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

Where did Maximilien Robespierre come from and what led him to rise from provincial obscurity to play a major role in the French Revolution? Why is he considered the central figure in the Reign of Terror? And how did a fastidious man opposed to violence become the chief proponent of bloodshed? Join Tom and Dominic as they describe how Maximilien Robespierre became one of the most powerful figures of the French Revolution, and his role in initiating the Terror, which saw thousands beheaded in Paris, and butchered throughout France. Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠⁠restishistory.com⁠⁠. To read our new newsletter, sign up at: ⁠⁠therestishistory.com/newsletters⁠⁠ _______ This episode is sponsored by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Try Claude for free today at http://Claude.ai/restishistory. _______ Advertise with us: ⁠[email protected]⁠ _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:42Speaker 00

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• 1:00Tom Holland?

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• 1:11Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 1:37Tom Holland?

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• 1:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  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. There's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria.

• 2:06Tom Holland?

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• 2:21Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 2:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  We are now, therefore, got to that black precipitous abyss, where all things have long been tending, where, having now arrived on the giddy verge, they hurl down in confused ruin, headlong, pell mell, down, down, till son-culottism 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.

• 3:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Que la terre soit 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, comes 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 Carlyle.

• 4:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Now, some of you might have found that reading a little bit theatrical, but of course, that was Carlyle's 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 it 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, Carlyle 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.

• 5:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the terror, this point in our story, 1793, 1794, is the absolute climax.

• 5:14Tom Holland?

  Yes, so Carlyle casts it as this kind of immense, unstoppable conflagration consumes all in its path and even its own prophets, so Saturn devouring 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 Carlyle was a massive influence on Charles Dickens, who said that he'd read it 500 times, Carlyle's book on the French Revolution. And so it's his principal source for Tale of Two Cities, which is, I mean, amazing,

• 5:59Tom Holland?

  the bestselling novel in English, though 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 as streams of blood, tumbrils, all of that that we were talking about yesterday comes from.

• 6:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 6:16Tom Holland?

  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.

• 6:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Completely.

• 6:27Tom Holland?

  So actually, in a lot of European countries, there is an emphasis on the, the kind of the more progressive elements of the revolution.

• 6:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  The metric system.

• 6:36Tom Holland?

  The metric, not just the metric system, but the language of rights and that kind of thing. But, but, but by the thought, for the British, it's just mad people chopping each other's heads off. And do you know the person who magnificently, magnificently summed this up?

• 6:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  I do. I know what you're gonna say.

• 6:56Tom Holland?

  So this is an interview that Madame Thatcher gave in 1989 to Le Monde. And 1989, of course, the bicentennial of Bastille Day, of the French, the start of the French Revolution. And it was part of a series of interviews with leaders from the G7, who were attending a summit in Paris. 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 Thatcher, absolutely uncompromising refusal to be diplomatic. And she said that the revolution is a terrible thing.

• 7:38Tom Holland?

  Up to the final death of Robespierre, oh, it was an age of terror. It was an age of terror. We did ours much more quietly.

• 7:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  She's not entirely wrong, to be fair.

• 7:51Tom Holland?

  Well, I mean, I suppose we did chop off the head of a king, but I think she's, she's talking about the glorious revolution and, you know, there was a lack of guillotining in that.

• 8:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 8:00Tom Holland?

  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 Frankophobic British, something that they've imagined, something perhaps made up by Carlyle? 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?

• 8:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  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?

• 9:09Tom Holland?

  So that phrase that Carlyle quotes, let terror be the order of the day. He is quoting a slogan that was publicly pronounced by a man called Bertrand Barré, who was one of the 12 men who sat on the Committee of Public Safety, which 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 Barré proclaimed it on the 5th of September, 1793,

• 9:53Tom Holland?

  so some two months after the murder of Marat, which we were talking about in the previous episode. And Barré 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 Barré's goal in saying, let terror be the order of the day, was to institutionalise repression against the perceived enemies

• 10:36Tom Holland?

  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.

• 10:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, the September massacres in the prisons, for example. Chaotic, anarchic.

• 10:54Tom Holland?

  All of that. And to reframe it as a kind of formal state policy. But just to reiterate, even this is, it's still fundamentally an attempt at crisis management. It's an emergency measure. It's a response to the crisis that is overwhelming the revolution.

• 11:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 bulwark against our enemies. But there is another way of thinking about the terror, isn't there? Which is much more almost terror as a positive force, terror on the offensive, terror as remodelling 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.

• 11:46Tom Holland?

  I mean, you might say literally a bloodbath, that the blood washes away the taints of monarchy and aristocracy and superstition. And that you have to have the bloodbath so that something purer 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 name-checked by Mrs Thatcher in that interview with Le Monde.

• 12:27Tom Holland?

  And who, on the 5th of September, when Barré proclaimed terror the order of the day, was actually the president of the Convention. And that is Maximilien Robespierre. So he is, people can probably have a sense 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's 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.

• 13:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  In our previous series about the French Revolution, Robespierre's been kind of threaded through it. You know, he's bobbed up from time to time and then gone away again. And he's 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 casts 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?

• 13:34Tom Holland?

  Yes.

• 13:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Perceived as its architect, perhaps not always fairly, I would say, actually. But he certainly articulates it more fluently and confidently than anybody else.

• 13:46Tom Holland?

  Yeah, 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 Somme. 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 whole of France get to be executed as traitors and enemies of the revolution. And then you were talking yesterday about the Vendée. I mean, the huge scale of slaughter there, that some French historians compare it to genocide.

• 14:27Tom Holland?

