710. The Terror: Death at the Guillotine (Part 4)

How did two of the French Revolution's leading figures, Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre, differ in their views on how to further the cause? Which scandalous conspiracy was Danton accused of being involved in that would lead him to the guillotine? And, was it true? Or the betrayal of a former ally? Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the terrible destruction of one of the great titans of the Revolution, Georges Danton, and the connotations of his cataclysmic fall for the future of the Terror. 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 _______ 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee, and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer, and no surprises along the way. Wise keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies. Most transfers arrive instantly. Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee, and get on with it. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the Wise app today. Be smart, get wise. T's and C's apply.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by AutoTrader. Now, if car shopping feels like a massive faff, buying your car online at AutoTrader makes it way easier, really. So you can shop loads and loads of cars online. You can compare prices. You can check the financing and trade-in options. And of course, you can do it from wherever you are. You start online, go to the dealer for your test drive, and finish wherever works for you. Your information, your data stays with you, so there is no starting over. Plus, you are working with local dealers, and there are real people there to help. So buy your car online on AutoTrader, really.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that 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. And he realizes, or rather, everybody else realizes, that there is a vast continent out there, and it is, of course, the Americas. So 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?

• 2:27Speaker 01

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

• 2:41Speaker 02

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

• 2:59Speaker 01

  The execution was already underway when, having crossed the Tuileries, I reached the gate opening onto the Place Louis Cans. From there, I saw the condemned men appear one after another on the fatal stage, only to vanish at once as the plank on which their eternal rest was to begin tipped them from view. Danton appeared last on that stage, drenched in the blood of all his friends. Day was fading. At the foot of the dreadful structure, standing out like a colossal silhouette against the sky, I saw this tribune rise up like a shade out of Dante, half-lit by the dying sun, seeming as much to be emerging from the tomb as about to enter it.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Nothing could match the boldness of this revolutionary athlete's bearing. Nothing could match the formidable set of that profile defying the axe, or the expression of that head, which, about to fall, still seemed to be dictating the laws. A dreadful spectacle. Time could never erase it from my memory. Now I felt the whole force of the emotion behind Danton's last words. Terrible words, which people repeated afterwards, shuddering with horror and admiration.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  "Above all, don't forget," he told the executioner, "don't forget to show my head to the people. It's worth seeing." So that's one of the most famous scenes, not just in the history of the French Revolution, but in the entire history of France. It is the eyewitness account by Antoine Vasson Arnaud of the execution of Georges Danton on the 5th of April, 1794. And it's a scene that's been immortalized in novels, in plays, in operas and films, and unsurprisingly so, because it is the spectacle of the French Revolution devouring

• 5:08Speaker 01

  one of its most memorable, and I think probably attractive, figures. And a buoyant, larger-than-life character, Dominique, who only a year earlier seemed at the peak of his popularity. A large Falstaffian man.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  A lesson to us all, Danton's fate, I think.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  A lesson to us all, yeah. And you're a particular admirer, aren't you, of the Franco-Polish film Danton, which came out during the Solidarity Confrontation, the trades union in Poland with the communist government, and starred Gerard Depardieu as Danton.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  I think Gerard Depardieu is an absolutely horrendous human being, and he is brilliant as Danton in this film. And in the film, because it's a portrait, it's actually a brilliant film, both about the French Revolution and about the crushing of the Solidarity Movement in Poland, the imposition of martial law.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  In the film, he is the champion of moderation against extremism. He is the champion of democracy against dictatorship, which is, of course, a little bit simplistic when you look at the story of the revolution.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  But it is, there is that kind of great sense of the binary, isn't there? Because on the one hand, you have Maximilian Robespierre.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Tall, thin, cold, fanatical, obsessed by ideas of God and virtue. And on the other side, his old friend Georges Danton, charismatic, a man of bulk, warm, the man who wants to stop the reign of terror, the people's friend.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  And that dynamic of the kind of the chill, cold, thin person, and the warm, jolly, fun, larger person. I mean, it's a kind of, almost archetypal.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  The sturdy man of the people.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  And the desiccated lover of abstract nouns. Yeah, completely.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  So it's a duel for the ages, but obviously, there's a lot more going on because we're at the sort of crisis moment for the revolution generally, war on the frontiers, war within France, loads of nuances. So we might as well get straight into it. And we'll get into it with our protagonist, who is Danton. So I think you're dead right, of all the French Revolution's great characters, Danton's probably the most magnetic. He's the one you'd go on a night out with, I think. And Depardieu, shocking bloke, brilliant actor, does a really good job of capturing his appeal in that film, which I recommend to people, it's on YouTube. So Danton is a big man, you know, stocky, famously ugly, but incredibly charismatic,

• 7:41Speaker 02

  energetic, he's a brilliant speaker, he's theatrical, he's generous. There's something slightly Churchillian, I think, about him, a man of tremendous flaws, but also great magnetic qualities.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Listeners may remember that I ventriloquized one of his most famous speeches and did it as Churchill.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  You did, exactly. Danton can be flippant, he can be greedy, he can be very, very corrupt, as we will see, but he's hard to dislike. And he was born in a place called Arcis in Champagne in 1759. So that means that he's about to turn 30 when the French Revolution breaks out, like so many of these people, he's a relatively young man. He has a very distinctive look because as a boy, he'd been both gored by a bull and trampled by pigs.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  That's bad luck, isn't it?

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's very unfortunate. So his lip was split and his nose was all mangled, and to make it matters worse, he had smallpox. So his face is quite a spectacle. Now, his father, who was a local prosecutor, sent him to boarding school, and then he went and settled on the left bank of Paris, and he became a lawyer. He got married, he had a couple of sons. And he, he's a funster, really, in the late 1780s. He has lots of sort of boozy dinner parties, he's well-known for them. He has lots of affairs, he's not a very good husband. He lives life to the full. And then when the revolution breaks out, he's living there in the left bank in this district called the Caudilliers, which is a real hotbed of militancy. So there's loads of people like him, young lawyers, there's artisans, stuff like that.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  And he's prominent in the protests around the fall of the Bastille, summer of 1789. He becomes a sort of leading light in the district. He's hanging out with Jean-Paul Marat, who we talked about a couple of episodes ago, and with a man called Camille Desmoulins, who's a great friend of his, who we will come to later on. And because Danton is a really good speaker, because he's a big man, he's kind of alpha male, he becomes a binoc. Do you know what a binoc is, Tom?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Big name on campus.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  He's a big name on campus. Yeah, exactly. And he founds the Caudillier Club in 1790, Radical Club, Talking Shop, becomes its first president.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Captain of sports teams.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Completely. He's the big man. You know, everyone knows him on the campus, all of that.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  And as the revolution escalates, his star carries on rising. So when, in the late summer of 1792, there was the great storming of the Tuileries Palace by the kind of Sainte-Culotte, by the insurrection of the commune, Danton was very much at the forefront of that. Uh, when the Girondins were running France, they had him as their Minister of Justice. Uh, he wasn't really one of them, though. They always regarded him with a bit of suspicion. But I mean, you mentioned the Churchillian aspect. Uh, he gives this incredible speech. You know, the Prussians are coming, France is at bay, and he says, what we need is de l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Or, you know, courage, more courage, and yet more courage, and we will win the day. And, you know, it works. Now, behind all that, he's not just a great speaker. He's also actually good at running things. He's pragmatic. He's one of those politicians, very common. You know, he, he talks a brilliant game, and he's very flamboyant, but actually, you know, when the doors shut, he's very smart, he's very pragmatic. He takes decisions, he's ruthless, all of this. Over time, though, he falls out with the Girondins a bit, and so he moves closer to the Montagnard faction. So that's Robespierre, Marat, and co. And by, let's say, 1793,

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Danton is seen as one of the three big beasts of that camp. So you've got Marat, Robespierre, Danton there, the three names that everyone knows. When Charlotte Corday wrote that manifesto about killing Marat.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, she mentioned Danton and Robespierre, didn't she?

• 11:34Speaker 02

  She did, exactly. She did. And he gets on, uh, he gets on fine, uh, with both of those guys. I mean, he's not a tremendous fan of, you know, Marat's not a great laugh, Danton is a great laugh, and neither is Robespierre, but their relations are solid. Then there's no enmity between them.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  When Danton's wife dies in childbirth.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  And he comes back, he's been at the front, and he digs up the coffin and embraces her in a very Gothic manner. Robespierre writes, writes him a very sweet letter.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  He does? Yeah.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  You know, says, oh, I love you until death, you're great, you're my best friend, all of this. Nothing will ever come between us.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  No, I mean, you could say, on the one hand, that is very much the literary formula of the day, that people do write like this, they write in an overwrought way that we would perhaps not do today. Uh, but genuinely, I think there's affection, there's a degree of affection between Danton and Robespierre.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's important for the, for the tragedy of what's going to happen, to recognise that Robespierre does love Danton.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  And indeed, loves, um, Desmoulins as well.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  So there's no sense whatsoever that they are heading for a kind of great crash at this point. So we're in 1793, and the beginning of 1793, I think it would be reasonable to call it a rollercoaster for Danton. So as you say, in February, his wife dies. She dies in childbirth, he's been away. He's been a massive womanizer, and I think his grief for her is perhaps slightly coloured by guilt that he hasn't been the best husband in the world.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Just weeks later, April 1793, as we heard in a previous episode, Danton is, um, one of the first people appointed to the New Committee of Public Safety. And actually, at first, he's seen as the dominant figure on that committee. The only thing is, at this point, spring, summer 1793, you know, we've talked before about how this is the beginning of the terror, the institutions being set up, the mood of paranoia, the obsession with conspiracies. Danton is slightly losing touch with that mood, I think. He is too pragmatic. On the committee, he's sitting there and saying, well, you know, maybe we should look to make deals with some of our enemies. Could we detach the Prussians or the Austrians from the enemy coalition? Could we talk to some of these sort of provincial départements that are in revolt?

