712. The Terror: The Fall of Robespierre (Part 6)

Why did the Terror reach unprecedented levels of bloodshed in 1794? Who was running France by this point? And, how was Robespierre finally destroyed, and dragged to the guillotine by his former allies…? Join Dominic and Tom as they reach the terrifying, climactic conclusion to their series on the Terror, as well as the French Revolution, with the gory execution of one of its most infamous players: Maximilien Robespierre. Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠⁠restishistory.com⁠⁠. To read our new newsletter, sign up at: ⁠⁠therestishistory.com/newsletters⁠⁠ _______ This episode is sponsored by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Try Claude for free today at http://Claude.ai/restishistory. _______ Advertise with us: ⁠[email protected]⁠ _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:58Speaker 01

  They call me a tyrant. If I were, they would crawl at my feet, I would stuff them with gold, I would give them the right to commit all the crimes they liked, and they would thank me for it. What is the faction I belong to? It is you, yourselves. What is the faction that since the beginning of the revolution has struck down so many traitors? It is you, it is the people. This is the only faction to which I am devoted. Who am I? I who have been accused. Why? A slave of liberty, a living martyr of the republic, both the victim and the enemy of crime.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Men who know me are slandered, other men's felonies are forgiven, but my zeal is treated as a crime. If you take away my conscience, I am the unhappiest of all men. I do not even enjoy the rights of a citizen. I am not even allowed to fulfill the duties of a representative of the people. I was made to combat crime, not to govern it. The time has not yet come when good men can freely serve the fatherland. For as long as this horde of rogues is in control, the defenders of liberty will be outcasts. So that's a brilliant speech. Maximilien Robespierre, addressing the National Convention on 26th of July, 1794.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  He's combating crime, he's defending the revolution, he is sneering at the very suggestion that he's a tyrant. Of course, he's not a tyrant. And yet, Dominic, you have written here a characteristically rambling, self-pitying speech.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is a rambling and self-pitying speech. I've actually read the whole thing. You can find the whole thing online. And to try to find a bit for you to read was a Herculean undertaking that probably took longer than preparing the notes for the episode, because it's so wordy, so rambling, so self-indulgent, his speech. Historians, I have to say, have given it an absolute pasting, by and large. It is worse than a bad speech, as we will discover. It is a terrible political mistake by Robespierre.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Worse than a crime and a mistake.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Exactly. So, and what is more, this is his envoi to the French Revolution and to this podcast. This is the last speech he ever made. Well, as we will see, there was a later speech that he makes, but actually, no one could hear what he was saying.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, he didn't have any strepsils.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Exactly. So, ladies and gentlemen, we are at the climax of this series. This is the 24th episode of the French Revolution. Now, initially, we did it in one.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  We did it in one 45-minute episode.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  And I think the average length of these episodes is about, what, four hours now?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Twice as long as that episode. Yeah, exactly.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Back then, it was kind of 40 minutes, wasn't it?

• 5:58Speaker 02

  So let's hope this isn't like the climax of Game of Thrones or something, that people say, it was poor, they threw it away, and the wrong person won. So happily, the French Revolution, as it's commonly told, ends with a narrative banger, like the fall of the Bastille, like the flight of Arend, like the murder of Mara, like the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, or the fall of Don Thon. It is a fantastic story, and there is lots of narrative drama, loads of twists. What is interesting about this story is that we know more about what happened on the 26th and 27th of July, 1794, than almost any other point in the revolution, because the people who ended up winning commissioned detailed reports from across Paris, from all the different sections, which were the kind of neighborhoods of Paris, as well

