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Christianity Under the French Revolution (Part 2) · Martyrs And Missionaries

0:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Martyr's Emissionaries is a production of Revive Studios.
0:40
[SPEAKER_00]: But before we dive in here, I have a question for you guys.
0:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think that Marie Antoinette helped cause the French Revolution or would it have happened without her?
0:49
[SPEAKER_00]: A couple weeks ago, I was watching a movie on her life and it reminded me of the connection that she had to be Holy Roman Empire because the Holy Roman Emperor was her brother and they had the whole divine right of King's thing, which was a huge hang up for her that kind of pitted her against the revolutionaries.
1:10
[SPEAKER_00]: malleable?
1:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't know.
1:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to get you guys a thoughts.
1:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Tell me what you think if you have opinions on this or if you have opinions on anything else regarding furniture evolution or any episodes, any ideas, all those things feel free to shoot them my way, email, Spotify.
1:25
[SPEAKER_00]: A great option there.
1:27
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the first stories I want to talk about before we actually dive headlong into the rest of the mess that goes down is kind of backtracking us a bit to the execution of King Louis XVI and not really directly him but actually his sister Elizabeth and a random priest that I think has a really cool story that I want to share with you guys.
1:48
[SPEAKER_00]: King Louis's sister Elizabeth she is a wonderful woman
1:56
[SPEAKER_00]: everybody in this entire story.
1:59
[SPEAKER_00]: She is a wonderfully devout woman.
2:01
[SPEAKER_00]: She is known for being supercaring, ridiculously devout and Christian.
2:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And she has probably the deepest connection to the royal family of anyone else, the last letter that Marie Antoinette writes.
2:15
[SPEAKER_00]: She writes to her sister in Elizabeth.
2:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And she is just a really cool lady that I wish we had more time to spend on, but she's just kind of, you know, she's in the shadows there, but she is a wonderful woman.
2:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the things that she did for King Louis is as he's getting ready to be executed.
2:31
[SPEAKER_00]: She said, hey, I have this priest that is my personal priest.
2:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And he's a great guy.
2:36
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't sign out with her evolutionary.
2:39
[SPEAKER_00]: He's a non-juring or a refractory priest.
2:42
[SPEAKER_00]: You may have him.
2:43
[SPEAKER_00]: His name is Henry Essex Edgeworth, and he's also a very cool guy.
2:47
[SPEAKER_00]: He wanted to be a missionary, but instead he goes to Paris, and he ministered among the English and the Irish Catholics there.
2:54
[SPEAKER_00]: He eventually becomes the vicar general of the Paris diocese, and that's how he became connected to the royal family.
3:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And then in 1791, he became Elizabeth's confessor.
3:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So Elizabeth recommends her priest to her brother, but being the priest to a condemned king was a dangerous mission that didn't really dissuade Henry though because he was known for being very courageously convicted and he's actually respected even by those fickle
3:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to share a story that I came across of his detailing, his experience being the confessor to the King this comes from, an Irish Times article called an Irishman's Diary, and it reads, it was a dangerous job to accept, and the anti-clerical mood of the times, the Abbey was not even allowed to wear vestments.
3:43
[SPEAKER_00]: But as he wrote afterwards,
3:44
[SPEAKER_00]: A king even in chains has a right to command.
3:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Edworth also mentions a small but chilling incident at the site of the execution, when the doomed king interceded on his behalf for the revolutionary police.
3:56
[SPEAKER_00]: I recommend this man to you, he told them, see that after my death, no harm comes to him.
4:01
[SPEAKER_00]: When they at first failed to reply, the king repeated his request, whereupon one of the men said, bruskly, yes, yes, we'll look after him, leave it to us.
4:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Edgeworth was not reassured by the tenor of this promise, so after the execution he is reported to have taken refuge in a nearby shop before escaping through a side door.
4:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Henry would refuse to leave France as long as he could be of comfort to Elizabeth.
4:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Elizabeth is killed.
4:25
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't flee France until then.
4:27
[SPEAKER_00]: He leaves behind his mother who had since died in prison.
4:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And his sister who was imprisoned, but still alive.
4:34
[SPEAKER_00]: He fled to Edinburgh, where Louie's younger brother, the future King's Charles, the 10th was living.
4:39
[SPEAKER_00]: He brought Elizabeth's final letter with him, and then he traveled to visit the other King's brother, and was invited to go with him to Russia.
4:48
[SPEAKER_00]: While he is in Russia, he contracted a fever because he was ministering to French prisoners there.
4:54
[SPEAKER_00]: But he is a really cool guy.
4:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I wanted to take a minute before we get into everything else and highlight this
5:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And now we need to talk about the Vendiute Rebellions.
5:06
[SPEAKER_00]: I kind of foreshadowed those on the previous episode.
5:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And now it's time to get into them.
5:11
[SPEAKER_00]: What happened to those provinces that refused to go up their priests and rebelled against the anti-cathlete the craze from Paris?
5:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And also just as bad in the eyes, the French government is they refused to give up their sons to die for the revolutionary cause, finding against other European powers.
5:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is a fascinating story, but you really have to separate Catholic mysticism from the facts a bit.
5:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I stumbled across this article while I was looking in general for more of the Christian element of this rebellion.
5:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm going to read a little bit of it for you.
5:44
[SPEAKER_00]: By the year 1793, the French Revolution had not yet met a Catholic people and arms who knew how to draw the sword of her name Cortez.
5:52
[SPEAKER_00]: This army wore a peasant uniform which consisted of the forbidden white cockade of the French king.
5:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Many vindians wore crosses in the image of the sacred heart as a mark of their loyalty.
6:02
[SPEAKER_00]: As warring Carol wrote, the spirits of the Crusades was upon them.
6:06
[SPEAKER_00]: This spirit was instilled in them largely due to the zeal of St. Louis Marim de Montfort, who in spreading devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Rosary, and the Sacred Heart, just a century before.
6:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The Vindians were very close to the Sacred Heart.
6:20
[SPEAKER_00]: It should be remembered that our Lord appeared to St. Margaret Mary in 1673 and asked that France be consecrated to his Sacred Heart.
6:28
[SPEAKER_00]: His wishes were neglected by the French kings, and it is the belief that the unheating of Christ's requests brought about the French
6:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly 100 years after Christ requested France be consecrated to his sacred heart, the Reina Terror struck France.
6:42
[SPEAKER_00]: King Louis XVI did consecrate his nation to the sacred heart, but it was not until he was imprisoned awaiting his execution to late.
6:51
[SPEAKER_00]: You come across a lot of that in Medieval text, but I'd never seen it in a modern article before, but because this movement is so famous in Catholic circles, you do get a lot of that.
7:02
[SPEAKER_00]: But we can find the facts that are hidden in there.
7:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And one major thing to know about the people of Indy is that they were a serious people.
7:10
[SPEAKER_00]: They were not like the mobs of Paris who were inflamed at even the slightest provocation.
7:14
[SPEAKER_00]: These were as a general rule, well-educated and Christian people, and the Vindi region just to kind of keep it in your mind as we're talking about it.
7:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It is located in Western France near the Atlantic coast.
7:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And the revolutionary propaganda that was coming from Paris, it fell on death years, because the nobility and the peasants in Vindi had a healthy relationship.
7:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And they didn't feel abused by their nobles or their clergy.
