question has continued to agitate the revolution.
• 1:08:28
  By late 1793, some people on the radical side have decided the logical answer to the fact
• 1:08:35
  that all these priests hate us is that we declare religion to be an abomination.
• 1:08:41
  The Catholicism in particular, but Christianity in general, revealed religion in general,
• 1:08:46
  is nonsense.
• 1:08:47
  It's the conscious articulation of oppressive myth to keep the people down.
• 1:08:53
  And there is quite a vigorous movement in late 1793, which is later called de-Christianization,
• 1:08:59
  didn't call itself that at the time.
• 1:09:01
  These de-Christianizers really want to build an atheistic public culture.
• 1:09:08
  And this is where things like the invention of a Republican calendar come in, in these
• 1:09:11
  months that you hear one, you move away from a calendar, which is completely defined by
• 1:09:17
  a religious liturgy, that the seven day week and the Sabbath and Lent and Advent and all
• 1:09:23
  these kind of things.
• 1:09:24
  And you found a calendar in nature.
• 1:09:27
  So you come up with lots of sort of, you know, very vague allusions to the weather and the
• 1:09:34
  cycle of the harvest and so on.
• 1:09:37
  And you design a whole calendar around that.
• 1:09:39
  And instead of the seven day week, you have a 10 day week, you know, which is a very middle
• 1:09:45
  class thing to think because it means workers have to work nine days before they get a day
• 1:09:50
  off instead of only six.
• 1:09:52
  They never really figure out what they've done there.
• 1:09:56
  The end of 1793 sees this real drive towards actual atheism as state policy.
• 1:10:04
  But Robespierre, as a follower of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is very much more attracted to the
• 1:10:13
  idea of natural religion, of deism, of the idea that you can separate all the churchy
• 1:10:19
  stuff from the basic fact of there being a benevolent deity.
• 1:10:25
  And he and other slightly more moderate people are also conscious that the overt atheism
• 1:10:30
  thing is really, really never going to wash with the peasantry, with the majority of the
• 1:10:35
  population.
• 1:10:36
  You can't make France atheist overnight.
• 1:10:39
  So they will come up with in the spring of 1794, the cult of the supreme being, which
• 1:10:45
  is really a sort of compromise measure.
• 1:10:48
  It's intriguingly kind of moderate, given everything else that's happening around it.
• 1:10:53
  But to allow people the idea of public worship, to allow people the idea of the supernatural
• 1:11:00
  and to recognize the immortality of the soul, as the decree puts it, and then to try and
• 1:11:06
  turn that into a kind of civic religion that celebrates all kinds of nice values.
• 1:11:11
  They're festivals of youth, festivals of old age, festivals of being good to your parents,
• 1:11:17
  festivals of all kinds of virtues.
• 1:11:21
  So it's to try to restore the idea of a kind of religious festivity to culture.
• 1:11:27
  Robespierre is really, really keen on this, but it is one of the points at which other
• 1:11:32
  people start to worry about him being a bit strange, that the more atheistic of his colleagues
• 1:11:39
  are all sort of exchanging sarcastic comments about him, because he's the current chairman
• 1:11:47
  of the National Convention.
• 1:11:48
  It's like a two week rotating chair.
• 1:11:50
  And he happens to be in the chair for these ceremonies, which means he gets to march in
• 1:11:56
  front of the procession and make the big speeches and so on when they inaugurate this cult.
• 1:12:01
  And there are people there in the background basically laughing at him and saying, oh,
• 1:12:06
  look, he's made himself pope now.
• 1:12:09
  So from a political point of view, it goes very badly for Robespierre's image with his
• 1:12:13
  colleagues.
• 1:12:14
  It actually turns out to be quite popular in the country at large, precisely because
• 1:12:20
  it's seen as a rejection of atheism.
• 1:12:22
  It's seen by a majority of people as a turning back towards a religious attitude that they
• 1:12:31
  regard as more normal and natural.