• 13:45Speaker 02

  We don't have to kill everybody, you know, let's find a way out of this. That's not what a lot of people want to hear.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  And he should have thought of that when he was busy setting all these institutions up. I mean, he clearly was not thinking through what could be done with them.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  No, he wasn't. I don't think he was. Um, at the same time, there is, of course, this mood in the summer of 1793, this absolute fixation on virtue, on republican virtue. And that's been there from the beginning, but it's become a lot more pronounced. And Danton's financial corruption, which is not unique. There are a lot of deputies taking money. This is a fairly corrupt political system, but he is well known for it. Danton has been taking bribes, and he's been buying up land in his native Arcis with mysterious money.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  But the more that, um, Robespierre becomes the binoc, and he is the incorruptible, so the more, uh, Danton's corruptibility comes to seem a little bit out of fashion.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Totally. His, his style is unfashionable. So, June 1793, I mean, only a few months after his wife died, he marries again. And he marries a girl called Louise. I mean, she is a girl, she's 16 years old, and she's been looking after the kids. And he takes her back to his hometown of Arcis on a break. And while he's away, on the 10th of July, he is voted off the Committee of Public Safety by the Convention. Now, this doesn't necessarily have to be an immensely sinister thing. People are being rotated on and off the Committee of Public Safety fairly often, and he's not completely out of favour. So actually, in September, that people in the Convention say, would you like to come back on to the committee?

• 15:31Speaker 02

  You know, the committee could use you. And he said, no, I don't really want to join any committee. I'd rather, I'll be a spur to them all. Sounds of, I mean, actually, that's a very Churchillian thing to say. You can absolutely imagine Churchill doing that. I won't get involved, but I'll be, I'll kind of be involved with all of them. So that's September. Middle October 1793, Danton falls ill. This is such a theme of the revolution, as we talked about before. These blokes are young, they're under enormous pressure, they're drinking a lot. They are, I mean, imagine the stress. You know, your country's at war, there's rebellions, plus you could lose your head if, if you manage things badly.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  I mean, you talked about the big three. Marat famously is always returning to his bath because he breaks out in pustules.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  And we said how Robespierre is always taken to bed with kind of nervous prostration. It's a theme.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  Completely. They're leading a very unhealthy, uh, existence. And by the time he comes back, so he comes back about six weeks later, um, from, from Arcis, where he's been kind of convalescing. He comes back in mid-November, and things have changed. So two big things have happened that you described in the last two episodes. Um, Marie-entrenette has been executed, and the Girondins have been executed. And by now, the reign of terror is well institutionalised and is well underway, which brings us to the big picture. So to remind people, the Montagnards have been running the roost since the summer, and their power is embodied now in these two committees. So you have the Committee of Public Safety, which directs policy,

• 17:02Speaker 02

  and the Committee of General Security, which controls the police and the revolutionary tribunal. Now, there is a new constitution. There is a new democratic constitution, but it has been placed on hold. Effectively, there is a state of emergency in France for completely understandable reasons. So Robespierre's kind of mini-me, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, the kind of archangel of death, archangel of terror. He has moved a resolution on the 10th of October to make the provisional government of France revolutionary until the peace. Basically, we're not going to implement the new constitution. The Committee of Public Safety is going to run things until we have peace, and only then will we do it.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  And Dominic, just to say, because people might think this is a cynical move.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  I, I really don't think it is. Saint-Just with Robespierre had played a key role in writing up that constitution.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  And we'll be talking about this in the next episode. You know, they genuinely, and I think correctly, see that this is not a time to be experimenting with new constitutions because... France is in a state of crisis and maybe you could say it does need a firm hand.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  It's a complicated question, actually. And, and I mean, we'll answer this to some extent in our very final episode. But I think a couple of things can be true at once. Number one, the institutions of terror, the Committee of Public Safety, do actually stabilise the situation. They do provide leadership and they do manage to, you know, they defeat the rebellions and they hold the line on the frontiers and indeed start to, start to win the war. So to, to that extent, absolutely right. The only question is, when you get to seventeen ninety-four, there is a definite question mark about whether, you know, Robespierre at that point, he will never be satisfied that France is at peace because there will always be corruption and vice to be fought.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Just to say that this constitution is precious to Robespierre and Saint Just because they've drawn it up.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  I don't think it is a cynical move to entrench that dictatorial power, which is sometimes how it's presented.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're not Vladimir Putin or something. You know, they're not cold, cynical, just interested in power for its own sake. Absolutely not. And of course, going hand in hand with the rule of the Committee of Public Safety is the policy of terror. Let's just say, just equate that to kind of revolutionary justice. So Saint Just says very clearly on the tenth of October, "Between the people and their enemies, there can be nothing but the sword. We must govern by iron those who cannot be governed by justice." So violence is a part of their, their sort of strategy. This is not, though, a dictatorship. It's not controlled by any one person and the committees are still reporting to the convention. There are aspects in which it anticipates later dictatorships. So power controlled by a very small group of people.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Opposition is treated as treason and dissent is punished with kind of state sanctioned violence. So in all those ways, it definitely looks ahead to the twentieth century and lots of historians have written about this. But I think the biggest thing is that actually what it's done is the French Revolution has been very anarchic for the last couple of years, very chaotic. And actually, under this new regime, the Committee of Public Safety, at about this point, autumn seventeen ninety-three, central state government in France is stronger than it has been for years. Probably going back, you know, well into the reign of Louis XVI, if not further back.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  You know, you have a really high functioning machine now that is handing down ruthless decisive edicts that is actually getting stuff done.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  The smack of firm government.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Completely. Within it, however, there are lots of tensions. So just to look at the Committee of Public Safety. If you think about that, there are these blokes, there's twelve of them, and they're meeting in a kind of green room. They're working very hard, late at night, all of this. And they're spending lots of time arguing among themselves. So on one wing, you have two people we've talked about already. You have Saint Just and you have this bloke called Georges Couteau, who's in his wheelchair.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  The sex addict.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  He claims he was paralyzed by having too much sex.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  And you've got Robespierre, who you've described already, pale, prim, glasses, wig, you know, all that. The corruptible moral authority. Robespierre, to be absolutely clear, it's really important, I think, that people dispel any sense of Robespierre being a dictator. He is not a dictator. He has this great moral authority, but he is one of a committee. And actually, a lot of the decisions on the committee, and this will be really important when we talk about the fall of Robespierre, a lot of the decisions on the committee are made by these kind of military bureaucrats. So there's a guy called Lazarkano who runs the army. There is Robert Lindy, who manages all the food supplies.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  These guys are like, their job is to win the war and to take all the decisions, to manage the administration, to do all that. They're the people who are really keeping the show on the road. And when Robespierre is talking at great length about the Republic of Virtue, these are men who are rolling their eyes and sort of surreptitiously signing requisition orders under the desk.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Military logistics is not Robespierre's vibe at all.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Not at all. And the differences between these men and Robespierre over time will become more and more pronounced, especially as they're working so hard, they're all knackered, they're all drunk, you know, all of this. However, the thing on which they're all united at this point is the policy of terror. So you described how they passed the thing called the Law of Suspects. The Law of Suspects allows them to arrest anybody.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's basically it, isn't it?

• 22:34Speaker 02

  To arrest anybody.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Anybody, yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Basically. If basically your conduct associations, talks or writings identify you as an enemy of the people or an enemy of liberty, then you've committed a crime. So there's that. The Paris Commune, I love this, the Paris Commune has, has drawn up and published a list of characteristics that render people suspect. These include speaking cryptically of the misfortunes of the revolution, spreading bad news, and this is the best one, affecting excessive severity in order to appear republican. So in other words, if you seem too keen on the revolution, you're probably a traitor. And this, they, they say very specifically, the list of enemies of the people includes those who,

• 23:22Speaker 02

  while not having done anything against liberty, also haven't done anything for it.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  So if you've literally done nothing at all, you're probably a traitor and an enemy of the people.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  If you're against the, the revolution, then you're guilty. And if you seem like you're in favour of the revolution, then you're guilty. And there's not really much leeway between those two categories.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  No, it's a very hard balance to strike. And in his history of the revolution, the American historian Jeremy Popkin says, "The great iron of this is a republic that is devoted to the rights of man." You know, the first, really the first state in history to be so explicitly devoted, even far more so than the American Republic, to this utopian creed, is running a prison system that is now on a scale without precedent in the Western world. So by the summer of seventeen ninety-four, by the time it's all over, about half a million people have been through the French prison system. Now, most of them do come out again. They obviously don't guillotine anything like a majority of these people.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  And even in Paris at the height of the terror, if you were accused of a capital offence, Tom, for example, had you been too enthusiastic in your support of the revolution and outed yourself therefore as a traitor.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  The chances are that you'd still come out with your head on your shoulders.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Unless I was an aristocrat.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Or Marie Antoinette.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  So the official death toll of the terror, I mean, estimates differ. Timothy Tackett gives a figure. It says the official death toll is seventeen thousand people, which in the scale of the great slaughters of the twentieth century is not great. If you include in that deaths in prison from starvation and disease, you're probably looking at forty thousand. And then if you look at the Vendee and so on, you're hundreds and hundreds of thousands. But, you know, it's not as enormous as the twentieth century killings. Now, it's important to remember, this is not senseless killing. It is killing with a purpose. I mean, that sounds a terrible thing to say, but they drew up the terror as this improvised response