7:36
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact,
7:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Their literacy rate was unusually high.
7:40
[SPEAKER_00]: They were double the rate of other rural regions, and they were almost on par with the literacy rates of Paris.
7:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is directly linked to their clergy who emphasized schooling, catechism and basic reading.
7:52
[SPEAKER_00]: They saw their priests as they were meant to be, genuinely servant leaders.
7:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Another reason why they were just unaffected by this whole thing is that Paris is about 250 miles away and even by today's standards that felt really far.
8:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the insanity that was going on in Paris just didn't affect them directly.
8:12
[SPEAKER_00]: But there were a few straws that kind of added up that eventually broke the Vindians.
8:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The very first one was the September massacres of 1792.
8:20
[SPEAKER_00]: This is before the death of King Louis.
8:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And actually, as I was researching for this part of the episode, it was exactly 234 years to the day that the massacres began.
8:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Moving backwards just a little bit, in April, France had declared war on Austria and Prussia and ally of Austria was grandfathered into the declaration.
8:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And by September, Prussian troops had invaded Paris and were rumored to be marching towards.
8:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Paris.
8:49
[SPEAKER_00]: During this time period, the Prussian troops were the best of the best.
8:53
[SPEAKER_00]: This was terrifying news for the Parisians.
8:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And as you remember, the Revolutionary Government issued its controversial declaration that the clergy were now civil servants, and they were answerable to the government of France.
9:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And as a result, there were hundreds of priests and nuns that were sitting in prisons who refused to acquiesce to this demand.
9:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So rumor got around as it did that these rebels would be only so happy to help the pressure army once they arrived and the Parisian mob did what it does best, it committed mass atrocities.
9:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to read some sections of correspondence from a British eyewitness to this whole thing.
9:30
[SPEAKER_00]: He has an interesting relationship, I think, to this event.
9:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not really sure why he was in Paris.
9:36
[SPEAKER_00]: There's some hints that maybe he might have been a bit of a spy just from some of the ways that he words things.
9:43
[SPEAKER_00]: But beginning here, September 3rd, 1792, he said a courier arrived here yesterday afternoon with an account with the pressons where some leagues on this side of Verdun.
9:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Immediately on receiving this intelligence to legislative assembly to create that as universal and alarm is possible, should be spread through the whole country.
10:00
[SPEAKER_00]: In order that no time might be lost in preparing for the general defense.
10:04
[SPEAKER_00]: In consequence, however, of the fermentation
10:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Fireing League alarm guns and beating two arms, the people assembled in different parts of the town, in a very tumultuous manner, and in about seven o'clock in the evening surrounded a church that I cannot pronounce.
10:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Where about 160 priests have been taken into custody since the 10th of last month.
10:25
[SPEAKER_00]: These unfortunate people fell victim to the fury of the enraged populace and were massacred with circumstances of barbarity, too shocking, too described.
10:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The mob went afterward to the prison of the Abbey, and having demanded of the jailers a list of the prisoners they put aside, such as work and find only for debt.
10:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And pulled to pieces most of the others.
10:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The same cruelties were committed during the night and continued this morning in all other prisons of the town.
10:48
[SPEAKER_00]: When they have satiated their vengeance, which is principally directed against the refractory priests, it is to be hoped the tumult will subside, but as the multitude are perfectly masters, everything is to be dreaded.
11:00
[SPEAKER_00]: He then goes on to talk about how the assembly sent off some of their best and most memorable people and how it didn't matter that they got insulted, but they were okay and they ran back and then he says that the royal family was safe, the pressians are advancing rapidly,
11:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he says that a party at the instigation of someone or other declared they would not quit Paris as long as the prisons were filled with traders.
11:26
[SPEAKER_00]: For so they called those who were confined in different prisons and churches.
11:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Who might in the absence of such a number of citizens rise?
11:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And not only affect the release of his majesty, but make an entire counter-revolution.
11:38
[SPEAKER_00]: To prevent this a large body of song Khaled.
11:40
[SPEAKER_00]: preceded to a church that I also cannot pronounce, where I miss the acclimations of a savage mob, they massacre it a number of refractory priests, all the vickers and the directors of the seminaries and the doctors and the archbishop and a number of others exceeding in all 170.
11:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he was on to describe a kangaroo court which the people set up to try the prisoners.
12:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And they of these small canons that were sent up, they filled them with stones and random junk, and they fired them at the prisoners and angry some firing squad.
12:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And our witness says that this began on Monday morning throughout all the prisons and Paris, and he went down on Tuesday evening, and the slaughters were still going strong.
12:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Continuing on, he said two of the municipality were then in the prison with some of the mob distributing their justice.
12:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Those they found guilty were seemingly released, but only to be set upon at the door by a number of pikes, and then among the savage cries of a vivaillination, they were hacked to pieces by those that had swords and were ready to receive them.
12:37
[SPEAKER_00]: After this, their dead bodies were dragged by the arms of the legs to the abbey, which is distant from the prison about 200 yards.
12:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Hence they were laid up in heaps till carts could carry them away.
12:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The kennel was swimming with blood and bloody, and a bloody track was traced from the prison of the abbey door, where they had dragged these unfortunate people.
12:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I was fortunate enough to be present when five men were acquitted, such a circumstance a bystander told me had not happened in the operations of this horrid tribunal, and these inconsistent murderers seem nearly as much pleased at the acquittal of a prisoner, as they were at its condemnation.
13:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The same congratulations intended the others that were acquitted and the same ones that were condemned.
13:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing can exceed the inconsistency of these people.
13:19
[SPEAKER_00]: After the general massacre of Sunday night, many of the dead bodies were laid on the bridge to be claimed.
13:25
[SPEAKER_00]: A person in the action of stealing a hangar chip from one of the corpses was hacked to pieces on the spot, by the same people who had been guilty of so much cruelty and injustice.
13:36
[SPEAKER_00]: This whole thing sounds absolutely insane.
13:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I imagine being this man watching this, seeing people just met out this justice with such insanity.
13:46
[SPEAKER_00]: If you were a reasonable person, I just imagine the damage that was done to these people would be immense.
13:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And the National Guard itself never even tried to intervene and I don't necessarily even think it was because they didn't want to.
14:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I imagine there were some people who did.
14:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem was they couldn't.
14:05
[SPEAKER_00]: because all of Paris was under control of the mob.
14:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And so if you went against the will of the mob, you became the next target.
14:13
[SPEAKER_00]: They were all frozen in fear and ruled by the mob.
14:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The final death toll for the September massacres was between 1100 and 1400 with about 250 being members of the clergy.
14:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And the next straw for the Vindians was the death of their king, as actually devoted Catholics, they believed heavily in the divine right of kings, and they believed the parisians had killed God's sovereign ruler over them.
14:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, in February of 1793, Paris decreed a levy and mass, a 300,000 man draft to fight against the proxions and the Austrians.
14:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is the moment where the Vendian said no more, we're not going to do it.
14:53
[SPEAKER_00]: When in early March, this decree reached their little sleepier region, riots erupted in one of the bigger towns, clashing with the National Guard, and one young peasant man is killed, and this means it's time for vengeance.
15:06
[SPEAKER_00]: a week later, in another town, thousands of peasants armed with pitchforks, clubs and hunting rifles, which would also mean that there were some nobility in the ranks here because gun ownership was determined by social class, and if you were no boy, you got guns, peasant, not so lucky.