  And certainly in Paris, the centre of the revolution, there is a kind of hideous melodrama to the displays of executions that are going on. I mean, this is why the guillotining 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 onto the neck results in great geyzers 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,

• 15:10Tom Holland?

  the blood is getting into the water system. And I think to his enemies, Robespierre comes to seem 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, "guillotining the executioner after having had all the French guillotined." So this sense of the terror as something that will end up consuming the entire country. 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.

• 15:55Tom Holland?

  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.

• 16:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Pol Pot or something. So you give the example, don't you, in your notes. At a really obvious point, Robespierre is personally extremely squeamish. And this will astound people. This man who is famous for guillotining all these thousands of people,

• 16:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  he, all his life, had consistently opposed capital punishment.

• 17:03Tom Holland?

  Completely. We did an 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 Gérondins had pushed. He was very against it. Even though ultimately, he is, you know, he's part of the institution that is responsible for sending people to the guillotine. He never goes and watches executions 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

• 17:48Tom Holland?

  that are being perpetrated out in the provinces. We talked yesterday about Marat, how the stress of 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...

• 18:06Tom Holland?

  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 nervous collapse throughout the months of the terror. So, 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.

• 18:50Tom Holland?

  We mentioned how Robespierre opposes the death penalty.

• 18:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 18:55Tom Holland?

  He also is a keen supporter of freedom of the press, he's backed this throughout his life, he's in favour 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.

• 19:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 19:15Tom Holland?

  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.

• 19:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Woke, guardian reading, snowflake, who knew?

• 19:31Tom Holland?

  A further thing that is strange about him, you were talking yesterday about how Marat 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 Ancien Régime in blood. So, Timothy Tackett, in his 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 repudiating aristocratic fashion.

• 20:14Tom Holland?

  And this guy says, "We now all look like beggars, boots and threadbare clothing, such is 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.

• 20:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 20:45Tom Holland?

  And the thing about the stockings is interesting, because of course, the culottes are the breeches that the aristocracy used to wear at Versailles to complement the stockings. And so, the song culottes is, you know, people who wear trousers, people who can't afford this style.

• 21:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 21:01Tom Holland?

  And as early as 1791, Robespierre had been described by a fellow revolutionary as the general of the song culottes. But Robespierre himself, despite being the general of the song culottes, he's still wearing culottes, 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.

• 21:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, because he's so prim, he's so meticulous, he's so dapper.

• 21:33Tom Holland?

  Fastidious.

• 21:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Now, what's going on there? How do you reconcile those two things?

• 21:39Tom Holland?

  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 Marat, or the turbulent events that will 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.

• 22:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Love a clue, brilliant.

• 22:16Tom Holland?

  So, Robespierre was born on 6th of May 1758 in Arras, which is a town on France's 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 Bovary or something like that.

• 22:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 22:47Tom Holland?

  Where they're a small-scale tragedies, but obviously incredibly personally felt if you are the person experiencing them.

• 22:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  And do you remember how we were talking in the Marat episode about how Robert Danton has this thing about, oh, so many of the revolutionaries have a sense of disappointment, frustration, you know, personal, professional, in their early lives that gives them a sense of resentment and unfinished business? And I wonder if that's the case with Robespierre? I mean, he definitely has it, there's something gnawing at him, isn't there?

• 23:16Tom Holland?

  Yeah, 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 Robespierre'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 Maximilien was born four months after his parents' wedding. And his parents go on to have three more children, so a brother for Maximilien Augustin, and two sisters, Charlotte and Oriette. And their father is an increasingly absent presence, his downward spiral continues.

• 24:00Tom Holland?

  Their mother is a continuous presence, and all her children clearly adored her. And so, that means that when, in 1764, when Maximilien was only six, she dies, the impact is felt, I think, by all four children as a completely crushing blow. And Maximilien 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 various relatives.

• 24:44Tom Holland?

  So, the two girls go to live with their paternal aunts, and the two boys, Maximilien and Augustin, go to live with their paternal grandparents, who were the brewers.

• 24:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 24:56Tom Holland?

  And Peter McPhee, in his biography of Robespierre, brilliant biography, writes that although born into a long line of lawyers and officials, Maximilien was now to be brought up in a milieu of manual work, with the sounds of carts and workers shouting in the local Picard dialect in the Rue Ranville. So, on the one hand, perhaps, this is giving him a sense of identification with 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.

• 25:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hence the clothes.

• 25:30Tom Holland?

  So, I think there is a kind of intriguing tension there.

• 25:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 25:35Tom Holland?

  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's six, he gets smallpox, and it leaves his face kind of pockmarked.

• 25:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, he's a little bit marginal, maybe? He feels a bit out of an outsider, doesn't quite fit, you know, he doesn't fit with the brewers.

• 25:55Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 25:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 26:00Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 26:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the other thing, of course, he's not a funster, is he?

• 26:03Tom Holland?

  Well, I think unsurprisingly, when you think of that, you know, all the kind of tragedies he's been through, he's not a funster, he grows up a very earnest, anxious, reserved little boy, and he's definitely not one of life's party animals. So, his sister Charlotte, years later, writing about his childhood, recalled that he very rarely played games, and that when he was involved in the games, the chief thing that he was into was clarifying and insisting on the rules.

• 26:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, no, the worst kind of child.

• 26:36Tom Holland?

  Yeah. 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 Carrera and myself.

• 26:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 26:53Tom Holland?

  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 Maximilien was very reluctant because he didn't trust them. And finally, he gives in, and the girls inevitably leave Robespierre's favourite 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 Maximilien flowed. So, all these tears, this is the age of sentiment.