• 25:19Speaker 02

  to the crises facing France in the summer of seventeen ninety-three. And basically, the terror does kind of do the trick.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it works.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, they are back on their feet. So let's give you a couple of examples. The economy was in meltdown. They have passed a thing called the Law of the General Maximum, which introduces these strict wage and price controls. And in the short time it works, it props up the paper money, the assignats, and Paris is still getting supplied with just enough food to keep going. So that's fine. Obviously, they're winning the war. I mean, they've turned the tide in the war. So there are two big victories in the autumn against Britain and Austria at a place called Enchut and Vatini. And then, we talked a little bit about this last time, they've turned the tide against the Federalist rebels and against the Vendeeans.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  So they recaptured Lyon on the ninth of October, and then a week later, they won this big victory against the Vendean rebels at Cholé. So at this point, let's say October, so this is about the point when Danton is falling ill and going away. You might say, well, brilliant, the terror has worked. Why don't we ease off now? We don't need to arrest so many people. We can give the Sanson and the people working on the guillotine can have a few days off. And actually, there are people saying that at this point, even, you know, there are people who have the courage to say it. So there's a writer and deputy called Louis Sebastien Mercier. And he said, "I can't believe we're continuing with the terror. The Montagnards are men of blood and mud, stupid and ferocious beasts."

• 26:48Speaker 01

  So what happens to him?

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Of course, he's thrown into prison. Yeah. Yes, not reasonable to say such things.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  It's counter revolutionary, isn't it?

• 26:58Speaker 02

  And part of that is because Robespierre and Saint Just, I think in particular, have a vision of the terror that goes beyond just winning the war. They at this point see it as an essential tool to transform France into this virtuous, sort of almost utopian republic. And they are doing what they see as positive things as well as just guillotining people now. So to give you a couple of examples, they are encouraging lots of local Jacobin clubs in the provinces. They're saying, you know, it's your job to go out there and to convert France, to start again. Sing patriotic songs, have rallies, have readings, do all this stuff, educate the people.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Well, don't forget, Robespierre had been to a Jesuit educational foundation and the Jesuits are very keen on, you know, give me the child and I will give you the man.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Exactly that. Education is a huge part of this, Tom.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Education, education, education, as another great revolutionary said.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  They have a plan for free education to the age of thirteen and they have a new curriculum, which will incorporate republican virtues. They're very interested in a very twenty-first century way in language and in the names of things. So they want to rename whole towns, whole streets, parks and things after the virtues that they think the, the Republic should celebrate. So in Orleans, for example, the, the, the different neighbourhoods are renamed, they're given called things like Liberté, Égalité, Brutus, Rousseau, and so on and so forth. I mean, that's something we're very familiar with today. Was there somewhere like Birmingham had a Diversity Street? You know, Integration Avenue, Kindness Close or whatever.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Diversity Street, I think, was the name of a song sung by David Brent.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  Well, that says it all, doesn't it?

• 28:48Speaker 01

  The true heir to the revolution.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  A very disturbing thing, actually probably the worst thing they're doing is designing the metric system.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's very bad, isn't it?

• 28:56Speaker 02

  So plans have been afoot for that for a little while. The convention is still working on it. The convention says the metric system is a symbol of the equality and a gauge of the fraternity that should unite all men. Because of course it's rooted in rationality rather than in organic tradition.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Chaotic imperial madness.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  Exactly. And talking about language, they want to eliminate the polite vu. So anyone who studied French at school will know there are two words for you, tu and vu. And they want to stop people saying vu because it is old fashioned and formal. Although one person who cannot stop himself is Maximilien Robespierre because he's so prim and formal. And he automatically keeps saying vu when everyone else would be saying tu.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  In the same way that he's wearing his colot and his waistcoat. I mean, it's good to know that they want to make French more like English.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Get rid of the genders. I think that would be the key thing. No le and la, no need for it. So there's a lot going on. And yet there are some people who think they should go even further. And chief among them is a man we met last time. He's the editor of a newspaper called De Pere Duchenne. He is the scatological pornographic ultra populist Jacques Auber. The scourge of Marie Antoinette, a man who I'm guessing that most people who listened to our last episode will not have a positive view.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Of this bloke. And Auber presents himself. He says, I am the champion of the working classes and of the streets. People are angry about high prices and food shortages. And the government should do something about it. They should be regulating the economy. They should be ensuring cheaper food. They should be having more surveillance to stop all the aristocrats who are clearly behind all this. People should be informing on their neighbours for hoarding food. And we should be executing merchants and shopkeepers who are not selling cheap food.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  It's blue sky.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. Auber is really going for it. So there's that. He's really going for the shopkeepers, but he's really going for the Catholic Church. We'll be talking more about the sort of religious side of the revolution in the next episode. But for now, just to simplify it. Auber and his allies, particularly in the government of Paris, the commune, are really keen on this de-Christianisation, anti-clerical agenda. They want to convert churches to temples of reason. They want priests to show their republican commitment by abjuring their vows, getting married, giving up the church. And they get a fair bit of momentum towards the end of seventeen ninety-three.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  So of about sixty thousand priests in France, some eighteen thousand of them, under pressure from Auber and his cronies, abandoned their status as priests, including the bishop of Paris.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Hey, Dominic, the Archbishop of Paris to you.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  The Archbishop of Paris. I can't believe I've mis- I've mis-bishoped him.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  He's encouraged to do this by Chomet and Auber, who pay a visit to him.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  And say that unless you do it tomorrow, you will be sentenced to death as an enemy of the people. And the whole being a martyr thing doesn't really kick in with him. He goes, fine, whatever.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  He had a look at the record of martyrs that he presumably had been speaking about for decades. He said, actually, on balance, I probably will give it up. Yeah. I actually wanted to get married anyway.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  And the irony is he ends up being guillotined as.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  That's terrible.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  For having abetted the terror.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  So they're holding bonfires of sacred relics and vestments and things. Auber and Co. most famously in Notre Dame on the 10th of November. They hold this festival of reason. And it's a deliberately sacrilegious festival. So Auber, in place of the altar, which he calls a stage for charlatans, he puts up a throne of liberty. And he gets a very nubile young woman to come and play the goddess liberty.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Very nubile, but apparently with bad teeth.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  And slightly scantily dressed.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Very scantily dressed. And she's perched on what will be a bit of a theme of this whole de-Christianisation movement, which is a papier-mache mountain.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Which is placed in the middle of the nave. And they put a Greek temple on it and she sits on the top.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  They carry her through the streets, don't they, to the convention? And they install her in the convention next to the president of the convention, who presumably is delighted by this. So the thing is, I mean, obviously there are a lot of people in France who are good Catholics. And a lot of people who take religion quite seriously and who are shocked by this. And one of these people, I mean, he's not necessarily a good Catholic, but he thinks it's a serious business. And that's Maximilien Robespierre.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  He hates it.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  Robespierre is a deist, isn't he?

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  He believes in the supreme being. Robespierre is not a man for a satirical joke, or indeed any form of joke.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  No.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  And he is horrified by all this.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  I think in two levels. I think as a believer in a deity, but also he sees it as mad to needlessly offend Catholics. What's the point?

• 34:07Speaker 02

  I think you're absolutely right. He thinks it's wrong, but he thinks it's politically wrong as well. And Robespierre, whenever he sees somebody make a mistake or do something that he thinks could undermine their cause, his natural reaction, his instinctive reaction is to say, well, why would Auber do that? Has Auber been put up to this? Why would he do something that will help our enemies? So there's a seed of something in his head, I think, from this point. Anyway, twenty first of November, so just a few days after this, Robespierre gives a speech. He attacks the atheist campaign for what he calls its exaggerated zeal. And actually, thanks to his encouragement, the convention then votes a couple of weeks later to uphold and protect freedom of worship.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  In other words, if you are a good Catholic, don't worry, carry on. We won't let Auber throw you on the bonfire, so were. Now, above all, at the beginning of December seventeen ninety-three, the convention passes a thing called the Law of Fremaire, which reasserts the power of the central government. This is under the pressure from the committees. The committees say, look, Auber, radicals, people on the streets, all of this. They should not be directing the revolution, we should. And the convention votes that basically the convention and the committees will control what happens. We are not going to let other people do this.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  And this is really important because the trend of the revolution has been so anarchic for basically decentralisation, giving power away. And now they're turning back and they're saying, actually, we've gone far too far down this road. We need a proper, efficient government. However, that doesn't mean they want to dismantle the terror. What they want to do is to centralise the terror, to institutionalise it as the guiding principle of government into seventeen ninety-four. It's not going to end before seventeen ninety-four, that's clear. It probably isn't going to end in seventeen ninety-four. In fact, is the terror ever going to end at all?