• 1:12:34
  And it will continue on after the Fort of Rossier.
• 1:12:36
  It will continue on in various forms until the end of the 1790s, until Napoleon restores
• 1:12:43
  the power of the Catholic Church.
• 1:12:46
  It's so fascinating.
• 1:12:47
  I wonder if you can pinpoint with Robespierre where exactly does he turn from this radical
• 1:12:56
  revolutionary advocating for a more universal enfranchisement.
• 1:13:01
  And I also read that he was against slavery.
• 1:13:05
  He was opposing the war and so forth.
• 1:13:08
  Where does he turn into this, like you said, priest ahead of the killing machine?
• 1:13:14
  Does he realize that that's happening or is he just carried away in a sense?
• 1:13:19
  Yeah.
• 1:13:20
  I think it's really a process which happens in the second half of 1793.
• 1:13:31
  He's always been someone who's understood himself as having a special relationship with
• 1:13:36
  the ordinary people.
• 1:13:38
  He's got this kind of idea that he's got his own personal metaphysical connection with
• 1:13:43
  them.
• 1:13:44
  I mean, he's not a man of the people in any other sense.
• 1:13:46
  He's a very kind of prissy, refined, delicate individual.
• 1:13:51
  Oh, really?
• 1:13:52
  He's not a drinker.
• 1:13:54
  He's not a man who likes laughing and joking.
• 1:13:57
  Danton, in that respect, is much more a man of the people in that sense.
• 1:14:02
  He's a man who could have had a whole tavern in stitches, whereas Robespierre would have
• 1:14:06
  been hiding in the corner drinking lemon juice.
• 1:14:08
  A bit of an introvert.
• 1:14:10
  Very much an introvert, except when he has the opportunity to make very long speeches,
• 1:14:14
  which he also likes doing.
• 1:14:17
  But in 1793, this is the process they've gone through.
• 1:14:22
  After the war has been expanded, after these initial measures of the terror have been brought
• 1:14:27
  in, there is just so much continued betrayal.
• 1:14:33
  Those brissettins, those gyrondins, those moderate Jacobins, or now moderate Jacobins,
• 1:14:40
  they again, they are mixed up in conflict with the ultra radicals.
• 1:14:43
  They end up getting purged from the convention, and they don't sit back and take that.
• 1:14:51
  Their confederates in places like Lyon and Bordeaux and Marseille, they start fighting
• 1:14:58
  against the central authorities.
• 1:15:00
  The gyrondin leadership flee to Normandy, towards Bordeaux.
• 1:15:07
  They stoke up literally a second civil war on top of the other one that's already raging
• 1:15:13
  in the Vendée.
• 1:15:15
  That will take another huge mobilization.
• 1:15:17
  That will take the siege of Lyon, the siege of Marseille, the reconquest of Toulon, where
• 1:15:24
  they've actually tried to surrender the French fleet to the British.
• 1:15:29
  The 1793 sees really tremendous acts of treason carried out by people who were Republican
• 1:15:37
  leaders, and tremendous acts of treason which are punished brutally with military suppression,
• 1:15:44
  with trials in front of the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris, the execution of all these
• 1:15:49
  brissettin leaders who go to the guillotine absolutely unrepentant, singing the Marseillaise.
• 1:15:56
  That sense that if they can be traitors, if they can behave like that, anybody can be.
• 1:16:02
  And Rob Spears, his belief in purity, his belief that people should be like him, they
• 1:16:08
  should be completely selfless, they should be dedicated to the people.
• 1:16:13
  When people start coming to him in late 1793 and saying, look, here's some evidence, actual
• 1:16:19
  evidence that other people in these ruling committees are corrupt.
• 1:16:24
  There's a huge financial scandal that sort of bubbles below the surface throughout these
• 1:16:28
  months.
• 1:16:29
  There is real corruption there.
• 1:16:31
  And he's seen as someone to whom this can be confided.
