708. The Terror: The Reign of Robespierre (Part 2)

0:00This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. Go to MintMobile.com slash history. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months, plan required $15 per month equivalent, taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only, greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy, includes up to 20 gigabytes of hotspot, capable device required, availability speed and coverage varies. See MintMobile.com. This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions,

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2:04in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the West? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realizes or rather everybody else realizes that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So, your anthropic knows the importance of questions and it's why Anthropic has found it on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people? So they asked over 100,000 people and what came back wasn't just fear. There was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Camp Kids have a better future. It turns out that there is hope in hard questions. Ask yours at Claude.ai slash rest is history and keep thinking. We are now, therefore, got to that black precipitous abyss, where the all things have long been

3:11tending, where having now arrived on the giddy verge, they hurled down and confused and ruined, headlong, pale male, down, down, till suncolotism have consummated itself. And in this wondrous French revolution, as in a doomsday, a world have been rapidly, if not born again, yet destroyed and engulfed. Terror has long been terrible, but to the actors themselves, it has now become manifest that their appointed course is one of terror. And they say, be it so. Glatteche, soil l'ordre du jour. Let terror be the order of the day. So what a dramatic moment, a key point in the story of the French revolution, the start of the terror. So this passage, which describes this great turning point, the dawning of the reign of terror,

4:14comes from the single most influential history of the French revolution that has ever been written in our native tongue. And the man who wrote it was one of the absolute intellectual titans of Victorian Britain. He was the Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlisle. Now, some of you might have found that reading a little bit theatrical, but of course that was Carlisle style. Some people might even say a melodramatic style. And I think they'd be right. So he's writing often the present tense. So he gives you this incredibly vivid palpable sense of immediacy. He puts you right in the heart of the revolution. And as you can tell from that passage, Tom, Carlisle sees the revolution as the equivalent of the flood or the apocalypse in the book of Revelation, this Titanic biblical reckoning between the forces of radicalism and violence and the forces of the established order. And the terror, this point in our story, 1793, 1794,

5:20is the absolute climax. Yes. So Carlisle casts it as this kind of immense unstoppable conflagration consumes all in its path and even its own profits. So satan devoured its own children. We talked about that in our first episode. And also Dominic in our first episode, we talked about how for the British and perhaps for the Anglophone world more generally, the terror is really what the revolution is all about. And it's not a coincidence that Carlisle was a massive influence on Charles Dickens who said that he'd read it 500 times. Carlisle's book on the French Revolution. And so it's his principle source for Tale of Two Cities, which is, I mean, amazing, the best selling novel in English. So it's that is the novel that's imprinted this idea of the revolution as being equivalent to terror, I think in the kind of the British imagination. And this is where our sense of it has streams of blood, tumbrills, all of that that we were talking about yesterday

6:24comes from. And I would say that in Britain far more than any other European country, the terror is actually seen almost as synonymous with the French Revolution itself. Really? So actually in a lot of European countries, there is an emphasis on the kind of the more progressive elements of the revolution. The metric system. Not just the metric system, but the language of rights and that kind of thing. But by the thought of the British, it's just mad people chopping each other's heads off. And do you know the person who magnificently magnificently sum this up? I do. And so this is an interview that Madame Sachire gave in 1989 to Le Monde. And 1989, of course, by centennial of Bastille Day, the French Revolution, it was part of a series of interviews with leaders from the G7 who were attending a summit in

7:28Paris. And all the other six leaders were incredibly respectful of the revolution and everything that it had given humanity. So all this language of rights and stuff. Mrs. Sachire, absolutely uncompromising refusal to diplomatic. And she said that the revolution was a terrible thing. Up to the final death of Rob Speier. Oh, it was an age of terror. It was an age of terror. We did ours much more quietly. She's not entirely wrong to be fair. Well, I mean, I suppose we did chop off the head of a king. But I think she's talking about the glorious revolution and there was a lack of guillotine in that. And so you said that in this series, we're going to be looking at the reality behind the myth. And for British listeners, the myth is this notion of the revolution being all about terror. And so listeners may be thinking, this idea of terror is this just a kind of francophobic British, something that they've imagined,

8:33something perhaps made up by Carlisle, one of his rhetorical flourishes, one of his melodramatic flourishes. But actually, it's not at all because the idea of terror being the order of the day, it originates with the revolutionaries themselves, doesn't it? Completely, it does. They never use the phrase, they don't call themselves terrorists as some historians later do, nor do they ever use the expression, the reign of terror as lots of historians do, and it's very common in the popular imagination. But the word terror and terror as a positive political policy as a strategy, as a deliberate choice, is there from 1793 and arguably even earlier, is implicit in a lot of what they're saying, isn't it? So that phrase that Carlisle quotes, let terror be the order of the day, he is quoting a slogan that was publicly pronounced by a man called Bertrand Barre, who was one of the 12 men who sat on the committee of public safety,

9:34which we talked about yesterday, this kind of proto-dictatorial institution that had been set up on the 6th of April 1793, and it was never enshrined as a kind of official policy, it was never an official motion of the national convention, which in effect was the government of revolutionary France, but it didn't need to be adopted as an official policy. And Barre proclaimed it on the 5th of September 1793, so some two months after the murder of Mara, which we were talking about in the previous episode. And Barre was offering this policy of terror as a way of dealing with all the multiple interlocking crises that we heard about in that first episode. So war, counter revolution, civil war, economic collapse, the collapse of the revolutionaries themselves into kind of bloodthirsty faction fighting. And Barre's goal in saying let terror be the order of the day was to institutionalize

10:42repression against the perceived enemies of the revolution and thereby to save it. And what this meant in practice was to reframe what had hitherto been ad hoc violence, violence that kind of emerged from the streets. The September massacres in the prisons, for example. Chaotic and Archeic, all of that. And to reframe it as a kind of formal state policy. But just to reiterate, even this is still fundamentally an attempt at crisis management. It's an emergency measure. It's a response to the crisis that is overwhelming the revolution. It strikes me that there's two different schools of thought here, two different kinds of terror. So what you're describing as the crisis management is terror as defensive. It's terror as in, you know, this is a bullwalk against enemies. But there is another way of thinking about the terror, isn't there? Which is much more almost terror as a positive

11:42force. Terror on the offensive. Terror as remodeling society or giving you a kind of a, I suppose, a philosophy of government. And this brings us to the person at the heart of the story. I mean, you might say literally a blood bath that the blood washes away the taints of monarchy and aristocracy superstition. And that you have to have the blood bath so that something pure and better can emerge from it. And this is quite a minority position in the beginning of 1793. But it will become increasingly influential. And the person who is most associated with it, probably the most famous or maybe notorious figure in the whole French Revolution was the one revolutionary that was named checked by Mrs. Thatcher in that interview with Le Monde. And who on the 5th of September when Barraire proclaimed terror the order of the day was actually the president

12:42of the convention. And that is Maximilian Robespierre. So he is, people can probably have a sense of of what he looks like. He is in 1793, 35 years old. He is short. He is slender. He is pale. In his appearance, he is compared by one contemporary to a cat that at some time he looks like a kind of domestic tabby at other times like a fierce tiger. In our previous series about the French Revolution, Robespierre has been kind of threaded through it. He is bobbed up from time to time and then gone away again. And he is not really at that point the undisputed star of the revolution. But this is the moment, isn't it? The sort of second half of 1793 when he finds himself cast or cast himself as the absolute central figure in the drama. And he becomes identified with the whole policy of terror. He embodies it. He personifies it, doesn't he? Yes.