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Well, so this is the context for Danton to return to Paris from the countryside where he has been ill. And he comes back around the nineteenth of November. So that is the peak of Auber's campaign against Christianity and the terror is in full swing. Slightly disappointingly, it's quite hard for us to know what Danton is thinking. Unusually, we have really few sources about Danton compared with other big figures of the revolution. But as far as we can tell, Danton is tired of the relentless radicalisation. He thinks the terror should probably start to be wound down. He thinks we can't wage war against all these enemies forever.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Some sort of deal is going to have to be made with the Austrians and the Prussians. And ultimately, we've got our republic now. Let's enjoy it. Let's settle down, have some stable, sensible government.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Have a massive dinner.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. He's becoming a little bit rest his politics, isn't he? He's becoming a little bit sensible government. So in the next few weeks, he gathers this little group of supporters and they're called the, that's Anglo-Saxon, they're called the indulgence. So in other words, they are people who agree with him. We should calm down a bit.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  People should agree disagreeably.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  Agree disagreeably, exactly.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Sorry, should disagree.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Hold on. No, on the rest is politics, they agree disagreeably, don't they?

• 37:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And most of the people who associate with Danton, then, I mean, the thing is, they are at this point, because he's slightly unfashionable, they are not the absolute big-name top dogs. They're slightly second-rank figures. He's been dropped from the football team, he's on the bench. Yeah, he has been. And the people he's hanging out with, that's the people who can't even get into the first team. So to give an example, there's somebody we'll come back to, he's a former actor and poet called Philippe Fabre de Glantine. And this Philippe Fabre, he designed the new revolutionary calendar. But the one really interesting person that Danton associates with, an old friend of his actually, someone we've met before, back in the, I mean, about 17 years ago, when we started the French Revolution, he's a young man called Camille

• 38:22Speaker 02

  de Mullin. If listeners can remember, just before the fall of the Bastille, there was this scene of this young man, pale, long-haired, standing up in the Palais Royal in the centre of Paris, on a table in a café, exhorting everybody to rise up against Louis XVI. And this was the kind of one of the great triggers of the whole revolution. And this guy, Camille de Mullin, he's now 33 years old. But people always treat him like he's about 10, don't they? They do. They completely infantilise him. They don't call him de Mullin, they always call him Camille by his first name, because they see him as immature. Robespierre and Camille had been at school together, they'd been to the same lycée, L'Ule Grand. De Mullin was two years younger than Robespierre,

• 39:06Speaker 02

  but they were great friends. They read Cicero, they read Tacitus, they read Rousseau, all of this. Robespierre was a witness at de Mullin's wedding, he married a very sparky, clever young woman called Lucille, who also was very invested in the revolution. God, I hope nothing bad happens to her. Yeah, I mean, I hope I haven't introduced her, I need to kill her off. De Mullin is much more excitable than his friend Maximilien, he is more sentimental. He becomes a Montagnard deputy, but no one ever gives him a proper job. And as you say, he's always seen as a bit of a, one historian calls him an immature lightweight. So, you know, he's unreliable,

• 39:49Speaker 02

  he's a bit babyish, all of this. Camille de Mullin has been shocked by the turn towards the terror. And he was reportedly horrified by the execution of the Girondins. It was claimed later that he had cried out in horror when the death sentence was handed down. And by the time Danton comes back, de Mullin has started to publicly call for particular acts of clemency, for example, because of the sort of xenophobia of the revolution in some ways, of the terror, anyway. They are clamping down on foreign citizens, and de Mullin says, oh, this is really unfair, you know, leave them alone. Now, he's a useful ally to Danton for two reasons. Number one, because de Mullin is friends with Robespierre,

• 40:31Speaker 02

  childhood friends, so useful to have him. But also because de Mullin, for all his supposed immaturity, he's a very talented journalist. And two weeks after Danton's return, and almost certainly with Danton's encouragement and connivance, he launches a new newspaper. It's called Le vieux Cordelier, The Old Cordelier. And it's sort of looking back to the early days of the revolution, you know, remember the old days when we were full of idealism, you know, at the Cordelier Club, in the Cordelier District, all of this. The first issue of this comes out on the 5th of December, and it's a blistering attack on Ebert and his faction. And de Mullin says, you know, Ebert takes public money to produce

• 41:15Speaker 02

  his newspaper, and he fills it with the language of the Channel House. Ebert talks about how he loves the revolution, yet when I was giving speeches encouraging people to march on the Bastille, what was Ebert? He was collecting tickets in the Variety Theatre, which he was, he was a ticket collector. The second edition, five days later, de Mullin goes for Ebert's atheism. He says, this campaign against Christianity is undermining the revolution, it's doing the foreigners' work for them. And both of these issues have been read and approved by Robespierre. Robespierre is fine with them, because Robespierre thinks Ebert's getting a kicking, brilliant, you know, Robespierre's sick of Ebert. But then the next two issues, which come out on the 15th and the 20th of December, go much further.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  So the 15th, which is issue three, de Mullin prints an attack on the terror, and he disguises it as a sort of fake translation from Tacitus. Yeah. So it's basically Roman emperors, you know, swapped liberty for tyranny, they changed simple glances, sadness, compassion, sighs, even silence into crimes. So there's that. And then issue number four is a really direct challenge to the government. de Mullin says, we have lost sight of what this revolution was meant to be about. It was meant to be about happiness, reason, equality, justice. He says, we've got two committees, public safety and general security, we should have a committee of clemency, because we've got

• 42:46Speaker 02

  200,000 people in prison, and I think we should let a lot of these people go, they've done nothing wrong. Be kind to them. Yeah. And he addresses Robespierre directly, his old friend, and he says, you want to remove all your enemies by means of the guillotine? Has there ever been such great folly? And these two issues are an absolute sensation. So government agents report to the committees that they are selling out, people are reading them out in the cafes, people are applauding what they're hearing. And why have they struck such a chord? Well, why they've struck such a chord goes back to something outside Paris. Obviously, there are always people who don't like a police state, so there are lots of people who don't

• 43:28Speaker 02

  like the terror, never liked it. But also, there are, I think, specific reasons for timing. First of all, these issues come out at precisely the point when the French have just had an amazing victory, they have retaken the crucial naval base at Toulon. From the British. Not least, from the British, thanks not least to a young man called Napoleon Bonaparte. So the war is now going really quite well. But at the same time, news is reaching Paris around about Christmas 1793, and then the early days of 1794, about the reprisals that are taking place where they've already defeated the rebels. So we'll be hearing more about

• 44:08Speaker 02

  these in the next episode. But Lyon, thousands of people blown up by cannons or bayoneted or shot, Nantes, 2,000 people drowned, forcibly drowned in boats that were towed out into the Loire and then deliberately sunk. And then, of course, the Vendee. So in the Vendee, thousands of people executed, entire towns wiped out, children, women forced to dig their own mass graves. One junior officer, I mean, this quote repeats a couple of times in general history of the revolution, I mean, it really jumps out at you. One junior officer wrote, we will use steel and flames, a rifle in one hand, a burning torch in the other.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Men and women, all of them must die, except the small children. But the bonkers thing about that, he wrote it to his mother. Yeah. Like, that was his letter, dear mummy, just to fill you in on what's going on. Anyway, even in Paris, there are a lot of people who think this is actually going much too far. This is, this is bonkers. Like, we can't kill everybody. Robespierre is not one of them. Robespierre doesn't like the arbitrary use of terror. No. But Robespierre does believe in terror as a guiding principle. He does believe that violence must go hand in hand with virtue, because otherwise virtue is powerless. It must be virtuous. Yes, exactly.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  But he's not in favour of random atrocities, to the degree that some of the revolutionaries are, I think. Exactly. We will see. He falls out with people who he thinks are just being sadists. Yeah. But Robespierre thinks if it's properly planned, and if these people are enemies to the people, sure, they've got to go. Yeah. So when de Mullin's attacking the terror, obviously I think, so this is just stupid and childish from de Mullin, he's not serious. When Danton attacks the terror, Robespierre thinks this is typical Danton, he's corrupt, he's too lax, he's worldly. Again, he's unserious about protecting what we've got. So on Christmas Day, which is now a working day for the convention, that's the fifth day of Niveaux, as they call it, under their new calendar, Robespierre

• 46:14Speaker 02

  gets up and he gives a big speech in the convention, and he says, you know, I'm going to explain the principles of our revolutionary government. And Robespierre says, we are fighting for liberty against its enemies, and the war's not over. Robespierre sets out his theory of what becomes known as the foreign plot. So this is, of course, something that has been brewing since the beginning of the revolution. But Robespierre says, you know, I know that Britain, Austria and Prussia have a secret network inside France. They have agents in the clubs, they have agents in the ministries, they have agents here in the convention, among the people I'm talking to, there are people who are

• 46:55Speaker 02

  working with the British. They know all about us, they caress our passions, they try to sway our opinions, they turn our own resolutions against us. And Dominic, they have, his brother, Augustin, had been to Toulon, he'd been a kind of agent on the scene at Toulon. And so he had been there and seen for himself the collaboration in Toulon with the British. So he's paranoid about the British. And the very fact that people are arguing in Paris is for Robespierre proof. Pitt's gold. Exactly, British gold. So he says, you know, we in your committees, are we going to ignore the voices on the one side that are saying that are fanatical and overzealous?