• 1:16:36
  But then he's also mixed up in these attempts to suppress ideological opposition, to make
• 1:16:42
  people like his friend, Camus de Moulin, stop publishing inflammatory things.
• 1:16:48
  And Camus will not stop publishing inflammatory things.
• 1:16:51
  So Camus will end up getting mixed up with Danton after they've got rid of the ultra-radicals
• 1:16:56
  and they get rid of the moderates.
• 1:16:58
  They will get rid of Camus, they will get rid of Danton, they will execute Camus' wife
• 1:17:03
  on trumped up charges of being involved in some kind of conspiracy.
• 1:17:08
  Rob Spears is plunging into this.
• 1:17:12
  And you can wonder whether to a certain extent he has become sort of morally lost.
• 1:17:18
  He has lost his way, that there is only forward, there is only assuming that everyone with
• 1:17:25
  initiative is bad, is capable of being bad.
• 1:17:28
  There is only that kind of paranoid attention.
• 1:17:32
  But that is the road he pursues.
• 1:17:36
  He has become, by the last three or four months of his life, dangerous to other people because
• 1:17:43
  he will accuse anyone of anything if he thinks it explains why everything's not going perfectly.
• 1:17:53
  Others will argue forever about to what extent his mental state is compromised, to what extent
• 1:18:01
  he's lost touch with reality.
• 1:18:04
  But his attitudes are also shaping reality.
• 1:18:07
  A lot of other people are going along with this until the moment when it looks like the
• 1:18:12
  laser beam, the eye of Sauron has turned on them.
• 1:18:16
  And at that point finally enough of them can get together to get rid of him and then it
• 1:18:20
  turns out that nobody was his friend.
• 1:18:23
  He is the scapegoat for everything.
• 1:18:26
  Because of course he doesn't do everything.
• 1:18:28
  He wasn't responsible for the tens of thousands of people that were killed in Lyon or Marseille
• 1:18:33
  or anywhere else.
• 1:18:34
  He wasn't responsible for any of the corruption that went on.
• 1:18:37
  He's against all of that.
• 1:18:39
  He thinks people should have pure motives.
• 1:18:42
  But he becomes a corrupt monster because it's useful for him to be one.
• 1:18:47
  And a lot of what's gone on ever since has been people deciding whether to either excavate
• 1:18:51
  him from under that pile of abuse or just pile more stuff on top of him.
• 1:18:56
  So he remains essentially divisive.
• 1:18:59
  What a fascinating story.
• 1:19:01
  All right.
• 1:19:03
  I'm sorry.
• 1:19:04
  I've taken up almost an hour and a half of your time.
• 1:19:07
  We slowly got to wrap up.
• 1:19:10
  We've come to the end of the terror.
• 1:19:12
  How do things stabilize?
• 1:19:14
  How does everything calm down?
• 1:19:16
  Why are not these people who just went through these events constantly looking over their
• 1:19:21
  shoulders if things are going to pick up again in this sort of a manner?
• 1:19:26
  How is the reign of terror coming to an end basically?
• 1:19:29
  Well, the scapegoating of role spirit serves these very useful purposes.
• 1:19:35
  It enables people to find something they can agree on, which means they don't have to look
• 1:19:39
  at their own behavior too closely.
• 1:19:44
  But that will remain fragile.
• 1:19:48
  Over the next year or so, there is a process whereby the very many people who've been detained
• 1:19:54
  as suspects, probably in one way or another, over half a million people who've been treated
• 1:20:00
  as suspects are let back into public life.
• 1:20:03
  People who've been expelled from the convention are let back into the convention.
• 1:20:06
  A lot of the gérondins' friends come back in.
• 1:20:10
  Different forces have different attitudes to forgiveness and vengeance.
• 1:20:13
  And this is very problematic over time.
• 1:20:15
  And there will end up being quite a lot of vengeance.
• 1:20:18
  But it's sporadic.