13:43perceived as its architect. Perhaps not always fairly, I would say, actually. But he certainly articulates it more fluently and confidently than anybody else. Yes, so he becomes the face of the terror both when it is being prosecuted and in the wake of it. And I mean, on the one hand, I mean, fewer people die in the terror than are killed in the British Army on the first day of the sun. I mean, that is one way of looking at it. On the other hand, I mean, a lot of people are killed in the terror. So something like 17,000 people across the the whole of France get to be executed as traitors and enemies of the revolution. And then you were talking yesterday about the Von Day. I mean, a huge scale of slaughter there, the Sun French historians compare it to genocide. And certainly in Paris, the center of the revolution, there is a kind of hideous melodrama to the displays of executions that are going on. I mean, this is why

14:49the guillotine is so memorable. The guillotine was designed to be merciful, to be an enlightened way of killing people. But the speed with which the blade drops on to the neck results in great geasers of blood, welling out. So it is a really spectacular terrifying sight. And so much blood ends up flowing over the course of the terror into the water supply that it becomes poisoned. And they have to move the guillotine because it's the blood is getting into the water system. And I think to his enemies, Robespierre comes to see the embodiment of everything that is making this happen. A kind of a monster who is threatening to turn the whole of France into a cemetery. And there is a famous cartoon which was published towards the end of the terror, which illustrates this. And it shows Robespierre and to quote the caption, guillotting the executioner after having had all the French guillotined. So the sense of the terror is something that will end up consuming the entire

15:54country. And you mentioned the word terrorist. So it's originally coined in French in 1794 after the terror has formally been brought to an end to describe a class of person who had never before needed to be described. So this is the birth of our notion of terrorism as a positive because terrorists obviously think that they are doing often God's work or the work of the people or whatever they do indeed. But you know you were talking about Robespierre. This idea that people have of Robespierre is this monster hungry for blood. I mean it's so common, it's common in political rhetoric. And Robespierre's bloodlust, his desire to sacrifice human life in pursuit of a better world has become an absolute staple of conservative political thought, hasn't it really? I mean he's a sort of monster haunting the conservative imagination. And yet the funny thing about Robespierre is when you look at him in so many ways, you know he is not Stalin or he's not Paul Potts or something. So you give the example, don't you in your notes.

16:57A really obvious point, Robespierre is personally extremely squeamish. And this will astound people, this man who is famous for guillotine in all these thousands of people. He all his life had consistently opposed capital punishment. Completely, we took the episode on the introduction of the guillotine and how Robespierre stood up, you know, right the way through all the meetings that were structuring the revolution from 1789 onwards opposing the death penalty. And he had a profound personal horror of violence. For instance, he had opposed the war against Austria and Prussia that the Giron d'Han had pushed. He was he was very against it. Even though ultimately he is, you know, he's part of the the the institution that is responsible for sending people to the guillotine. He never goes and watch his execution himself. He hasn't got the stomach for it. And even during the terror itself, he does disapprove of a lot of the more indiscriminate atrocities that are being perpetrated out in the provinces. We talked yesterday about Mara, how the stress

18:03of being in the eye of the political storm brought him out in kind of boils and all kinds of, you know, skin complaints. I think Robespierre, likewise finds the process of administering the terror very stressful, which I'm sure won't be much consolation to those victims. But it is notable that he seems to have retired to his bed in a state of kind of nervous collapse throughout the months of the terror. So he's as you say, he's absolutely not Stalin. He's not cavalier about this. He feels the burden of it, I think, very personally. And also his political opinions, I mean, they are very liberal Democrat. They're very inoffensive. They are exactly the kind of thing that today constitutes the political mainstream for parties in pretty much every Western democracy, I would say. We mentioned how Robespierre opposes the death penalty. He also is a keen

19:05supporter of freedom of the press. He's backed this throughout his life. He's in favor of universal male suffrage, not female suffrage, although he is incredibly popular with revolutionary women, as we will see. He supports progressive taxation to support universal education. He supports the idea of human rights. He's a firm believer in them. And he's an abolitionist. He wants to see slavery go. So these are all pretty politically impeccable positions from the perspective of today. Works, garden reading snowflake, who knew? A further thing that is strange about him. You're talking yesterday about how Mara dresses in a way that makes him seem the embodiment of the revolution. He dresses as a child of the street. And how by 1793 this is something that most revolutionaries are doing. This is not Robespierre's vibe at all. Robespierre's vibe does not remotely seem that of a revolutionary itching to drown the Aussie-Arae's gene in blood. So Timothy

20:10Tachatin is book on the terror, which we've been quoting a lot in this series. He quotes one of Robespierre's colleagues in 1793, who is very into this notion of kind of repudiating aristocratic fashion. And this guy says, we now all look like beggars, boots and threadbare clothing, such as our stylish costume. These are the clothes that people in the convention are wearing almost as a kind of uniform. But Robespierre, I mean for him, it might as well be Versailles in 1781 or something. So he loves a powdered wig. He loves an embroidered waistcoat. He loves a waistcoat. Robespierre loves silk stockings. He loves a handsome blue coat. And the thing about the stockings is interesting because of course the collot are the the bridges that the aristocracy used to wear Versailles to complement the stockings. And so the songcullot is, you know, people who wear trousers, people who can't afford this style. And as early as 1791,

21:10Robespierre had been described by a fellow revolutionary as the general of the songcullot. But Robespierre himself, despite being the general of the songcullot, he's still wearing collot. He has them. He's wearing his pantaloons. And so it is striking that the man who more than anyone else is associated with sweeping away the old order should affect the fashions of that very order. Yeah, because he's so prim, he's so meticulous, he's so dapper, fastidious. Now what's going on there? How do you reconcile those two things? I mean, it's fascinating from the point of view of personal psychology. But I think it also matters because looking at Robespierre's character and background helps us as well maybe to get a handle on what's going on in the terror because Robespierre is so influential on it. And so before we carry the story on from the death of Mara, or the turbulent events that

22:11we'll be following that, let's just have a quick look at Robespierre's backstory, because we haven't given it yet in the course of our various series on the French Revolution. Maybe see what clues we can find there. Love a clue, brilliant. So Robespierre was born on the 6th of May, 1758 in Arras, which is a town on Francis Borders with Holland. And it's very prosperous, it's very pious, and it's unbelievably boring. And Robespierre's early life is marked by kind of repeated tragedies and petty humiliations and reading about them. Kind of remind me of 19th century novels that always feature these kind of things, Madame Bovery or something like that, where there are small scale tragedies, but obviously incredibly personally felt if you were the person experiencing them. And remember we were talking in the Mara episode about how Robert Danton has this thing about all so many of the revolutionaries have a sense of disappointment, frustration, personal, professional in their early lives that

23:15gives them a sense of resentment and unfinished business. And I wonder if that's the case with Robespierre. I mean, he definitely has a, there's something gnawing at him, isn't there? Yes, so in that context, I mean, let's look at his parents. So his father was a lawyer who was very unstable and very downwardly mobile. And he had got Rossierre's mother who was the unmarried daughter of a brewer, so considerably lower class to a lawyer. He got her pregnant. So it was a shotgun wedding and Maximilian was born four months after his parents wedding. And his parents go on to have three more children. So a brother for Maximilian, Augusta, and two sisters Charlotte and Oriet. And then father is an increasingly absent presence. His dad would spiral continues. Their mother is a continuous presence and all her children clearly adore her. And so that means that when in 1764, when Maximilian was only six, she dies,

24:20the impact is felt, I think, by awful children as a completely crushing blow. And Maximilian, in particular, was devastated. And throughout his adult life, whenever his mother was mentioned, tears would come to his eyes. He would completely tear up. Their father, basically by now, has vanished. He is not the kind of man who is prepared to shoulder the burden of looking after four motherless children. He vanishes from the scene. And so the children end up being divided up between kind of various relatives. So the two girls go to live with their paternal aunts. And the two boys, Maximilian Augusta, go to live with their paternal grandparents, who were the brewers, a Peter McFee in his biography of Rosvia, brilliant biography, writes that although born into a long line of lawyers and officials, Maximilian was now to be brought up in a millier of manual work with the sounds of carts and workers shouting in the local Picard dialect in the Ru Ronville. So on the one hand, perhaps this is giving him a sense of identification