• 6:42Speaker 02

  as hundreds of different individual police reports. A great historian, Colin Jones, wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Fall of Robespierre, based on all these reports, reconstructing almost minute by minute the events of those two days. And yet, as he points out, the paradox is, we know what people did, but we don't know what they said or what they thought. And so much of this is a mystery, because it happened behind closed doors, it happened, there were whispers in the shadows. And basically, as soon as it was all over, people started making up stuff about why they behaved as they did, they started inventing things, and the truth became obscured behind this kind of great fog of propaganda. But two things right at the beginning.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Number one, what happens in today's episode is not inevitable. I don't think any historian thinks it's inevitable. This is your classic case in history of a very dramatic event in which things could have turned out very differently, so often the way with political crises.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  And that's the genius of Colin Jones's book, isn't it? That he makes what is a very familiar story seem exciting, unexpected, you don't know, as you turn the pages, you don't know what's going to happen.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  He has a nice, it's a very simple trick, but by telling it in the present tense, he gives it a sense of immediacy.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Like Carlisle.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  The grand old man of British writers on the French Revolution.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  There was a sense in his book that the end is not yet written, the end is not predetermined, which is as it should be. The other thing, I think, which his book reinforces, this really is a story about individuals and individual decision-making. It's actually so often in sort of textbooks about the French Revolution, you'll see the lines, you know, this couldn't last forever, there was inevitably going to be a backlash, and when it came, Robespierre fell. But actually, in this case, it becomes very clear, this is not about a backlash against the terror, or at least if there is a backlash against the terror, it's not the sole cause. There was a nice line, I thought, from a Montaigne deputy called Marc Antoine Baudou, which probably sums the whole thing up. Baudou said, "The struggle of the Ninth of Tiamidor," which is the date attributed to this, "was not a matter of principles, it was a matter of killing." And we will see how true that is.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  I suppose an obvious point would be that accusing someone of having the wrong principles is an excellent way of killing them.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Exactly so. So let's get straight into it, and let's set the scene. We're in Paris, it is the 15th of June, 1794. It's a week after the Festival of the Supreme Being, and the reign of terror is at its height. So if you listened to the last episode, you will recall Tom describing the law of Pré Riel, which was passed five days ago on the 10th of June. And Pré Riel created this new category of enemies of the people. So these are, if you mislead the people, if you spread false news, you deprave public morals, you speak ill of the republic, all of this. And these political criminals will be tried by the revolutionary tribunal with no legal representation, no witnesses, and there's no need for evidence. The jurors can rely on their consciences and their love of the fatherland, and if the verdict is guilty, then the only possible sentence is death.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Now, at the time, there was a tiny bit of resistance in the convention.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Made the argument successfully that only people with something to hide could possibly be against this law.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  D'accord.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, in that case. And what happens in the next few weeks is that the terror reaches unprecedented levels. Now, on to the centralisation agenda, which has always been a huge part of the terror. All suspects in the provinces are now being brought to Paris to be tried and guillotined. Probably as a result of that, the conviction rate rises from 50% to 80%, and the rate of killing rises tenfold. This is very deliberate. One prosecutor says at the time, "With this new law, we will purge the prisons in a single blow and rid the soil of liberty of this garbage, these dregs of humanity." And so in the seven weeks after the 10th of June, so that's between the 10th of June and 27th of July, and that's basically the period of today's episode, about 1,400 people are guillotined.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  That's more than in the whole of the previous 14 months. So the law of Prairieelle, if you are Robespierre, is really working. And some of the victims, I mean, the victims include some people we've talked about in the podcast, so for example, the lawyer who defended Louis XVI, Malzerb. I remember you, you were quite a fan of his, weren't you, Tom?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Well, he's very widely admired. I mean, he's seen almost as a kind of conscience of the early stages of the revolution. So to lose him is really quite something.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  People who like science, Francis greatest chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, he's for the chop as well. If you like poetry, Francis greatest poet, André Chigny, is also guillotined, as are, of course, hundreds of ordinary men and women, as one historian puts it, who had muttered too loudly about the price of bread.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Time to revolutionary behaviour.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  So that summer, so many people are killed that there is a problem with the guillotine. The guillotine, as we described last time, for the festival of the supreme being, it had been moved away. It had been moved to, from Place de la Révolution to Place de la Bastille. But at the Place de la Bastille, the shopkeepers complained that this is bad for business. They don't like the tombrils rattling past, and they definitely don't like the guillotine. They don't like the pools of blood in the square, and they don't like the rotting bodies, especially in the summer heat. So on the 14th of June, the government moved the guillotine out of the city. Well, they moved it basically into the suburbs, to a square on the edge of the city, to the east, beyond the walls.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  But Dominic, just to say that it will be brought back to the Place de la Révolution in about six weeks for reasons that we will be coming to.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  Exactly right. Now, even at this point, there are people who say this has definitely gone too far now. There's a republican bookseller called Nicolas Rouault. I think we've quoted him a few times in earlier series. He's often quoted in histories of the revolution because he's such a great source. He wrote letters to his brother, he wrote loads of letters to his brother about what was going on in Paris, and he said, "Our leaders are now making themselves hated because of the horror. No citizen can be sure that he will be alive in two days' time." So talking of the leaders, let's focus in on them. And let's, if you imagine, if the rest of history were an HBO series or a film, there's one day, surely it will be. The camera is swooping over Paris and it zeroes in on one building in particular, on one room in that building. And the building is the royal palace of the Tuileries, and the room is in what were

• 12:45Speaker 02

  once Marie Antoinette's apartments. So if you imagine the camera swooping in, we're in a room with rich carpets, tapestries on the walls, this big chandelier, and in the middle is a huge oval table, which is covered with green baize, like a kind of snooker table. And the table is piled with papers, and there are 10 men around the table, and these are the members of the Committee of Public Safety. Now, by law, there are meant to be 12. One of them, a guy called Eero de Seychelles, was guillotined for corruption when Danton fell. Another one, the youngest member, man we've talked about a little fair bit, Louis Antoine de Saint Just, he is away in what's now Belgium, visiting the army.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  He's having a lovely time, very jolly.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  He is having a good time, when it's going well, as we will discover. And now of the others, these are the men who are running France in the summer of 1794. And very roughly, you can divide them into three groups. On one side, you have Robespierre and his friends. So that's Robespierre, Saint Just, the archangel of terror or archangel of death, and their friend Georges Couton, who's the bloke who's been-

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Too much sex.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's in a wheelchair. He says he's been having too much fun. I think historians generally think there are other reasons. To the public, these three men, Robespierre, Saint Just and Couton, are the faces of the Committee of Public Safety. They are the spokesmen for the terror, the champions of the terror. And that's actually how lots of sort of popular histories treat them to this day. Then you have the men who actually make things work, the technocrats, the bureaucrats who know how the machine works and are basically in charge of it. So three of them in particular, there is a guy called Lazar Kano, who was a mathematician and military engineer. He's effectively the minister of war. He's the guy who's in charge of the army. There is a guy called Claude Antoine Prieur, another military engineer. He's the minister of munitions.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  And a guy called Robert Lindet, who's the oldest member of the committee, he's a lawyer, and he is, you might call him the minister of supply. He's in charge of food supplies, the economy, infrastructure, all that. So you've got Robespierre and Co, you've got the technocrats. And then there's a more radical group, who, if you're doing it left and right, would be on Robespierre's left. And in particular, two friends, very important players in this story. There's a guy called Jean-Marie Collot, Collot d'Abois, he was called. So Collot used to be an actor and a theatre director, and he still has very dramatic kind of mannerisms, and it's got a sort of slightly lovey style to him. And then there's a lawyer, who's a great friend of his, called Jacques Nicolas Biodaire. Biodaire was a lawyer.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  These two guys, Collot and Biodaire, were economic radicals. They were appointed initially to please the sans-culottes, the masses on the streets. They were big fans of the terror. Collot had in fact been involved with the massacres in Lyon, so he's got a lot of blood on his record. Both of them are atheists. Now, last time we talked about the tension between Robespierre and the atheists. These guys, Collot and Biodaire, are very keen on the de-Christianisation campaign. They are not impressed by Robespierre's enthusiasm for the supreme being, which they regard as bonkers. And in recent months, Collot and Biodaire have become increasingly close to one other person we should talk about on the committee, who is called Bernard Barrère.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  He's the guy who proposed demolishing all the royal iconography in Saint-Denis.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Absolute trimmer.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Barrère is the longest-serving member of the committee. He's a fixer, he's a sort of Peter Mandelson figure, I suppose, isn't he? He's an operator.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  But unlike Peter Mandelson, he's a survivor.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, he doesn't keep having to resign in disgrace.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  He is the oldest living, surviving member of the, he dies in kind of 1883 or something.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, he advised Charles de Gaulle in 1940.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  He never, he's the eternal advisor. He's probably there advising Macron now.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  So Barrère has become close to Collot and Biodaire, the two radicals. In terms of what they actually do, these guys, their workload is intense. The only thing I think it possibly compares to is producing a history podcast.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Wow, they must be shattered.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're exhausted. On average, the Committee of Public Safety send out between 800 and 900 letters and decrees every day, and each decree requires multiple signatures. Some of them start work at seven o'clock in the morning. They work all morning, then they go to the convention in the afternoon for the debates. Some of them will go to the Jacobin Club to listen to the speeches in the evening. Others will just go straight back to work at the Committee of Public Safety's room in the Tuileries. By 10 o'clock in the evening, most of them are back at the table, doing their paperwork. They'll often work until two or three in the morning, and some of them, they're working so hard, they don't even bother going home, they just sleep in kind of makeshift camp beds that are put up in the committee room.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  So the fact that the guys who are basically running the French Revolution are getting by on three hours' sleep is perhaps an understated factor, the lunacy of what's going on.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Exactly. I totally, I mean, they are fraught. They're at the, this is why they keep having nervous breakdowns, physical collapses, and so on and so forth. But who actually is doing all of this work? I mean, this is a key part of the story. We actually have, I think, 608 surviving Committee of Public Safety orders from May and June, from the month of Prairieelle, as it was called. And 90% of these were drafted by the three technocrats, by Kano, Lindet and Prieur. So these are the guys who are basically running the war effort, and they are working effectively with a couple of hours' sleep here, a couple of hours' sleep there, and they're just constantly replying to letters, writing orders and all this. Also very hardworking are the radicals, Biodaire and Collot. We know this from the records, they are always there, they're very regular, they do loads