• 1:20:20
  It tends to focus on relatively small numbers of leaders who can be accused of very clear
• 1:20:24
  crimes and tried and executed.
• 1:20:29
  The sense that they all have that there is a threat from below, that the radical crowd
• 1:20:34
  is still dangerous.
• 1:20:36
  This is reinforced by uprisings in Paris in the spring of 1795.
• 1:20:41
  And an elite consensus that that needs to be rigorously repressed is again something
• 1:20:46
  that binds the political class together.
• 1:20:51
  France has been fundamentally destabilized.
• 1:20:54
  And they will attempt to have a new constitution in the middle of 1795, where just to bring
• 1:21:02
  that into operation, they have to use the services of General Bonaparte to defend them
• 1:21:07
  against the royalist coup in Paris.
• 1:21:11
  That constitution is a model of checks and balances by camera or legislature, the directory,
• 1:21:18
  which is like a sort of five man presidency overseeing the government.
• 1:21:22
  So your power is radically decentralized.
• 1:21:27
  But every time over the rest of the decade, in 97, 98, 99, when they're supposed to have
• 1:21:32
  free elections to those legislatures, the executive will change the result of those
• 1:21:40
  elections.
• 1:21:41
  There will be an administrative coup, people will be barred from office, people will be
• 1:21:44
  stripped of office, electoral results will be overturned, because the people at the center
• 1:21:49
  are just too afraid of actually giving any initiative to this radically divided country.
• 1:21:57
  And from the other end of the political telescope, again, the history of the later 1790s in many
• 1:22:03
  localities is one of ongoing vendetta, where the injuries and the insults which emerged
• 1:22:12
  during the period of the terror are layered on top in some cases of decades old, local
• 1:22:17
  feuds, in some cases are brand new local feuds, where law and order really is in very short
• 1:22:26
  supply right through to the end of the decade, where it starts to be more militarized and
• 1:22:32
  that the army, the idea of military justice starts to be seen as something more neutral,
• 1:22:38
  more beneficial to everyone in society who's got something to lose.
• 1:22:43
  And this is the road which takes France down to eventually deciding they just need to get
• 1:22:48
  rid of the politicians, they need strong men.
• 1:22:53
  And initially, some of the politicians think they can have a strong man and use him as
• 1:22:56
  a puppet, but they're wrong.
• 1:22:58
  And they will get Napoleon and Napoleon will impose order.
• 1:23:04
  And frankly, after a whole decade of revolutionary upheaval, most people are really quite glad
• 1:23:09
  of that.
• 1:23:11
  Whatever the revolution achieved, it has disintegrated to such a point by the later 1790s that the
• 1:23:18
  authoritarianism is very much welcomed by the population at large.
• 1:23:23
  With a twist of ultimate irony, at the end of it all, we don't get a king but an emperor,
• 1:23:29
  not immediately, of course, but eventually.
• 1:23:31
  And then a few kings back again afterwards.
• 1:23:33
  Right, the Bourbon restoration, right.
• 1:23:35
  It takes a long time to decide that the revolution was genuinely revolutionary, that you can't
• 1:23:41
  just turn the clock back.
• 1:23:43
  That's really a perspective from a generation after that.
• 1:23:48
  A while back, I interviewed historian of the Napoleonic period, Michael Rove from King's
• 1:23:54
  College, London.
• 1:23:55
  And he said that he believes Napoleon was great because I asked him, was Napoleon great
• 1:23:59
  or was he not great?
• 1:24:00
  And he said he was great, primarily because he was an institution builder.
• 1:24:06
  How much is this aspect of his legacy owed to the revolution?
• 1:24:14
  Most of it.
• 1:24:15
  And again, I think this is where one will always wrestle with these relativists.
• 1:24:23
  Napoleon for me is a very bad man.
• 1:24:27
  Interesting.
• 1:24:28
  His personal attitude to other people was sociopathic and megalomaniac.
• 1:24:36
  And I think there is ample evidence for that.