25:27with the workers, people who are working with their hands. On the other hand, you can understand why he would perhaps have wanted to hold on to the outward signs of respectability. Hence the clothes. So I think there is a kind of intriguing tension there. And definitely generates a sense of insecurity in him. As also does the fact that the same year that his mother dies, so when he six, he gets smallpox and it leaves his face kind of pop marked. So he's a little bit marginal, maybe feels a bit out of an outsider. It doesn't quite fit. He doesn't fit with the brewers, but equally the fact that he's been brought up by brewers means he doesn't quite fit with the middle class people that he aspires to join. And the other thing, of course, he's not a funster, is he? Well, I think unsurprisingly, when you think of that, all the kind of tragedies he's been through, he's not a funster. He grows up a very earnest, anxious, reserved little boy. He's definitely not one of life's party animals. So his sister Charlotte, years later,

26:27writing about his childhood, recalled that he very rarely played games. And that when he was involved in the games, his roles, the chief thing that he was into was clarifying and insisting on the rules. Oh, no, it was kind of child. So again, whether there is a clue there as to the role that he will adopt for himself in due course, he's also, and I like this about him. He's a great fan of the pigeon. So like Gordon Kerer and myself, pigeons and sparrows, and he keeps them and feeds them and kind of looks after them. And his sisters were always begging him to be allowed to look after these pigeons. And Maximeleon was very reluctant because he didn't trust them. And finally, he gives in, and the girls inevitably leave Rossby's favorite pigeon outside in the garden. There's a storm and the pigeon dies. And Charlotte recalled how at the news of this death, the tears of Maximeleon

27:29flowed. So all these tears, this is the age of sentiment. Yeah. Death of a pigeon. Rossby air is totally buying into that kind of sensibility. Why would the pigeon die in a storm? That's what baffles me. Pigeons don't generally die in storms. Probably struck by lightning, I imagine. I'm offering a thesis there. I don't know. I think history is silent on that. So he's, he's pop marked. He's lost his mother. He's very earnest. He doesn't play games. He's lost his pigeons. You might think things are looking terrible for him. But actually, it's okay because he is brilliantly intelligent. He turns out to be an absolutely superb student. And he wins a scholarship to an elite Jesuit foundation. It's not actually being run by the Jesuits at this point because they've been expelled from France, but it still maintains that Jesuit ethos of emphasizing education. And this is a school called the collège Louis Le Gros in Paris. And previous alumni of this school

28:31had included mullier and Voltaire. And also intriguingly the marquee de Sard. So he'd been there too. And I looked this up and the list of alumni who followed in Ross Piers' way is amazing. So Victor, you go Sartre, Roland Bart, Jacques Chirac. Jacques Chirac, friend of the show. A man who loves a quick shower. Yeah. Mr. Five minutes or whatever it's called. I think three minutes, wasn't it? Shower included. Jacques Derrida. Thomas Pinkerti. So I mean, absolutely, roll call of famous French writers and intellectuals. Wow. And Jacques Chirac. Very good. And when he's at the it's when he's at the school, yes, that this incredibly famous mythologized moment happens, which so many people see as the absolute key to Rob Speier's career and indeed to the course of the French Revolution. So this is when he meets the royal couple. Well, tell the story Tom and tell

29:34me if it really is the key. So Louis XVI and Mariana Tvanette have gone to France to be anointed with the Holy Oil and to be crowned. And they're returning from their coronation. And the boys of the collège Louis Le Gros have been preparing, you know, what sounds an unbelievably dull reception with lots of verse declamation in Latin. And Rob Speier, as the price student, has been entrusted with the task giving them a ceremonial speech of welcome. And he has to wait outside for the royal coach to arrive and it's bucketing down with rain. And he's kneeling waiting for them to arrive. And the coach lumbers up. And because it's raining, the royal couple don't get out of the coach. They just sit in the coach and kind of smile politely when they listen to this but drag called schoolboy. Give what I'm sure is very, very dull talk. And they when it's delivered, they acknowledge the speech with kind of polite smiles. And then, you know, they give a signal and the carriage clatters off. And that's the end of it. Hold on. So the version that I read sometimes is

30:38they didn't look at him. They don't care. They splash him with mud and water. No, they they behave as politely as they can, but they don't want to get wet. That's reasonable. I don't think that's unreasonable. But you can see that those stories that you know, he gets splashed with mud and everything. This is being used to explain his hostility to the monarchy and his desire to bring down the alterage, he might all, I don't think this is true at all. Okay. I mean, I think it probably didn't help make him into a monochist or anything like that. I don't think it explains what is inspiring him in the revolution because there are much, much more formative influences as we will see. So, Rochia does very well at school. He qualifies as a lawyer and he returns to his hometown where he makes a name for himself as a friend of the poor. He is always taking on the cases of people who can't afford legal representation. Okay. And so he makes a good name for himself. People see him as a virtuous, principled person, an admirable person. But having said that, I mean, he seems

31:41destined for a life of the utmost provincial obscurity except that Rochiair himself, I think, is daring to dream. He's daring to dream of a better life and a better order for France. And the reason for this is the very familiar one that he's been reading a lot of books. That was a bad sign. But he's been reading very particular books. That's not we had talked about Charlotte Corday, reading Plutarch and Cornay in the previous episode. Basically, everybody in the French Revolution has read the same books and Robespierre has read all of them. Yes, so back in the 17th century, Thomas Hobb said that he would ban the reading of histories by the Greeks and the Romans because it just fostered rebellion and revolution against kings. And I think that everything that happens in the 18th century would have confirmed him in that view. So, Rochiair like Charlotte Corday and like so many other stars of the revolution is obsessed by classical history. He becomes a huge admirer of the virtues of the Greeks and the Romans.

32:41Their love of country, their determination not to allow their fellow citizens to succumb to conspiracies by evil aristocrats. And the archetype of this is Cicero, provincial upstart who comes to Rome and saves his country from Catalan who is the archetype of a CD aristocratic conspirator. And he is obsessed by this in a way that so many people are. He takes it very seriously and he clearly identifies with Cicero very, very strongly. But the person he really loves again a very familiar name throughout this entire series is Russo, the favorite philosopher of an entire generation of revolutionaries. And Robespierre claimed that he had gone to visit Russo in 1778. So he wrote, I saw you in your last days and this memory is a source of proud joy for me. So scholars are unclear whether this is actually true or not. Russo is about to die. So the only way that

33:43Robespierre could have gone to see him, he was only 19, he would have had to skip school to go and see him. So there are lots of bough-rothers of Robespierre who think this is unlikely, but it's not impossible. And even if he made it up, I mean it's kind of tribute to how passionately devoted to Russo Robespierre is. And the reason that he loves Russo is that Russo defines for Robespierre the kind of the core principles that will underlie his politics throughout his entire life. And there are really three key aspects of Russo's philosophy that Robespierre comes to kind of treasure. And the ultimate one of these, the kind of the non-negotiable conviction that Robespierre holds to throughout his entire life is that the common people are the absolute embodiment of virtue. And if that is the case, then it follows as Russo puts it. And this is the second principle that Robespierre holds to, that the first of all laws is the well-being of the people.