• 18:22Speaker 02

  of signatures on the papers, and they're handling a lot of the boring, routine correspondence.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Now, now.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Maximilien Robespierre, a slightly different story. He only drafted 14 degrees of these 608 and his mate Couton only drafted eight. Saint Just is a bit of a no-go because he's of course away with the army. So you can't really blame him. So these guys are not really doing the heavy lifting. Now, it's true that Robespierre is away a lot because of ill health, but as Colin Jones says, actually even before that, he wasn't really pulling his weight. He has provided the soundtrack, but his actual input has been minimal. There are a few people listening to this who have not worked with somebody like that, who does a lot of, you know, he seems very enthusiastic in meetings or whatever. But actually, when it comes to the heavy lifting, they're nowhere to be seen. Given how little sleep they've got and the pressure they're under, it's not surprising that cracks have emerged.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  So the tentacrats are basically drowning in paperwork. They are sick of the factional squabbles. They are exhausted of Robespierre's lectures about virtue and they are baffled and bored by the cult of the supreme being. So when they're forced to troop along to the cult of the supreme being, they're like, I have so much work to do.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  How long do I have to stay on this papier-mâché mountain? Is it urgent?

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Exactly. And they have become increasingly restive in recent months. So when the arrest warrant was drawn up for Danton, Robert Linde refused to sign it. Carnot has had these blazing rows with Robespierre and Saint Just. At one point, he called them ridiculous dictators. Now, anybody else who did this would risk heading to the guillotine. But these guys are so essential to the war effort and to the machine, they are effectively untouchable. You know, within reason, they can say what they like. The other people who are sick of Robespierre are Colo and Bio Varen. And for them, I think it's not so much political. Although there is the issue about atheism and de-Christianisation, a lot of this is personal. They find Robespierre haughty and sanctimonious. He clearly doesn't like them and doesn't trust them. And Bio really hates Robespierre.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  So when Robespierre comes into the room, Bio will fall silent. He will sort of sulk and brood and he kind of mutters under his breath while Robespierre is talking. Now, I said it was the 15th of June. They've got a meeting today and it's going to be especially tense. Everyone knows that because they've got a joint meeting in the diary with the Committee of General Security, which is the other big committee that runs the police and the revolutionary tribunal. And on this committee, general security, the two dominant figures are called Marc-Guyum Vadye and André Ammar. And Vadye and Ammar, effectively secret policemen, are very keen on the terror. They are very keen on the de-Christianisation campaign and they were very scornful of the festival of the supreme being. They have no time for it at all.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  And just generally, the committee of general security has become very resentful in recent months. They feel that the committee of public safety are taking over a lot of their powers and responsibilities, that they're treating them as underlings, not as equals. And Robespierre and Saint Just have even set up their own independent police bureau, reporting directly to them, which the general security people are not happy. It's your classic kind of FBI, CIA turf war. But today, when they come in, Vadye and Ammar seem very pleased with themselves. And Vadye says, well, I've got a long report to present. And he starts reading it out and he says, there is a new conspiracy threatening the republic. My agents have uncovered an eccentric old woman called Catherine Théo, who lives in the Latin Quarter.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  This woman Théo, for years claimed that she was the mother of God. It was unclear whether she was a separate mother of God or whether she was the Virgin Mary in some form.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Just to be clear, she is 80.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  So it would be a miracle.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  It would be a miracle. So for years before the revolution, she was held in the Soule Petrier Hospital. She was let out. She's now been hanging around in the Latin Quarter and she's been saying that she is about to give birth to a new Messiah and that Robespierre is his prophet. And this woman Théo has a small following, a few kind of semi aristocratic women, but mostly poor local women from the neighbourhood. Some of these women are informants for the committee of general security. I think what is pretty clear is that Vadye is hoping to use this against Robespierre. He is probably planning to forge correspondence or to coerce witnesses to state that Robespierre put this Catherine Théo up to it, that he is using this in order to get himself named