• 1:24:40
  But one of the things he gives to France is the ability to refocus on what the revolution
• 1:24:48
  should have been able to achieve in terms of institutions, in terms of the codification
• 1:24:56
  of law, for example, which was a process that had started in 1790.
• 1:25:01
  They're not doing anything from scratch in the 1800s.
• 1:25:04
  They're picking up a decade of work.
• 1:25:06
  The consolidation of uniform local administration, of justice, of commercial codes, making peace
• 1:25:13
  with the church, whatever you think about that as a compromise.
• 1:25:18
  All these were things that needed to be done in order for France to have any kind of peace
• 1:25:24
  with the heritage of the revolution.
• 1:25:27
  Of course, a lot of the institutions Napoleon builds are essentially authoritarian, much
• 1:25:32
  more so even than the revolutionary ones, that election under Napoleon becomes offering
• 1:25:39
  him a short list of suggested candidates for post and he gets to pick.
• 1:25:45
  It's absolutely reversing the logic of what election is in any meaningful sense.
• 1:25:51
  And of course, what Napoleon will eventually do is very nearly break France completely
• 1:25:58
  through the demands of his war making.
• 1:26:01
  And people will, again, argue until forever about who's really to blame for all these
• 1:26:06
  wars.
• 1:26:07
  But you always come back.
• 1:26:08
  Napoleon never tried very hard not to go to war with anyone.
• 1:26:13
  He was very much of the mind that war was usually a good answer.
• 1:26:19
  And that will in the end throw France back into the arms of both of Louis XVI's brothers.
• 1:26:24
  They both get a crack at the throne after Napoleon.
• 1:26:27
  One of the reasons for that is just because Napoleon has always been seen as this destabilizing
• 1:26:33
  influence.
• 1:26:35
  The powers of Europe never wanted to make peace with him durably because they never
• 1:26:42
  really trusted him to make a durable peace.
• 1:26:45
  And so the whole Napoleonic legacy will be thrown over and you go back to the Bourbons
• 1:26:50
  for another generation.
• 1:26:52
  And yet that takes us into the 19th century and upheaval after upheaval.
• 1:26:58
  A broad question at the end.
• 1:27:01
  Is it necessary for these kind of momentous events of massive social and political change,
• 1:27:08
  or more specifically revolutions, to always be accompanied by a lot of bloodshed?
• 1:27:13
  You mentioned the American Revolution as well, that it was proportionally similar to the
• 1:27:18
  French Revolution in that regard.
• 1:27:21
  Well, I mean that is one of those questions where you look at the historical record and
• 1:27:28
  you ask yourself, how do these things happen?
• 1:27:32
  How do countries get new constitutions?
• 1:27:36
  How does change happen over time?
• 1:27:39
  And it's one of those situations where post 1945 Western Europe is a kind of bubble where
• 1:27:51
  the immense scale of the horror and suffering that had gone on for various reasons in the
• 1:27:55
  first 45 years of the century, bracket that off.
• 1:28:01
  And you have to bracket off other things like decolonization, which is an extremely violent
• 1:28:05
  process as well.
• 1:28:06
  If you bracket all that off, you can make kind of the slow evolution of the European
• 1:28:11
  Union, etc, etc, look like a kind of normative process, like the kind of thing that ought
• 1:28:16
  to happen all the time.
• 1:28:18
  And maybe it ought to happen all the time.
• 1:28:20
  So the thing with history seen more broadly is it doesn't never happened like that before.
• 1:28:26
  And we're dangerously close to it never happening like that again.
• 1:28:32
  Thinking about France in particular, applying that question there, what you're looking at
• 1:28:35
  again, going back to 1787, 1888, you're looking at collapse.
• 1:28:41
  What had happened in France by July and August 1789 was that state authority, all the things
• 1:28:47
  that make the everyday relationships between people, property, the legal system, the justice
• 1:28:54
  system, each other, neighbouring communities, all those things had collapsed.