34:45Nothing that does not contribute to the well-being of the people should be allowed in a virtuous state. And that idealization of the people, capital B, so important to the French Revolution, we saw a little bit of a Marra, but Robespierre even more so completely. And what Robespierre also holds to very passionately, and again, he gets this from Russo is that history will throw up certain individuals who are peculiarly qualified to voice the will of the people. So the the Volante General, as Russo calls it, which in turn means that the will of the people isn't necessarily to be identified with the opinions of the majority. Yeah, I love that. So that's the very convenient. The will of the people and what the majority of people think are two very different things. Yes. And this, I mean, this is, this, this will be a kind of a trend on the left, I guess, throughout its subscriptory, that people on that bar left, you might say, are often very

35:48impatient with the people for not entirely corresponding to their sense of what the people should be. And Robespierre identifies very strongly with his notion. And I think it's probably not pushing the psychologizing too far to say that Robespierre sees himself potentially as being such a person, someone who is qualified to articulate the will of the people. Of course. And actually, if you are the very bright boy, who's a slightly unusual fit, but has been brought up among the people, that might give you a sense of combined loyalty to them, but also perhaps a tiny element. I'm sure he would never have thought this himself of contempt for their views. And I believe that he was better equipped to articulate what was good for them than they are themselves, don't you think? Yeah, I'm sure he would never have thought of that consciously. No, but unconsciously he thinks, I know them, they are not maybe the best judges of their own, of their own best interests, but I do care about them and I am better equipped. I really understand

36:53them and a way they don't understand themselves. I mean, it's a pre-Marxist version of worrying about the false consciousness that the working masses have and that perhaps it takes a brilliant intellectual to penetrate this and to see what really matters. And that the masses of people are unqualified to do that. And I do think the Robtspia kind of sees himself in those terms. And this is, I think, what explains why when the French Revolution erupts in 1789, he is desperate to be a part of it. So Ruth Skur, who wrote another biography of Robtspia fatal purity, which is wonderfully well written. She wrote his recognition of this opportunity and the ferocity of his determination to see it was amazing. He is determined to go to Versailles to be part of, you know, this great assembly of the various estates that Louis XVI has summoned. And so he gets elected. He goes to Versailles as an elected representative of the people of his hometown. But he is, even though he's an elected representative, he is of course relative to

37:57lots of other people who are assembling in Versailles, basically in nobody. I mean, he's very earnest, he's very stiff. He seems to be without much charisma at all. And yet over the course of the four years that follow the eruption of the Revolution, he emerges to become one of the most celebrated figures in Revolutionary France, admired and hated any core measure. And the measure of his rise to power is something that you mentioned in your previous episode, Dominique, that on the 27th of July 1793, France is seemingly on the verge of disintegration. Roves-Pierre is elected to this proto-dictatorial body, the committee of public safety. And this means that he is now one of 10 men soon to be 12, who have been appointed to protect the nation from invasion, from counter-revolution, from economic collapse, and in effect, try and save the revolution from imploding totally. And why him? I mean, what,

39:01you know, we described him very prim, very well read, maybe a little bit prig-ish, not exactly an obvious man for a national military and economic emergency. So what are the qualities that have led Roves-Pierre to the top? What do people see in him? Well, I think there are two in particular, and both of these have been on public display from his earliest days as a lawyer back in Arras. And the first of these is that he displays a remarkable constipancy of principle. From the earliest days, he is kind of unswerving in his opinions. He doesn't trim, he doesn't tack, he doesn't alter them. And these principles are essentially a completely resolute commitment to popular sovereignty, to the will of the people. A profound sympathy for the people, a sense of identification with them, and an opposition to autocratic government. And the consistency with

40:02which he holds these principles makes him seem to both his friends and indeed his enemies very unusual. And it gives him a kind of austere reputation, even those who dislike him are forced to respect him. And this is then combined with an absolute commitment to his own ferociously high moral standards. He is unbrivable. And again, this makes him pretty much unique among all the French revolutionaries, obvious contrasts with Don Tor, who is cheerfully, cheerfully corrupt. But basically everyone is pocketing bribes left right and centre. Robespierre never does. And again, this makes him seem so unusual to his admirers to kind of make him seem a unique figure. And again, it's kind of redulent of Plutarch, this idea of the heroes of the early Roman Republic. People who are completely or steer in their personal habits completely committed to principles

41:05of moral virtue. And he serves, I think, the revolution as a model of what civic and revolutionary virtue could be and can be. And ever since May 1791, he's been given this magnificent nickname, the incorruptible. And maybe this takes us back to his dress, doesn't it? Because I mean, you're talking about his consistency. He, everybody else has changed what they, I mean, they've changed their principles, they've changed their politics, they've changed their factions, and they've changed their clothes to go along with it. Yes, he's always been himself and he'll never change. Hence the stockings, I guess. He is not a man who is going to give up the fashions that he likes just to demonstrate his virtue. He doesn't need to do that. His virtue should be self-evident. And because he is seen as such an admirable person, he is the incorruptible. This reputation is going to prove an incredible asset for the committee of public safety. Because it serves as an assurance to good citizens everywhere that the committee shares in Robespierre's own moral

42:06property. Robespierre's kind of complete commitment to the procedures of the committee to its workings is evident from the moment that he joins it. So he attends all its meetings assiduously. He goes in at seven o'clock in the morning to read and respond to the dispatches. He returns after a long day of business at eight o'clock in the evening. He often stays late into the night. And this is a huge commitment. And it means that with Robespierre as the kind of example of what these committee members are expected to do, the committee very rapidly becomes the kind of beating heart of the revolution. So its meetings are held in this green papered room in the Pavillon de Floor, which is a 17th century building that connected the twelery where the convention had its kind of headquarters on the Louvre. And inevitably the Pavillon de Floor has been renamed. It's become the Pavillon de la Galité, the pavilion of equality. And this

43:07room with its green wallpaper is basically now the nerve center of the revolution. And the mood in it is incredibly fee-brile. It's fraught. It's anxious. The average age of the committee members is 30. They're often absolutely tanked up on drink. There's a general mood of panic. As well, there might be because basically everything that could go wrong seems to be going wrong. So we talked about it in the previous episode. Military crisis, Civil War, inflation, breadstorted is Dominic, it's like Britain in 1974. Ah, that's fantastic Tom. That's a great comparison. You're welcome. Who's Marcia Williams in this analogy? The incorruptible doesn't have a Marcia Williams. No, he doesn't. He's above all that. I mean, his incorruptibility is so useful at the time when people are looking for traders, because he is the one person nobody would ever suspect of being a traitor. I mean, at a point when you're saying, you know, Dumourier, the Jérône d'Héveur, behind the mask, they were actually plotting all along. Finally, we found a bloke that nobody would ever, ever say that about.

44:11But he's not just there as a sort of, as a mascot, is he? He is there because he has an idea of the way out of the crisis that is going to become incredibly potent in the next few weeks and months. Yeah, so he has an explanation for what's been going wrong, but even more crucially, he has a solution. So when you're in the midst of a crisis, you want someone who can give you what seems a plausible way out of it. And this is what Rob Spear does. And it gradually enables him over the course of the weeks and the months that follow his ascension to the committee to take on an ever more propondrant role in it. And it will turn out that Rob Spear isn't just a man of the utmost moral probity, not just a man with an unrivaled insight into the pathologies of the revolution, but also crucially a man who is absolutely brilliant at politics. And in fact, probably better at politics than any other revolutionary in France.

45:16Krahi, that's a big claim. Well, we'll come back after the break and Tom will justify this extraordinary claim. This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps, many of them started as hard questions that people didn't want asked. Yeah, there's a classic example of that Tom at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the West? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus, great pioneering voyage of discovery. And it is of course the Americas. So, you know, Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic has founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people? Anthropic asked 100,000 people. And what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer

46:20ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions. Ask yours at Claude.ai slash REST is history. And keep thinking. We assess a premised with high confidence it was Russian. Holden derrations accountable is world war. They took down a British passenger jerk containing 350 people. Man in the cremle is playing Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play? Oh no. You're the prime minister. If done, nothing. We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. Kill the president of Russia. Yes. Who is going to be able to pull this off? Devised as a technically rigorous geopolitical action forever.