• 47:36Speaker 02

  And on the other side, the voices of kind of weakness and moderation, we're going to stick to our course and do the right thing. And there's this great torrent of applause from the convention, and Robespierre breathes a sigh of relief. However, this does not solve the issue of Danton and de Mullin, because what does he do about them? His friends. Two weeks later, Robespierre goes to the Jacquesman Club. And it's a very febrile mood in the Jacquesman Club, because of course, they are Jacquesmans too. And Robespierre actually starts the meeting in quite a conciliatory style. He says, look, what I'm going to say to you tonight is enough of the factions. I see no factions

• 48:16Speaker 02

  anymore. I see only Frenchmen. You know, there's just us, the French people against our enemies. This is what the Kaiser said, by the way, at the beginning of the First World War. I see only Germans.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Is there any, is there anything that would join all French people in the common cause, Dominic, that they could rally behind?

• 48:32Speaker 02

  I mean, you think you've heard some bad things in this episode with the drownings and the shootings, but now it gets worse. I should warn listeners, if you're driving, pull over because Robespierre is going to say something very, very incendiary. This is a massive trigger warning. He says, for tonight's debate, I propose the following subject, the crimes of the English government and the vices of the British constitution.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Monstrous.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  That's insane from Robespierre. He's really let himself down.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  He deserves everything he gets.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  So they're about to embark on this demented debate, slacking off the British. And then Desmoulins turns up. He turns up late. And as he makes his way in, there's a bit of heckling, you know, some of the hardliners are shouting at Desmoulins, you know, I hate your newspaper. And there's an argument that breaks out about the newspaper. And some people start shouting at Robespierre, you know, are you going to condemn this? He's your friend. And Robespierre tries to play this cleverly because he is still very fond of Desmoulins. And he says, I agree, Camille should renounce his political heresies. His writings are dangerous. They give hope to our enemies. And then Robespierre says, however, we should distinguish between

• 49:40Speaker 02

  the person and his works. I mean, this is so patronizing. Camille is a thoughtless child. He's 33, who has good inclinations, but he's been led astray by bad company.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  And the bad company is Danton, is it?

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Danton and people like that. Exactly. So let's not expel him from the club. Let's burn his newspaper in front of the members of the club. So Robespierre's horror, Desmoulins does not take this as the gift that Robespierre intends. Desmoulins is like, what? Burn the newspaper? Are you mad? And Desmoulins says, I reply in the words of Rousseau, burning is not an answer.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  So that's a famous phrase from Rousseau. And Rousseau is Robespierre's great hero and political lodestar.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Imagine how, you know, how provocative that is for Robespierre. This huge argument breaks out. Robespierre basically issues a threat to Desmoulins. He says, you must learn, Camille, that if you are not Camille, you would not be treated so lightly. In other words, watch your head. And actually, of all people, the person who jumps in to sort of say, come on, that's, let's, let's leave it. Let's leave it, is Danton. So Danton jumps in, managed to calm it down. But what Danton does not know is that Robespierre is now in possession of a secret that could destroy him. Because in the last few weeks, informants have been coming to Robespierre and Saint Just with bombshell revelations

• 51:09Speaker 02

  about this foreign conspiracy to undermine the revolution. And these are revelations that for Danton will be literally fatal.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Blimey, what could these revelations be? Only one way to find out. Join us after the break.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  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. For thousands of years, humanity was defenseless against it. But thankfully, we live in a time of incredible ingenuity and American scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the Gates Foundation.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Yes. So they're creating a new generation of bed nets that kill up to 90% of mosquitoes. And that leads to a 50% drop in malaria, saving lives and protecting vulnerable communities. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:12Speaker 03

  For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  Tremfya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremfya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject Tremfya, proper training is required. Tremfya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis, serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them, and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your

• 54:02Speaker 03

  doctor about Tremfya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more, or visit tremfyaradio.com.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Welcome back to The Rest Is History. So Dominic, at the end of part one, you were promising bombshell revelations. What are these bombshell revelations?

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Okay. So one day in the middle of October 1793, one of Danton's friends, the bloke who designed the new calendar, Philippe Fabre de Glantine.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  He sounds a Roman.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, terrible name. He asked to see Robespierre in Saint Just. And they met him, and they met him along with the Committee of General Security, the police committee. And Fabre said to them, I have sensational information about the foreign plot to undermine the revolution. He said, I have uncovered this network of spies and basically financiers, speculators, Spanish, Belgian, Austrian, Czech, Prussian, loads of different names. It's this big web of very shady characters, and a lot of these people are posing as foreign friends of the revolution. And they are being funded by the worst people in the world,

• 55:14Speaker 02

  the British, by William Pitt. They have infiltrated our clubs. They've infiltrated the convention. They have even infiltrated the ruling committees. And it is these people who are funding the factions criticizing the government, for example, Ebert and his ultra radical campaign. They are the spearhead of this. And Robespierre and Saint Just listen to this, and they are shocked, of course, they're appalled by it, but they are not surprised. Because of course, they've always believed there was a foreign plot. This is just confirming everything they had suspected. Is there really a foreign plot?

• 55:56Speaker 02

  No. This is the crazy thing. This bloke Fabre's made all this up. So basically, this isn't an absolutely bonkers story. Fabre's made this up to hide his own corruption. So what Fabre has been doing is, we mentioned in the first half, that there's been a lot of corruption. There's a lot of money changing hands, bribes and all of this. Fabre and some of his pals have been extorting and embezzling vast sums of money from banks, from life insurance companies, and above all, from a company called the French East India Company, which is in the process of being wound up by government order. Fabre's been taking all this money.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  And Fabre's worried that Ebert is going to expose him. So what he thought he'd do is, he thought, well, I'll denounce Ebert as a tool of a foreign conspiracy. I'll tell Robespierre what he wants to believe. I'll bring down Ebert before he can expose my corruption.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  Because that's the key, isn't it? That he's telling Robespierre what he knows Robespierre will want to hear.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  Completely. Exactly. Now, at first, Robespierre and co don't do anything with this information. They sort of sit on it. But clearly, people are talking because rumors start to spread. And the rumors spread around the convention. There's talk of corruption. There's talk of, this talk of, you know, foreign bankers and embezzling and the plot and all this. And at this, another deputy, who's called François Chabot, he's also worried about being exposed for quite separate corruption. So he goes to see Robespierre with a different conspiracy. He says, I have evidence that foreigners and royalists are behind a plot to embezzle money from the East India Company.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Got it. I mean, if you had shares in the East India Company, you'd be getting them out with all this talk going around.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  You would. So that's the company that Fabre, as he has been embezzling from. So at this point, Robespierre has information from two different people about basically two different plots. Both of them are kind of fictional, but both of them are inspired by real corruption, by people trying to cover up their own corruption. And Robespierre, when he sits down and looks at these plots, he says, well, it's pretty obvious that both of these plots are real. And they're both part clearly of the same conspiracy. There's this massive spider's web of foreign financiers, corrupt deputies, and the East India Company. And as Robespierre sits and thinks about it, he thinks, well, this explains everything.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  This explains Ebert and his attack on the Christian church. It explains all the faction fighting, the criticism that we've been getting about the terror in the convention. All of this is being funded by the British. That flipping William Pitt is behind the whole thing. And Fabre, remember, is friends with Danton.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  And Danton is famously corrupt.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  Danton is incredibly corrupt. Both Fabre and Danton have been criticizing the terror.

• 58:54Speaker 02

  So at this point, does Robespierre seriously think that Danton is part of a foreign conspiracy? I think it's very hard to say because we don't have a window into Robespierre's mind. But what is definitely true is that if Robespierre wanted to think that,

• 59:10Speaker 01

  He could.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  He now has the ammunition to do it.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  And there's also all that, the chat of the fact that Danton had been making overtures to Marie Antoinette and the Austrians in the summer. So this is all part of the swirl of

• 59:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  conspiracy theory.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  There's a lot of chat about Danton generally, isn't there?

• 59:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  I think there's been for, for months, there has been talk that Danton is not quite as pure. He's not as dedicated.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Well, he's not incorruptible.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  No, exactly. So Robespierre doesn't rush into action. I think if Robespierre had genuinely been burning with hatred for Danton, he would have used this straight away. He doesn't. What he does though, is he prepares the ground. So all through January into 1794, they've had this row at the Jacobin Club, which we had before the break. In the next few weeks, he's talking to the enforcers of the revolution, the Committee of General Security, who run the police and the revolutionary tribunal. And a lot of the people on the Committee of General Security hate Danton because they quite enjoy running the terror. And one of these guys is called Vadier. And Vadier says, when they're talking about Danton, Vadier says, he has this extraordinary line,

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  "I'm looking forward to gutting that fat turbot." And when word of this reaches Danton, if you forgive my language, it's Danton's language, not mine. He says, "If Vadier touches me, I will eat his brains and shit in his skull."