• 22:42Speaker 02

  as the son of God.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  This is such a kind of ludicrous expedient. It illustrates just how incorruptible Robespierre is, that they're reduced to peddling it. If you think that Danton was in that situation, there'd be no problem in finding some murky example of corruption, but they just haven't got anything on Robespierre.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Having to make mad stuff up. Exactly. And when Robespierre hears this, of course, Robespierre has no sense of humour. I think an important element, actually, in the story we're going to be telling. Robespierre has no sense of humour. Somebody else could have laughed it off or made a joke about it. Robespierre is very offended. He's furious, in fact. And it's clear to him that since this comes just a week after the festival of the supreme being, which you described as the happiest moment of his life, he's really offended by this. He's outraged. They have a massive argument. Vadye says, I would like to open a case against Catherine Théo at the revolutionary tribunal. Let's have this out in open court. And Robespierre goes mad and he says to all the other people on the committees, this is insane. You have to block this. Robespierre wins. They do block it, but the mood is very bitter.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  And from that day, relations between the two committees are pretty close to breaking down completely. And what is particularly offensive to Robespierre is that the two radical atheists on his own committee, Colo and Bio, sided with Vadye. So this is something he will not forget in a hurry. So two weeks go by. If we fast forward to the 29th of June, on the 29th of June, Saint Just returns to Paris and he is coming in the wake of incredible news. I mean, literally bombshell news. Three days earlier, at a village called Flarus, near Charlois in Belgium, the French army and a general Jordan has fought this big battle against the Austrians under the Prince of Cobourg. And the French won a big victory.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  This is a great victory for their new citizen army, for their new guns that the manufacturers have been working so hard to make, and actually for their new technology. This is the first battle in history that used aerial observation in the form of a hot air balloon.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Brilliant fact.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  So they sent people up on a hot air balloon. They could see where the Austrians were. Massive result for the French. In fact, such a massive result, the Austrians decide the Low Countries are lost and they're going to pull out of the Low Countries. So with this win, basically two things. The road to Amsterdam is open, so the French are going to take over the Netherlands as well as Belgium. But also it is clear now that France is not going to lose this war. The war of the First Coalition, as it's called. Yeah, the war's not over, but it will end on terms favourable to the French at some point. That is clear, they're not going to be invaded. So whether you need the terror is an interesting question. Anyway, Saint Just has come back. He goes straight to the committee of public safety. When he walks in, he's horrified by what he finds because they're in the middle of

• 25:25Speaker 02

  another ferocious argument, Robespierre and some of the others. We don't know what the argument was about. It was probably still about this Catherine Théo business. At one point, Colo and Bio shout at Robespierre and they call him a dictator. And the tentocrat Linde also shouts at Robespierre and he shouts, the nation is not just one man. You know, so effectively they are sick of him and they're sick of his talk of virtue and they're sick of him talking as though, you know, his own personal fortunes and those of the republic are identical, I suppose.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  I mean, that is a trend in his thinking, isn't it? He's kind of done that all his life.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Exactly. And Robespierre's shaking with anger and he storms out and he is followed by horrified Saint Just. And after this, Robespierre is so outraged that he stays away from both the committee and the convention for the next six weeks.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  And so he is not hunting after his enemies. He's not kind of going after Fouchet or whatever.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  He is at home, the house of the Duplay family, licking his wounds and thinking. And what he's thinking, we don't know. Colin Jones, in his book, I think most historians think this, what Robespierre is probably thinking is that the committee of public safety have unfortunately let him, let him and France down, that they are probably infected by the same corruption, possibly the same taint of treachery that Danton and Ebert and so many people before were infected by.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  And there's only one way to deal with infection like that.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, cut it out. Exactly. The, what was it, the national razor?

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Shaved by the national razor.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  And the author we've talked about a lot, R.R. Palmer, in his book 12 Who Ruled, is very good on the optics of this, that Robespierre cannot see that, quote, "by sitting virtuously at home or making self-righteous speeches at the Jacobin Club, he reduced himself in the eyes of men who continue to bear the burden of office." I mean, here's a way to think about it. Imagine you're part of a committee, a group of people who had so much work to do, under so much pressure, and one of your number decides he's going to go off home for six weeks and he will surface occasionally to make speeches accusing you in a sort of failed way of letting everybody down, but he's not actually going to do any of the work himself. This is what a lot of the people on the committee of public safety start to think.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  And of course, what to the public, it looks as though Robespierre is setting himself against the government of which he is a part, that basically he's an individual separate from the convention and the committees, which is a very, very dangerous role, I think, to try to play. Anyway, do you know who this reminds me of actually? Tony Benn in the 1970s. This is exactly what Tony Benn did. And that's actually not the first, I'm not the first person to make that comparison. So don't give me any credit.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  I was going to give you credit and now I feel, I feel that I've been tricked.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  You have been tricked.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  I worked hard. I connived at that and I've got the results I wanted.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  You didn't have to tell me that. I would have just sat here thinking how brilliant you are. And now it's all crumbled to dust.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it would have been hollow. It would have been inauthentic. It would have been meaningless. I wouldn't have taken any pleasure in it. Now, Robespierre going away for six weeks. What makes this so dangerous is that he does have enemies in the convention. So just on the convention, convention in theory has 749 members, but it's been purged and a lot of them have gone away as deputies on mission. So it's often half empty of the members. 200 of them are Montagnard. They're the kind of governing faction. Most of them, however, just are in the centre. They're sort of woolly. They're hanging around. And it's a classic case, familiar to anybody who knows anything about like student politics or something, of a very fanatical, organised minority imposing their will on a majority who don't really care as much as they do.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  But the mood in the convention is very anxious at this point. So late June, early July, 1794. There are rumours that Robespierre is planning another purge of deputies. There are a lot of deputies who have taken the odd bribe here or there. They got involved with the dechristianisation campaign. They went out to the provinces and they might have overstepped the mark a little bit by killing some priests.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Mowing people down with grape shot.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Exactly. Talking of which, we met one of these last time. So the world's most ruthless physics teacher, Joseph Fouchet. Fouchet, as we heard last time, has offended Robespierre on multiple levels. Slaughtering thousands of people with cannons, attacking churches. He's very corrupt. He has been rude about the festival of the supreme being. And he stood for the presidency of the Jacobin club and actually won it to Robespierre's horror. Robespierre then had him kicked out, didn't he? But Fouchet is determined that he's going to, if he's going to go down, he's going to go down fighting. And so Fouchet has been going around in the early summer of 1794, saying to people, other deputies, do you know, Robespierre's got this list of people he's going to purge?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  A little list.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you're on it actually. How do you feel about that? So Fouchet is very good at politics. Whether Robespierre is good at politics has been an interesting grey area. Fouchet is exceedingly good at politics. Now, there's another man, probably on Robespierre's list, who's also very good at politics. He is a deputy who'd been at the recapture of Toulon, recaptured it, of course, from the British, which is unfortunate. This guy's called Paul Barras. He has been also accused of going too far of having rather let himself down with some mass executions. And Barras is going to be a massive figure in the politics of the late 1790s, in part because he has made friends with a certain young Corsican.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  An artillery officer.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  An artillery officer.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Who catches scabies, doesn't he, in the course of the siege?