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48:26Hey everybody, welcome back to the rest of history. It is the 26th of July 1793. So we are 13 days after the murder of Merra. And this is the evening before Maximilian Rob spare joins the committee of public safety. And let's zoom in on one house in Paris in the Rous Sant'Onery. It's a small two story house. It's a few minutes walk away from the Jacobin club, where the radicals meet in the convent of the Jacobin. And this is the house where a cabinet maker lives called Mockeys to play and his family. He's a joiner and he's also a very keen radical. And he has a lodger. And the name of that lodger is, of course, Maximilian Robespierre. And Tom has been there for two years and he loves it, doesn't he? He loves the duplays. He does. He at Myers-Morris duplay as a kind of example of the working classes for whom

49:26Robespierre is fighting. But also there is a madame duplay and she has three daughters and they just fuss and fuss over Robespierre and he absolutely adores this. So to quote Charlotte his sister, he was actually very jealous of the women in the duplay family. They expressed towards him the most vivid interest and surrounded him with their thousand delicate concerns. He was extremely susceptible to all these sorts of things. So he doesn't just have one Marceau Williams, he's got three. But his relationship with them is above suspicion. So pure, purely platonic. And his own room is very, very spartan, which is exactly how he likes it. So there's a bed, there's a writing table, there's some bookshelves, absolutely nothing else. So it is a suitably a set of retreat for the incorruptible. Nobody ever hints at any impropriety in Robespierre's relationship with the the women of the duplay family. Just going to emphasize that. So he's in his room and that evening he sits down at his desk and he ponders

50:32the terrible crisis that is facing France and the revolution. So there are foreign armies on French soil, the Austrian suppressions. There is a British naval blockade. There is a mass insurrection in Vonde. We heard about that in the last episode. There are counter-revolutionary uprisings, federalist uprisings, historians, call them in cities that include Leon, Marceau, and crucially the great naval base of Toulon, where the British Navy is hovering on the margins. And of course, there are food shortages in Paris and so there are demonstrations in the streets all the time. Robespierre contemplates this and then he draws up, well let's call it a catacism, you know, the kind of the religious quality of the most radical revolutionaries, I think is very evident. And this is an example. And what Robespierre is trying to do is to define the precise challenges that he will be facing as a member of the committee of public safety, which he's going to be joining the following day. And so he writes,

51:32question, what is our answer to provide governance for the benefit of the people? And the people of course for Robespierre are the great embodiment of virtue. And this is a principle that he's absorbed from Rousseau and which he will never abandon. This assumption that the poor are intrinsically good. They can do no wrong. But there is a problem, which is the front facing massive popular insurrections in the provinces. And so this requires Robespierre to answer an obvious question. If the people are intrinsically good, why are they behaving in such a way? Why are they refusing to behave in a kind of the selfless and patriotic manner that they probably should be if they are intrinsically virtuous? And Rousseau's answer to this puzzle is that they are being kept in ignorance and poverty by the rich and the corrupt. So it's a sort of version of our old friend false consciousness, but one that has been much more deliberately and malevolently contrived

52:37by this coalition of the enemies of France and of specifically of the poor. So he's saying, who are the chief obstacles to the enlightenment of the poor? The paid journalists who mislead them every day by shameless distortions. I'm very familiar with that argument I have to say. That is very... So in other words, if only people weren't reading awful columnists in the daily mail, everything would be perfect. That's absolutely Robespierre's vibe. A Rousseau blames turncoat generals like Lafayette and Di Morrie, both of whom have defected from the revolution to foreign enemies. The British who Rousseau describes as an insulin and vial people, and particularly their prime minister, William Pitt, who is seen as flooding France with gold. And the temptation to blame everything that is happening on France on Pitt's gold is a very strong one to which revolutionaries will repeatedly succumb.

53:39And Rousseau blames traitors and conspirators, and these are perhaps the most penacious enemies of all, because these are monsters who wear the show of patriotism, but who secretly beneath the surface are working for the overthrow of the revolution. And just on that, here's a man thing. It is often said in the final months of 1793 or early 1794, the more keen somebody appears to be on the revolution, the more likely it is that they are a traitor. They're protesting too much. Yeah. And so Rousseau blames draws up this list of all the enemies that France is facing. And he comes to the conclusion that all these perils, they're not just a kind of concatenation of distinct and separate crises, but rather the expression of a kind of omnichrises, you might call it, a singular conspiracy that has multiple tentacles and that these

54:39tentacles are reaching out to throttle the revolution wherever it can get a grip. And there is a clarity to this perspective, a kind of a purity and starkness, which when he goes to join the committee of public safety and presents it to them, his fellow members find very appealing. Yeah. And in fact, probably this is why they've co-opted him. Well, this idea of the omnichrises, you know, that everything is related and that absolutely everything comes back to this conspiracy. This is going to run through this episode and the next four episodes. You know, this is what explains his motivation and that of some of his colleagues, that they genuinely believe it, don't they? They have fallen down the YouTube rabbit hole and they genuinely think that these people, these people, these people who actually don't know each other at all are all working in one plot and actually will impede his paying for it. Yeah, that's exactly what he thinks. And because of his moral reputation and because of the clarity

55:43with which he expresses it, I mean, he doesn't, he's not accepted immediately as the leader of the committee and his fellow members don't agree with him on every point, but it does mean that his understanding of the crisis facing the revolution and what is taken to fight it becomes increasingly influential. Well, it's very simple. It's very simple. It's very attractive. Yeah, because a simple policy is always the most welcome. Yeah, you don't want to fathom around with dealing with multiple contingencies. You want a nice clear answer that explains everything. Completely. So there are two men on the committee in particular who are massive Rob's Pierre fans and let's just look at them because they're going to play an important role in the story that we're going to be telling over the course of the terror. So the first of these, Dominique, you quoted him several times in episode one. It's a guy called Georges Couton. So he's 38, so three years older than Rob's Pierre when Rob's Pierre joins the committee and he's a lawyer from the Averne in the South of France. And all his life, he had suffered from bad joints, bad sinews. And unfortunately by 1793, he's

56:49effectively paralyzed below the way. So he's confined to a wheelchair. And what did cause this? His doctors had diagnosed meningitis, but Couton himself blamed this condition on having had too much sex as a young man. And whether he says that because it sounds slightly more glamorous explanation, face condition, the meningitis, I don't know whether he genuinely believed it. Did that weaken his joints? Did that also explain the bad joints? No, I wasn't aware that that was a consequence of it, but maybe it is. Lessoners can absorb that lesson as they wish. I mean, you think he's a lovely man, don't you? This guy, Couton? I don't. I'm reporting the general consensus on Couton, which is people find him very in private, charming, affable, like Ross Pierre. He's a bit of a sentimentalist, but unlike Ross Pierre, he has a sense of humour. He's a fun person to be with. So he's a funster. Great. He's a funster, but as a politician, he completely buys into Ross Pierre's diagnosis and the cure. The other big Ross Pierre fan on the committee is perhaps the most glamorous of all its members.