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  It's just like Cicero.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like the dying days of the Keir Starmer government.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  So the 17th of January to 10 days after the row at the Jacobin, the Committee of General Security made their first move. They arrest Fabre and they arrest Chabot. So these, the two informants, and they arrest a few of Danton's other friends. Now meanwhile, the tension between Danton and Robespierre is growing almost day by day. Danton is still giving speeches, saying, you know, "We should not go to extremes. If anything, we should err on the side of liberty." And when he says about erring on the side of liberty, that seems to send a coded message that he's against the terror. There's then a sort of pause for 10 days, which is dominated by arguments about the revolt in what's now Haiti, in Saint-Domingue.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  And ultimately, the abolition of slavery, a huge, huge issue, huge deal. We don't really have time for it today. We'll have to do it in a separate series, I think. But the day after the abolition of slavery, which is the 5th of February, Robespierre gives another of his landmark speeches, clearly aimed at Danton.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  It's a banger of a speech, this.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  It's a big speech. What's the point of the revolution? What's the point of the terror? And he borrows from Cicero, of course, who they've all read, they're all obsessed with Cicero. And he paints this picture of this republic of virtue in which, you know, vices will become virtues and all of this. And he says, "We want France to be the model to the nations, the terror of oppressors, the consolation of the oppressed, the ornament of the universe. That is our ambition. That is our aim." You know, a wonderful vision.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  But we cannot have that without the terror. Without terror, virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Famous chilling words.

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he says, you know, the critics of the terror say the terror is falling on ordinary people, but it isn't. Because if you're a virtuous patriot and you're a citizen, you have nothing to fear. If you are against us, you have no rights because you cannot be a citizen. You're putting yourself outside the republic. So as long as you stay in the tent, the terror will never fall on you. You'd have anything to worry about. Now, as R R Palmer says in his great book, 12 Who Ruled, the thing about this is basically it's kind of a recipe for permanent terror. Because Robespierre is saying the terror will fall on you if you ever step outside the tent.

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  But basically, he's saying if you ever criticize or if you ever disagree, you are not a citizen, you are not a patriot, you are not a Frenchman. And therefore, you know, there's only one way you're headed and that's you're getting on your tumbrel.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  This is the kind of blueprint for the 20th century totalitarian

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  states. But I guess to defend Robespierre, he doesn't know that. He is still negotiating the contours of this kind of new dispensation, which is something very novel and potentially chilling, as you said. But, but I think you have to believe in Robespierre's incorruptibility. He does think he's doing the right thing.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  But that's the chilling thing though, isn't it about Robespierre? He's totally sincere.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  If he was here now, he would say, "You don't understand. I am going to build a better world. I genuinely am interested in virtue."

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Because virtue without terror is nothing.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  That's exactly what he thinks. That is exactly what he thinks. It's telling, I think, with, people keep falling ill so often in this series. It's a sign of how overwrought Robespierre is that he gives this speech and he immediately falls ill, overworked, stressed. He seems, I mean, everybody has it, but he does seem especially prone to burnout. And he retreats for almost a month to the Duplay family's house, which is where he lodges, which you described before. Now, while he's away, the pressure carries on building. France is now mobilizing militarily on an unprecedented scale in European history. 700,000 men in uniform, the whole economy is basically being put to work to feed and supply the army.

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  And that means that everything else is deteriorating. So on the 23rd of February, government agents report to the committees, "The situation in Paris is really alarming. There are shops that are completely empty, the butchers are all closed, people are fighting in the streets for food. And when merchants arrive in the, in the city with supplies in the countryside, they're being attacked by mobs of women who are scrabbling to get all this bread or vegetables or whatever."

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  So it's like 1789 all over again.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  It is like 1789 all over again, but the committee are very unsympathetic. So the committee actually say, "Well, if the public, you know, they're whingeing about no bread, they must cultivate Spartan virtues." Georges Couton says, "What are they complaining about? All they need is a single scrap of meat a day. If I had the police power in my hands, I would make privation the order of the day."

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Slogans for a happier France.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  Of course, the person who's benefiting from this is Ebert on the ultra radical wing. Because by early February, Ebert has turned his rhetoric up to 11. He is running these absolutely ferocious editorials, saying, you know, tavern keepers, butchers, grocers, farmers, get them all to the guillotine. If they can't provide for the people of Paris, we will, you know, punish them until they do. There are protests in the streets. There's this sort of sense that we've had so often in the revolution of momentum, of tension, of moving towards an inevitable showdown. And that moment seems to come on the 4th of March, 1794. Ebert goes to the Cordelier Club, founded ironically by Danton.

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  And he says, you know, "Heads have got to roll. I've got a list here of 73 deputies. These are people who supported the Gironde. They've got to go. Des milans got to go. There's a load of moderates and weaklings. They're traitors. They've got to go." And at the end of this meeting, they take a black veil and they put it over the framed picture of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. And they say, "We are not going to withdraw it until the people have recovered their sacred rights." And everybody understands this is the cue, the signal for a new insurrection, a new attack on the convention, effectively a new son culotte coup. But the difference between this and previous ones is that this one fizzles out almost immediately.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  Because they call to the sections of Paris, the neighborhoods, but only one of them, the Cordelier, their own one, Ebert's home one, is the only one that answers the call. The Paris Commune, the city government, doesn't call out the National Guard. There is a sense, I think, that Paris is exhausted, that basically people are sick of grabbing their halberds or whatever and

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  you know, taking to the streets.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Is, is this the first time that an attempt to outflank the kind of establishment on the left fails?

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  Yes, it is.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  That radicalism up till now has always seemed to have the wind in its sails. And this is the first time that the wind doesn't blow the sails.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  Yes, it is. That's what Ebert's fate absolutely denotes. It's like this far and no further. The radical energies of the revolution have reached their kind of natural limit, I would say. So amid all this, amid all this kind of chaos, the convention votes to renew the powers of the Committee of Public Safety for another month. And that same evening, Robespierre returns from his sick bed for the first time in weeks. And he goes to the Committee of Public Safety. It's a momentous sort of late night meeting. Saint-Just has brought along a big report on the rival factions, a denunciation of the factions. He says, "I want to read this to the convention tomorrow." The rest of the committees say, "Fine, go for it." So the next day, the 13th of March, Saint-Just gets up in the Tribune of the Convention.

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  And he reads out what he calls "A report on the factions of foreign inspiration and on the conspiracy plotted by them to destroy representative government by corruption and to starve Paris." And Saint-Just says to the convention, yeah, Saint-Just is a very compelling speaker. People are frightened of Saint-Just as a speaker because he's so good at it. He says, "All of this that we see on the streets right now, the food shortages, the political opposition, the sense of mounting chaos, this is part of a vast conspiracy masterminded from London. A conspiracy so vast that it's penetrated the clubs and it's working through the factions. People who are moderates, people who are extremists, they're all pretending they are working for our enemies.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Every faction is criminal because it works to divide our citizens." And as Palmer says in his book, "It's not the voice of revolution. It's not the voice of rebellion. This is the voice, the language of men in power." So it's the language of authority stamping out dissent.

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  And that evening, the committee makes its move. Ebert and his key collaborators are arrested and taken off to prison alongside, and this is a very Reign of Terror trick, this bizarre collection of people that they will just throw in to try to give the appearance of a conspiracy. So to quote Palmer on this, the people arrested included a Dutch banker, a French general, a hairdresser, a bookseller, a tobacconist, a doctor, a surgeon's apprentice, an ex-peasant woman, and someone described as a man of letters.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  String up the man of letters.

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  Definitely. Someone described as a man of letters is a very nice touch, I think. It's like, like in the old days, like in the old days of my mid-market newspaper, I top them thing when I used to refer to people I disapproved of as self-styled intellectuals.

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  Anyway, these people are all dragged in front of the tribunal. They're accused of being a foreign conspiracy. The trial begins on the 22nd of March. Ebert is accused of trying to undermine the economy, but there's attacks on shopkeepers. Ebert can't believe this.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's the toast of the streets. He's the friend of the people.

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, Ebert is completely stunned by this and he keep, he, he doesn't take it seriously. I think he thinks the streets will rise.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  And rescue him. And this doesn't happen at all. And when he's proclaimed guilty on the 24th of March and he's sentenced to death, Ebert is stunned. He can't believe it.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  Don't you know who I am?

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. He's taken away, he's taken straight to the guillotine. There's a massive crowd and people are so excited about this. I mean, Ebert, the man who wanted to guillotine everybody else, he's getting guillotines and he disgraces himself. He's a shambles. He's no Marie Antoinette.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  So he does not behave with, yeah, the dignity of the ex-queen.

• 1:11:40Speaker 02

  No. So one man in the crowd, the government agents reported to the committees what was said. So there's brilliant quotes. One man in the crowd apparently said of Ebert and his collaborators, they died like cowards without balls. And another one sounding very Trumpian, I have to say, said, we thought that Ebert would have more courage, but he died like a loser.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  Thank you for your attention to this matter.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, he died like a dog. Anyway, that's the end of Ebert. Now, as you said, Tom, this is a very significant moment in the revolution because it's the first time you've had authority versus the streets and authority has definitively won. And there's a sense, I think now, okay, it's clear that where the revolution's not going to go. You know, it's not going to tip over into this sort of ultra populism. However, the other implication of this, the committees wanted to hold what they saw as the line between the two factions. They've basically crushed one. What are they going to do about the other, which is Danton and his allies? So now we come back to the issue of Danton and Robespierre.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  As you said at the beginning, it's seen as this kind of Titanic duel between these two completely different personalities, struggle for the soul of the revolution, all of this, a struggle for power between two implacable antagonists. But that's really not right. Robespierre, I think, does not want to kill Danton. That's why it takes so long to do it. And he genuinely, I think, hopes that Danton will come round. So if you've seen the film, in the film from the 1980s, this is very celebrated scene where Danton and Robespierre have a kind of reconciliation dinner, organised by Danton in the film, which I think is not correct. And Danton is like stuffing himself with oysters. He's like a man at the Rest is History's Christmas dinner.