• 27:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, death of a pigeon.

• 27:26Tom Holland?

  Robespierre is totally buying into that kind of sensibility.

• 27:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Why would the pigeon die in a storm? That's what baffles me. Pigeons don't generally die in storms.

• 27:34Tom Holland?

  Probably struck by lightning, I imagine.

• 27:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Struck by lightning?

• 27:37Tom Holland?

  I...

• 27:40Tom Holland?

  I'm offering a thesis there.

• 27:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 27:42Tom Holland?

  I don't know. I think history is silent on that. So he's, 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-Grand in Paris. And previous alumni of this school had included Molière and Voltaire.

• 28:25Tom Holland?

  And also intriguingly, the Marquis de Sade, so he'd been there too. And I, I looked this up and the list of alumni who followed in Robespierre's wake is amazing. So Victor Hugo, Sartre, Roland Barthes, Jacques Chirac.

• 28:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Jacques Chirac, friend of the show.

• 28:43Tom Holland?

  A man who loves a quick shower.

• 28:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, Mr. Five Minutes or whatever he was called.

• 28:48Tom Holland?

  I think it's three minutes, wasn't it?

• 28:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Shower included, remember?

• 28:53Tom Holland?

  Jacques Derida.

• 28:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 28:55Tom Holland?

  Thomas Pinkerton. So, I mean, absolute roll call of famous French writers and intellectuals.

• 29:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow.

• 29:03Tom Holland?

  And Jacques Chirac.

• 29:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very good. And, and when he's at the, um. It's when he's at the school.

• 29:09Tom Holland?

  Yes.

• 29:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  That this incredibly famous mythologized moment happens, which so many people see as the absolute key to Robespierre'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 me if it really is the, the key.

• 29:27Tom Holland?

  So Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette have gone to Reims 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-Grand have been preparing, you know, what sounds an unbelievably dull reception with lots of verse declamation in Latin. And Robespierre, as the prize student, has been entrusted with the task of 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. Because it's raining, the royal couple don't get out of the coach.

• 30:09Tom Holland?

  They just sit in the coach and kind of smile politely. They listen to this bedraggled 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.

• 30:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hold on. So the version that I read sometimes is they didn't look at him, they don't care. They splash him with mud and water.

• 30:34Tom Holland?

  No, they, they behave as politely as, as they can, but they don't want to get wet.

• 30:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's reasonable. I don't think that's unreasonable.

• 30:40Tom Holland?

  But you can see that those stories that, you know, he gets cut, splashed with mud and everything. This is being used to explain his hostility to the monarchy and his desire to bring down the old regime and all. I don't think this is true at all.

• 30:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 30:53Tom Holland?

  I mean, I think it probably didn't help make him into a monarchist or anything like that. But 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 Robespierre does very well at school. He qualifies as a lawyer and he returns to his hometown, where he makes a, 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.

• 31:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 31:22Tom Holland?

  And so he, 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 destined for a life of the utmost provincial obscurity. Except that Robespierre 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.

• 31:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, that was a bad sign. But he's been reading very particular books, hasn't he? We had talked about Charlotte Corday, reading Plutarch and Cornet in the previous episode. Basically, everybody in the French Revolution has read the same books and, and Robespierre has read all of them.

• 32:03Tom Holland?

  Yeah. So back in the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes 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 Robespierre, 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, their love of country, their determination not to allow their fellow citizens to succumb to conspiracies by evil aristocrats.

• 32:44Tom Holland?

  And the archetype of this is Cicero, provincial upstart who comes to Rome and saves his country from Cataline, who is the archetype of a, a seedy 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 strongly. But the person he really loves, again, a very familiar name throughout this entire series, is Rousseau. The favourite philosopher of an entire generation of revolutionaries. And Robespierre claimed that he had gone to visit Rousseau in 1778. So he wrote, "I saw you in your last days and this memory is a source of proud joy for me."

• 33:28Tom Holland?

  So scholars are unclear whether this is actually true or not. Rousseau is about to die. So the only way that Robespierre 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 biographers of, 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.

• 33:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 33:52Tom Holland?

  To Rousseau, Robespierre is. And the reason that he loves Rousseau is that Rousseau 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 Rousseau's philosophy that, that Robespierre comes to kind of treasure. And the ultimate one of these, the kind of the, the, the, 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 Rousseau 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.

• 34:36Tom Holland?

  Nothing that does not contribute to the well-being of the people should be allowed in a virtuous state.

• 34:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  And that idealization of the people, capital P, so important to the French Revolution. We saw a little bit of Marat, but Robespierre even more so.

• 34:50Tom Holland?

  Completely. And what Robespierre also holds to very passionately, and again, he gets this from Rousseau, is that histories will throw up certain individuals who are peculiarly qualified to voice the will of the people.

• 35:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 35:06Tom Holland?

  So the, the Volonté Generale, as Rousseau calls it, which in turn means that the, the will of the people isn't necessarily to be identified with the opinions of the majority.

• 35:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I love that. So that's the very convenience.

• 35:22Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 35:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  The will of the people and what the majority of people think are two very different things.

• 35:28Tom Holland?

  Yes. And, and this, I mean, this is, this, this will be a kind of a, a trend on the left, I guess, throughout its subsequent history, that people on the far left, you might say, are often very impatient with the people for not entirely corresponding to their sense of what the people should be.

• 35:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 35:46Tom Holland?

  And Robespierre identifies very strongly with this 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, the, the will of the people.

• 36:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course. And, 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, 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 a belief that he was better equipped to articulate what was good for them than they are themselves, don't you think?