57:58And this is a guy who's only 25, so the baby of the committee. And this is a guy called Louis Antoine de Saint-Jouist. And he's very dandy-ish, very handsome, kind of rock star vibe. He's like a kind of young Mick Jagger, long hair. Long hair. Loves the singer, Natalia and Arya. He's always doing that. But he's also very, very chill, very self-disciplined, impalcably committed to his values, to his beliefs, in a very Ross Pierre fashion. And in fact, he has been very influenced by Ross Pierre. So he had written to the great man back in 1790, actually when Ross Pierre wasn't really a great man. He kind of talentspotter to him at a very early age. And Saint-Jouist, the writer of Ross Pierre, I do not know you, but you are a great man. You are not merely the deputy of a province, you are the deputy of the Republic and of mankind. And you can imagine how this goes down with Ross Pierre. He thinks this is brilliant. So he and Saint-Jouist become very close. But I think

58:59Saint-Jouist is actually much more intellectually formidable than Ross Pierre. And he becomes the great ideologue of the revolution at its most violent. And he will come to be given this nickname, the Archangel of Terror, which I think brilliantly conveys the sense of glamour that comes to attach itself to him. And Saint-Jouist is the model for almost the kind of the bionic terrorist that haunts the pages of Dostoevsky or people like that. The sense that there is a poetry in terror that risks consuming the world. He's like somebody from the Badam-Minehawf group, or some American fringe group in the 1970s. Long hair. He's quite cool. He's terrifying. He's ruthless. He's cold blooded. Well, he's simultaneously cold when it comes to condemning other people to death. But there is something about him that gets other people very excited. But I think also in the 19th and then into the 20th century, what gives him this glamour is the sense that he more than perhaps

59:59anybody else involved in the revolution is a precursor of communist revolution. Yes, completely. He's an avatar of what is to come. So Ross Pierre had these two very, very charismatic allies, and they obviously provide him with political support on the committee. Ross Pierre has his own sense of destiny and of self-assurance. And so he comes to take an ever more commanding position on the committee. And already only a few days after he has joined the committee and observed at one of their meetings, could describe Robespierre's colleagues. And I quote, as silent in the face of his words and his principles. So these words and principles, I mean, what is he saying? He's talking about the people, presumably he's talking about how much he believes in them, may still not be the conspiracy, but what else? Well, I think his fundamental principles are admirable ones. He has a firm faith in democracy and in constitutional government. And Dominic, you mentioned very briefly in the first episode that a new constitution was being celebrated as Charlac

1:01:03Caldé arrived in Paris. And this constitution had been drawn up by Robespierre, abetted by Sanjoust and Couton. And they've done it in record time. They drawn it up in early June. And its profitions were ones that Robespierre absolutely believed in. It offers a commitment to universal mail suffrage without any qualification. Free public education, which is to be funded by progressive taxation. And it declares as a matter of national principle that the state has a duty of care towards its most unfortunate citizens. So this is, and I don't think it's an acronym to use this phrase, the most progressive constitution that history has ever seen up to this point. Yeah. I mean, it's the kind of thing that progressives in any western state today would very happily vote for, I think. And the French people themselves vote for it, don't they?

1:02:05They have a referendum and they, by massive majority, they endorse it. They do. So this is held throughout June and July. And the results are announced on the 10th August, which is the anniversary of the abolition of the monarchy. And it turns out that almost two million people have voted in favor of it and only 11,600 against it. And so Robespierre is delighted. It's now been proven that he is the voice of the people. They completely back him. And since he has, you know, he essentially is the author of this constitution. Of course, he wants to see it put into action. The problem is that he feels that France is not yet ready for it, not with the revolution being menaced by a conspiracy that threatens to destroy it all together. And so he says, what we must do is first defeat the conspiracy and then introduce the constitution. And sure enough, in the event, so in on the 10th September 1793, the constitution will end up being officially suspended.

1:03:07Yeah. And Robespierre completely backs this. And it's due reflection of the fact that the, you know, the revolution is facing massive crisis that challenges everywhere. And Robespierre feels that the focus should be not in introducing the constitution, but rather on defeating this kind of hydrated conspiracy that is threatening to destroy it completely. But this brings us, doesn't it, Tom, to the terror, to the brain of terror. So how to defeat the conspiracy? And his strategy here is implacable and ruthless. And I mean, am I exaggerating you think to describe it as he's going to mobilize all the resources of society, effectively every man, woman and child and the kind of national effort to root out conspiracy and any deviation from the path of revolutionary righteousness. Well, if you were going to defeat a conspiracy that is menacing the people, you need the people in their entirety to defeat it. So let me read what he

1:04:08wrote in the catacism, you know, that he was drawing up on the evening before he joined the committee of public safety. And this is a very brutal prescription for ending the crisis. So he wrote, how can we end the civil war by punishing traitors and conspirators, especially those deputies and administrators who are to blame by sending patriot troops under patriot leaders to reduce the aristocrats of Leon, Marseille, Toulon, the Vondet and all other districts, whether banner of royalism and rebellion has been raised. And by making a terrible example of all the criminals who have outraged liberty and spilled the blood of patriots. And that is a potentially exterminatory policy. And it is very obviously one that contradicts Rob's PS deeply held and often expressed opposition to capital punishment. And so listeners may be wondering, well, what impact does this have on his

1:05:09reputation for unyielding principle? And the answer is it has no impact whatsoever. And the reason for this is that even as Rob's PS has been saying, he's opposed to the death penalty, he has also right from the very beginning of the revolution back in 1789, been arguing that to live through a revolution changes everything that there might come a time when civilized norms would need to be suspended and that the end must justify the means. And because he has been arguing this since 1789 at a time where this prescription was unthinkable to most enthusiasts for the revolution, it gives him the moral authority to push this policy and not to seem like he's just kind of, you know, dreamt it up as a way of buttressing his own power. So as late as the trial of Louis, the 16th for which Rob's beer had voted, he'd expressed his hope that Louis's execution would be

1:06:11the last that the revolution would require that there would be no need for the state to mandate the the putting to death of of any further person. But as you said in the previous episode, the thing that changes everything is the defection of D'Maurier, this this former Giron d'Arminista who had won great victories for the French Republic, but then had kind of turned, turned coat, gone over to the enemies of France, and which had been interpreted by Rob's beer as by Jacobin, Montignan, people like that, as a potentially moral blow to the revolution. And because it's a potentially moral blow, that means that those who are responsible for it cannot possibly be treated with mercy. So to quote Rob's beer, for every attempt made against the security of the state or the liberty, equality, unity, and indivisibility of the Republic, capital punishment is now the only appropriate punishment. And people understand that this goes against his opposition to capital

1:07:11punishment, but they kind of respect the fact that he's prepared to sacrifice that principle on the much greater principle, which is that the revolution must be saved. And so he's not seen as someone who is kind of shifting his position. He's being seen as someone who is who is cleaving to the ultimate needs of the revolution, even if that comes as moral cost to himself. I mean, one of the points actually is that in the next few months, he and Sanju spend a lot of time making speeches to explain their rationale. And one of the points they make is that if you were oppose the government, if you're undermining the national war effort, and therefore you're obviously working for the foreign conspiracy, you don't really count as a citizen because true citizens would be with us. And if you are not a citizen, then all our talk of, despite their idea that the human rights stuff is universal, they sort of have their care you need to because they say if you're not a citizen and you're a foreign traitor, then all the right stuff doesn't apply to you. You don't have any rights under the law, so we can do whatever you we want to you. This citizenship depends

1:08:15on as it were political correctness. Well, virtue, I think they do explicitly say that kind of virtue without teeth is worth nothing. Of course, yes. And that therefore terror is a manifestation of virtue. I mean, we'll probably come to this when we look at what happens with Don Tor. But this idea that terrorism manifestation of virtue, this is a principle that is starting to evolve across the summer of 1793. And interestingly, it's initial focus is in the field of military affairs, which is absolutely not Robespierre's biber tool. I mean, he has no experience of military matters whatsoever. But he supports ascending on the 4th of August of twin armies to crush insurrections in the two key counter-revolutionary outbreaks, one in Leot, one in Marseille. And Leot is invested on the 7th of August and the siege of that city will drag on for months. But Marseille is reduced to obedience very rapidly. So it's occupied on the 25th of August. And there are mass reprisals. And Marseille

1:09:20itself loses its name. And it's kind of renamed Ville Saint Norm, so kind of the town without a name. And two days before Marseille capitulates to the forces of the revolution, the national convention had taken a massive, massive step, a step that will resonate, not just through the history of the revolution, but through the entire future of industrial warfare. They enact a levee on mass. So this is the first mass conscription of the modern age. And it's prescription. I mean, it's people who have read about the war efforts of the competence in the first or second world will recognize this. So it says, the young men shall go to battle. The married men shall four jams and transport provision. The women shall make tents and clothes and shall serve in the hospitals. The children shall turn old linen into lint. The old men shall repair to the public places to stimulate the courage of the warriors and preach the unity of the republic and hatred of kings. So it is a seismic moment for the first time. An entire nation is being summoned to arms.

