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Christianity Under the French Revolution · Martyrs And Missionaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a lease from the future because I forgot to put a trigger warning at the very beginning of this episode when I was recording it.
• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So just a heads up if you are listening with young children or you are sensitive to violence, the French Revolution is a very violent and bloody event.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And therefore I wanted to give you a heads up in case anyone is sensitive to those things.
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're listening to martyrs and missionaries, I'm Elise and in every episode I'll bring you a new martyr and or missionary, the cold and the brave.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this episode, we're talking about Christianity under the French Revolution.
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am ridiculously excited to bring this to you guys today.
• 0:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know I've teased it out a couple times for almost a year now, so I apologize for the delay, but I do think and I hope that it'll be worth it that you guys will enjoy it.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: But before we get into that, I wanted to mention two things.
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first thing is that there is an upcoming deep dive.
• 1:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: So for those of you who are Patreon, or those of you who would like to be Patreon supporters, you can head over, I will put the link in the episode description here because Troy has just done a three hour deep dive into bleeding Kansas.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you aren't sure what bleeding Kansas is, this is an episode for you.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you are sure, if you know what bleeding Kansas is, it is still an episode for you.
• 1:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is one of the craziest stories I think in American history that gets overlooked.
• 1:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a blurb in your history book.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I remember taking Missouri State history as I call a student.
• 1:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: and I think it was maybe a paragraph.
• 1:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you've got missionaries coming to Kansas because Kansas was not a slave state, but they were fighting over.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it going to be a slave state?
• 1:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it going to be a free state?
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Missouri was obviously a slave state.
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then you have some of the Mormons.
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've got Joseph Smith.
• 2:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've got a caning in Congress.
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've got just corruption everywhere that you look.
• 2:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've got John Brown.
• 2:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: et cetera et cetera.
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if you're looking for a deep dive that has a little bit of everything, then this is definitely for you.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Troy worked very hard at it.
• 2:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think you guys will enjoy it.
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the second thing I wanted to do was read some of these Spotify reviews I got from you guys.
• 2:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this first one comes from I really should make these bigger.
• 2:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I take a screenshot and then it's like really small.
• 2:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is from Caliber on the Melinda Brinkin episode.
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said you got me emotional at the end how beautiful I do like that story as well.
• 2:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this one is also from Kome Wood on David Brinerd.
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he says, I really love podcasts like this.
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love hearing about bold men and women of the faith.
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It makes me bold.
• 2:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then this last one is from Richard.
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is on part two of Robert Mothett.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said he enjoyed part two.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said, your pronunciation of the African and South African names is perfect.
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then he wondered if I got any, any insight into some sermons of Mothett's.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I did not, if any of you guys happen to have some Robert Mothett sermons
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let me know, send them my white because I agree they would make an excellent revive thoughts episode.
• 3:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Very glad to hear that my African and South African redundancies were pretty decent.
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not so sure that we'll hold up for this French episode, but I will try my best as I always do.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I stumble on through.
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So hopping into this episode, the catalyst for how I wanted to do this episode is that I fell in love with the French evolution, which I know was a weird thing to say, but I really thought it is one of the most fascinating and just endlessly unraveling events in human history that I can think of, I don't know there's more, but for me, I really enjoyed just digging into it.
• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: I stumbled across a presentation and the presentation was about why we should study the French Revolution.
• 4:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this presentation stated that it fought for values we still hold dear today, liberty, equality and fraternity.
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ideas of liberty, racial and sexual equality and fraternity or brotherhood are all shown.
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It shows how ordinary people can make a difference, ancient dictatorship, democracy is introduced all those things, and because we need to keep the revolutionary spirit alive because the fight for liberty, equality, and fraternity still hasn't been one.
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, conversely, Plato considered democracy to be the lowest form of government because it places political power in the hands of those least capable of handling it and inevitably leads to mob rule, which will then lead to a tyrant rising up from the ensuing chaos.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in the French Revolution, it is inevitably what happens, the rise of Napoleon.
• 4:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: But whether or not Plato's theory holds true for any other historical people, it definitely definitely happened for the French Revolution.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think we all implicitly understand that the revolution was bloody and violent, but maybe we think that it was a necessary, it was essential because it allowed France to cast off the shackles of the bourgeoisie and then step into the age of enlightenment.
• 5:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is taught as kind of a necessary evil and maybe not even really that evil because they had to, they were so deep in it, they had to break free.
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then others would compare it to the American Revolution.
• 5:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, Thomas Payne and Thomas Jefferson from the American Revolution, they were frustrated because George Washington refused to give support to the cause because they thought that it was just like their own revolution.
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So why can't we support them?
• 5:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Washington understood very early on that it was a different revolution for many reasons, but chief among them in his opinion, it was a godless revolution.
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a revolution that wished to replace God with enlightenment philosophies to worship man and to worship reason.
• 5:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: But for the vast majority of people, when it first got started, that's that's not what they thought at all.
• 6:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because very few people could see where it was going to end up.
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the beginning, many people simply wanted a constitutional monarchy like that of England.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: A glorious revolution was a bloodless revolution.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's what they wanted.
• 6:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not what
• 6:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to set the stage for us here.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1789, France is almost bankrupt.
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: In today's money, they were about $1.3 trillion in debt.
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The seven years war or the French and Indian war and the American Revolution had set them back a great deal.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they also had two poor harvest, which meant that the cost of bread ended up taking 88% of the average Frenchman's living wage, and the French love their bread, right?
• 6:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: They need that bread to live.
• 6:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And their society was also based on social status.
• 6:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was known as the three estates.
• 6:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first estate consisted of the clergy, or the church.
• 6:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The second state was that of a nobility.
• 7:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the second estate made up about 2% of the population.
• 7:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: This population owned 35% of the land and was largely exempt from taxes.
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the third estate was everybody else.
• 7:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, in my opinion, ideas had spread like wildfire throughout France, especially those of Russo, who taught the concept of popular sovereignty.
• 7:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The people have to give consent in order to be governed and the government acts on their behalf as an extension of the people's will.
• 7:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they also listen to a Voltaire's views on freedom of speech, and he has a very anti-Christian bias, and also Montesquieu, who's known for his system of checks and balances, his separation of powers.
• 7:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The unfortunate king and queen of France during this time were Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Louie was never meant to be King.
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had an older brother who died before him that shoved him into a role he didn't want, and didn't seem to have been trained for or prepared for in any way shape or form.
• 8:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And his entire demeanor is not that of a King.
• 8:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's a very
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: at fellow he enjoys locksmithing, he enjoys hunting, he had a very gentle and passive personality and that personality is not well-suited for the current political climate because a soft man is not made for hard times.
• 8:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Marie Antoinette was Austrian, she's a Habsburg princess who was married off to Louie when she was 14 and he was 15 and their marriage was part of an unpopular political alliance between these two countries and that made Marie the subject of a lot of gossip and slander.