• 36:29Tom Holland?

  Yeah, I, I'm sure he would never have thought of that consciously.

• 36:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, but unconsciously, he thinks.

• 36:34Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 36:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  I, I know them. They are not maybe the best judges of their own.

• 36:39Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 36:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of, of their own best interests, but I do care about them and I am better equipped. I really understand them in a way they don't understand themselves.

• 36:46Tom Holland?

  I mean, it's a pre-Marxist version of worrying about the false consciousness that the, the working masses have and that perhaps it takes a brilliant intellectual to penetrate this and to see what really matters.

• 36:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 36:59Tom Holland?

  And that the mass of the people are unqualified to do that. And I do think that Robespierre 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 Skerr, who wrote another biography of Robespierre, 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 does, he gets elected. He goes to Versailles as an elected representative of the people of his hometown.

• 37:42Tom Holland?

  But he is, even though he's an elected representative, he is of course relative to lots of other people who are assembling in Versailles, basically a 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 in equal measure. And the measure of his rise to power is something that you mentioned in your previous episode, Dominic, that on the 27th of July, 1793, France is seemingly on the verge of disintegration.

• 38:26Tom Holland?

  Robespierre 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.

• 38:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  And why him? I mean, what, you know, you described him very prim, very well-read, maybe a little bit priggish, not exactly an obvious man for a national military and economic emergency. So what are the qualities that have led Robespierre to the top? What do people see in him?

• 39:10Tom Holland?

  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 consistency 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.

• 39:52Tom Holland?

  And the consistency with which 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 un-brivable. And again, this makes him pretty much unique among all the various French revolutionaries.

• 40:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 40:28Tom Holland?

  Obvious contrast is with Dantor, 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 redolent of Plutarch, this idea of the heroes of the early Roman Republic, people who are completely austere in their personal habits, completely committed to principles of 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.

• 41:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 41:27Tom Holland?

  Yes.

• 41:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's always been himself and he'll never change. Hence the stockings, I guess.

• 41:31Tom Holland?

  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 probity. 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 dispatches.

• 42:14Tom Holland?

  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 Flore, which is a 17th century building that connected the Tuileries, where the convention had its kind of headquarters in the Louvre. And inevitably, the Pavillon de Flore has been renamed. It's become the Pavillon de l'Égalité, the Pavilion of Equality.

• 42:58Tom Holland?

  And this room with its green wallpaper is basically now the nerve centre of the revolution. And the mood in it is incredibly febrile, 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.

• 43:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 43:18Tom Holland?

  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, bread sorted is. Dominic, it's like Britain in 1974.

• 43:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ah, that's fantastic, Tom. That's a great comparison.

• 43:36Tom Holland?

  You're welcome.

• 43:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Who's Marcia Williams in this analogy?

• 43:40Tom Holland?

  The incorruptible doesn't have a Marcia Williams.

• 43:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, he doesn't.

• 43:42Tom Holland?

  He's above all that.

• 43:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, his incorruptibility is so useful at a time when people are looking for traitors, because he is the one person nobody would ever suspect of being a traitor. I mean, at the point when you're saying, you know, Dumouriez, the Gérardin, whoever, behind the mask, they were actually plotting all along. Finally, we found a bloke that nobody would ever, ever say that about.

• 44:02Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 44:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  But he's not just there as a sort of, as a mascot, is he? He is there because he, 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.

• 44:18Tom Holland?

  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 Robespierre 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 preponderant role in it. And it will turn out that Robespierre isn't just a man of the utmost moral probity, not just a man with an unrivalled insight into the pathologies of the revolution, but also, crucially, a man who is absolutely brilliant at politics, and in fact, probably better

• 45:03Tom Holland?

  at politics than any other revolutionary in France.

• 45:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Crikey, that's a big claim. Well, we'll come back after the break, and Tom will justify this extraordinary claim.

• 45:19Tom Holland?

  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.

• 45:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

• 46:02Tom Holland?

  Anthropic asked 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? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

• 46:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ask yours at claude.ai/RestIsHistory. And keep thinking.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  We assess Prime Minister with high confidence it was Russian.

• 46:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 46:40Speaker 04

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 46:43Speaker 05

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 46:55Speaker 06

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 46:57Speaker 05

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today.

• 47:01Speaker 07

  Kill the President of Russia?

• 47:04Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 47:06Speaker 07

  Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 47:08Speaker 06

  Sergeant Tom MacDuff!

• 47:10Speaker 07

  Devised as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller. We have two times deadly key. Where Britain plays its strongest arm. He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Bear Hunt. Available now in full wherever you get your podcasts.

• 47:29Tom Holland?

  This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history.

• 47:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot, capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 48:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hi everybody, welcome back to The Rest Is History. It is the 26th of July 1793. So we are 13 days after the murder of Marat. And this is the evening before Maximilien Robespierre joins the Committee of Public Safety. And let's zoom in on one house in Paris, in the Rue Saint-Honoré. It's a small two-storey 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 cabinetmaker lives called Maurice Duplay and his family. He's a joiner and he's also a very keen radical.

• 48:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he has a lodger, and the name of that lodger is of course Maximilien Robespierre. And Tom, he's been there for two years and he loves it, doesn't he? He loves the Dupleys.

• 49:03Tom Holland?

  He does. He admires Maurice Duplay as a kind of example of

• 49:10Tom Holland?

  the working classes for whom Robespierre 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, who 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."

• 49:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he doesn't just have one Marcia Williams, he's got three.

• 49:42Tom Holland?

  But his relationship with them is above suspicion.

• 49:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  So pure.