15:21
[SPEAKER_00]: But these guys surrounded a recruitment center in slaughtered local officials, National Guardsmen, anyone suspected of being part of the Republican or their evolutionary government.
15:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And these riots continue to spread, and the Vendians realized that they needed military structure and leadership because they're smart.
15:39
[SPEAKER_00]: They realized that they needed moral as well as military guidance.
15:42
[SPEAKER_00]: For the moral leadership, they approached Jacques Catalini.
15:45
[SPEAKER_00]: He's a wagon driver.
15:46
[SPEAKER_00]: He was known for being charismatic as well as Pius.
15:49
[SPEAKER_00]: He was also maybe a black market dealer.
15:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And he will eventually earn the nickname of the Saints of Onju.
15:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And for military leadership, they approached a man named Charles DeBon Shaw, a noble and celebrated military veteran of the American Revolutionary War.
16:05
[SPEAKER_00]: and under this new leadership structure, they give their fledgling army an honorable name, the Catholic and royal army.
16:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the things we do not want to do is we go through this is talk about every single military movement that happens and so we're going to kind of a jetpack.
16:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I think is the term that used in the film industry.
16:23
[SPEAKER_00]: to zip through.
16:24
[SPEAKER_00]: They are wildly successful in in a movie.
16:26
[SPEAKER_00]: This will be the part where they pull the map and you see the army marching across a burning map.
16:31
[SPEAKER_00]: You cut to scenes of guerilla warfare tactics, which no doubt they learned from the American Revolution.
16:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were headed towards Paris until the Battle of Sholain.
16:40
[SPEAKER_00]: This is October 17, 1793.
16:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And already the St. of Onju,
16:48
[SPEAKER_00]: What made him an excellent leader also made him an easy target because he would charge out in front with his men in this way he was killed in action.
16:55
[SPEAKER_00]: But why did they lose at show length?
16:58
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a few good reasons.
17:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The government had sent in a professional army and these were the best of the best.
17:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And the counter-revolutionaries were experiencing an ammunition shortage and also they were fighting an open ground and not guerrilla style and they have lost a lot of their key leaders.
17:16
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the key leaders is Dave Olshah.
17:18
[SPEAKER_00]: He is mortally wounded.
17:20
[SPEAKER_00]: He's lying on his deathbed.
17:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And as he's lying on his deathbed, he hears that his men are about to murder 5,000 captured Republican troops because they're about to lose.
17:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And from his deathbed, the Bonshaw issues the order, mercy for the prisoners, Bonshaw commensates.
17:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And this act of mercy was swept under the rug by the revolutionaries because it just didn't fit the narrative, but the men spared their never-forgotten and the son of one of these men grew up to be a famous sculptor, and a statue of Bonshaw.
17:49
[SPEAKER_00]: issuing this order from his deathbed now resides inside the abbey of a French church.
17:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, after this battle goes sideways, there's now 70,000 people.
17:59
[SPEAKER_00]: There's the elderly, there's the military, there's women, there's children, they want to flee to the city of Granville or Granville, that's all in the coast and the ideas they we picked up by English ships.
18:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And they are, of course, pursued.
18:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of them became sick and suffer from dysentery, which revolutionary doctors, mockingly called the brigand sickness.
18:19
[SPEAKER_00]: but the English never showed.
18:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And when they get to the city, the Vindians attempt to siege it, but they fail and then they flee again, their pursuit, they had to leave behind the elderly and the children in the week.
18:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And these are slaughtered by the Republican troops.
18:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And eventually they caught up with the main army and they absolutely slaughtered them as well.
18:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And I believe it's here that the archaeologists have found a mass graves filled with quick lime and the skeletons that are in these graves show evidence of the brutality that is consistent with their evolution.
18:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, backing up just a little bit again, this is before the battle of Sholae, the National Convention sent forth a decree of pacification.
19:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, when we think of pacification, we think, oh, you want to make a compromise with these people, but that is not what it meant in this case, and the first policy of pacification,
19:12
[SPEAKER_00]: was issued that the city of the own was going to be siege.
19:16
[SPEAKER_00]: These were supporters of the rebellion.
19:18
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the second largest city in France, and the man the National Convention sent to oversee this operation is named George Couton.
19:26
[SPEAKER_00]: He is a close friend of Robes Pierre.
19:28
[SPEAKER_00]: He's a revolutionary, is dedicated.
19:30
[SPEAKER_00]: He's very...
19:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Military minded he is also in a wheelchair in 18th century France and I can't imagine the travel would be easy for him And he's been in a wheelchair for quite a while because they think that now he had some kind of illness I don't know if it was like
19:49
[SPEAKER_00]: not rickets, but like smallpox or something that rendered him into a wheelchair, but he was against that theory.
19:56
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, no, no, the reason why I'm in this wheelchair is because of my libertine youth, and it caused illness, and now I'm in a wheelchair.
20:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Who knows what was going on there, but either way, he was the military commander.
20:09
[SPEAKER_00]: overseeing this operation, and the siege began in August, so before the battle of Chile, and by October, the city was in ruins, and Kutan was waiting to see what the orders would be from Paris.
20:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And the order from Paris was that Leon shall be destroyed.
20:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Leon made war on liberty.
20:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Leon is no more.
20:28
[SPEAKER_00]: they ordered the destruction of Lyon's name, buildings, and identity, as well as a monument to be built over its ashes, and the demand was to completely destroy the city to erase it from the map because Lyon's defeat would be made a permanent and symbolic symbol they even wanted to change the name to some revolutionary name that I have since forgotten.
20:46
[SPEAKER_00]: and it didn't happen.
20:48
[SPEAKER_00]: But they wanted to demonstrate what happened to rebellious cities under the new Revolutionary Governments.
20:53
[SPEAKER_00]: However, Kutan was hesitant to fully execute this decree.
20:57
[SPEAKER_00]: So he destroyed some buildings.
20:58
[SPEAKER_00]: He enforced curfew.
21:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And he destroyed two beautiful
21:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And their records to the state that Kutan said, I can dim you to be demolished in the name of the law.
21:10
[SPEAKER_00]: However, he stopped short of the mass punishments that were decreed by the National Convention, and he ultimately relieved himself of his command.
21:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And in his place, the Convention puts two men that had no such reservations.
21:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're going to talk only about one of those a man named Joseph Fushe.
21:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Joseph Fouche is a truly horrible human.
21:29
[SPEAKER_00]: He is a rabid ultra-leftist, Jacobine, he hated Christianity and he did everything he could to contribute to the decrystionization of France, which we'll see later on.
21:39
[SPEAKER_00]: He quickly set up these tribunals, but these tribunals were hardly more fair than the ones during this attempt of massacres.
21:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And on December 4th, 60 men were slated for execution.
21:49
[SPEAKER_00]: but the guillotine, the symbol of the revolution, it was deemed to be too slow.
21:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So instead, the men were tied together and were killed by having the cannons filled with grape shot, fired at them.
22:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you're not familiar with grape shot, is it's basically a, it looks like a bunch of grapes.
22:07
[SPEAKER_00]: but it's like a cannon of grapes and it kind of all fit together but when they are shot out they go everywhere like kind of like a shotgun like a scatter shot and so it inflicts mass casualty and those who didn't die in the official firing and that's many of them because it's not accurate.