• 8:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: They called her madame deficit.
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was seen as an unwanted foreigner.
• 8:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was extravagant.
• 8:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was vain and much of what we consider fact about Marie is actually propaganda even her
• 8:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: she never said it.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It came from a Russo book about a vain princess.
• 8:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the propaganda machine during the French Revolution was out of control.
• 9:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had vicious propaganda printed about her licentious behavior, and these caricatures would have laid the foundation that would make
• 9:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Marie is, she is some of those things, she is a little vain, she is very spendy, but she's also a huge fan of Russo.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Rousseau is all about back to nature, back to the simple things, very childlike, very uncomplicated.
• 9:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she was, in some ways, a very charitable person because she would go to soup kitchens and give things like go out and be seen doing charity, kind of very celebrity-esque.
• 9:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she is a very childlike person.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: She had a lot of books on her shelf.
• 9:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: She probably didn't read them very much like an influencer, but an influencer who was
• 9:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Russo's ideas were very popular during the French Revolution, but probably the ones that were more famous would be Voltaire and Denise Deterot.
• 10:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Voltaire said that every sensible man must hold the Christian religion in horror.
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Voltaire's writings mock scripture, clergy, and believers, and it poised in the minds against the faith that had shaped the European civilization.
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was a very unserious, very satirical individual, and he had a deep contempt for God.
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And did a row, likewise, had contempt for God.
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wrote that, man will never be free until last king is strangle with the entrails of the last priest.
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Ditto's words revealed the revolutions true aim, not just political change, but the violent eradication of both monarchy and Christianity's.
• 10:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: On these ideas didn't remain abstract, they eventually became policy, resulting in massacre persecution, and the systematic attempt to erase God from a French society.
• 10:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will get to that a bit later.
• 10:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the first moments of the revolution that can be tangibly traced to some kind of an origin
• 11:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the estate's general, it's kind of the entire meeting of the government.
• 11:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were meeting together to approve new taxes because things had gotten pretty bad, and they had not met for 175 years.
• 11:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Can you imagine the government not beating fell on absolutely insane?
• 11:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it quickly became about a lot more.
• 11:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: A lot more present-day troubles, the third estate was very concerned about how they were going to feed their families because the price of bread was just rising.
• 11:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: They wanted tax equality.
• 11:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: They wanted basic civil liberties like freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
• 11:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the first and second estate refused to give into any of the third estate's demands.
• 11:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: and box them out.
• 11:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: They actually kept them out of the meeting places.
• 11:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so the third estate pinned their hopes on a man named Jacques Nicarre or Nicarre, I'm not sure, but he is the new Swiss finance minister.
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they were very disappointed when he just was a very lost a fair, very blase guy.
• 12:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: He towed the party line and they felt very disrespected.
• 12:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they were kind of promised some concessions, but then those concessions ended up being taken away.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the 30 states had been infiltrated by a the minor nobility.
• 12:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: These guys that kind of, how would you say they, they fashion themselves as the people's heroes that they were equally suffering with all of the people.
• 12:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they definitely weren't, but France had a major nobility problem because anybody could become nobility every father's son, whether legitimate or illegitimate.
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: was somehow tied to the mobility, but the estate and all of the finances, all the wealth got passed down to the eldest son.
• 12:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if you were not a legitimate son or if you were a younger son, you kind of had to make it on your own.
• 12:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's all these different little minor nobles just wandering around with nothing to do.
• 13:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: So he take up a good cause at hoping to kind of esteem themselves because they don't really care about the people, but the people think that they do.
• 13:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Part of the reason that the estate general went so sideways in the first place was because of the King and Queen's own personal tragedy.
• 13:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because right before it got started up, they lost their seven-year-old son to tuberculosis and that plunged them both very deeply into grief, which caused King Louis to really be unable to focus on this very, very important meeting.
• 13:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so he was getting yanked around by different people, the first and second of the states, and he wanted to sympathize with the third estate, but he was in no place emotionally to handle that.
• 13:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so this will lead to the tennis court oath being put into place.
• 13:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: They gather at this tennis court because they've been kicked out of everywhere else.
• 13:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And on June 20th, 1789, they declared they would not stop meeting until France had a new constitution.
• 13:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then they broke away and formed their own national assembly,
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this sounds pretty good, pretty reasonable, if you're getting boxed out of a meeting why not start your own government and decide to represent that other 98%.
• 14:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, unless at a month they had gone from this tennis court oath to this moment, which is recorded by a journalist for the radical revolution in newspaper, La Ami, Dup, pupil, or people.
• 14:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know sure.
• 14:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it was started by Jean Paul Marrah, and he is the journalist now famous for his portrait, which depicts his unfortunate death in a bathtub.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And here is the quote.
• 14:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Better TA is no more.
• 14:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: His head is nothing more than a mutilated stump separated from his body.
• 14:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: A man, oh God's a man, a barbarian tears out his heart from his palpitating viscera.
• 14:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: He is avenging himself on a monster.
• 14:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: His hands dripping with blood.
• 14:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: He holds up the steaming heart under the eyes of the man of peace, assembled in this August tribunal of humanity.
• 14:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tyrants cast your eyes on this terrible spectacle, shutter, and see how you and yours will be treated.
• 15:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: This body so delicate and so refined, bathed in perfumes is horribly dragged in the mud and over the cobblestones.
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Despits and ministers, your rain is over.
• 15:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Frenchmen, you are exterminating tyrants.
• 15:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your hatred is revolting frightful, but you will at last be free.
• 15:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think what good, what satisfaction, what happiness awaits you and your children,
• 15:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: it's temple for you.
• 15:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: This scene is already horrifying on its own, but the entire thing from beginning to end is actually so much worse because, uh, better TA is the son of the finance minister.
• 15:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: They claimed that the finance minister said that the people could eat hay in response to their rising need for bread.
• 15:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: and so they decided to cut off his head, put on a pike, and then before they curled bitter tea aid, they taunted him by saying, oh, like his papak, his papak, like it's horrible.
• 15:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's awful, guys.
• 15:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The entire thing is horrifying, and this should really tell you where the front revolution is going.
• 16:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is very early days.
• 16:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there's a whole other thing that's happening with this quote because they are really they're larking or they're caused playing as these Romans, these heroic figures that are just going to step up and save France.
• 16:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you'll see this with the whole August thing, the Temple of Liberty, we'll get into that more in part two when we discuss all the weird cults that pop up.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: But this quote about the death of Baratier occurs one week before the infamous storming of the Bostille, which is now recognized as Bostille Day or Independence Day in France.
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the summer of 1789, France and especially Paris was on the brink.
• 16:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the brink of what they do not know, but I would imagine that the atmosphere felt akin to the air right before a massive lightning storm.
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: King Louie had employed foreign troops to help bring order to Paris, which was experiencing little mini riots, so 20,000 of these foreign troops were marching towards Paris, causing a panic.