• 49:48Tom Holland?

  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, you know, a suitably ascetic retreat for the incorruptible. Nobody ever hints at any impropriety in Robespierre's relationship with the women of the Duplay family.

• 50:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 50:09Tom Holland?

  Just going to emphasise that. So he's in his room. And that evening, he sits down at his desk and he ponders the terrible crisis that is facing France and the revolution. So there are foreign armies on French soil, the Austrians, the Prussians. There is a British naval blockade. There is a mass insurrection in the Vendee. We heard about that in the last episode. There are counter-revolutionary uprisings, federalist uprisings, historians call them, in cities that include Lyon, Marseille, 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.

• 50:51Tom Holland?

  Robespierre contemplates this and then he draws up, well, let's call it a catechism. You know, the kind of 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, "Question: What is our aim? 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.

• 51:31Tom Holland?

  This assumption that the poor are intrinsically good, they can do no wrong. But there is a problem, which is that France is 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 Robespierre's answer to this puzzle is that they are being kept in ignorance and poverty by the rich and the corrupt.

• 52:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  So it's a sort of version of our old friend's false consciousness, but one that has been much more deliberately and malevolently contrived by this coalition of the enemies of France.

• 52:26Tom Holland?

  And of specifically of the poor. So he's saying, you know, who are the chief obstacles to the Enlightenment of the poor?

• 52:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 52:34Tom Holland?

  The paid journalists who mislead them every day by shameless distortions.

• 52:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm very familiar with that argument, I have to say.

• 52:41Tom Holland?

  That is very...

• 52:43Tom Holland?

  So in other words, if only people weren't reading awful columnists in the Daily Mail.

• 52:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 52:50Tom Holland?

  Everything would be perfect. That's absolutely Robespierre's vibe. And Robespierre also blames turncoat generals like Lafayette and de Morier, both of whom have defected from the revolution to foreign enemies.

• 53:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 53:03Tom Holland?

  The British, who Robespierre describes as an insolent and vile 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. And Robespierre also blames traitors and conspirators. And these are perhaps the most pernicious 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.

• 53:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  And just on that, here's a mad 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."

• 53:55Tom Holland?

  They're protesting too much.

• 53:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 53:57Tom Holland?

  And so Robespierre 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 omnicrisis, you might call it. A singular conspiracy that has multiple tentacles. And that these tentacles 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,

• 54:38Tom Holland?

  which, when he goes to join the Committee of Public Safety and presents it to them, his fellow members find very appealing.

• 54:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 54:48Tom Holland?

  And in fact, probably this is why they've co-opted him.

• 54:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, this idea of the omnicrisis, 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 William Pitt is paying for it.

• 55:23Tom Holland?

  Yeah, that's exactly what he thinks. And because of his moral reputation and because of the clarity with 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 it's taken to fight it becomes increasingly influential.

• 55:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, it's very simple. It's very simple. It's very attractive.

• 55:51Tom Holland?

  Yeah, because a simple policy is always the most welcome.

• 55:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 55:54Tom Holland?

  You don't want to faff around with dealing with multiple contingencies. You want a nice, clear answer that explains everything.

• 56:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Completely.

• 56:01Tom Holland?

  And so there are two men on the committee in particular who are massive Robespierre 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, Dominic, you quoted him several times in episode one. It's a guy called Georges Couteau. So he's 38, so three years older than Robespierre when Robespierre 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 effectively paralysed below the waist. So he's confined to a wheelchair. And what has caused this? His doctors had diagnosed meningitis.

• 56:44Tom Holland?

  But Couteau 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 for his condition than meningitis, I don't know whether he genuinely believed it.

• 56:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Did that weaken his joints? Did that also expand the bad joints?

• 57:01Tom Holland?

  I don't know. I wasn't aware that that was a consequence of it, but maybe it is. Listeners can absorb that lesson as they wish.

• 57:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, you think he's a lovely man, don't you, this guy Couteau?

• 57:11Tom Holland?

  I don't. I'm reporting the general consensus on Couteau, which is people find him very in private, charming, affable, like Robespierre. He's a bit of a sentimentalist, but unlike Robespierre, he has a sense of humour. He's a fun person to be with.

• 57:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he's a funster. Great.

• 57:27Tom Holland?

  He's a funster, but as a politician, he completely buys into Robespierre's diagnosis and the cure.

• 57:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 57:33Tom Holland?

  The other big Robespierre fan on the committee is perhaps the most glamorous of all its members. And this is a guy who's only 25, so the baby of the committee. And this is a guy called Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just. And he's very dandyish, very handsome, kind of rock star vibe. He's like a kind of young Mick Jagger.

• 57:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Long hair.

• 57:58Tom Holland?

  Long hair, loves to sing in Italian aria. He's always doing that. But he's also very, very chill, very self-disciplined, implacably committed to his values, to his beliefs in a very Robespierre fashion. And in fact, he has been very influenced by Robespierre. So he had written to, to the great man back in 1790. Actually, when Robespierre wasn't really a great man, he kind of talent spotted him at a very early age. And Saint Just had written to Robespierre, 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.

• 58:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh.

• 58:34Tom Holland?

  And you can imagine how this goes down with Robespierre. He thinks this is brilliant.

• 58:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, of course.

• 58:40Tom Holland?

  So he and Saint Just become very close. But I think Saint Just is actually much more intellectually formidable than Robespierre. And he becomes the great ideologue of the revolution at its most violent. And he will come to be given this, this nickname, the Archangel of Terror.

• 58:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 58:59Tom Holland?