• 1:29:01
  They'd collapsed into something which for a lot of people felt horribly and dangerously
• 1:29:05
  like a state of nature, where taking up arms was the only option.
• 1:29:11
  And everything that happens in the revolution is one way or another an attempt to remedy
• 1:29:16
  that collapse.
• 1:29:19
  Now what you think about that is very much dependent on your own personal ideological
• 1:29:24
  politics.
• 1:29:25
  I mean, the Ancien Mégis Monarchy was a hideously exploitative society.
• 1:29:31
  It oppressed the majority of its population overtly and shamelessly.
• 1:29:37
  It was better off gone.
• 1:29:40
  But practically speaking, getting rid of it brought horrors.
• 1:29:47
  And how far you accept that as worth the price is a fundamental political question that each
• 1:29:55
  person has to adjudicate for themselves.
• 1:30:01
  And what do you think?
• 1:30:03
  What do I think?
• 1:30:09
  It's not a question that you can simply resolve.
• 1:30:13
  Because these things are not simply, in my mind, worth it or not worth it.
• 1:30:17
  They are what happened.
• 1:30:20
  And what we're looking at in history, what I try to look at in history is to understand
• 1:30:26
  the extreme complexity of what happens when systems break, when people try to change things,
• 1:30:34
  the extent to which unintended consequences almost always overwhelm initial intentions.
• 1:30:42
  These are realities.
• 1:30:45
  It doesn't make sticking with what you've got necessarily the best answer, because that
• 1:30:52
  could lead itself to catastrophe.
• 1:30:56
  That can lead to a worse collapse down the line.
• 1:30:58
  Collapse is not necessarily avoidable.
• 1:31:02
  But I do regularly come back to the point that within any given society, we should always
• 1:31:10
  be very careful to try to preserve things like the basis of democratic freedom.
• 1:31:17
  Because those things break in so many different ways.
• 1:31:21
  They were so difficult to establish in the first place.
• 1:31:24
  They required, historically, so much bloodshed that to think about throwing them away is
• 1:31:34
  a suicidal act for a society.
• 1:31:37
  And I'm deeply, deeply disturbed as we look around the world to see how trivially people
• 1:31:44
  treat the right not to just have arbitrary things done to them.
• 1:31:51
  People are far too happy with thinking about giving up that right for themselves as long
• 1:31:55
  as they think someone they don't like will have some bad things done to them.
• 1:31:59
  And that is a recipe for disaster.
• 1:32:02
  And that is the recipe we are increasingly cooking up around us these days.
• 1:32:07
  Ultimately we'll always come down to this question or sentence.
• 1:32:12
  You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, right?
• 1:32:16
  But then...
• 1:32:17
  Indeed not.
• 1:32:18
  But then if you pour the eggs into the fire and end up eating the ashes, what have you
• 1:32:23
  really gained?
• 1:32:24
  All right, professor.
• 1:32:26
  The very first question I asked you was if the French Revolution was indeed the most
• 1:32:30
  important event in European history, like one of my university professors once claimed,
• 1:32:35
  you assured me that things were a little bit more complicated than that.
• 1:32:39
  So at the end, let me try again with an even sneakier question.
• 1:32:43
  Please forgive me.
• 1:32:44
  If the French Revolution didn't happen, what would Europe and indeed the world look like
• 1:32:50
  today?
• 1:32:54
  It's a fundamentally unanswerable point because one of the things the French Revolution gives
• 1:32:59
  us through its own evolution, through what happens later under Napoleon and into the
• 1:33:04
  1830s, it gives us the ideological spectrum through which we understand the world today.
• 1:33:11
  It gives us the concepts of left and right at a very trivial level, but it also literally
• 1:33:16
  gives us the ideologies of liberalism, conservatism, modern aggressive nationalism and indeed socialism,
• 1:33:25
  all in their own ways are absolutely dependent on the conditions created by the French Revolution
• 1:33:34
  in order to be evolved into existence.