• 17:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Jackson the Care, which was the People's Finance Minister, he had been let go by the King, and so they felt that they had been betrayed because he wasn't great.
• 17:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: They actually weren't happy with him two seconds ago, but he was there, man!
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And two days before the storming of the Bastille, there was a young journalist whose name was Camille, Des Muldam, Des Malines.
• 17:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he stood atop a cafe table and then he proclaimed to an angry crowd, the nation has been insulted and he grabs these green leaves as a symbol of hope and he sticks them into his hat.
• 17:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the crowd rushes off to the most obvious place you could think of, and I'm sure you would think of it as well, the wax museum.
• 17:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they grab the wax heads of Joc and a care, and the Duke Day or Leans, and they attach them to pikes, and they pay the parade them around town, which is totally normal.
• 17:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's what you would do, right?
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And kind of a fun fact is that while they're doing all this, the young Madame Maruitu so,
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: but she had this connection to the royal family.
• 18:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: She apparently taught the king's sister candlemaking and then said that she lived in the palace for nine years.
• 18:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, during the reign of terror, she is imprisoned because of her relationship with the royal family, but she is rescued by well-connected friends at the last minute, but she's let go on the condition that she would make full body casts and death masks for
• 18:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: These people that she worked with and had a good relationship with, so she does the death masks for both Marie Antoinette and for King Louis XVI.
• 18:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm sure with much satisfaction, she also does the death mask for Rogues Pierre who will be the one head blinding the rain of terror.
• 18:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: So these rioters after they marched into the wax museum, they then head to the Tudoris Gardens near the Royal Palace.
• 18:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was a Sunday afternoon, so many families were picnicking there.
• 18:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And chaos breaks out there because the King's German cavalry there are the traditional mercenary forces that were hired traditionally by King's because they were unswayed by French politics, but this is not the time to pull them out.
• 19:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, citizens fight back, they throw stones, they throw chairs, pieces of statues, and so the cavalry ends up pulling back a mile and a half, essentially emboldening the rioters.
• 19:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then the ordinary soldiers who were French, they refused to fire on the rioters, and many actually deserted and took their guns and the munitions with them.
• 19:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then two days after this, the mob will break into a supply depot and steal about 30,000 muskets, but these muskets have no gunpowder.
• 19:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: They need to figure out how to actually use them.
• 19:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so their first thought is to go to the boss deal, because tradition
• 19:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: In addition to being a very tiny prison, it was also used for gunpowder storage.
• 19:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the Bastille was built in a 1300, so it's really old.
• 19:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was built during the 100 years war to keep those pesky English at bay.
• 19:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And a few days before all the events that we've just been talking about, the King at Order 250 extra barrels to be stored at the Bastille, because of the growing unrest.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And to understand a bit more why the Bastille became this huge symbol, we have to understand what it symbolized to the French or kind of what they said is symbolized to them.
• 20:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I mentioned earlier it was built during the Hundred Years War, but it was used on and off to house influential and political prisoners, but it was by no means an infamous place that was this picture of oppression.
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that would change in the early to mid-17th century when Cardinal Rishaloo, he is the chief minister to Louis XIII, and also the bad guy in the Three Musketeers.
• 20:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: He used it to house anyone accused of opposing the king in there, and he was a horrible human.
• 20:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: He is the guy who made the absolute monarchy in France possible.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he is a very famous quote, which reads, if you give me six lines written by the hands of the most honest of men, I will find something in them with which to hang him.
• 21:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then later, it's used to house French Protestants after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
• 21:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is under Louis XIV, the Sun King.
• 21:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was a ballet dancer, had amazing legs very vain individual.
• 21:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And later on, there were a satirist and other social commentators.
• 21:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were held there as well, including Voltaire, who was held there twice.
• 21:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the marquee, they saw it was also held there.
• 21:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And rightly so, because he was a nasty man who deservedly locked up with the key thrown away.
• 21:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And honestly, so many things should have happened to that man.
• 21:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he's where we get the the termist sadism from that gives you any idea about why he should be thrown away.
• 21:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Bostille also housed the man in the Iron Mask during the reign of Louis XIV, and nobody has a clue who the man in the Iron Mask is.
• 21:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It probably wasn't Leonardo DiCaprio, but we can't rule it out.
• 21:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: They thought maybe it's the King's older brother, maybe it's his twin brother, an illegitimate son, an unrelated political prisoner.
• 22:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody will ever know it is one of those great enduring mysteries.
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: But without getting too much more into the weeds, it was a prison for the wealthy.
• 22:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was a fancy prison.
• 22:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had actually been renovated.
• 22:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think maybe like 50 years before all these events happened.
• 22:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had been extended and it had been much more like it was kind of a place to go.
• 22:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: You could buy flowers, they were markets, all these things.
• 22:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And even the prison food itself was like smoked duck.
• 22:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not a place that was just like inspiring terror for all these different people.
• 22:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then there were some novelists who had stayed there and they had created some rumors that perhaps it wasn't as nice as it claimed to be.
• 22:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So one person said that he was innocent and he had been there and was chained to a corpse and Voltaire wrote that it was a place for revenge.
• 22:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there was another guy in the Bastille who had been who had sent a letterbomb to the mistress of King Louis V.
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: and he wrote about his time there, but although its accuracy was questionable, these letters did a lot to reinforce this bias that the Bastille was this despotic institution.
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: But regardless, King Louis XVI had actually planned to close it by the end of 1789 and turn it into a public square because it cost more to run than it was worth.
• 23:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when it was stormed,
• 23:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: seven prisoners inside.
• 23:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let's get into the story itself.
• 23:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: So by 10 a.m. on July 14th, there were about 900 people who were gathered outside the Bastille demanding gunpowder.
• 23:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Administration of the prison had been giving to a man named
• 23:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Governor Delaney, and he had been born in the prison and was now a middle-aged man.
• 23:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was living there with 82 retired soldiers and 32 Swiss guards.
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he invites two of these mobs, this mobs' leaders into discuss and the stall while he awaited orders from Versailles.
• 24:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is where the royals lived and so everything had to kind of come through Versailles.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: But while these guys are there, he served them lunch and then he invites another guy in there to also discuss.
• 24:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now they wanted all the gunpowder and also all the guns, which Delaney could not give them without proper authorization, of course he was never going to get proper authorization for this.
• 24:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: But he was another guy who's not quite made for the times because he was very detached from this dangerous situation, which I suppose if you grew up in a prison, you're very isolated from the outside world, you probably wouldn't know what to do either.
• 24:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: So by 130pm, the mob grows restless and breaks into the outer courtyard of the Bastille.
• 24:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they're pushing towards the main gate, but it's a confined space, and the soldiers do not want to fire on the civilians, and about two hours later, the royal guards show up to join the mob, and they brought with them light cannons, and some of these cannons were actually quite fancy, because they were gifts from the King of Siam to the Louis XIV.