1:10:26And in the long run, this levee on mass will make France effectively invincible in battle for decades, because France has the, by far the largest reserves of manpower of any country in Europe. And so by summoning it to arms, it makes itself completely irresistible in battle. This is the bedrock, the foundation standing in the Napoleonic Empire. Yes, it is. But the immediate circumstances in which this levee is summoned, it's not a tall obvious that this policy is going to work. So as August turns to September in 1793, things in Paris are becoming very grim. There's no bread. Inflation is going through the roof. Even Ross Pierre can't afford to buy his beloved silk stockings. So you know that things are getting very bad. And then on the second of September comes completely devastating news. And this is news from Too Long, the great naval base on the south coast.

1:11:27And this is that the counter revolutionaries surrendered the great port to the British. Poor people. So we talked about this in our series on Nelson and we saw it from the British perspective. But from the French perspective, the loss of this key naval base, traitors have betrayed it to the royal navy of all forces. It's completely devastating. And so unsurprisingly in Paris, there is a massive new wave of paranoia and starving mobs take to the streets of your Gase, you talked about in the previous episode, the enraged. Oh yeah, moustaches. People with their bristling moustaches, terrifying. And one of their particular leaders who is a seasoned radical named Gaspard Schoenet, he puts into words their motivation in a great public speech. Every day we learn of new trees and new crimes. Every day we discover the emergence of new plots. And these words carry massive weight with the sonculate and the orangreje.

1:12:29Because Schoenet is not some nobody from the slums. He is effectively the chief legal and administrative officer in the Paris commune, which is basically the municipal government of the capital. And on the 5th of September, Schoenet leads a march on the convention. So this is the day after he'd given that rabble-rousing speech. And a great crowd of moustachioid orraje, follow him, cheering, singing patriotic songs, waving slogans and banners, war on tyrants, war on aristocrats, all of that. And they arrive in the convention and Schoenet leads them on a kind of invasion of the convention. And inside he delivers a petition on behalf of the demonstrators who are mastered his back. And then he gives a lengthy speech. And when he finishes this speech, up stands Barre. And he gives that momentous slogan with which we began this episode. Let

1:13:33terror be the order of the day. And Barre goes on to say, let us be in revolution because everywhere counter revolution is being woven by our enemies, the blade of the law should hover over all the guilty. Now Rob Spier, he is president of the convention at the time. He actually finds the invasion of the petitions on settling rather than inspiring. You know, he's a stickler for a priority. He doesn't really approve of this action from the streets. But with his kind of customary acuity, he's very quick to take advantage of this proclamation that terror should be the order of the day. As we said, it doesn't become an official motion of the convention, but it's taken on board by the committee. And isn't this just a brilliant example of the way in which rather than necessarily the whole business being directed from the top, there are radical energies from the streets. And part of the process of institutionalizing the terror is actually saying, well, we don't want mob roaming around the streets, lynching people and stuff. We want to

1:14:36centralize it, bureaucratize it, we want to do it on a proper basis. And that's what Rob Spier and the committee of public safety are really all about. Yeah, they're saying, okay, you want terror and we agree. The needs of the Republic demand it. Let's provide the legal instruments that will enable us to enforce it, rather than having mobs going around murdering people in prisons. That's basically it. That's that's their kind of rationale. And I think, you know, one shouldn't be cynical about it. They think that this is for the best, I think. So what does this mean in practice? So on the 5th of September, they split up the revolutionary tribunal, which had been established a few months previously to try political prisoners. They split it into four concurrent chambers, which means that they can expedite the processing of cases. They decree that the judges and jurors who are trying these cases should be appointed by the committee themselves. So that means that they can vet who's going to be on these juries. And following this, unsurprisingly, the acquittal rate

1:15:38drops precipitously. So it increasingly becomes very unusual to be acquitted. And then on the 7th September, the key development, the law of suspects, it's called very notorious process of legislation because it vastly broadens the category of person who is liable for arrest. So just to go through people who can now be arraigned under this law of suspects, nobles who had displayed a lack of patriotism and revolutionary zeal, Emma Gray, so people who have fled abroad, and government employees who have been discharged from office. And so there are quite a few of those. Anyone who lacks a certificate of good citizenship and this certificate was something that is issued by the revolutionary authorities to serve as an identity card. But inevitably, it has come to serve as well as a kind of an official stamp of ideological purity. If you don't have one, then you are by definition, um, account of revolutionary. So you need one.

1:16:43Anyone who fails to demonstrate a satisfactory discharge of their civic duties, I mean, again, if you want to get rid of someone, you could apply that to almost anyone. And then most sweeping near all, and I quote, those who by their conduct, relations, or language spoken or written have shown themselves partisans of tyranny. So this is a sweeping, I mean, literally terrifying law. But of course, for true patriots, that's the point of it. That's what it's serving. And um, attack it draws on the diaries of this woman, Rosalie Julien, who's the mother of one of Rospaier's agents out in the provinces. And she, she thinks that Laura suspects is brilliant. She absolutely loves it. And she writes to one of her sons, it is so necessary for the security of the state that even those who are innocent victims cannot complain if they are truly Republican. So in other words, you know, you get convicted, sent to the guillotine. You should, you shouldn't moan about it, but just reflect that you're serving the cause of the people. We've heard this so

1:17:44many times in history and similar circumstances, you know, if you're innocent, you have nothing to fear. So, and if you have something to fear, if you're frightened, well, you're probably, that's just so, so you're guilty. Yeah. I mean, I think that reflects the mood of, you know, complete paranoia that is governing not just the committee itself, not just the convention, but the streets of Paris, in a sense that there are traitors and conspirators everywhere and that it's only by really violent repression that the revolution can be saved. And again, I mean, anyone who has seen the operations of social media today will kind of recognise a very pale echo of that mood, I think, when the mob moves, the mob moves. If you have been cancelled, it just shows that you were right to be cancelled in the first place. But you know what? The thing is, it works. Yeah. The revolution is saved. The terror serves the purpose for which it has been introduced. A key moment comes on 6 October when Leon, the second city of France, it's been under siege for

1:18:49two months. It finally falls. And the committee of public safety decree mass executions and the destruction of all the buildings in the city that are not owned by the people. And Ross Biaire, echoing a line in Tasset has declares epigrammatically, Leon is no more. And Couton, so the the guy who had too much sex and got confined to wheelchairs as a result, and he's the committee's man on the scene. Yeah. He wants to go even further and deport vast ways of the population, which he sees as kind of incredibly counter-revolutionary. And he writes to Ross Biaire and says, you know, they're so counter-revolutionary that I feel they will be for generations. So we need to bust them out and kind of settle them in the depths of the country. But Ross Biaire refuses this. He says that's too extreme. And he continues to insist that the mass of the people are naturally virtuous. They're naturally good. So even in Leon, they can be trusted. But the people who cannot be trusted are the counter-revolutionaries who had brought Leon to such ruin. They have to be dealt