  Which I think brilliantly conveys the sense of glamour that comes to attach itself to him. And Saint Just is the model for almost the kind of the Byronic 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.

• 59:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's like somebody from the bottom half 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, simultaneously cold when it comes to condemning other people to death. But there is something about him that gets other people very excited.

• 59:37Tom Holland?

  But I think also in, in the 19th and then into the 20th century, what gives him this glamour is the sense that he more than perhaps anybody else involved in the revolution is a precursor of communist revolution.

• 59:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, completely.

• 59:51Tom Holland?

  He's an avatar of what is to come. So Robespierre had these two very, very charismatic allies and they obviously provide him with political support on the committee. Robespierre has his own sense of, 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, an observer at one of their meetings could describe Robespierre's colleagues, and I quote, as silent in the face of his words and his principles.

• 1:00:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  So these words and principles, I mean, what is he saying? He's, he's talking about the people presumably, he's talking about how much he believes in them, he's talking about the conspiracy, but what else?

• 1:00:34Tom Holland?

  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 Charles Caudet arrived in Paris. And this constitution had been drawn up by Robespierre, abetted by Saint Just and Couton. And they'd done it in record time, they'd drawn it up in early June and its provisions were ones that Robespierre absolutely believed in. It offers a commitment to, to universal male suffrage without any qualification.

• 1:01:16Tom Holland?

  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 anachronism to use this phrase, the most progressive constitution that history has ever seen up to this point.

• 1:01:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Tom Holland?

  I mean, it's the kind of thing that progressives in any Western state today would very happily vote for, I think.

• 1:01:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the French people themselves vote for it, don't they? They have a referendum and they, by a massive majority, they endorse it.

• 1:01:54Tom Holland?

  They do. So this is held throughout June and July and the results are announced on the 10th of August, which is the anniversary of the abolition of the monarchy. And it turns out that almost 2 million people have voted in favour 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.

• 1:02:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:14Tom Holland?

  They completely back him. And he, 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 altogether. And so he says, what we must do is first defeat the conspiracy and then introduce the constitution. And sure enough, in, in the event, so in, on the 10th of September, 1793, the constitution will end up being officially suspended.

• 1:02:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:54Tom Holland?

  And Robespierre completely backs this. And it's due reflection of the fact that the, you know, the revolution is facing massive crisis of challenges everywhere. And Robespierre feels that the, that the focus should be not in introducing the constitution, but rather on defeating this kind of Hydra-headed conspiracy that is threatening to destroy it completely.

• 1:03:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  But this brings us, doesn't it, Tom, to the terror, to the reign of terror. So how to defeat the conspiracy? And his strategy here is implacable and ruthless. And I mean, am I exaggerating, do you think, to describe it as, he's going to mobilize all the resources of society, effectively every man, woman and child in the kind of national effort to root out conspiracy and any deviation from the path of revolutionary righteousness.

• 1:03:43Tom Holland?

  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 wrote in the catechism. 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 Lyon, Marseille, Toulon, the Vendee and all other districts where the banner of royalism and rebellion has been raised.

• 1:04:24Tom Holland?

  And by making a terrible example of all the criminals who have outraged liberty and spilt the blood of patriots. And that is a potentially exterminatory policy. And it is very obviously one that contradicts Robespierre's deeply held and oft expressed opposition to capital punishment. And so listeners may be wondering, well, what impact does this have on his reputation for unyielding principle? And the answer is, it has no impact whatsoever. And the reason for this is that even as Robespierre has been saying he's opposed to the death penalty,

• 1:05:06Tom Holland?

  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.

• 1:05:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:42Tom Holland?

  As a way of buttressing his own power. So as late as the trial of Louis XVI, for which Robespierre had voted, he'd expressed his hope that Louis's execution would be the last that the revolution would require. That there would be no need for the state to mandate the, the putting to death of, of, of any further person. But as you said in the previous episode, the thing that changes everything is the defection of Dumouriez. This, this former Gironde minister who had won great victories for the French Republic, but then had kind of turned, turned coat and gone over to the enemies of France.

• 1:06:24Tom Holland?

  And which had been interpreted by Robespierre as by Jacobin, Montigny and people like that, as a potentially mortal blow to the revolution. And because it's a potentially mortal blow, that means that those who are responsible for it cannot possibly be treated with mercy. So to quote Robespierre, 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 punishment, 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.

• 1:07:09Tom Holland?

  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.

• 1:07:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, one of the points actually is that in the next few months, he and Saint Juve spend a lot of time making speeches to explain their rationale. One of the points they make is that if you 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 cake and eat it, 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 we want to you. This citizenship depends on, as it were, political correctness.

• 1:08:02Tom Holland?

  Well, virtue, I think, they do explicitly say that kind of virtue without teeth is worth nothing.

• 1:08:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course, yes.

• 1:08:11Tom Holland?

  And that therefore terror is a manifestation of virtue. I mean, we'll probably come to this when we look at what happens with Danton. But this idea that terror is a manifestation of virtue, this is a principle that is starting to evolve across the summer of 1793. And interestingly, its initial focus is in the field of military affairs, which is absolutely not Robespierre's vibe at all. I mean, he has no experience of military matters whatsoever. But he supports the sending on the 4th of August of twin armies to crush insurrections in the two key counter-revolutionary outbreaks, one in Lyon, one in Marseille. And Lyon is invested on the 7th of August, and the siege of that city will drag on for

• 1:08:56Tom Holland?