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  Wine, port, foie gras, you name it.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  It's all flatter.

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  Exactly. But Robespierre is just sitting there chilly, doesn't want to eat anything. Actually, in the written sources, most of them say that they had this meeting, Danton was very emotional and some of them say Danton burst into tears. Those sources tend to come from the later 19th century. And I think what historians think is they probably, what probably happened was, it might not have been a dinner, it might have been a dinner, we don't know, but they must have had one or more meetings in the last week in March. Robespierre saying to Danton, could you give us your support? Could you back the committees? You know, surely we can find a way through this. And Danton not playing ball, saying, no, I don't agree with you.

• 1:14:22Speaker 02

  I think the terror has to end.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  I think, I mean, I remember that, that Robespierre, the, the stories that Danton cried, that Robespierre saw this as a malign tactic on the part of Danton to make him feel bad.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. But they're so emotional, they're always crying, aren't they, the French revolutionary leaders? I mean, I don't think it's unreasonable by Danton. Anyway, the truth is, the sources on this are so vague, it's impossible to know. What we do know is that by the end of March, Robespierre has made up his mind that Danton has to go. It is clear to Robespierre, Danton is not going to abandon his campaign against the terror. And actually, Desmoulins has prepared a new issue of the Vieux Cours de Lié and it's seen as so damning about the Committee of Public Safety that the printers are refusing to touch it. So as Robespierre sees it, I mean, people always tell the story from Danton's perspective, completely understandably, and not Robespierre's, but just from Robespierre's perspective.

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  Robespierre's perspective is Danton is going to destroy the revolution. The terror is what's keeping the revolution going and Danton is going to destroy it. And he's surrounded himself with a load of kind of total mediocrities and, and actors.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  Plus, he's massively corrupt and he's always taking bungs.

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  And you can't have that in a virtuous republic.

• 1:15:38Speaker 02

  No. So the last days of March, Robespierre and Saint-Just prepare the indictment. The case, as we've said, writes itself, right? The corruption. We know that Danton took dodgy money. Robespierre has all these allegations of massive conspiracies and things. And, you know, Danton has been unguarded and he has said things to Robespierre that most people would laugh off, but Robespierre, yeah, he's not a funster. So when Danton said to him, they were talking about virtue, and Danton said to Robespierre, I know no virtue greater than that which I practise every night with my wife.

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  Robespierre does not smile at this. He thinks this is disgraceful.

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  And Saint-Just thinks it's disgraceful as well. And in the speech that he will give against Danton, he cites that specifically and clearly does not take it as a joke in the slightest. And I think the lesson is it's dangerous to make jokes when Robespierre and Saint-Just are on the scene.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  Completely. So late on the evening of the 29th of March, the drama is set in train. So there's a joint meeting of the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. Saint-Just presents them with his indictment. He says, I'm going to read this in the convention tomorrow and then I'm going to call for Danton's arrest. And the men from the General Security Committee, basically the political police, Vadié and Amar, they say, are you mad? Danton's a brilliant speaker. If you read this out in the convention, Danton will reply, he will destroy you and then you'll look like a fool. You arrest him first, get him safely locked up, then denounce him. Saint-Just is very offended by this, by the thought that, that they don't rate his rhetorical

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  ability compared with Danton's. He basically has a strop. He throws his hat in the fire and then storms out.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  That is a strop.

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a massive sulk. So he storms out and actually all the other members of the Committee of Public Safety say, you know what, you're right, we probably should arrest him first. So they agreed they'll do that. They drew up the warrant. One by one, they sign it. You can see this in the film, very famous scene. One member of the Committee of General Security says he won't sign it. And also a member of the Committee of Public Safety, Robert Lindé, who's in charge of supplying the army. And Lindé says, my job is to provide for our citizens, not to execute our patriots. And that little hint there of a fracture within the Committee of Public Safety between the people who are getting stuff done, Lindé, Kano and people like that, and then the

• 1:18:09Speaker 02

  people who love talking about virtue and organising executions, that's going to become more pronounced in a couple of months. Anyway, this meeting breaks up. So it's now the early hours of the 30th of March.

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  I think it's pretty clear that in the next few hours rumours spread and somebody tipped Danton and Desmoulins off. There are various accounts of what was said. Danton supposedly, one version said that he was told flee the city and he said, no, they won't move against me, they wouldn't dare. Danton was cocky. Another version, he's told to emigrate and he said, no, I will never leave France. You cannot carry your homeland on the soles of your shoes. A nice line. And there are stories that Desmoulins went to see his old classmates, Maximilien Robespierre, went to his house but was turned away from the door and said, I am lost. If he won't see me, I am lost. Anyway, that night, the 30th, they are arrested, they're taken to the Luxembourg prison, they're going to face trial by the

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  revolutionary tribunal. We don't have any accounts of the scene when they were arrested, unfortunately. But we do know that the next day, the 31st, the news spread very quickly. It was a massive sensation. A police agent reported, people are stunned and don't know what to think. And in the convention, a scene of total chaos. So one of Danton's allies rushes into the convention. He says, unbelievable, Danton's been arrested. Citizens, I declare that Danton's as pure as I am. It's an unwise thing to say. Yeah, I know, I know. God. I mean, also for travel, why don't you? Risky. So there's tumult in the hall. This guy who broke the news, he's called Lejeune. He says, they should bring in the prisoners, bring in Danton and Desmoulins, let them face their accusers,

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

  bring in the committee, let's have this out. And Robespierre forces his way through the shouting throng of people. He is described as pale with anger and seemingly impelled by the sense of a great danger. And he gets up there and he says to the convention, from his perspective, not unreasonably, we've arrested so many people, why does Danton get special treatment? You know, we should treat the people we arrest equally. And he says to them, do you not have the courage to break a false idol? And then he is followed onto the tribunal by Saint Just. The archangel of death, icy kind of recital of the charges. Danton was working with the foreign plot. Danton was taking money. And if you doubt it, look what's happening to

• 1:20:35Speaker 02

  France. Look at the shortages. Look at the collapse of our currency. Look at the hoarding of goods. Look at the unrest in the provinces. This is all the foreign plot. The men we are denouncing were never patriots. They were aristocrats, more adroit and cunning than those at Coblenz, i.e. the immigrants. Yeah, their maxims were those of Cataline. Exactly. So they've gone from being Cicero, they've become Cataline. So this does the trick. The Robespierre-Saint Just combo, which often works, the convention fall into line. And so it is that two days later, on the 2nd of April, Danton and Desmoulins are led into the Palais de Justice for trial by the tribunal. And as with Ebert, the committee

• 1:21:16Speaker 02

  have muddied the waters by throwing in a load of random people, bankers and things. So there's a Dutchman, a Belgian, there's two Moravians, there's a Dane and there's a Spaniard. I mean, to be fair, everyone hates a foreign banker. They do. Exactly. I thought you were going to say everyone hates a Dutchman, but... No, I love a Dutchman. You love the Dutch. And Fabre and Chabot, they're also there. So the two blokes who'd gone to Robespierre to save themselves with their plot stories. Yeah. They failed to do so. And the point, of course, is throwing so many people in this to create the sense of conspiracy. And from the start, Danton's in great form. He says to his fellow prisoners, provided they let us speak at length, I am sure of routing my accusers. I don't think he thinks he's going to get away. He thinks he's just going

• 1:21:59Speaker 02

  to humiliate them and they will execute him, but he will go down fighting and history will reward him. Yeah, he'll leave a name to posterity. Completely. At this point, I think, I have, I do have to say, Danton is very confused in my mind with Winston Churchill, because I think this is exactly how Churchill would have behaved. You know, the sort of, the bumpousness, the arrogance. Looking to history as his judge. Completely. Yeah. I mean, this is so Churchillian. They ask him at the trial, yeah, when he's checking into the prison or something, what's your name and address? And he says, I will soon be living nowhere. As for my name, you will find it in the pantheon of history. I mean, that's amazing. Yeah. But Desmoulins is even, is even less modest, isn't he? Yes, he is. I mean, Desmoulins, to be fair, who's often described as this sort

• 1:22:44Speaker 02

  of immature weakling. They ask him for his age and he says, I'm 33, the same age as the son coolot Jesus Christ when he stood before Pontius Pilate. I mean, you can see how basically if you were standing next to Danton, you'd be, you'd raise your game, wouldn't you? You'd raise your repartee game. And actually, what follows, the trial. The trial is one of the great set pieces in all French history. So it's held in the Palais de Justice. It's packed. The galleries are rammed with spectators. Massive anticipation. The prosecutor, I mean, you couldn't make this up, the prosecutor is Desmoulins's distant cousin. He's a guy called Fouquier-Tanville. And he's always described as the villain

• 1:23:24Speaker 02

  of the piece, that one of Stalin's prosecutors. But actually, I think that's a bit unfair. Most historians say Fouquier is actually quite a conscientious lawyer and a stickler for details, methodical, serious and stuff. And he's, he completely fails to keep order. So people are shouting all the time from the galleries. Danton, who's a very big man, is just treating this as a stage. He's like a kind of bull tossing dogs left, right and centre. Completely. And he's so loud, everyone says he's got this tremendous voice. He's so loud that people are standing in the street outside, outside the building and they

• 1:24:05Speaker 02

  can still hear him. He says this on day one, men like me cannot be bought. On their brows are imprinted in ineffaceable characters, the seal of liberty, the genius of republicanism, and I am accused of having crawled at the feet of vile despot. And the court president tries to cut him off by sort of tinkling this little bell. And Danton says, the voice of a man who has to defend both his life and honour must vanquish the sound of your little bell. So that's day one. He's warming up. Day two is the turn of the defence. Fouquier's presented the indictment. At this point, Danton is just on absolutely titanic form.