• 25:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this was the kind of cannon that could smash through the inter gates, and Delaney didn't want to turn his own cannons on the civilians, so he just didn't do anything.
• 25:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: and then a few of them in broke the chain to the outer drawbridge which costed to collapse in crush at least one person.
• 25:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then they also thought they had been led into a trap when they rushed into the courtyard even though they're the ones rushing in and this leads to absolute mass chaos because Delaney tries to show the mob that he his cannons are not loaded while this backfires and an emboldens the mob.
• 25:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so Delaney gets desperate and he almost decides to blow up the whole thing and go out in this blaze of glory, but the soldiers didn't feel the same way, so then he tries to negotiate and threaten to blow it all up if his demands were not met.
• 25:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: But in the middle of these negotiations, the main fortress was reached and Delaney was dragged out.
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he was meant to go to the HQ, they had quarters for this budding revolutionary movement.
• 26:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But instead he was beaten and dragged and stabbed repeatedly on the way there.
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then he famously screamed out enough, just let me die.
• 26:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he kicked a man in the groin and then his head was son-off, sought-off, and attached to a pike, as was their way.
• 26:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: and parade it through the town for a few hours before being thrown into the river.
• 26:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And by 5 p.m., the white flag of surrender had been raised over the Bastille.
• 26:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, who were the seven men that were imprisoned at the Bastille when it was stormed?
• 26:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was four forgers, a nobleman who was imprisoned at his family's request because he was a deviant, and then two men who were mentally ill.
• 27:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The marquee they saw had actually been there a few days prior, but had already been transferred.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, one of these two men who was mentally ill, he believed that he would either
• 27:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: and he was quietly put back into prison the following day because he plundered his hosts home and he joined Marquille de Saudin and the other mentally ill inmates and so he was a little bit out of the frying pan into the fire.
• 27:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: but they have to figure out how to capitalize on this whole Bastille thing.
• 27:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they create this epic myth and then they destroy the evidence because the crux on which the whole revolution rests is the storming of the Bastille and if it was not an evil institution then what was the point?
• 27:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they start telling these elaborate stories, how they're these old bones that were just trapped in there and they were the bones of prisoners, but they were actually the bones of the soldiers who had died there, like the old retirees.
• 28:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: They claimed they found the skeleton of the man, the iron mask.
• 28:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were finding torture devices, which were like, they were just random pieces of equipment.
• 28:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the old guards who had survived her had kind of like left the bustle at that point,
• 28:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're only too happy to experience their own five minutes of fame, so they're leading people through telling these, just crazy stories.
• 28:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there were paintings and sketches that were distributed throughout France that made the bus deal look a lot more impressive than it actually was.
• 28:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in the whole place ends up getting destroyed the following year, and so nobody can call out the lies if they can't examine the building.
• 28:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And here we kind of come across a very interesting relationship.
• 28:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do love this that this exists, but Marquis Delafiette, who had been a hero to the Americans during the American Revolution.
• 28:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was kind of the adopted son of George Washington.
• 29:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: and they wrote letters and sent gifts to each other and one of the gifts that Lafayette sent to Washington in 1790 was the key to the Bastille, along with a drawing which showed its destruction as a victory over this despotism.
• 29:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lafayette will later on come to see their evolution much differently, but for now he sees it as kind of the twin to the American Revolution.
• 29:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the day after the bus deal is stormed, on July 15, King Louis gave an unscheduled speech before the assembly, and he capitulated to the revolution, he apologized, he withdrew the troops from Paris, and he famously said, I am the one who is one with the nation.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then a few days later, he would sit before the assembly as Lafayette was made the leader of the new National Guard and have the Revolutionary Tri-Color Cockade pinned on him.
• 29:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this cockade was designed by Lafayette.
• 29:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it featured the red and blue colors of Paris and the bourbon white for the King's of France.
• 30:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as this cockade is pinned on him, Louis cried a little bit.
• 30:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the people took it as a
• 30:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: but it is really just the opposite.
• 30:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the end of everything for him.
• 30:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this should have been where the peaceful transition of power happened.
• 30:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: They would transition to a constitutional monarchy.
• 30:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: We wouldn't be talking about this, but the people couldn't help themselves.
• 30:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were completely mad with power.
• 30:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when we got to the bus deal, as we talked about earlier, they would end up killing Berthier and Berthier's father and have that entire,
• 30:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Psychophantic Disgusting Display, and there's a man named Simon Shama, and he wrote a book entitled Citizens, Quantical of the For Interevolution, and in it he has a quote that perfectly, I think, encapsulates the essence of the For Interevolution.
• 30:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: He writes, violence was not just an unfortunate side effect, it was the Revolution's source of collective energy.
• 31:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Moving ahead a little bit in August of this same year, the National Assembly met together to work out their own preamble in the style of America's Declaration of Independence.
• 31:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this initial document was drafted by Marquis De Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson.
• 31:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: A Lafayette himself was deeply Roman Catholic and he remained so throughout his entire life.
• 31:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: He mentioned to God very frequently in his public speeches,
• 31:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thomas Jefferson is famously a deist in the same vein as Benjamin Franklin.
• 31:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He believed in God and the moral teachings of Jesus, but rejected his divinity and all things supernatural.
• 31:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this was just the new hot religious bent during the Enlightenment years.
• 31:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: But interestingly, all out atheism, even among the later French Revolutionaries, was detested.
• 31:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we'll see more of this
• 31:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: But many of these early revolutionaries, including Lothia, they really did like in themselves to America and her revolution, but there really is no crossover.
• 32:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are very key differences even from the very beginning, because the American Revolution was very highly influenced by the great awakening, and it did have small doses of enlightenment thinkers, specifically those who espoused Christian philosophies, even if they themselves were not.
• 32:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Conversely, many of the French Revolutionaries held a deeply anti-Christian sentiment and were influenced by the works of Voltaire and Didero and others who were blatantly against Christianity.
• 32:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thomas Jefferson, who was serving as the ambassador to France during this time period, he was deeply sympathetic to these revolutionaries and allowed his home to be used as a meeting place during his tenure as ambassador, and this would actually get him in trouble because the royal government didn't like that he was being seen as America citing with the revolutionaries, which Washington would obviously not like as well.
• 32:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so he distanced himself publicly as in his official capacity representing America, while he still kind of contributed in less official capacities.
• 33:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: When this French preamble was finished, it was officially titled The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
• 33:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in its official revision before it's out there and it's published, it was done by a man named Abbey Sace.
• 33:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I believe it's how you say that.
• 33:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Sace is a Catholic priest, a political thinker, and he wanted to be a professional soldier in his earlier years, but his health was poor, and he had these very pious parents who pushed him into the clergy, and this was a path that he really didn't want to do, but he only did it because it was seen as the only path forward for political advancement, which was a common problem in France.