  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 itself loses its name, and it's kind of renamed Ville-Sonneum, so kind of, you know, 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 levée en masse, so this is the first mass conscription of the modern

• 1:09:36Tom Holland?

  age, and its prescription, I mean, is people who have read about the war efforts of the combatants in the First or Second World Wars will recognise this. So it says, "The young men shall go to battle, the married men shall forge arms 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. And in the long run, this levée en masse will make France effectively invincible in

• 1:10:17Tom Holland?

  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.

• 1:10:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is the bedrock, the foundation stone of the Napoleonic Empire.

• 1:10:34Tom Holland?

  Yes, it is. But the immediate circumstances in which this levée is summoned, it's not at all 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 Robespierre can't afford to buy his beloved silk stockings. So you know that things are getting very bad. And then on the 2nd of September comes completely devastating news. And this is news from Toulon, the great naval base on the south coast. And this is that the counter-revolutionaries surrendered the great port to the British.

• 1:11:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, poor people.

• 1:11:19Tom Holland?

  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, is completely devastating. And so unsurprisingly, in Paris, there is a massive new wave of paranoia, and starving mobs take to the streets, the enragés, you talked about in the previous episode, the enraged.

• 1:11:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, yeah, moustaches.

• 1:11:49Tom Holland?

  People with their bristling moustaches, terrifying. And one of their particular leaders, who is a seasoned radical named Gaspard Chomet, he puts into words their motivation in a great public speech. "Every day we learn of new treasons, new crimes, every day we discover the emergence of new plots." And these words carry massive weight with the sanglot and the enragés, because Chomet 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, Chomet leads a march on the convention.

• 1:12:32Tom Holland?

  So this is the day after he'd given that rabble-rousing speech, and a great crowd of moustachioed enragés 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 Chomet leads them on a kind of invasion of the convention. And inside, he delivers a petition on behalf of the demonstrators, who are massed at his back, and then he gives a lengthy speech.

• 1:13:07Tom Holland?

  And when he finishes this speech, up stands Barre, and he gives that momentous slogan with which we began this episode, "Let terror 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, Robespierre, he is president of the convention at the time, he actually finds the invasion of the petitions unsettling rather than inspiring. You know, he's a stickler for propriety, he doesn't really approve of this action from the streets.

• 1:13:46Tom Holland?

  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.

• 1:14:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 institutionalising the terror is actually saying, well, we don't want mobs roaming around the streets, lynching people and stuff, we want to centralise it, bureaucratise it, we want it done on a proper basis. And that's what Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety are really all about.

• 1:14:28Tom Holland?

  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.

• 1:14:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 1:14:37Tom Holland?

  Rather than having mobs going around murdering people in prisons. That's basically it. 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.

• 1:15:20Tom Holland?

  And following this, unsurprisingly, the acquittal rate drops precipitously. So it increasingly becomes very unusual to be acquitted. And then on the 17th of 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, émigrés, so people who had fled abroad, and government employees who have been discharged from office. And so there are quite a few of those.

• 1:16:04Tom Holland?

  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 a counter-revolutionary, so you need one. Anyone 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 of all, and I quote, "Those who by their conduct, relations, or language, spoken or written, have shown themselves partisans of tyranny."

• 1:16:47Tom Holland?

  So this is a sweeping, I mean, literally terrifying law.

• 1:16:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:52Tom Holland?

  But of course, for true patriots, that's the point of it, that's what it's serving. And Tackett draws on the diaries of this woman, Rosalie Julien, who's the mother of one of Robespierre's agents out in the provinces. And she, she thinks the law of 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 shouldn't moan about it, but just reflect that you're serving the cause of the people.

• 1:17:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  We've heard this so many times in history in similar circumstances, you know, if you are innocent, you have nothing to fear. So, and if you have something to fear, if you're frightened, well, you're probably, that just shows you're guilty.

• 1:17:40Tom Holland?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that reflects the mood of, you know, complete paranoia

• 1:17:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:45Tom Holland?

  that is governing not just the committee itself, not just the convention, but the streets of Paris, 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.

• 1:18:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  If you have been cancelled, it just shows that you were right to be cancelled in the first place.

• 1:18:17Tom Holland?

  But you know what? The thing is, it works.

• 1:18:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:21Tom Holland?

  The revolution is saved. The terror serves the purpose for which it has been introduced. A key moment comes on the 6th of October, when Lyon, the second city of France, it's been under siege for two 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 Robespierre echoing a line in Tacitus declares epigrammatically, Lyon is no more. And Couteau, so the guy who had too much sex and got confined to a wheelchair as a result, and he's the committee's man on the scene.

• 1:19:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:00Tom Holland?

  He wants to go even further and deport vast swathes of the population, which he sees as kind of incorrigibly counter-revolutionary. And he writes to Robespierre and says, you know, they're so counter-revolutionary that I fear they will be for generations. So we need to bust them out and kind of settle them in the depths of the country. But Robespierre 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 Lyon, they can be trusted.

• 1:19:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:30Tom Holland?

  But the people who cannot be trusted are the counter-revolutionaries who had brought Lyon to such ruin. They have to be dealt with, with extreme prejudice. And Robespierre knows precisely who ultimately are to blame.

• 1:19:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Girondes. Now, if you were being more critical of Robespierre, 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.

• 1:20:29Tom Holland?

  Yeah. And I think this charge sheet does matter to the sense of Robespierre as someone who's personally virtuous, because even though he has broken bread with a lot of the Girondes, he has also been pursuing a venomous personal feud with the leader of the Girondes, Brissot.

• 1:20:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:20:44Tom Holland?