22:25
[SPEAKER_00]: They were finished off with bayonets and with muskets.
22:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the next four days, 400 counter-revolutionaries were executed in this style.
22:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, Robe's pair, here's about this.
22:36
[SPEAKER_00]: He's concerned.
22:37
[SPEAKER_00]: He's like, why aren't you using the guillotine?
22:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Make use of what we have invented for this very purpose.
22:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And Fushe said, fine, we'll supplement with the guillotine.
22:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the following months, 1900 citizens were executed in Lyon.
22:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Fushe's justification was, we are causing much impure blood to flow, but it is our duty to do so.
22:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It is for humanity's sake.
23:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Fushe sadly would never face justice.
23:03
[SPEAKER_00]: He managed to say on top his entire life.
23:05
[SPEAKER_00]: He even served Napoleon, even though he betrayed him twice.
23:08
[SPEAKER_00]: He then retired to Italy as a rich man.
23:11
[SPEAKER_00]: He was running as memoirs until his peaceful death at a ripe old age.
23:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Which just doesn't feel fair.
23:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is what it is.
23:20
[SPEAKER_00]: and now we're moving on to the drownings at the city of Nantes.
23:23
[SPEAKER_00]: In Nantes, Jean-Baptiste Ketterier, he was appointed to punish the counter-evolutionaries, he wrote a 20-page letter to the convention promising not to leave a single counter-evolutionary or landlord at large in Nantes.
23:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And for most people that would have taken a paragraph, but he decided to make it twice as long as most college essays.
23:43
[SPEAKER_00]: In Nantes, he formed a legion of troops called the Legion of Marae, this is named after that radical jockel bin journalist who would be killed in his bath tub.
23:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And he set up his own tribunal, but soon decides he doesn't even need those pesky things, so he just starts rounding people up.
24:00
[SPEAKER_00]: In November of 1793, he orders that 200 priests who were currently imprisoned be assembled on the dock on the river.
24:07
[SPEAKER_00]: He tightly packed 90 of them with their hands and feet bound onto a boat.
24:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The boat was sailed out into the river and it was sunk.
24:14
[SPEAKER_00]: A three of the priests survived and they were picked up by a ship that heard the screaming and then they were taken back to
24:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, from here, it escalated.
24:26
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't just priests and nuns, but it became ordinary men, women and children, and they were all stripped naked and bound in one account reads old men, pregnant women, and children were drowned with no sort of distinction.
24:38
[SPEAKER_00]: They were put on board lighters, which were railed round to keep the prisoners from jumping overboard, if they should happen to disengage themselves.
24:46
[SPEAKER_00]: They were plugs made in the bottom, or sides, and being pulled out the boat sank and all in it were drowned.
24:52
[SPEAKER_00]: and these brownings were called by a carry-a and is men national baptisms and these prisoners were referred to as birds and a cage and sexual assault of the women in the prisons were rampant and carry-a himself is documented as having taken part in these and his methods were intentionally sadistic and dehumanizing.
25:13
[SPEAKER_00]: There are reports, actually I won't talk about those.
25:16
[SPEAKER_00]: There are so many different reports in here of the different things that he
25:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And in one instance, they were 60 prisoners that were left bound and tightly packed onto one of these boats for over two days, before it was sunk.
25:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And this went on for four months until Word got back to Rose Pier, about Carrier's method, and he was recalled to Paris, and in those four months, between four to five thousand people were drowned, several hundred of those being priests and nuns, 2,000 died by firing squad or the guillotine, another 4,000 died of typhus and starvation while they were in prison.
25:49
[SPEAKER_00]: and then dozens of eyewitnesses came forward to tell the convention about the atrocities they had seen at Nantes things which once again we will not recount here.
25:57
[SPEAKER_00]: But Carrier tried to play it off like, oh, I was barely involved.
26:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Where is Nantes?
26:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I've never even heard of it.
26:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It reminds me of scar in the Lion King when he gets dropped down to where the Hine is are and he's like, oh my friends and they're like friends at that.
26:13
[SPEAKER_00]: We were the enemies and he meets a very similar end because he then gets guillotine.
26:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Which in my opinion is more merciful than being torn apart by Hainas, but you know, it happened and he did die, he did pay for his crimes in that way.
26:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, in the aftermath of this entire rebellion, there is actual pacification, eventually the government and Paris decided that they couldn't spend all this time of.
26:37
[SPEAKER_00]: fighting the Vindians because they had other bigger fish to fry and so they gave them religious liberty with the priests of their choice and exemption from the drag, which was all they wanted in the first place, so all this could have been avoided if they had listened from the get go, but that's not the point of the revolution, the point of the revolution was to
26:56
[SPEAKER_00]: dominate the lives of the people and to completely remove Christian influence from every sphere, when they could not, they did compromise.
27:03
[SPEAKER_00]: But now we're going to move on to something a little less dark, although when it comes to the revolution, that's a relative term.
27:10
[SPEAKER_00]: But we're going to talk about Rogues Pierre, because we've been hinting around about him and his role in this whole thing, but who was he and would you believe me if I told you that he was originally against the death penalty?
27:23
[SPEAKER_00]: This man who works for it so much slaughter, almost single handedly.
27:27
[SPEAKER_00]: was only for the death penalty in cases of self-defense, so what happens?
27:32
[SPEAKER_00]: For that, we need to back up a little bit.
27:34
[SPEAKER_00]: His full name is Maximilian Robes-Pier.
27:37
[SPEAKER_00]: His mother died in childbirth not with him, both another sibling.
27:40
[SPEAKER_00]: He and his brother were sent to live with grandparents, and his sisters were sent to live with their aunts.
27:46
[SPEAKER_00]: He is obsessed like everybody else.
27:48
[SPEAKER_00]: He's obsessed with Roman and Greek orders.
27:51
[SPEAKER_00]: He goes to school.
27:52
[SPEAKER_00]: He becomes a stand-out veteran.
27:54
[SPEAKER_00]: He is so good.
27:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Then in fact, he actually gives the welcome address to King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette when they visit his prestigious school after their coronation.
28:04
[SPEAKER_00]: He kneels in the mud in the rain to address the royal family as a 17-year-old student, and in 17 years later, he would become one of the most adamant voices fighting to ensure their execution.
28:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the 17 years between these two events, he became a lawyer and he wrote, he lauded virtue above all else.
28:24
[SPEAKER_00]: He was like Marie Antoinette and like many of these French people during the time.
28:29
[SPEAKER_00]: He was obsessed with Russo, and Russo was obsessed with virtue.
28:33
[SPEAKER_00]: In his book, The Social Contract.
28:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Russo expanded the definition of virtue, moral goodness, to not just the individual, but a society to the citizen, to be a virtuous citizen, was to put the will of the citizenry above selfish ambition, and to ensure the survival of the public good goes above all else.
28:52
[SPEAKER_00]: This is why the royals, the nobility, and the others were so evil, because they put their own
28:59
[SPEAKER_00]: elective.
29:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Rosebeer became a lawyer and he championed the rights of the poor and he wanted the abolition of the death penalty.
29:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And today we probably call him something like a like a state accord appointed lawyer, a pro bono lawyer, and one of the reasons why he wanted the death penalty abolishes these saw that it was unfairly applied to his clientele.
29:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And another important thing to know about Rose Pier, I think, not necessarily the most important, but it gives you an idea of who he was and how he viewed himself.
29:29
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a co-aft, dandy.
29:32
[SPEAKER_00]: He put so much effort into how he looked, and this is very much an opposition to the trend of his day.
29:39
[SPEAKER_00]: He still wore breaches, he wore tights, he had a powdered wig, when everybody else around him was going much more sloppy, much more natural.
29:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that his intention was very clear.
29:50
[SPEAKER_00]: He was above the chaos.
29:52
[SPEAKER_00]: He was above the muck and the mire.
29:54
[SPEAKER_00]: He was pristine.
29:55
[SPEAKER_00]: He was order and virtue personified.
29:59
[SPEAKER_00]: He would later on join the Jacobin Club, and he would rise to become a very influential member of both the original National Assembly and the later National Convention, and he was a political mastermind.
30:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't use that term lightly.
30:12
[SPEAKER_00]: He was legitimately scary with how good he was at manipulating things.
30:17
[SPEAKER_00]: He was like a spider.
30:18
[SPEAKER_00]: He was always weaving webs to ensure that his will was carried forth, and as opponents were stymied.
30:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is how he insured that the king would die.
30:27
[SPEAKER_00]: a year and a half after he spoke to the assembly to convince them to abolish the death penalty, which fell on death years.
30:34
[SPEAKER_00]: He then spoke to ensure it's use against the king because of virtue, if the king was virtuous and innocent, then the revolution was not.
30:45
[SPEAKER_00]: In his own words, Louis was king and the Republic is founded.
30:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The great question with which you are occupied is settled by this argument.
30:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Louis has been deposed for his crimes.
30:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Louis denounced the French people as rebels.
30:56
[SPEAKER_00]: To punish them, he called upon the arms of his fellow tyrants.
31:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Victory and the people have decided that he alone was a rebel.
31:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Therefore, Louis cannot be judged, he has already been condemned.
31:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Else the Republic is not cleared of guilt.
31:09
[SPEAKER_00]: To propose a trial for Louis XVI of any sort is to step backward toward royal and constitutional despotism.
31:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Such a proposal is counter-revolutionary, since it would bring the revolution itself before the court.
31:23
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, if Louie could yet be tried, he might be found innocent.
31:27
[SPEAKER_00]: If Louie is acquitted, where then is the revolution?
31:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And you'll notice there he uses this word counter-revolutionary, and this is the lynch pen upon which the whole of the rain of terror will rest.
31:41
[SPEAKER_00]: There are counter-revolutionaries.
31:43
[SPEAKER_00]: They stand against the will of the people.
31:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The will of the revolution, and therefore, they must be eradicated if the revolution is to survive.
31:51
[SPEAKER_00]: But the problem with this is obvious because who ultimately decides the will of the people and the direction of the revolution and what happens when these ideologies clash what happens when rocs pier alone decides that he is the guiding star of the revolution.
32:27
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that happens are purges.
32:29
[SPEAKER_00]: One of these early attempts was against Marquis de Lothia, who thankfully escaped to Austria, where I was kept as a prisoner until his release was secured by Napoleon, who if I'm not mistaken, asked him to serve in his government, and Lothia was just done with that over the whole thing, and he went off and retired, lived somewhere else and was happy and peaceful.
32:48
[SPEAKER_00]: So that story has a good ending.
32:50
[SPEAKER_00]: So how do you decide?
32:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Who is a patriot and who is a counterrevolutionary?
32:55
[SPEAKER_00]: You set up something so innoculously named that it can't possibly be bad, something like the Committee of Public Safety.
33:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Not scary at all, right?
33:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It's established in April of 1793, and really when it got started, it wasn't particularly scary.
33:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It was really more of a war cabinet to handle military invasions and economic issues.
33:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It was closed, it was secretive, but it wasn't moving fast enough.
33:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The Jacobins and other left wing radicals voted the originals out and brought in their more radical counterparts, including Robes' Pierre.
33:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And once again, I want to elude to a fictional character in Emperor Palpatine because I think he is a lot like Robes' Pierre.
33:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Because behind the scenes he's moving things, he's manipulating things and people to make sure that he is made the leader of the Republic.
33:41
[SPEAKER_00]: When he goes before the Senate, he gives his big speech and the same thing for O's Pierre, and it's like, the idea is the same.
33:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh no, please don't give me power.
33:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, okay, if you insist, hold to such a good job.
33:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And by December, this new crew had bypassed the National Convention entirely.
33:58
[SPEAKER_00]: and it was aimed at clearing out the prisons by either killing the suspect or letting them go.
34:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And it made enemies of the revolution such a vague accusation that literally anybody could be brought forward on charges and they were because that was the point.
34:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And political enemies were the first up on the chopping block, especially those pesky moderates because they thought that maybe all of this want and killing had gone on too long too far and maybe they should actually focus on running the government.
34:26
[SPEAKER_00]: instead of getting into more foreign wars and beheading the populist in mass, but in defense of all this violence, Roaks Pier gave one of his most well-known speeches entitled on political morality.
34:37
[SPEAKER_00]: He argued that terror and virtue must work in tandem to preserve the revolution and here I'll read some excerpts from his speech.
34:44
[SPEAKER_00]: If the main spring of popular government in peacetime is virtue amid revolution, it is the same time both virtue and terror, virtue without which terror is fatal, terror without which virtue is impotent, terror is nothing but prompt severe inflexible justice, it is therefore an emanation of virtue, it is less as special principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most pressing needs.
35:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The protection of government is only due to peaceful citizens and all citizens in the Republic are Republicans.
35:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The royalists, the conspirators, are strangers or other enemies, is not this dreadful contest which liberty maintains against tyranny, indivisible, are not the internal enemies the allies of those in the exterior.
35:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The assassins who lay waste of the interior, the intrigues who purchase the conscience of the delegates of the people, the traders who seldom, the mercenary libelous paid to dishonor the causes of the people to smother, public virtue to fan the flame of civil discord and bring about a political counter-revolution by means of a moral one.
35:51
[SPEAKER_00]: All these men are they less culpable or less dangerous than the tyrants whom they serve.
35:58
[SPEAKER_00]: You can see why he was famous for his rhetoric.
36:01
[SPEAKER_00]: He's really good at it.
36:02
[SPEAKER_00]: But he's also very too sighted because some of the things that he is saying here, like the mercenary libeless who are paid dishonor the cause of the people, that's something that the government did constantly.
36:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Rogues Pier did constantly.
36:17
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll see that a little bit later.
36:19
[SPEAKER_00]: But they were famous for bringing people in as false witnesses or things to sway the opinion
36:26
[SPEAKER_00]: the government in order to get what they wanted.
36:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Now one of these people that Robes Peer thought was a counter-evolutionary, a tyrant, was Thomas Payne, who was famous for writing common sense during the American Revolution.
36:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was marked as an enemy because of his moderate views, but he wasn't even that moderate, he just wasn't completely rabid, and it was while he was in prison awaiting his execution that he wrote his most damaging book.
36:51
[SPEAKER_00]: the age of a reason, which is a direct attack on God and the Bible, and this is especially ironic because he was only saved by an act of Providence.