• 30:53Speaker 02

  And Barras and this Corsican artillery officer will in due course share a mistress. Or at least Barras will give this bloke his mistress.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Would this mistress be called Josephine?

• 31:03Speaker 02

  Josephine, poor teeth.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  There's Barras, there's Fouchet, and there's even more significant for our story, a third person who's probably on Robespierre's list. This is a young man and he's called Jean Lambert Talion. Talion is 27. He used to be a printer. He was very big in the Paris Commune. He was a mate of Danton. He was a radical deputy. And in late 1793, he was sent to Bordeaux to establish the terror in Bordeaux. And he got stuck in. He loved it. He was very zealous in feeding the guillotine. But then, ah, Cupid's arrow struck. He fell in love with this Spanish-born woman who'd married a local aristocrat. She's rich. She's very sexy. Her name is Theresa de Cabarus. And she was said to bathe in strawberry juice.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  She's a hot dollar.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that would be sticky personally.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  You have to have someone to lick it off.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Surely. And that man is Talion. Yeah. So they started an affair. He lost interest in the guillotine once he met Theresa and has become lax in his duties. So he's gone from one extreme to the other. He was guillotining people left, right and centre. He met Theresa and then he said, oh, well, actually, forget that. I've found something much more fun. He was summoned back to Paris. She followed him. Robespierre had her arrested. And she is now in the prison of La Force. She is facing trial as an aristote and probable execution. And she has been sending Talion, her lover, increasingly desperate letters. To quote one, she says, "I had a dream in which Robespierre no longer existed and the prisons were open. But thanks to your obvious cowardice, there will soon be no one left in France capable of making my dream come true.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  Are you a man or not?"

• 32:41Speaker 01

  She's a spitfire.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  She is. She's tremendous. And she's obviously playing a lot on Talion's mind. On the other hand, Talion is very frightened for his life. He knows that Robespierre thinks he's corrupt. Of course, he did used to be a friend of Danton's. Robespierre has kicked him out of the Jacobin club as well. And Talion is being tailed by the secret police, which he knows. So these men, Fouchet, Barras, Talion, form a little kind of anti-Robespierre alliance. Are they an organised conspiracy with a blueprint to bring him down? Not really. Probably they're all trying to save themselves. They are whispering to other deputies. But I don't think they had a very clear plan of what they were going to do. There is a mark of anti-Robespierre sentiment. There are a lot of deputies who think, you know, Robespierre does like purging people.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  And I'm not perfect. You know, I haven't been squeaky clean. I've probably dabbled in a few brown envelopes. I've probably executed a few people just for the fun of it. I don't want to be the next Danton. So that's the convention. And we should just say a word about the public as well. What do the people of Paris think? Well, actually, the committees are not terribly popular in June 1794. And the first reason actually, paradoxically, goes back to that military victory at Fleuruse. So when the news of the battle broke, people in Paris were understandably delighted. You know, brilliant, we're actually winning some battles. And they organised these big street parties, evening street parties. Everyone would bring their own food and drink and they would toast their army and the republic and all this kind of thing. And you would think the Committee of Public Safety would love this.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  But actually, the Committee of Public Safety don't like this at all. Why are people organising themselves without our approval? Without our say-so, without following the rules? What's going on? Without having followed the rules, they're having fun. And what is worse, the different classes are mixing freely. The working classes, better off people, and they're talking about peace and looking forward to peace. This is very not on brand. The Committee of Public Safety actually sent Bernard Barrer, the fixer, to denounce the street parties in the convention. He said, "Fraternity does not consist of meals in the streets. There can be nothing in common between the opulent egoist who sighs for inequality in kings and the sans-culottes who loves only the republic and equality. These people should not be sitting together at trestle tables, eating coronation chicken sandwiches. It's an outrage."

• 34:51Speaker 01

  They like all those councils that banned jubilee celebrations.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  Exactly. That's what it is. So the street parties have been banned as counter-revolutionary, which is absolutely bonkers. But even more significant is the thing that kicked off the revolution in the first place. And if people remember, what really kicked off the French revolution was the price of bread. Now, they've got this paper money, the assignés, and that's been tanking again. The shops are running out of food. The bread prices have gone up. There's been a wave of strikes and protests in Paris by the artisans, who have always been the driving force of the revolution. Pushed by the Committee of Public Safety, the government of Paris, the municipal government, which is called the Commune, has been cracking down on public discontent. So they've been suppressing strikes.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  They've been enforcing wage controls. They've been banning meetings of the local section assemblies. In fact, they've got a load of pottery workers who wanted higher pay. And these pottery workers are going to be hauled before the revolutionary tribunal as an example to the others. And what is worse, the Committee of Public Safety, to deal with this inflation, have drawn up what they call a wage maximum. Basically, wage controls. And this is going to come into effect in Paris towards the end of July.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  How many people is that going to affect?

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Oh, everybody. It's going to affect, you know, to cap on wages. It's going to affect a lot. If you're a carpenter, your daily pay is about to be cut by half. If you're a blacksmith working in these big arms factories they've set up, your pay is going to be cut effectively by two thirds, your living standards. On the streets, there is not much love for the commune or indeed for the committees. Now that said, if you're a smart politician, you can capitalise on this. It's not as though these people are desperate to jump into bed with Robespierre's opponents. By and large, they don't really know who Robespierre's opponents are. At any given point in history, most people have never heard of half of the politicians who think they're terribly important. Clearly, there is a sense of discontent here, but if Robespierre plays his cards right,

• 36:47Speaker 02

  he can exploit that and turn that against some of his enemies. So this wage maximum is due to come into effect on the 23rd of July. And that same day, Robespierre returns to the Committee of Public Safety for the first time in six weeks. And his colleague Barrer, the great trimmer, has been saying to people, come on, there's been too much squabbling. Let's all come together and let's advertise our unity to the world. So Robespierre comes back, sort of, everyone's a bit sheepish. Saint Just greets him, says it's brilliant to have the martyr of liberty back with us. And Robespierre, as is his want, gives this incredibly self-pitying speech. He says, "Well, I've been thinking about the revolution. You've always been bitching about me behind my back. Don't think I don't know what you've been doing."