• 33:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: and also a common problem in America and in England before the Great Awakening is that this is a symptom of the disease that will just keep seeing throughout these episodes.
• 33:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a massive problem with religion in France, the Christian religion specifically.
• 34:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: But, say, he detested religion and he strongly preferred the Enlightenment thinkers over theology.
• 34:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time that he officially entered the priesthood, he said he had freed himself from all superstitious sentiments and ideas.
• 34:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this final draft of the preamble contains his worldview.
• 34:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It says that rights are not endowed by the creator, but they are a natural sacred and analiable from birth.
• 34:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: But what makes them sacred?
• 34:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't explain that.
• 34:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The source of political authority in the American Declaration comes from the consent of the governed, but in France it comes from the ambiguously named nation.
• 34:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the most importantly in the American Declaration, God's name is specifically referenced many times, whereas in the French Declaration it is witnessed in the presence and under the auspices of the supreme being.
• 34:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you'll hear more about the supreme being when we cover robes pier
• 35:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the French declaration demolished the long-held divine right of kings and the authority of the Church and instead placed authority and sovereignty in the state and in the nation.
• 35:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what happens when these two worldviews clash will see a bit later, but moving forward a bit more into the narrative we come to the women's march in the attempted murder of Marie Antoinette.
• 35:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: This happens in October 1789.
• 35:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can see these things are really clipping along very quickly.
• 35:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: We started the story in June.
• 35:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're only into October.
• 35:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this next escalation of their evolution occurred when a group of working women, 6,000 strong decided that they had had enough of the lack of bread, and they would march to the palace at Versailles and try to reason with the king.
• 35:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there is a very interesting relationship that existed between specifically the fish, manga wives, and the queens of France.
• 35:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, Marie Antoinette did not have that kind of relationship with them, but historically,
• 36:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: They would go to the queen and she would give them certain gifts like for the birth of a child or their weddings and things like that.
• 36:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: But from re-entuinette, they didn't even call her the queen.
• 36:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: They called her that Austrian woman.
• 36:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they held her responsible for all their woes, and their notions were confirmed by propaganda pieces, which said that she wanted to store all the grain in Versailles and starve out France.
• 36:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's just so on the nose that you would think they would do a double take, but they don't.
• 36:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is something that throughout the entire story, they fall for every piece of propaganda that is tossed at them, even have heartedly.
• 36:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think a lot of it is because it's just confirmation biases is what they wanted to hear.
• 36:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so it's what they heard and they didn't care if it was true or not, because it probably was.
• 36:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when the National Guard heard that the women were marching, they wanted to go to, and they threatened to kill Marquis De Lafayette if he did not march with them, which tells you just how out-of-control things are.
• 37:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as these women are marching, Marie Antoinette is in her little rustic fancy village.
• 37:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a village that was fashioned after the Norman, like I just very peasanty village.
• 37:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's a very Russo.
• 37:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she's feeding her ducks and she decides it gets a little bit hot and so she goes and rests in a grotto and her husband is away hunting.
• 37:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And while she's resting, the guards rush and to tell her about this marching crowd and they take her back to the palace.
• 37:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: She checks on the kids.
• 37:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the crowd will get there about five to seven hours before the 15,000 strong and national guard.
• 37:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they come in, there's a few of them that come into negotiate with the king for bread.
• 37:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're seven of them.
• 37:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And one of the people who speaks is the 17 year old flower girl.
• 37:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she is so exhausted and also just so nervous that all she can get out is
• 38:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the king is so moved, he summoned somebody to bring her smelling salts and they end up going through these negotiations and the king is very, very sympathetic and he says, okay, of course, like we will get you Brad, I he's crying, everybody's crying and they go outside and they tell everybody what happened, the good news, the king will will hear them and will help them.
• 38:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: and you would think they're gonna be happy.
• 38:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, they say, you guys are traitors, you've been sold out, you're not one of us anymore, and they threaten to kill the flower girl by hanging her from a lamp post with her own gardeners, and she's only saved by the royal guard.
• 38:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: When Lafayette does finally get there at midnight, he spends a couple hours going between the king and the people, and he feels that the situation is under control.
• 38:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So he ends up going to bed about 2 a.m. at a nearby estate.
• 38:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And because of what happens next, he is dubbed General Morpheus after the Greek god of sleep.
• 39:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because while he slept, the mob found an unlocked side gate,
• 39:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: and then stormed a palace, that the entire place would be heavily guarded under lockdowns, so I think there was an inside work done there.
• 39:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: but they had straight for the Queen's apartments, and they're screaming the whole time, we want to cut off her head, cut out her heart, and fry her liver.
• 39:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the Queen's guard defend her wing, but they are cut down, and the Queen is awakened by all the commotion.
• 39:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she jumps out of bed, and then she rushes to this secret door that has this tunnel that will lead her to the King's apartments.
• 39:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And these women rush in just right after the bed still warm.
• 39:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, she barely got out in time.
• 39:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: They rush in, they began attacking her bed
• 39:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then Lafayette is a woken and told what is happening at the palace he rushes over he leads the king out onto the balcony, and he presents a royal guard with this tricolor cockade of the revolution, which causes the crowd to shout long-lived the king.
• 39:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then similarly he leads Marie into a net out to the jeering crowd.
• 40:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: He bows deeply to her he kisses her hand, and this leads to shots of a long-lived the queen.
• 40:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: These people are impossibly fickle and just terrifyingly fickle people.
• 40:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So by this, Lafayette is able to stop further bloodshed, but the crowds demands are non-negotiable.
• 40:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The royal family must return to the palace, the palace in Paris, and they are marched to Paris surrounded by 60,000 people for a nine-hour trip.
• 40:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it is not a nine-hour trip.
• 40:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: but having 60,000 people, like follow you, it makes it a nine-hour trip.
• 40:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the royal family is essentially held under house arrest in Paris.
• 40:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the relationship between Lafayette and Marie despite this balcony display is very chilly.
• 40:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: because Marie used him as a jailer and says that she would rather die than be saved by him again, and then he sees her as the sole impediment to his goals for an English-style constitutional monarchy, because she holds very firmly to the divine right of kings that the king is God's chosen representative, and he sees her as a bit of a worm tongue whispering in the king's ear against the demands of the revolution and essentially functioning as a mouthpiece for Austria, her own homeland.
• 41:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Thomas Jefferson actually famously said that if there were no Marie Antoinette, there would have been no revolution, and he said this because she's an extravagant spender who both Lothia and Jefferson credited with the fiscal collapse.
• 41:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, this is not fair by any means because France was in a lot of problems along before Marie Antoinette got there.
• 41:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But she also didn't know how to tighten the belt because they were in dire straits and she just was, uh, she was a spender.
• 41:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: She has been thrift.
• 41:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: So she didn't listen to the needs of the people and this did not make them happy.
• 41:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think anything would have made them happy, but this was just adds more fuel to the fire.