1:19:55with with extreme prejudice. And Ross Biaire knows precisely who ultimately are to blame. Yes. So this brings us to the people that were beginning to be locked up in the last episode. And these are the people who were previously the dominant faction in the National Convention. And these are the Jirhondah. Now, if you were being more critical of Ross Biaire, you would say, these are people with whom he once broke bread. These are people who were once members of the same radical clubs as he was. They were part of the revolution. They were just as enthusiastic as he was. But he doesn't see it that way. Does he? And he has this long charge sheet that as he sees it leaves no room for doubt that they have actually been plotting to undermine France and its people from the very beginning. Yeah. And I think this charge sheet does matter to the sense of Ross Biaire as someone who's personally virtuous because even though he has broken bread with a lot of the Jirhondah, he has also been pursuing a venomous personal feud with the leader of the Jirhondah,

1:20:58Briso, the anti-slavery campaigner, who's often seen as their leader. And so it is important to Ross Biaire that he lays out the charge sheet so that people won't say he's just engaged in a faction battle. So the charge sheet is that they had foisted this disastrous war on France. It was a Jirhondah who had pushed France into declaring war on Prussia and Austria. And then in the form of General Dumoulier had tried to betray it. So the evidence there to Ross Biaire seems clear. The treason is arrent. He charges them with being soft on nobles, soft on priests, and that their laxness had served to foster the rebellion in the fond day. He then charges that following their expulsion from the Convention in June 1793, which we talked about in the previous episode, their crimes had become even more palpable. That those who had escaped house arrest, and among these was Jean-Marie Rouleau, husband of Mademois Rouleau, the Salonista,

1:21:59former minister of the Interior under Louis XVI, that they had all fanned out into the provinces, and that these were the traitors who had formmented the counter-revolutionary movements in Lyon, in Musée, in Corn, in Bordeaux, that these were the traitors who had handed too long over to the Royal Navy. And that therefore only one punishment could possibly suffice for this abominable behavior, and Ross Biaire is determined to see it enforced. And I think that even though Ross Biaire does have this kind of personal feud with Briso and some of the other Girondeir, he genuinely does not see himself as governed by selfish emotions. He genuinely sees himself as Cicero, foiling the conspiracy of Cataline. He sees himself as the disinterested defender of the people, of the revolution of France. And the measure of this I think is that enormous numbers of people agree

1:23:05with him. They agree with his self-estimation. And people in the committee, people in the convention. Yeah, they do, they compete, and they back him. And so because of this, he is able to nail the Girondeir as the people who have to be punished for all the disasters that are over at Wellming France. And so those Girondeir leaders who are still at liberty are declared outlaws, and when they're caught they are guillotine. As some of them commit suicide, and so there's kind of terrible story of two prominent Girondeir who commit suicide out in the countryside in a field, and their bodies have found a week later half devoured by wolves. Meanwhile in Paris, the trial opens on the 24th October of Briso and 20 other Girondeir. And initially from Ross Biaire's point of view, their trial does not go well. So the accused unsurprisingly are very defiant, they're very eloquent, they sound convincingly patriotic because of course they are patriotic. And actually it goes so

1:24:06badly for Ross Biaire that five days into the trial, someone in the committee stands up and proposes that the trial be abandoned, that it's clearly not justified or required. But Ross Biaire is having none of this and he steps up to the tribunal. And he makes a really striking and I think sinister counter-proposal, namely that the jury should be asked in my quote, whether they have enough evidence to satisfy their conscience. And this is massively to move the goalposts, because basically what that means is that jurors are being asked to arrive at their verdict based not on evidence that might have satisfied a traditional court of law, but rather on their own intuition, their own gut feeling, their sense of whether the people who are being prosecuted are guilty or not. And that's adequate. And this idea that you start a trial, it doesn't go well,

1:25:06so you then change the rules halfway through to rig it so that it will go as you want. We will see this again in this series actually. It's a disturbing development. Yes, at the same time Rob Sperer is always anxious to give it the pattern of legality, isn't he? I mean, I genuinely think he feels it's the right thing to do. If you're a revolutionary, he was right to do it, I think, is his feeling and the feeling of his supporters. So unsurprisingly, in the wake of all this, the Jirondah accused our found guilty and the verdict is brought in on the 31st of October. And one of the 21 Jirondah who've been found guilty, the moment the verdict is announced, he reaches for a knife that he had smuggled into the trial and he stamps himself and kills himself. And his corpse is still loaded onto the tumbril together with the 20 Jirondah who have neglected to commit suicide in this way. And on the way to the Gillotine, the surviving 20 Jirondah all

1:26:07sing the Masees. And if you're a Jirondah, it's a very stirring scene, but doesn't help them, they will lose their heads. And then soon afterwards on the 8th of November, they are followed by the most famous female Jirondah. And this of course is the wife of Rolo, Mademiro Lolo. And she is very much a living reminder of happier times when her salon had been the most fashionable, the most influential in the whole of revolutionary Paris, the great meeting place for the Jirondah throughout 1791 and 1792. But not just the Jirondah because Rolfier himself had attended it. And it indeed, Mademiro Lolo had praised Rolfier two years before her execution for ranking among the small number of courageous men who are always faithful to their purpose. Ross Biair of course would say that he's still being faithful to his purpose, the irony. Mademiro Lolo however does not, because

1:27:07when she's brought to the Gillotine, she gazes across the square and she sees this great plinth on which they had previously stood a statue of Louis XIV. And that of course has been toppled. And in its place has been erected a clay statue portraying liberty. And Mademiro Lolo gazes at this and then utters very famous words, liberty, what crimes are committed in your name. And a few days later, news of his wife death is brought to Rolo and he leaves the place where he's been hiding out. And he goes out into the countryside and he sits beneath a tree on a country lane. He draws out his sword stick and he impales himself. That is the end of him. But Dominic, Mademiro Lolo, although her fate is famous, her last words are very famous. She's not the most famous woman nor even perhaps the most tragic to have perished in that autumn of 1793 because a month earlier, a woman whom

1:28:14Mademiro Lolo had always hated and despised had gone to the Gillotine ahead of her. And this was a woman who for Patriots everywhere had come to seem the embodiment of everything that they were pledged to destroy and that woman was of course Mary and Twinnett. Crakey. So in our next episode, we will be tracing how the revolutionaries seek to complete the final eradication of the last relics of monarchy. They'll destroy the symbols of monarchy. They will take Mary and Twinnett herself to the Gillotine and we'll be talking about one of the most affecting stories of the entire revolution. This is the fate of Mary and Twinnett's son. So he's the boy, little boy who royalists regard as Louis the 17th and his fate is a very, very sad story. So don't miss it. Now that's not the only episode we'll be doing. We're doing the fault of Donton. We'll be doing the attack on Christianity

1:29:17and we'll be doing the final showdown. The climax of the reign of terror, the fall of Maximilian Croberspier. And if you want to hear all those episodes now and your Restless History Club member, you can. So your next three or four hours are going to be brilliant. If you are gutted because you're going to miss out fear not, you can go to therestlesshistory.com. You can sign up. You can join the club immediately. You'll get those episodes right away. But also you can look forward to a whole load of supplementary benefits. The kind of thing that would make a Republican or royalist weep with envy. And you could also sign up if you like to our newsletter, which will have loads of loads of stuff about the French Revolution more than you could possibly want to read. Surely not Dominic. Surely people want to read every last word of it. It's that good. Yeah, that's that's actually true because it is really good. So there's loads of French Revolution content. Next up, Marianne Tuenette, do not miss that episode. It is an absolute banger. Tom, on that note,

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