  The anti-slavery campaigner, who's often seen as their leader. And so it is important to Robespierre that he lays out the charge sheet so that people won't say, you know, he's just engaged in a faction battle. So the charge sheet is that they had foisted this disastrous war on France. It was the Girondes who had pushed France into declaring war on Prussia and Austria. And then in the form of General de Murey, had tried to betray it. So the evidence there to, to Robespierre seems clear. The treason is ardent. He charges them with being soft on nobles, soft on priests, and that their laxness had served to foster the rebellion in the Vendee. He then charges that, following

• 1:21:27Tom Holland?

  their expulsion from the convention in June 1793, which we talked about in the previous episode, their crimes have become even more palpable. That those who had escaped house arrest, and among these was Jean-Marie Rolland, husband of Madame Rolland, the salonista, former minister of the interior under Louis XVI, that they had all fanned out into the provinces, and that these were the traitors who had fomented the counter-revolutionary movements in Lyon, in Marseille, in Caen, in Bordeaux, that these were the traitors who had handed Toulon over to the Royal Navy. And that therefore only one punishment could possibly suffice for this abominable behaviour.

• 1:22:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:12Tom Holland?

  And Robespierre is determined to see it enforced. And I think that even though Robespierre does have this kind of personal feud with Brissot and some of the other Girondes, he genuinely does not see himself as governed by selfish emotions. He genuinely sees himself as Cicero foiling the conspiracy of Catalin. 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 with him.

• 1:22:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:51Tom Holland?

  They agree with his self-estimation.

• 1:22:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  And people in the committee, people in the convention.

• 1:22:56Tom Holland?

  Yeah, they do, they completely, and they back him. And so because of this, he is able to nail the Girondes as the people who have to be punished for all the disasters that are overwhelming France. And so those Girondes leaders who are still at liberty are declared outlaws. And when they're caught, they are guillotined. And some of them commit suicide. And so this kind of terrible story of two prominent Girondes who commit suicide out in the countryside in a, in a field, and their bodies are found a week later half devoured by wolves. Meanwhile, in Paris, the trial opens on the 24th of October of Brissot and 20 other Girondes. And initially, from Robespierre's point of view, their trial does

• 1:23:39Tom Holland?

  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 badly for Robespierre that five days into the trial, someone in the committee stands up and proposes that the trial be abandoned, that it's clearly, is clearly not justified or required. But Robespierre 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, and I quote, whether they have enough evidence to satisfy their conscience. And this is massively to move the goalposts. Because basically, what that

• 1:24:22Tom Holland?

  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.

• 1:24:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:34Tom Holland?

  But rather on their own intuition, their own gut feeling, their sense of whether the, the people who are being prosecuted are guilty or not. And that, and that's adequate.

• 1:24:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this idea that you start a trial, it doesn't go well. So you then change the rules halfway through to rig it so that it will go as you, as you want. We, we will see this again in this series, actually. It's a disturbing development, and yet at the same time, Robespierre is always anxious to give it the patina of legality, isn't he?

• 1:25:07Tom Holland?

  I mean, I genuinely think he, he feels that it's the right thing to do. If you're a revolutionary, he was right to do it, I think, is, is his feeling and the feeling of his supporters. So unsurprisingly, in the wake of all this, the Girondes accused are found guilty. And the verdict is brought in on the 31st of October. And one of the 21 Girondes 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 stabs himself and kills himself. And his corpse is still loaded onto the tumbril, together with the 20 Girondes who have neglected to commit suicide in this way. And on the way to the guillotine, the surviving 20 Girondes

• 1:25:52Tom Holland?

  all sing the Marseillaise. And it's, you know, if you're a Gironde, 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 Gironde. And this is, of course, is the wife of Rolland, Madame Rolland. 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 Girondes throughout 1791 and 1792. But not just the Girondes, because Robespierre himself had attended it.

• 1:26:34Tom Holland?

  And indeed, Madame Rolland had praised Robespierre two years before her execution for ranking among the small number of courageous men who are always faithful to their purpose. Robespierre, of course, would say that he's still being faithful to his purpose.

• 1:26:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  The irony.

• 1:26:50Tom Holland?

  Madame Rolland, however, does not, because when she's brought to the guillotine, she gazes across the square, and she sees this great plinth on which there 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 Madame Rolland 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's death is brought to Rolland, and he leaves the place where he's been hiding out. And he goes out into the countryside, and he sits

• 1:27:31Tom Holland?

  beneath a tree on a country lane, draws out his swordstick, and he impales himself.

• 1:27:39Tom Holland?

  That is the end of him.

• 1:27:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:41Tom Holland?

  But Dominic, Madame Roland, 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 seventeen ninety-three, because a month earlier, a woman whom Madame Roland had always hated and despised had gone to the guillotine 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, Marie Antoinette.

• 1:28:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Crikey. 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 Marie Antoinette herself to the guillotine and we'll be talking about one of the most affecting stories of the entire revolution. This is the fate of Marie Antoinette's son. So he's the boy, little boy, who royalists regard as Louis XVII. 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'll be doing the fall of Danton. We'll be doing the attack on Christianity and we'll be doing the final showdown, the

• 1:29:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  climax of the Reign of Terror, the fall of Maximilien Chrobisbea. And if you want to hear all those episodes now and you're a Rest is History club member, you can. So your next, you know, 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 therestishistory.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.

• 1:29:49Tom Holland?

  Surely not, Dominic. Surely people want to read every last word of it. It's that good.

• 1:29:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, that's, that's actually true because it is really good. So there's loads of French Revolution content. Next up, Marie Antoinette. Do not miss that episode. It is an absolute banger. Tom, on that note, merci et au revoir.

• 1:30:08Tom Holland?

  Au revoir.

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