• 41:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: But some of this blame must certainly be placed upon the King himself, because he is his own man, but also he's really not, because he's actually much of the problem.
• 42:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: His own brother, compared his lack of backbone, to trying to vainly hold on to a handful of oiled billiard balls, because his opinion and decree was simply that of the last person who had talked to him.
• 42:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, if the royal family was firmly under their thumb in Paris, under their watchful eye, the National Assembly turned their attentions towards the church.
• 42:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as we know, the French economy is in shambles.
• 42:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe a massive debt problem.
• 42:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inflation problem needed to be dealt with immediately before the new government losses support the support of these very fickle people.
• 42:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: So in November of the same year, we have a move past 1789.
• 42:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: They saw an easy way out.
• 42:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: They would just take the lands from the church.
• 42:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Catholic Church easily owned 10% of all French land, they paid no taxes, and they took a 10% tax from the peasant class on all agricultural goods.
• 43:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was no secret that the church in France was massively corrupt.
• 43:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of the higher ups in the church were not devout.
• 43:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: They just used the church to gain power, like Abbey Sace.
• 43:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there were hundreds of Abbey Saces.
• 43:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is not necessarily representative of the friars and the monks and the nuns, because only the nobility could rise to the ranks of the church to become the bishop, so the cardinals or whatever.
• 43:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: So these lower positions were the only ones open to the peasant class.
• 43:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So as a result, there were many of them who were actually devout and actually cared for their flock.
• 43:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the complication to this matter, I mean, there are many complications, but one of them is that these lands housed hospitals and charity houses, and who was going to run those if you take the lands away from the church.
• 43:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the state says, no problem, we'll take it over.
• 43:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm gonna tell you, you're gonna be shocked, just flabbergasted, because they didn't even try.
• 44:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Social welfare fell to an absolute all-time low.
• 44:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And who could have seen it coming?
• 44:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'll only tell you, just about anybody with eyes.
• 44:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is how it goes every time.
• 44:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And later, many of these monasteries and these churches became prisons for holding disobedient priests or other counter-revolutionaries, others became factories, some catheters were actually repurposed and served as a place of worship before they called to reason, which will discuss in part two.
• 44:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the church, understandably, condemned this land grab and then urged the vowed Catholics not to buy the lands from these public auctions and then Rome, the Pope also condemned it, but there was nothing to be done.
• 44:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now ironically, these public lands did nothing to help the third estate, the peasant class, because they were bought up by the nobility who priced the peasants out of the market.
• 44:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And these sales also did nothing to actually help the economy in fact they caused hyper-inflation, so the plan was that they would print bonds and each bond would be backed by land.
• 45:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when the land was bought, they would pay them off, they would use the bond to pay off a creditor, and then the bond was burned.
• 45:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the new government was outspending itself, so it started printing off bonds called Ossenia, which they used for everything, and they backed them with nothing.
• 45:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they became worthless and actually coined their own phrase as worthless as an Ossenia.
• 45:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: A few months later, the government then would take an even more radical step to close the monasteries and to force out the monks and the nuns, and why would they do this?
• 45:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was very easy.
• 45:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had no social utility.
• 45:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: They spent their life in prayer, they were fasting, and this would contribute nothing to the state.
• 45:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And also, the monastic institutions were more deeply tied to the Vatican whom the National Assembly viewed itself as a direct rival to their power.
• 45:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So in order to get these monks on these nuns to leave, they said, hey, we'll give you a pension for those of you who leave voluntarily and you rejoin society.
• 46:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there were two different reactions to this decree.
• 46:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The monks were relieved and they were relieved because they weren't devout.
• 46:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was actually a lot of social pressure to join the monastic institutions because like I said before, only the oldest son got the land, got the, you know, all the inheritance.
• 46:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so if you were a minor son, you were left with nothing.
• 46:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so if you didn't want to be a soldier, you went into the church because maybe you could become an habit or something.
• 46:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they were also influenced by enlightenment ideals.
• 46:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there just wasn't, there wasn't a whole lot there.
• 46:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: They weren't there for the right reasons.
• 46:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The nuns on the other hand, they fought tooth and nail because they joined the order either out of devotion or to escape the social pressures of marriage.
• 46:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they did not want to go back and also the pension lower offered to them was much lower.
• 46:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: but the great irony of these pensions in general is that the government could not afford them.
• 47:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so a couple of years later, they just stopped trying.
• 47:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they left these elderly monks and nuns to live on the charity of their families and maybe if they were lucky, their communities.
• 47:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then the National Assembly just kept going.
• 47:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were on a roll and so they just kept the ball going and to see how far it would go.
• 47:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the next big thing came in July of 1790, all the clergy were now going to be paid civil servants, and their diocese were to be restructured, which eliminated many bishop positions and the bishops in the higher clergy were obviously outraged by this.
• 47:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the average friar kind of took it in stride because they were guaranteed a livable wage, and the bishops had always been living high on the hogs.
• 47:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: This kind of felt like, you know, this is more fair for them.
• 47:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: but the sticking point for them and actually for many of the peasants were that the clergy positions would no longer be appointed by the church.
• 47:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead they would be voted upon by citizens and not just Catholics but Protestants Jews and those kind of not atheists but atheists all the same like everybody got to say and who the new Catholic church people were.
• 48:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the whole nation was kind of holding his breath to see what the Vatican would say.
• 48:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the Pope said nothing for several months.
• 48:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so the National Assembly just took a step further and made all the clergy take a vow to serve the king, the constitution, and the state.
• 48:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if they did not do this, their pensions would be taken and they were no longer able to hold mass or to give communion.
• 48:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the king, being a prisoner in his own home, he is forced to sign this document.
• 48:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he feels that by signing it, he has damned his own soul, especially when the pope responds.
• 48:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The pope responds pretty quickly.
• 48:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: He condemns the action and he urges these non-juring or these rebel clergy to hold the line.
• 48:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: and then he commands peasants not to take the sacraments from any clergy who has sworn in oath to the state, and this split the country in half, because more than half of the although all the clergy took the vows, but then he had the other half who didn't, and the peasants felt this was just a bridge too far, and many of the regions, especially outside of Paris, rallied around their rebel priest.
• 49:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the reprisal for their rebellion will be swift and it will be brutal but that is for in next time.
• 49:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The king himself actually refused to take sacraments from a state priest and instead he kept a rebel priest in secret but when the revolutionary press found out about it he was just eviscerated in all the papers.
• 49:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then for Easter he wanted to take the family away from Paris to attend a mass in the countryside where he could receive communion from one of these
• 49:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: But on attempting to leave the city, his carriage was surrounded by a mob and he was verbally abused for over an hour and the National Guard refused to disperse the mob and so he had to turn around and head back to the palace and he knew officially once and for all that he was no longer the sovereign ruler of his people but he was a prisoner.
• 50:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: After this very simple Easter plan to just simply attend mass and take communion fails, Louis gets pretty desperate and he decides to flee France with his family and cross the border into modern day Belgium.