• 1:33:37
  A concept like conservatism didn't need to exist before the French Revolution because
• 1:33:42
  the notion that you needed a political ideology to justify only slightly changing things was
• 1:33:49
  meaningless.
• 1:33:52
  Revolutionary upheaval on the order that France brought about was not understood as possible,
• 1:33:57
  except in the history of the Reformation, for example, kind of religious ideological
• 1:34:02
  fanaticism, the idea that you could have secular ideological fanaticism and needed to do something
• 1:34:09
  about it was what the French Revolution put on to the world stage.
• 1:34:13
  The idea that revolution itself was a thing and that you could orchestrate a revolution
• 1:34:19
  or conspire towards a revolution and bring about material change.
• 1:34:25
  The whole 19th century of history of Europe is shaped by the attempt to revolutionize,
• 1:34:33
  whether it's in the name of a different social class, whether it's the name of different
• 1:34:36
  nations, whether it's in the name of other forms of liberation.
• 1:34:42
  Without what the French Revolution gave us, we wouldn't have a vocabulary to describe
• 1:34:49
  all of that.
• 1:34:50
  The people who did it wouldn't have had a vocabulary to do it with.
• 1:34:56
  So you imagine a kind of alternate history in which none of this happens and that people
• 1:35:01
  end up trying to describe completely different, quasi continuity with the world of the 18th
• 1:35:10
  century.
• 1:35:11
  And you're spiraling off into science fiction very quickly.
• 1:35:15
  Is the French Revolution, which told people how to think about these things, it told Hegel
• 1:35:20
  how to think about the world spirit.
• 1:35:22
  It told Marx how to turn Hegel on his head and talk about class.
• 1:35:26
  And then it told everybody else how to not do that, how to think in other ways.
• 1:35:31
  Everything is bouncing back and forth off of that heritage of what people saw happen
• 1:35:37
  in France in 1789 and afterwards.
• 1:35:40
  All right.
• 1:35:41
  So this statement from my professor, which seemed completely ridiculous at the beginning
• 1:35:45
  now in light of your answer, doesn't seem so crazy at all.
• 1:35:49
  If there is a modern history, if there is a history of modernity, then the French Revolution
• 1:35:55
  is squatting there at the origin point and you cannot go round it without very large
• 1:36:02
  detours.
• 1:36:03
  Professor Anders, thank you so much.
• 1:36:05
  This was an incredibly illuminating conversation.
• 1:36:08
  Absolute pleasure.
• 1:36:09
  Thank you for taking the time for the second time.
• 1:36:14
  And for everybody who wasn't listening to the first episode, where can people find you
• 1:36:19
  on social media?
• 1:36:22
  I have a Twitter account still.
• 1:36:24
  I'm Prof Dave Anders on there, fairly actively.
• 1:36:28
  And where can people find your book, The Terror?
• 1:36:30
  Find bookstores everywhere?
• 1:36:32
  I imagine so.
• 1:36:33
  I mean, it's 20 years old now, so probably some secondhand bookshops as well.
• 1:36:38
  Fantastic.
• 1:36:39
  Again, thank you so much.
• 1:36:40
  My pleasure.
• 1:36:42
  Thank you so much for listening.
• 1:36:43
  If you like what you heard, please consider subscribing to Smart Cookies on YouTube.
• 1:36:48
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• 1:36:52
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• 1:36:56
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• 1:36:58
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• 1:37:02
  Just type Smart Cookies Podcast in there.
• 1:37:04
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• 1:37:06
  Last but not least, I have to thank the absolute legends that are my producers on this show,
• 1:37:13
  my existing patrons on Patreon, Aida, Mancian, Micheal Medved, Medinio, Gordon, Juriciu,
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• 1:37:29
  So massive thanks.
• 1:37:31
  And yeah, see you in the next episode.
• 1:37:34
  Bye.