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Some of them are clearly not really that pleased to see him, like Carnot and the bureaucrats. But the radicals, Colo and Bio, try to reassure him. They say to him, "We're your friend. We've come so far together. Come on, let bygones be bygones." And they agree that in four days' time, so on the 27th, Saint Just will give a big speech in the convention and unveil a big report on the situation facing France. He will reassure the convention, "Your two committees are united. They're working together. We're going to win the war and build a better world." But the very next evening, which is July the 24th, there is a very bad sign for the people who want unity. Robespierre and Couton, in his wheelchair, go to the Jacobin club.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  Couton wheels himself up to the front and he gives a blazing speech attacking the Committee of General Security. He says, "They're out of control, these policemen. They're making corrupt and arbitrary decisions. Something has to change." He says, "There are people among us, so-called comrades, whose hands are full of riches and who reek with the blood of their innocent victims. Impure individuals who seek to corrupt public morality and to build a throne of crime on the tomb of virtue." Now, what Couton doesn't actually say, these people who clearly have not been obeying the rules, he doesn't say who they are. It could be Fouchet and Talion. It could be Vady and Amar on the Committee of General Security. It could be the bureaucrats, Carnot and Linde. It could be Colo and Bio Varen.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Could be all of them.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Could be all of them, right? Could be anybody. So no one knows. Meanwhile, Robespierre, unbeknown to a lot of these people, has actually been working on a big speech of his own. It's the speech, Tom, that you regard as an absolute banger and everybody else regards as rambling and self pitying. He is going to come back to the convention where he hasn't been for weeks. He's going to come back with a bang. And that moment is scheduled for the 26th of July, two days later. It's a key turning point in this story, and it proves to be one of the most dramatic twists in French history.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know about you, ladies and gentlemen, but I am massively looking forward to hearing more about this sensational speech and to finding out how it secures Robespierre in command of the French Revolution for the next decade. So don't miss it.

• 39:50Speaker 01

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

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that, Tom. At the end of the 15th century, and the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus, great pioneering voyage of discovery, and it is, of course, the Americas. So, you know, Anthropic knows the importance of questions, and it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Anthropic asked 100,000 people, and what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

• 40:50Speaker 02

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

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• 41:41Speaker 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.

• 42:02Speaker 02

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• 42:44Speaker 01

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Rest is History, where it is the 26th of July 1794, or it's some mad revolutionary date, which I can't work out. We are in Paris, of course, and we're in the Old Court Theatre, the salle des machines of the Tuileries Palace, which is now the venue for the National Convention. And it is obviously a very theatrical setup. You've got a wooden stage structure with chairs for the president and for clerks, and it's adorned with captured enemy flags, speaker's rostrum. You've got that Ark of the Covenant, haven't you, with the with the constitution inside it?

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  And looking down to it, you've got bank seating for 749 deputies, and you've got public galleries for almost 1,500 spectators. And in the chair is the radical atheist Collo from the Committee for Public Safety. And Dominic, he is not a Robespierre fan, is he? We've established this. And will this have any significance in the proceedings that are to follow?

• 43:50Speaker 02

  It may well do.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Because Robespierre has come here, hasn't he, to give a speech, this banger of a speech?

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, as you say, a very theatrical setting. Collo, a former actor, is perhaps a little trace of makeup on his features, a little flourish as he sits down in the president's chair. And he's not a Robespierre fan because Collo is a very keen atheist, not a fan of the Supreme Being, among other things.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  I call Robespierre.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Exactly. In the Danton film, the Gerard Depretio film, there was a guy who I'm assuming is meant to be Collo, who is absolutely chewing the scenery. He's made up like a clown or something.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Brilliant.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  Anyway, so Robespierre stands to deliver this tremendous banger of a speech. It's two hours long, and it is absolute textbook Robespierre bingo. So loads of virtue and loads of terror, which he describes as the thunderbolt of retribution launched by the hand of liberty.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  I always thought to like.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  I mean, the thing about the French Revolution, the French revolutionary rhetoric is terrible metaphors. What did we have a second ago? The throne of virtue on the blood of traitors or something. Anyway. So Robespierre, I mean, people have heard this now a thousand times. But there are a couple of things worth noting about this speech, which I know you love. Even by Robespierre's own standards, this speech is crazily self pitying. So he says, you know, I'm the martyr of liberty. If it weren't for my conscience, I should be the unhappiest man alive. As he goes on, you know, as he enters the sort of 27th hour

• 45:30Speaker 02

  of the speech, his, it's obvious how suspicious and paranoid he really is. He has not a good word to say about anybody, only these veiled and sometimes not so veiled criticisms. Again and again, he talks about the criminal conspiracy facing the Republic. He says there are monsters in our midst. He points a finger at the convention's finance committee, which, you know, has been not part of this story at all in all the episodes we've done, because they've just been doing stuff with debt, public debt. He says the finance committee is a sink of corruption.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  He's probably not wrong there, is he?

• 46:10Speaker 02

  There's a little bit of corruption, I think. But actually, to be fair, I think the finance committee have done quite a good job.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  As I'll explain in a second. The Committee of General Security, the secret police, he says they've been infiltrated by aristocrats and criminals. Even the Committee of Public Safety are no longer doing their job properly. So my colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety, they spend more time criticizing me than they do fighting the enemy within. And at the end of his speech, this very sort of, this very almost tear stained rhetoric that people love in the 1790s, he says, people have accused me of wanting to be a dictator. But how can they criticize me? How can they object to a man like me who wants to tell the truth and is willing to die for it? How can they object to a reasonable man who knows how to die for his country?