• 50:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: This occurs June 20th, 1791 and it is known as the flight to Perenz.
• 50:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Perenz was not the final destination.
• 50:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is where the whole thing falls apart.
• 50:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The plan in theory is pretty foolproof, but there are a few things that happen that obviously mean that it didn't work.
• 50:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The plan was to travel across the country, go over the border, and then the Austrian troops would come in with the royalist French guards that were loyal to the king, and they would help take back Paris and restore the king to the throne.
• 50:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: This had been worked out back and forth with the Austrian monarchy and all those things.
• 51:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Marie Antoinette's brother was Leopold II who was the Holy Roman Emperor, and he had been pretty reticent to help out before this, but once he realizes that the King and Queen are in very dire straits, he decides to exercise the authority and help them escape and then help them potentially take back their throne.
• 51:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The King's brother and his wife flee at the same time and they make it across and then his old brother had actually already left two years before.
• 51:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So why does it fail for King Louis and Marie Antoinette?
• 51:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are several reasons.
• 51:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The route that was proposed went through a town where he had been crowned King and Louis was afraid that if he went through there he'd be too easily recognizable
• 51:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: taking a completely alternate route which led him through a very winding route and it wasn't maintained well and it would be harder to furnish horses etc.
• 52:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it was a non-negotiable, the other non-negotiable was that he wanted the entire family to travel together.
• 52:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had made a pact that they would never be separated.
• 52:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: which meant that they would need a very large carriage in order to accommodate them, their governesses, their two children, and I believe there was one or two other people who were also traveling with them.
• 52:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: This meant they were slow, they were conspicuous, and it just the whole thing at this point is just not looking too good, but he's the king.
• 52:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have to do what he says.
• 52:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Slay aside on two very inconspicuous disguises, Marie would go as a governess and Louis would go as a valet, and as they are leaving, they're heading towards the carriage just the night they're sneaking out, the whole thing almost falls apart, because as Marie is walking towards the garden,
• 52:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: she sees Lothia walking towards her chatting deep in discussion.
• 52:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So she hides back in the shadows.
• 53:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he passes by her.
• 53:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: They do make it to the carriage.
• 53:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: They head out.
• 53:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before they leave, King Louis leaves a 16 page letter outlining in detail what he hates about the revolution.
• 53:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Specifically, it's treatment of the Catholic Church.
• 53:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this letter, when it is found out,
• 53:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: So as they're traveling, it's actually somewhat comical, because King Louis has never traveled in conspicuously before.
• 53:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So as they're so doing these different stops, which they have to do quite frequently, because this is a large carriage, they need so many horses, and it also takes a very long time to change out six horses.
• 53:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: So he's going with people and he's like talking to them not obviously as the king, but he's making a small talk with everybody.
• 53:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's getting out at every stop and it makes him look more noticeable, especially in these very sleepy towns that they're passing through and the Marie Antoinette.
• 53:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's also very sweet and she's giving out like silver to like silver.
• 54:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think cutlery or something.
• 54:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is not something a governess would have on hand, and also the people who are with them seem to be deferential towards this governess and this ballet, and the whole thing is just looking a little bit shady.
• 54:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: inevitably their luck runs out as their changing horses at one of these towns they're actually behind schedule by several hours so these soldiers that were supposed to be there waiting for them with their horses they had left because they didn't think the king was making it they thought something had gone wrong and so they had to hunt for these horses they eventually find them but as they are switching them out
• 54:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: there's a postmaster who is there and he used to be a soldier and he recognizes the king which isn't very hard to do because he has very notable features and he's very tall and he has a very distinctive nose and he had been comfort eating during his stay in the palace and so he had put on quite a bit of weight so he makes quite a distinctive character
• 55:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this guy who found in this postmaster, he actually told a story, I believe it's probably embellished to make it just sound more like, ooh, but he says he pulled up a piece of money and he looks at the money and he realizes this is definitely the king.
• 55:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: But he doesn't act well as information at first, instead he waits to hear from Paris to see if the king is in fact missing.
• 55:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: He realizes the king is missing, at this point the king and the carriage have moved on, so he grabs a friend, and then chases them down for 11 miles, he beats them,
• 55:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: by just a few minutes and he tells these guys in verins.
• 55:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said close off the gate, close off the bridge.
• 55:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do not let them cross if you do you are a trader.
• 55:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Verins is 50 kilometers or 31 miles from the border.
• 56:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were so close.
• 56:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the town votes, they decide that they do not want to be anti-revolutionaries and so they send the king back.
• 56:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And once again, they are accompanied by tens of thousands of people walking all the way back into Paris.
• 56:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is the end.
• 56:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: because even though the national assembly tries to cover things up, they discovered this letter, they don't want to let it get out because if they do, it will cause a civil war because you would have the royalist faction fighting with their evolutionary faction and they just do not want any of that mess.
• 56:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they make up a lot.
• 56:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The king's been kidnapped.
• 56:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's back now.
• 56:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Don't worry about it.
• 56:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: He can't even signs the new constitution.
• 56:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when the Revolutionary Press inevitably gets their little guppy paws on this letter, they publish it.
• 56:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And everybody knows the National Assembly was lying to the people and this causes a deep rift in trust and it leads to the rise of the Jacobins.
• 57:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And these guys are the most radical of radicals.
• 57:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are rabid revolutionaries.
• 57:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are the ones who will lead the reign of terror
• 57:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: A little over a year later, nothing has happened to the king, just yet, but Prussia and Austria had declared war on France and France is losing very badly, and the revolutionaries the mob is wondering, are the Royals colluding with the Austrians and the Prussians?
• 57:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the answer is absolutely yes, and would you even blame them?
• 57:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the mob breaks into the palace, and they go tearing through the whole thing, the royal family escapes to a national assembly.
• 57:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the mob finds this secret vault, basically, that has all these letters in it that are encrypted or they're made with invisible ink, and they prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that King Louie had been colluding with foreign powers to get himself back onto the throne.
• 58:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The National Assembly cannot cover this up.
• 58:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The story is too big.
• 58:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what do they do?
• 58:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: They decide to put him on trial for high treason.
• 58:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: He is unanimously accused of treason, his guilty, and then they have to figure out what you do with a sovereign who is guilty of treason, and they decide to put up a vote for his execution.
• 58:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And his fate is determined by one vote.
• 58:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would be executed.
• 58:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: two notable figures who voted for his death or this postmaster, who had noticed him on the flight to Verenze, he is now a member of the assembly, a great friend of the revolution, and then his own cousin.
• 58:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: His own cousin is a rabid radical, but he is not a rabid radical because he actually believes in the revolution.
• 58:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's doing it purely for personal gain.
• 58:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: He felt slighted by the king.