37:00
[SPEAKER_00]: In the final days of the reign of Terror, he was marked for death.
37:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The only problem was that when they marked his cell as they were moving through.
37:08
[SPEAKER_00]: to use the chalk to mark the tops of their doors.
37:10
[SPEAKER_00]: His door was open, and so they ended up marking the inside of his door, and when they came through the next day to look at the chalk marks and drag people out, they didn't see his chalk mark because it was on the inside.
37:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And then a few days later, Rogues Pierre fell, and all the prisoners were released.
37:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And then after he is released, he goes on to publish the age of reason, but this black listed him from all of his circles, George Washington others would not talk to him because he was an atheist.
37:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And it wasn't invoked to be an atheist.
37:44
[SPEAKER_00]: You could be a deist, you could be agnostic, which is basically the same thing, but deism is all the rage.
37:50
[SPEAKER_00]: You could be a devout member of your faith, but do not be an atheist.
37:56
[SPEAKER_00]: and because of this book he just he falls off the map.
37:59
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is a man whose name I believe is Richard Watson.
38:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I may be I'm I'm getting that wrong.
38:06
[SPEAKER_00]: But he is an English in Bishop and he takes the age of reason and he dissects it line by line argument by argument.
38:14
[SPEAKER_00]: and writes our a bottle to at this her bottle would go on to be famous and it was used in seminaries and things to directly answer the questions that age of reason brought up which is a good book actually to read today because many of the arguments that Thomas Payne uses in the age of reason are ones that we all hear today so if you want to check it out check it out I think it be a good idea
38:36
[SPEAKER_00]: But Thomas Payne then decided he would answer this guy's rebuttal to his book and he does, but he can't get it published because he's such a social outcast.
38:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So it wasn't until after his death, the summary took it and published it.
38:50
[SPEAKER_00]: But it wasn't really anything revolutionary.
38:54
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just kind of more of the same.
38:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So there you have the life of Thomas Payne, who is connected to the revolution, he still thought it was a great idea even after all of this went down.
39:06
[SPEAKER_00]: But Jacques Malay DuPont has a quote that I think is perfect to describe this situation because like Thomas Payne, who was a supporter of the Revolution, the Revolution turned against him.
39:17
[SPEAKER_00]: So DuPont has this phrase, this quote, this says, like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.
39:26
[SPEAKER_00]: it's perfect.
39:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It's such a fitting description of the revolution.
39:29
[SPEAKER_00]: All these people who thought that their revolution was one thing, when somebody else got control, it became something else and they were on the outs.
39:36
[SPEAKER_00]: They're just eating each other constantly.
39:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, one of the things that we haven't talked about so far in the revolution has been the guillotine, so we need to remedy that.
39:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Who came up with the idea?
39:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a man named Joseph guillotine, and his idea was a good one because the medieval tactics they still used in France were so barbaric.
39:59
[SPEAKER_00]: only the nobility got a swift beheading death and they decided because the principles of their evolution were liberty equality and fraternity they needed to adopt something that would give every man equal death and so they took this model for the guillotine and they operated it on a wide scale.
40:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Now this doctor had no idea that his device would be used for such carnage and he
40:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And then in later years, his children petitioned the government to have their names legally changed to avoid association with this device that became known as the National Razor, and was responsible for killing 17,000 people, and at its height, 300 people a week.
40:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And people were so fascinated by this device because it was just terrifying, and there's a whole subculture that gets set up
40:52
[SPEAKER_00]: around the guillotine, people were wearing guillotine earrings, the women specifically, were wearing them and they had these little red liberty caps on them, and during the rain of terror, you had to dress so patriotic to make sure that no one could accuse you of being a counter-evolutionary and so these women just everybody just dressed as though they were sold out a thousand percent for their evolution, even if they weren't,
41:16
[SPEAKER_00]: because you had women like the knitting ladies that sat next to the guillotine all day day after day and they watched people and they were actually a lot of them were the women from the women's march and they were sold out harbys for this revolution but they would sit there next to the guillotine
41:37
[SPEAKER_00]: as it was chopped chop on a way they'd be knitting clothes for the Revolutionary Soldiers and as people were brought up to the scaffold they would boo and they would spit on them and then they would lead the people in Revolutionary Songs.
41:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were even hired out by the government, which is why I said that rose pier is a bit dishonest.
41:58
[SPEAKER_00]: They were hired out by the government to sit in on the proceedings of the convention.
42:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And if somebody got up that had a more moderate view or a view that the far left didn't like, then they would be shouted down and they would be threatened with death and all these things.
42:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And so in this way, people who had more moderate, more normal views were terrified to express them less they end up on the guillotine.
42:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's hard for us to realize sometimes that there are just, there are these people in effort regeneration that just are completely devoid of humanity and in the French Revolution, it was the knitting ladies.
42:38
[SPEAKER_00]: These ladies were absolutely evil.
42:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And now I need to talk about the decrystionization policies specifically.
42:47
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you replace the faith of an entire country deeply entrenched in Catholicism?
42:52
[SPEAKER_00]: You attempt to systematically excise it like the cancer that you think that it is, but if you do not replace it with something else, the people will feel aimless, because their entire lives, whether they were religious or not, were controlled by the church even down to the very calendar.
43:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So the government decided to create a calendar that replaced the traditional
43:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Every other country in Europe used.
43:15
[SPEAKER_00]: They even banned the use of the word Sunday, and they replaced the seven day system with a 10 day system called the decade, whatever the equivalent of that is in French.
43:25
[SPEAKER_00]: All religious holidays were abolished, even street names were changed from those of saints or other religious sounding names and giving new revolutionary names.
43:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And the calendar was implemented in 1793, but it was actually back dated to 92, because it needed to commemorate the founding of the first French Republic.
43:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were obsessed with Romans.
43:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So they named the days of the week in a fusion of Latin and French except for decade, which was Greek.
43:52
[SPEAKER_00]: So they had days like Primi D, Duo D, 3D, Quadradi, so on and so forth.
43:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And the months were actually changed according to their seasons in a deliberate nod to Russo.
44:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The same days were replaced with agricultural and nature specific i.e.
44:09
[SPEAKER_00]: pagan holidays, like this exciting one that I'm sure everybody wants to celebrate the day of the Will Barrow.
44:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Each month was then divided into three decades, but this left them with five days left over to match the Gregorian calendar, so they stuffed a bunch of patriotic days in there, like a virtue day, genius day, labor day, and my personal favorite is opinion day, where you could roast and mock and freely critique the government without reprisal, only that never happened because nobody trusted the government not to just arrest them the next day.
44:44
[SPEAKER_00]: and then they went even a step further, they even changed the clock to a decimal time trying to apply the metric system, which the French Revolution invented, hence why we all say, as we should say, along with the imperial system.
44:58
[SPEAKER_00]: But in this system, one day was 10 hours, one hour was 100 minutes.
45:03
[SPEAKER_00]: One minute was 100 seconds, so noon was at exactly 5 o'clock.
45:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Midnight was at exactly 10 o'clock.
45:11
[SPEAKER_00]: H-24am in standard time, normal land time would be exactly 350 on a decimal clock.
45:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And as you can imagine, this made international trade absolutely impossible.
45:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And as a result, it was abandoned after just a year and a half, but the calendar system lasted much longer for 12 years until it was abolished by Napoleon.
45:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And now when you talk about the cults, and there are a lot of cults that go on, but we will only highlight two of them.
45:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason for these cults was that people needed something else to worship, you had to replace the church with something else.
45:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And the first of these cults that popped up,
45:50
[SPEAKER_00]: was the cult of reason, which was up as you can see, though it was Earth's reason and also liberty.
45:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And these two seemed intertwined.
45:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And most important, though, the very first tenant of the cult of reason was to reject any form of deism.
46:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Joseph Fushe, he was the guy in charge of Leone, he was one of their fiercest supporters.
46:13
[SPEAKER_00]: He ordered all the crosses and all religious symbolism to be removed from the cemeteries and for all the cemeteries gates to bear the inscription, death is the eternal sleep.
46:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And the cult of reason continued to grow when it culminated in the festival of reason at Notre Dame.
46:30
[SPEAKER_00]: and before this festival officially took place, they ripped out all the religious iconography, even the 18 statues that represented biblical kings that was on the outside of the cathedral because the writers thought they were French monarchs because they're not smart.
46:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And the alter itself was replaced with the altar of liberty and a Greek mountain a paper mache was put near it and dedicated to philosophy.
46:53
[SPEAKER_00]: A miniature Greek temple was placed at the very top and was decorated with the busts of enlightenment thinkers.
46:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And the goddess of reason or liberty was placed near this mountain and it was played by a real woman in this instance.
47:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It was played by the wife of one of the cult's founders and she was dressed in Roman attire and attended by young girls.
47:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Also dressed in Roman garb and they used actual actresses because they didn't want to worship statues, didn't want to have any iconography in there.
47:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, they claim they weren't worshipping at all.
47:23
[SPEAKER_00]: They just sung revolutionary songs and hymns to the goddess of reason.
47:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of these hymns I came across and I will put the whole thing in the episode description for you, but it's a story of the pivot from the Catholic Church to an idealized era of reason and here's just a little bit of it.
47:41
[SPEAKER_00]: In order for all of us to be as one I want to go to Rome, to preach reason to the Pope and convert the holy man, leave there the playthings of the world's infancy.
48:10
[SPEAKER_00]: A priest is always a priest.
48:12
[SPEAKER_00]: We would love never a less to believe that the vow of his mouth has been dictated to his heart.
48:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It is up to you now to put the lie to history, consecrate the future to being deserving of the honor, through civic conduct, of being the adopted child of our Republic.
48:29
[SPEAKER_00]: but it totally wasn't religious.
48:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And this festival would lead to riots all over Paris and the desecration of whatever churches were left, melting church bells into cannons, destroying religious paraphernalia and donning priests with the red cap of liberty.
48:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Robes Pierre is outraged by the existence of this cult, in part because it was led by his rivals.
48:51
[SPEAKER_00]: But also, because as I said earlier, it's bad to be an atheist.
48:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The worst thing you can be better to be a Catholic or a Protestant than an atheist, but best of all, to be a deist.
49:02
[SPEAKER_00]: So Rog's peer used his cloud and his leadership in the government to get rid of those responsible for the cult of reason and he has them sent to Viki, a team except for as we know, Joseph Fushay escapes.
49:13
[SPEAKER_00]: But he then forms his own cult, the cult of the Supreme Being, which is a blending of deasome and civic duty driven by his one obsession, virtue.
49:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Enrope's Pierre got the idea for the Supreme Being and how it ought to be worshipped from Russo, who wrote that God could be understood and felt by looking at nature and love in service to the Supreme Being was tied to loving one's fellow citizens and indicating one's self to civil service.
49:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to give a side note here because this idea isn't even original to Russo.
49:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It actually comes from a 1516 novel called Utopia by Thomas Moore.
49:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And I didn't know this except for the fact that my husband was reading it and he was like, oh, it has the supreme being here, like listed because
49:57
[SPEAKER_00]: it detailed how in an idealized society everybody would worship the supreme being.
50:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So this idea passed from more to Russo, to Rospier, who saw it actually realize he conducted a giant festival to the supreme being intentionally on Pentecost.
50:15
[SPEAKER_00]: in 1794.
50:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And the massive procession began in the Toulouse Garden, and Rogues Pier led the way even ahead of all the other leaders of the convention.
50:24
[SPEAKER_00]: He was in a light blue coat, he was wearing yellow pants, he had a tricolor sash, a plumed hat, and a bonnet of flowers and wheat, symbolizing himself as the leader or the high priest of this new religion in France.
50:37
[SPEAKER_00]: He led the procession about a mile and a half along the same
50:40
[SPEAKER_00]: and the procession was absolutely staggering, about 500,000 people, which is essentially the entire population of Paris at the time, and the procession led to a paper mache of atheism, which he set a flame, and as they watched it burn, it revealed the blackened statue of wisdom.
50:58
[SPEAKER_00]: and the rivals in the government are naturally upset by this because they see it as what it was him setting himself up as a dictator.
51:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And some of them even giggled and scorned him rather publicly from the crowd as he led the ceremonies, but he took note of these people and then he signed the decree which would accelerate the killings under the reign of terror.
51:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And the because of this, Robespierre's political opponents realized they had to act quickly to put a stop to his
51:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And just seven weeks later, they orchestrated a political coup so intricate that it deserves its own movie, but we did not have time for all that, so we're going to kind of skip to some of the highlights here.
51:38
[SPEAKER_00]: So jumping forward a bit, following Rose Pier is public denunciation by the convention.
51:44
[SPEAKER_00]: He and his five besties, including his brother, were taken to the hotel late villain.
51:48
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the same hotel that the early revolutionaries operated out of and kind of
51:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And here it's a bit confusing because it seems like maybe they were supposed to be somewhere else and they might have escaped and then tried to hold up in the hotel.
52:05
[SPEAKER_00]: But either way, the convention declared them as al-Waz and then sent a massive army of people to them and robsphere's brother, seeing all these troops advance.
52:16
[SPEAKER_00]: He leaps from a balcony onto the bay
52:25
[SPEAKER_00]: and then Robes Fierre attempts to kill himself with a pistol but the attempt is botched and it's either because his aim was bad or the intervention of a soldier and he and the others were taken in and the next morning he had to have a few of his teeth and pieces of his jaw removed.
52:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The next day, he is condemned as a counter-evolutionary without even a trial because of the law that he himself put in place to speed up these killings.
52:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was taken to wait as turn as number 10 in line for the guillotine, and when he approached the scaffold, the executioner took off the bandage that was holding his jaw together, which caused him to scream and agonizing pain that continued all the way up until his head
53:09
[SPEAKER_00]: That this man who was known for his rhetoric and his slippery words was reduced to screams of the very end of his life.
53:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And with his death, the reign of terror came to an end.
53:21
[SPEAKER_00]: But as you can imagine, the end of the reign of terror didn't mean that France just magically popped back to normal.
53:27
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a minched backlash against the remaining perpetrators by the victim's families, the gangs, the muskidines, or the guild of youth who were quietly encouraged to commit murders and prison massacres via the newspapers.
53:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Which is a quite smart and not an extinct method.
53:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Lots of different governments have used it over the years to get their people to do what they want without getting their hands dirty because in this way for France, specifically, they didn't have to take responsibility for the right of terror nor did they have to mobilize the military.
53:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And this period in time is called the White Terror, or the Thermedorian reaction, which is named after one of their little months of the year.
54:06
[SPEAKER_00]: But when the muskidines had kind of overseen all of the deaths of the enemies, they were in and of themselves interesting, because they dressed like dandies.
54:15
[SPEAKER_00]: They had like little neck scarves, they had their hair tied back, and they had like trench coats, and they carried lead pipes or whatever
54:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And so once they had killed everybody they saw as responsible for this right of terror, they became royalists.
54:35
[SPEAKER_00]: They wanted a monarch again, and as a result, they became a threat to the government, and they were brutally removed from this world, and one of the ways that they were removed from this world was through the failure of a royalist uprising.
54:49
[SPEAKER_00]: This is October 17, 1995.
54:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The government brings in the military.
54:54
[SPEAKER_00]: They bring in young Napoleon.
54:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where Napoleon really gets famous.
54:59
[SPEAKER_00]: It's this moment is called the whiff of grape shot because he takes cannons filled with grape shot and fires them into the crowd and breaks up this royalist rebellion.
55:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And after all of this takes place, the government dissolves once again into a directory, a directory of five people.
55:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And it relied on military power to keep the peace it was weak, it was a nipped.
55:23
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the people who was on the directory later on, his name is Abby Sase, who's named you may recognize because he's one of the guys who drafted the rights and declaration of the citizen and of the manor.
55:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever the preamble is of the very first constitution in France, he's the guy who really made it as anti-God as possible.
55:44
[SPEAKER_00]: He has an idea, he's going to use Napoleon to end the directory and make himself the leader of France.
55:52
[SPEAKER_00]: but it backfires spectacularly and results in the coup of 18 Brumier 1799, which causes three men to rule all of France.
56:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of those guys is Episase.
56:04
[SPEAKER_00]: One is somebody else who doesn't go down in history is being anybody important.
56:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other one is Napoleon Bonaparte.
56:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Napoleon then pushes the other two aside to make himself the first console and he knows that Abbey is kind of a slippery fella.
56:21
[SPEAKER_00]: So he says, Hey, here's what I'm going to do.
56:23
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to get all these empty titles and all of these accolades and you're just going to kind of go play over there while I actually do stuff.
56:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And in this way, the French Revolution has a very ironic echoing of Rome, because early on they idolized Brutus, this man who killed Julius Caesar, but then they ended up paving the way and then celebrating the rise of their own Caesar, Emperor Napoleon.
56:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And after all of this chaos, they welcomed the very tyrant that they thought they were getting rid of.
56:56
[SPEAKER_00]: I bet it, this was a tyrant who would lead them to temporary greatness like Julius Caesar, but it also gave them exactly what they didn't want.
57:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly like Rome.
57:07
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a whole thing we could go and talk about and we're not going to, but it would be fascinating, right?
57:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it would be.
57:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to take a moment just on Napoleon himself because he is a very quotable man, but probably my favorite quote from him was said as his moving towards his final exile, and he's defending himself to a critic who was accusing him of basically being just a mechlamani at a tyrant like was written about him in the English papers.
57:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, I found a crown in the kennel.
57:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I cleansed it from its filth and placed it upon my head.
57:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And to be quite honest, he's not wrong.
57:45
[SPEAKER_00]: France would never have gotten back on track.
57:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Had it not been for Napoleon like figure, which could lead us into Plato's theory again, but we're not going to go into that.
57:54
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll kind of move along and say after Napoleon, France will go through 60 years of instability, before it finally stabilized,
58:03
[SPEAKER_00]: in 1878 with the third republic and this is if we're being generous because they didn't truly stabilize until 1958 when they brought in their military hero Charles De Gaulle to help them and he agreed to as long as they let him write the constitution.
58:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this proves that France is really better off with a strong hand at the wheel.
58:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Charles De Gaulle gave them their modern
58:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, going back to the slideshow from Park 1 was the revolution really all about liberty, equality, and fraternity.
58:40
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
58:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And is there anything to admire about the revolution?
58:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, no.
58:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing at all.
58:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a horrible time in history that has had nothing, but horrible effects ever since.
58:54
[SPEAKER_00]: One of these horrible effects was what happened to the church after all of this, specifically in this case, the Catholic Church.
59:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Because 20,000 priests had been forced to abdicate, 6 to 9,000 were forced or agreed to marry, 300 priests were exiled to French Guinea and left to fin for themselves in a bog.
59:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And 30,000 priests fled France.
59:14
[SPEAKER_00]: 40,000 churches and 1,500 monasteries were destroyed, were converted into temples, prisons, or warehouses.
59:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And even when Napoleon reinstated the church in 1801, and this was kind of a compromise with the Pope, these priests were still paid by the state and they had to be loyal to the Emperor.
59:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And it split the clergy between those who had returned and felt they could get back underway, and those who felt that the Pope had compromised too much with Napoleon, and later on Napoleon would actually kidnap and hold hostage to different posts.
59:49
[SPEAKER_00]: After the fall of Napoleon, there was a revival that came to France and was spread by the English and the Swiss.
59:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's really hard to tell what exactly the fruits of this movement in France were because in Switzerland it led to the formation of the Red Cross, in England it led to the Sunday School movement.
1:00:06
[SPEAKER_00]: In France, it did lead to the urbanization of Protestant churches.
1:00:10
[SPEAKER_00]: but it may have also fused Christianity with socialism.
1:00:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It did, though, lead to the French Free Church which still operates in small pockets today, but the death now for Christianity in France was the doggy determination of the Catholics to support the monarchy at every available opportunity.
1:00:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually, the people got so tired of it, and in 1905, the government issued the law of sautee, I believe is how you say it, or the separation of church and state, but instead of protecting the church from the state, it protects the state from the church and religion of any kind.
1:00:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Religious attire and symbols are banned from all government institutions, and the stats on Christianity today in France are depressingly dismal.
1:00:55
[SPEAKER_00]: 53% are atheist or agnostic, 27-28% are Catholic, 10% are Muslim, 6% are Orthodox, 3% Protestants, and 1% Jewish.
1:01:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Today the fastest growing religion in France is Islam, mainly due to immigration and higher birth rates when you compare it to the native French population.
1:01:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is good news for evangelical Christianity.
1:01:21
[SPEAKER_00]: A new evangelical free-church opens every 10 days in France, and the population of evangelicals in France is up to 1 million, which is still a small but a growing demographic.
1:01:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And many are drawn in from social media platforms like TikTok, looking for alternatives to atheism, Catholicism, Islam, or sterile, feeling, mainline denominations.
1:01:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Christianity in France has a long and storied past, but a rich one, I think, because it begins with Clovis the First and Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, King Louis the 9th St. Louis, the one who leads through Crusades.
1:01:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Bernard of Clarevo, John Calvin, the whole Huguenon, saying just name a few,
1:02:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And the French Revolution sought to decimate and erase that Christian past, and to be quite fair they were largely successful, but to give us some hope.
1:02:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to quote G.K. Chesterton who wrote, Christianity has died many times and risen again.
1:02:18
[SPEAKER_00]: For it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.
1:02:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you enjoyed this episode and this exploration of all things French Revolution as such as I did, and I also hope that you have some hope going forward about the future of Christianity in France.
1:02:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And as always, thank you for listening to Modernism Missionaries, I'm Elise.