• 1:24:46Speaker 02

  He doesn't bother looking at the jury or the judges. He does all of his remarks to the spectators. And he says, my friends, you will judge me when you have heard me. My voice will be heard, not just by you, but by all of France. And the world. And the world, exactly. He says, you know, where are my accusers? Where is Robespierre? Where are the committees? The cowards who slander me but do not dare to attack me to my face. And at the end of the day, he ends with these absolutely magnificent lines. If ever I'm on trial for some driving offence or something, I'd like to think I'd go down like this. During the last two days, the court has got to know Danton. Tomorrow, he hopes to sleep in the bosom of glory. He has never asked for pardon. You will see him

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  fly to the scaffold with his usual serenity and the calm of a clear conscience. Do you know, I almost want you to be arrested for a traffic offence, to say that I can hear you deliver that peroration. Do you? The reality would be so banal. I'm so sorry. Yeah, I'm a bit tired. So for the authorities, this is a terrible embarrassment. And it's actually getting worse because at the beginning of day three, Danton says, I would like to call a long list of witnesses in my defence. And he has a huge list of deputies from the convention and even members of the Committee of Public Safety. And the judges say, no, you can't call all these people. And the crowds start hooting and shouting at them. And Fouquier-Tanville,

• 1:26:13Speaker 02

  the prosecutor, who is described by one witness as affolé, which means panicked, he scribbles a note to the Committee of Public Safety and he says, look, this is totally out of control now. If we don't change the rules, I cannot guarantee that we will get Danton's conviction. And Saint Just rushes to the convention and he says, we have a national emergency. I have to say, this is shameless from Saint Just. We've all been talking about his, you know, their rigid principles and their belief in their own virtue and they're really sincere and all this. But this, I cannot be sincere. This is cynical. Saint Just says, Danton's allies in the prisons are planning a mass breakout and they're

• 1:26:54Speaker 02

  going to murder members of the convention. And actually, Desmoulins's wife, Lucille, is in on it. She's one of the organisers. That's not gallant, is it? It's not good from Saint Just. And Saint Just goes on to say, look at the way Danton is behaving in the courtroom, shouting, dominating, all of this. Doesn't that prove he's guilty? What innocent man ever revolted against the law? I mean, a chilling sentiment. Basically, defend yourself, it proves you're guilty. And the convention approves an emergency decree that the prosecutors can remove defendants from the courtroom if their behaviour insults the justice of the nation. That same day, by the way, the Committee of General Security issues a warrant for Lucille Desmoulins's arrest as well, so Desmoulins's wife. Now,

• 1:27:37Speaker 02

  she, in the interim, had written Robespierre a very moving letter, reminding him of their old friendship and how important he'd been to their family. She'd said to him, do you think the people will respect you for destroying your friends? Do you think they will bless somebody who doesn't care about a widow's tears or an orphan's plight? And she even went to Robespierre's house, but Robespierre refused to see her. I mean, the thing is that for Robespierre, this is the index of his virtue because he is genuinely distraught at the thought of them dying. Yeah. I'm such a kind person, I'm killing my friends. Well, but you know, who would you, who would you betray, your friends or your country? He's betraying his friends.

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So in the meantime, Fouquier-Tanville now has what he needs. The next morning, the 5th of April, Danton and co are removed from the court. They're dragged out and as they're dragged out, Danton shouts furiously. He says, we're going to be judged without being heard. And then he says very mockingly, you know, go on, take us to the scaffold. Fouquier says to the jury, I believe you've heard all you need to. Can you make your decision? The sentence is, of course, death. As they're waiting in the Luxembourg prison, Danton seems rueful. He's actually quite wry. He says, funny thing is, none of those people know anything about government. If I left my balls to Robespierre, my legs to Kooton, the Committee of Public Safety might last a bit longer. But I think that's a very

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  good line. Desmoulins, however, is crushed at the thought of parting from his wife, Lucille. He doesn't know at this point that she has been arrested. And he writes to this last letter, very affecting, one of the most well-known letters in French history. My Lucille, my darling, despite my torment, I believe there is a God. One day I will see you again. Adieu, Lulule. Adieu, my life, my soul, my goddess on earth. I feel the shores of life receding before me. I see you again, Lucille. I see my arms around you. My tied hands embrace you. My severed head rests its eyes on you. But she never actually gets to read it because she has now been locked up as well.

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  So late that afternoon, they are taken to the guillotine. Dusk is falling. You described the scene, the eyewitness account. Desmoulins, just before he was executed, was told that his wife had been arrested and he was devastated. He fought with the executioners on the scaffold until the shirt had almost been ripped from his body and they have to force him into the guillotine. And then Danton goes last. He cuts this incredibly defiant figure, that amazing last line. Don't forget to show my head to the people. It'll be worth it. You know, a very fitting epitaph. And finally, Lucille Desmoulins, she was guillotined a week later and she wrote a very affecting last letter to her mother before she died. "Good night, dear maman. A tear falls from my eyes.

• 1:30:31Speaker 02

  It is for you. I am going to sleep in the tranquility of innocence." So that's that. Danton is dead and Robespierre and the Comités have won. And on the face of it, Robespierre now appeals unassailable. And he and his allies have crushed their critics and they've sent a clear message that basically any challenge will not be tolerated. However, inside the Comités, it's clear there is now a mood of deep suspicion. So the army guy, Carnot, later said, "That spring," so let's say March, April, "we had to move our meetings to a different room so that people would not be able to observe the storms that agitated us." And of course, in the convention, if you're one of their deputies

• 1:31:15Speaker 02

  and you've just seen Ebert on, as it were, the left, go to the guillotine and you've seen Danton, on the more moderate wing, go to the guillotine. You know, if they can both go, who's to say you're safe? And actually, even at this point, with Robespierre, apparently at his peak, there are signs that this cannot last and people who think this can't last. And there's a story that when Danton was on his way to the guillotine in the Tunbril, he looked up as they went past Robespierre's house and he said, almost to himself, "You will soon be following us. They will tear your house down and they will sow the ground with salt."

• 1:31:59Speaker 02

  And as we will see, he was not wrong.

• 1:32:01Speaker 01

  Thank you, Dominic. The stage is now set for the climax of this series, the dramatic final weeks of the Reign of Terror. So next week, two episodes to finish this series. First of all, the apotheosis of Robespierre as he climbs yet another Papier-Mache mountain to celebrate the festival of the supreme being, a very, I mean, kind of one of the most bizarre episodes in the whole of the French Revolution. And then the last episode, it's the final showdown as the convention turns on a Robespierre and the revolution destroys its favorite son.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  And club members, of course, you can go ahead, hear those episodes right away. And if you are not a member of the club and you'd like to join them, then sign up at therestishistory.com. And on Wednesday, very excitingly, club members will get a very special bonus, a discussion about the French Revolution with one of its best-known chroniclers, the great historian Simon Sharma. Au revoir.

• 1:33:14Speaker 02

  Au revoir.

• 1:33:24Speaker 04

  You know that friend you only call when you need something? HomeServe's here for you. Got a burst pipe, HVAC outage, or electrical issue? HomeServe has your back for regular use where basic homeowners insurance typically won't help. With a protection plan from HomeServe in place before disaster strikes, just call us. We'll send a qualified contractor and help you avoid unexpected expenses. Maybe we're the last ones you want to call, but we're happy to hear from you. Go to homeserve.com/audio for 50% less your first year. Savings compared to renewal price in Florida.

• 1:33:57Speaker 05

  20th Century Studios presents the most incredible survival story of the year.

• 1:34:04Speaker 05

  Whale Fall, on October 16th. To survive the unthinkable, do the impossible. You're going to become so dangerous that the predators can't help but let you go.

• 1:34:13Speaker 00

  We're going to get out of here.

• 1:34:19Speaker 05

  Whale Fall, rated PG-13, in theaters October 16th. Get tickets now.

• 1:34:25Speaker 06

  Dev Experts has over 20 years of experience in fintech development with more than 800 engineers and a physical presence in 11 countries. Supporting some of the largest institutions in finance with trading platforms, order management systems, matching engines and more, Dev Experts is here to help your financial business succeed. Learn more.