• 59:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: and he thinks if he joins the revolution and he does something so absolutely radical as to vote for the death of his own cousin, the jacobins would absolutely trust him he could rise to the ranks and probably maybe even become king himself he didn't know.
• 59:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it actually backfires because the jacobins are kind of like this is a bit much for us.
• 59:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: We think maybe you're just an opportunist and so 10 months later he follows his cousin to the
• 59:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, surely before the king is to be executed, he leaves a letter to his son and to others kind of saying what he wanted his legacy to be leaving guidelines for them and his letter reads in part.
• 59:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I most warmly enjoyed my children that after what they owed to God, which should come first, they should remain forever united among themselves.
• 59:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Submissive and obedient to their mother and grateful for all the care and trouble which she has taken with them, as well as in memory of me.
• 59:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I beg them to regard my sister as their second mother.
• 1:00:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I exhort my son, should he have the misfortune of becoming king?
• 1:00:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: To remember that he owes himself wholly to the happiness of his fellow citizens.
• 1:00:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: That he should forget all hates and all grudges, particularly those connected with the misfortunes and sorrows which I am experiencing.
• 1:00:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I exhort my son to care for all the persons who were attached to me as much as his circumstances will allow.
• 1:00:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: To remember that it is a sacred debt which I have contracted towards the children and relatives of those who have perished for me and also those who are retarded for my sake.
• 1:00:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: I came across a website that has a lot of the King's last moments with his family, letters, personal testimonies, those kinds of things, and I will link it in the episode description because I think it's really worth looking through if you have a moment.
• 1:00:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The king is led to the scaffold in a covered carriage, so he's kind of protected from the people.
• 1:00:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when he gets up to the guillotine, he stands before a silent crowd.
• 1:00:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do not know what to do.
• 1:00:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he stands up at his full height.
• 1:01:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's very proud, he's very dignified, and he addresses them.
• 1:01:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I die innocent of all the crimes imputed to me.
• 1:01:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: I pardon the authors of my debt, and I pray to God that the blood you are about to shed may never be required of France.
• 1:01:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he went to speak more, but the Revolutionary has tell the drummers to just start drumming to drown him out.
• 1:01:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so nobody can hear him anymore.
• 1:01:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he's placed under the guillotine and the blade dropped.
• 1:01:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the crowd is silent for a few moments.
• 1:01:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: They don't know how to react.
• 1:01:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then eventually they break out into cheers of Viva La Revolutionan, Viva La France, and they start storming the guillotine.
• 1:01:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: his head is held aloft.
• 1:01:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: They start dipping their garments into the blood and waving them up showing that the king was human and that all this divine right of kings and all this stuff is bunk and it is about as heathenistic and as heathenistic as you can possibly imagine.
• 1:01:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then a few months later comes the Queen's death.
• 1:01:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And to me, this is even more sad.
• 1:02:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think they're both very sad.
• 1:02:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: But to me, I think the Queen's death is the most sad.
• 1:02:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because she has been separated from her children.
• 1:02:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Her son is sent to be reeducated by a radical jacoban.
• 1:02:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he is treated horribly.
• 1:02:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's only eight years old.
• 1:02:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he is beaten all books and literature.
• 1:02:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And everything is taken away from him.
• 1:02:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he is forcibly fed very strong alcohol and forced to confess all these different things that his mother had done to him, and then he, he will like scream and cry in his sister who is actually above him.
• 1:02:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here's him, but she can't do anything about it.
• 1:02:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this last letter that they have him signed, accuses the queen of something so egregious that I'm not going to mention it, but I assume you can infer what it is.
• 1:02:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: They accuse her of this and they accuse her sister in law of this as well.
• 1:02:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: This letter wasn't really intended to be used formally in court.
• 1:03:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was just a final character assassination.
• 1:03:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when they actually ask her specifically about this crime during her trial, she says,
• 1:03:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: If I have not replied, it has become a nature itself for fuses to respond as such a charge laid against a mother.
• 1:03:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she has found guilty of all charges.
• 1:03:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: This high treason and also emptying of the treasury, which she did not do.
• 1:03:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I want to make an amendment to something I said earlier, where she was a spin thrift, especially in her earlier years.
• 1:03:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: But looking a bit closer, it actually seems as though she had ramed it in somewhat ahead grown, more mature.
• 1:03:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: So these things they laid upon her were not even true anymore.
• 1:03:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she certainly did not empty the treasury.
• 1:03:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once she has found guilty, they will lead her to the guillotine a few hours later, but before this, she scribbles a final note that is addressed to her sister-in-law.
• 1:03:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it reads, "...it is to use sister that I write for the last time.
• 1:04:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have just been condemned, not to an ignoble death, but to rejoin your brother, innocent like him, I hope to show the same firmness in my last moments.
• 1:04:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I experience the tranquility of mind ever attending a guiltless conscience."
• 1:04:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It grieves me very sensibly to leave my poor children.
• 1:04:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know that I existed only for them and you, my kind and affectionate sister, you who have, through affection, sacrificed everything in order to be with us.
• 1:04:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: In what situation do I leave you in?
• 1:04:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I learned from what passed at my trial that my daughter has been separated from you, a last my poor child, I did not write to her, she would not receive my letter.
• 1:04:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do not know even whether this will reach you.
• 1:04:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Receive here my blessing for them both.
• 1:04:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I hope that one day when they are older, they will be reunited to you and enjoy your tender cares without interruption.
• 1:04:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let my son never forget the last words of his father, which I am fatacly repeat to him, let him never seek to revenge our death.
• 1:04:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Her sister-in-law would never receive this letter, and she would follow Marie to the guillotine seven months later.
• 1:05:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Marie is treated much differently than her husband.
• 1:05:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: She has led through the crowd on an open platform.
• 1:05:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's unprotected from the crowd who been spits and jeers and throws stuff at her and does all things, which you would imagine they would do, but she maintains her dignity and is not given to their taunts.
• 1:05:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when she steps up to the guillotine, she accidentally step on her executioner's foot.
• 1:05:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And her last words were, sorry sir, I did not mean to do it, but even her last words are twisted and the revolutionary press, because they wrote that she intentionally stepped on his foot to make a scene and display her royal arrogance.
• 1:05:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when the blade comes down, she is executed October 16th, 1793, her death was met the same way her husband was with celebration and with macob displays.
• 1:05:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And her son would die at the age of 10 from tuberculosis caused by his diabolically cruel living conditions.
• 1:05:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Her daughter would be released to Austria after a prisoner exchange for that very same postmaster from Verenze.
• 1:06:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she only found out the fate of her family after her release.
• 1:06:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And with the removal of the royal family, the Jacobins are now free to exercise their absolute will over France.
• 1:06:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: So in the next episode, we will talk about the reign of terror, the safety committee, the cults to reason and the supreme being, the brutal crackdown on the priest rebellions, and finally, how does it all end?
• 1:06:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: As always, thank you for listening to Marta's missionaries.
• 1:06:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Elise.