• 46:57Speaker 01

  How indeed.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Well, what's Robespierre thinking with this speech? So Colin Jones has great analysis of this. He basically says, Robespierre has been in the Duplay's house, in his, shut up in his bedroom for six weeks, and he's been brooding about all the slights and the criticisms. And he has come to the conclusion, struck him like a revelation, that all along, he's been even more right than he thought.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  What a brilliant conclusion to come to.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a conclusion that so often strikes me, actually.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  God, I imagine even better and wiser than I imagined.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  So Robespierre thinks the Republic of virtue is not too far away now. You know, we've won that battle. The revolt in the Vendée has been defeated. You know, Lyon's been brought back into the fold. But of course, that means that our enemies, you know, they will stop at nothing now. Their conspiracy must be reaching its absolute peak. So this is not the time to relax. It's time to intensify the terror. Let's double down to get to the promised land.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Because compromise is.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Corruption.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Compromise is corruption completely. So what he's looking to do with this speech, I think, is to establish the ground for, in a few weeks, a purge of the convention. He would probably have thought to use the sans-culottes, the commune, the municipal government, to do that, much as he had done against the Gironde a year before. And this is what I think what most of his listeners thought. So the very first professional historian in France to write about the revolution was called Alphonse Houlard. And he had this wonderful line, for all the talk of martyrdom, Robespierre to his listeners sounded less like a man determined to die for the cause than a man who wanted to kill for it.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  But his great mistake, same as Couton at the club before the break, he's made some very vague threats and allegations about monsters and conspirators and stuff. But he hasn't really named many names. He hasn't said who he's talking about. What if he had? I think it could have worked. I think if he had picked on a few, couple of people that everybody, and prepared the ground, as a politician does, Fouchet, Talion. You're picking off the stragglers. Yeah. If he could bring down Ebert and Danton. I mean, it's a question about how often you can, of course, pull off the same trick. But if you'd got an organised support, if it appears that you have bayonets behind you and the streets behind you,

• 49:28Speaker 02

  you know, are there that many people who are going to go to the guillotine to defend Fouchet or Talion or whoever? Well, not if the risk of standing up for them is that you then become an object of suspicion yourself. Yeah. I mean, as we'll see in this, in the next half hour or so. You know, there are moments in parliaments or in assemblies or whatever where the outcome is uncertain and people could jump one way or another. And they make individual decisions on the spur of the moment based on who they think is going to win. And that's going to happen this time. But actually, the way that Robespierre has done this by not naming names, everybody in the convention thinks, well, could it be me? And instead of intimidating them into silence, he's actually scaring them into answering back.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  So the classic example is the guy who was the head of the convention's finance committee. And he was somebody who actually Robespierre did name. I mean, this was mad from Robespierre, such a mistake. He names this guy Pierre-Joseph Combon, his name is. Combon, who's just been sitting on the sidelines throughout. It's like, what, me? He can't believe he's being dragged into this. Combon was a businessman from Montpellier. A Protestant businessman, actually, rich businessman. He'd come in, he'd said, I'll sort out France's national debt. He's been doing it. Everyone thinks he's brilliant at this job. He's got no enemies. He's not even that corrupt. He's respected on every side of the sort of political spectrum. And now, when he sees Robespierre slagging him off, he's like, what?

• 50:59Speaker 02

  And he goes and he demands the rostrum and he says, this is absolutely outrageous that my committee are being dragged into this by Robespierre. It is time to tell the truth. One man is paralysing the will of the convention and that man has just been speaking. It is Robespierre. Ah, blimey. For somebody who is not, you know, in the sort of, in the thick of the factional struggle, to be doing this is quite a big moment. So he's like the little boy saying the emperor has no clothes to a degree. A little bit, yeah, I think he is. There is unexpectedly enthusiastic applause at this. And some of Robespierre's enemies in the committees think, oh. So Béaut gets up from the Committee of Public Safety and he says to Robespierre, he says, well,

• 51:43Speaker 02

  if Robespierre had bothered to turn up for the last six weeks and actually do some work, he would know better than to make so many wild allegations. And then Vadye and Amar from the Committee of General Security, they pile in as well. It's disgraceful for Robespierre to make these allegations against people on the committee without naming them and without giving them the right of reply. So there's a big argument and eventually they agree that very unusually, the convention will not immediately print Robespierre's speech and have copies sent out to all the different communes across the country because it's too contentious. So they will be denied this banger of a speech?

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Imagine that was a, what a fun evening that would be for somebody else to be reading out Robespierre's speech to your local Jacobin club. Come, children, gather round. I have some readings. So Robespierre is, is very shaken and shocked by this. One deputy said afterwards, he saw him slumped in his chair, muttering darkly to himself in a rage. I'm lost, I'm lost, all this sort of thing.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  Now, that evening, of course, the Jacobin club are meeting as they always do. And they meet in Rue Sainte-Anne-Aurey, which is just down the road, in this, right in the centre of Paris. It's just down from Robespierre's house. And Robespierre turns up and he says, you know, fellow club members, I'm among friends. I'd actually like to read my speech to you, if that's okay. And Colo, the actor, he's already heard it once. And he's like, what? Are you joking? And Colo says, no, it's too divisive. You're not reading the speech. And Robespierre says very coldly, we can all see who's afraid of being unmasked in the presence of the people. And the crowds say, yes, yes, we want to hear the speech.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  So Robespierre gives the speech and at the end there are huge cheers. And at that point, Robespierre's great friend Couton says, I want to speak too. And he is carried to the rostrum, of course, because he's paralysed. Couton says, citizens, I'm convinced of the facts that Robespierre has enunciated. We are witnessing the deepest of all conspiracies yet. Yes, there are pure men in the committees of government, but it's certain there are villains as well. And he points very dramatically at Colo and Béaut. He says, we shall see the conspirators at this rostrum. We shall examine them. We shall catch them out. They will grow pale in the presence of the people. They shall be convicted and they shall perish.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  And everyone's shouting and whooping with, and they're pointing and screaming at Colo and Béaut. À la guillotine, à la guillotine. You know, basically it's a lynch mob and Colo and Béaut have to run for the exit. They leave the Jacobin club and they go back to the office of the committee at the Tuileries Palace. Both the committees, as usual, are working late. Saint-Just is in the committee room at the table and he's working on this big report that he's going to unveil to the convention tomorrow. The report that to show everybody how united they all are. And Saint-Just, I actually don't really like Saint-Just, but I feel a tiny bit sorry for him with this conversation because he of course doesn't know what's going on. And he says to them, they come in and he says, ah, what's new at the Jacobin club?

• 54:59Speaker 02

  Funny evening. Yeah, how's it going? And Colo went mad at him. He said, you really don't know. Aren't you great friends with the man who's behind all this, the man leading us to civil war? You, you're a coward and a traitor. You're scoundrels, the three of you, determined to lead the fatherland to ruin. And when people hear Colo, this is your classic sort of, I don't know, boys boarding school or girls boarding school even worse. Everybody finds that they discover this new scapegoat and they're like, yeah, let's pile in. So everybody else piles in. A guy called Elie Lacoste from the Committee of General Security says, yes, there are trembers of the rogues, Robespierre, Couton and Saint-Just, plotting against the country.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  And Barrère, who's the trimmer, who can see where the wind is blowing, says to Saint-Just, yeah, you insolent pygmies, a cripple, a child and a scoundrel. You couldn't even run a farmyard. I mean, that's an ominous moment, isn't it? God, if Barrère is swinging around. Exactly. The wind really is changing. Saint-Just has been working on this report, just kind of looks up and he, he's pale and he doesn't know what to say, stammering. Because it's come from nowhere. It's come absolutely nowhere. He just asked them how they, they had a fun evening. Yeah. And Colo says, I expect you're planning to have us killed, are you, tonight or tomorrow? Well, we're going to stay at our post and we'll unmask you. I expect you're making plans against us, right? And I expect that's what you're doing with all these papers. You're the enemy. You're the conspirator.

• 56:26Speaker 02

  And Saint-Just is so stunned, he can't get his words out. And he tries to show Colo what he's been writing. Colo says, I don't want to look. You could take our lives, you can have us killed, but you will never delude the virtue of the people. This is the former actor, of course. He's having a brilliant time. Oh, oh, what wrongs are this? Exactly. Infernal villain. I can't take someone called Colo seriously, though. Why not? We've got a guy in our cricket team, he's called Colo. That's his nickname. Okay. He's very much not a kind of revolutionary figure. Okay, well, that explains it. So anyway, Colo, like a, like an, like an actor, like a sort of volcano returning to its slumbers. He eventually subsides. Oh. Enough. Yeah, exactly. Avant.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  We will meet in Chester or something like kind of Henry the Fourth type scene. Anyway, he calms down. Saint-Just finally gets a word in. He says, listen, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll finish this. I'll bring it to the committee tomorrow. You can all read it, approve it, and only if you approve it, I will present it to the convention. Yeah, come on, let's be friends. Because Saint-Just, I mean, he, he is better at compromise than Robespierre by this point. Yeah. You know, he can see the problem brewing. I think he is, actually. I think he is. But he will make a terrible mistake, as we will see. He goes back to his report on which he's been working very hard, the poor fellow. He finishes his report at five o'clock in the morning.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  Probably he went to see Robespierre after that, which is why he changed his mind. We don't know. Now, while all this has been going on.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  Clearly, some of the people on Robespierre's potential enemies list have also been going around the city. The most obvious candidate to be on that list is probably Jean Lambert Talion, the guy whose girlfriend is in prison. Yeah, Spanish girlfriend who bathing in strawberry jam. Who's been sneering, sending mocking letters, saying, you're a man at all, you know, all this. Talion has been going around visiting moderate deputies. Now, most of the deputies live near the Tuileries Palace or on the Rue Sainte-Honneurie, so you can go and visit a lot of them. And he's said, look, Robespierre is totally out of control. He's clearly planning a coup against us. We've got to stand up to him. That's what Talion's been doing overnight.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  So, dawn on Sunday, the 27th of July, which is the ninth day of Thermidor. The Committee of Public Safety meet as normal at 10 o'clock at the Tuileries, and they're waiting for Saint-Just to come and show them this famous report. Saint-Just does not show up. He's very hurt by what happened last night, and he's decided he's not going to show them the report after all. He's going to go to the convention and he will open his heart to them. He will explain, you know, just how much Robespierre means to him. He will, and Robespierre means the revolution. Oh, folly of follies. Exactly. What a falling off was there. Yeah.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  The pygmies that have been sniping at Robespierre. He's going to, you know, say it's very unfair. So the committee wait for him, he doesn't turn up. Eventually, they go across to the Tuileries Theatre just before midday, and the deputies have been gathering for a couple of hours at the theatre for the convention meeting. The convention meeting would always start at 11 with a very boring reading of correspondence, so people would arrive during that. Colo, the actor, is going to be in the chair again, the president. And as they go in, Talion is there, he's outside, he's whispering to potential allies in the corners. I'm sure Fouchet is doing much of the same. And Talion is saying to them, you know, I'm going to speak up, I'm going to seize the moment. It is claimed that

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  he said, by this evening, Robespierre will be no more. So the bell strikes noon, midday, and Saint-Just, this is his moment, he comes in with his speech, big pile of papers, he goes up to the rostrum, and he starts, very Robespierre-like. He says, I belong to no faction. I am against all factions. And just a couple of words later, he embarks on this very convoluted metaphor about the Tarpeian Rock. Now, you will know this, Tom. Traitors a flug off it in ancient Rome. Yeah, so you're a traitor, you're thrown off this rock, that's the end of you. And he's just embarked on his Tarpeian Rock metaphor, which is so beautifully crafted. And at

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  that point, Talion jumps to his feet, and he says, I have a point of order. This has got to end. I'm going to have to really restrain myself from doing it all, is this sort of ludicrous actor's voice. But they are all playing parts, aren't they? So it's appropriate. And Talion says, Robespierre and Saint-Just say they don't belong to any faction, but they're the most divisive people in the convention. They have come here to assail the Fatherland, to aggravate its troubles, to hurl it into the abyss. Talion says, do you know what? Until today, I was frightened of the tyrant Robespierre. And he compares him actually to Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell, who he regards bizarrely as a bad man. And Talion

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  pulls out a dagger, and he says, but this morning, I armed myself with a dagger to pierce Robespierre's breast if the convention does not have the courage to vote for his arrest. And people start clapping, and, you know, these are clearly Talion's mates, clapping and cheering. And Saint-Just, for, I mean, I was about to say the first time in his career, I mean, this happened last night, but the first time in public. He's always normally a very good debater, but he doesn't have an answer. He's so shocked to have been interrupted. I mean, also, he was working till 5am. Yeah. So he's absolutely exhausted. He seems to lose his nerve, and he just sort of slumps

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  into his seat in shock while Talion is speaking. Now, at this point, Robespierre jumps to his feet, says, I want a right of reply. And this is where it really matters, that the person in the president's chair is Colo, who hates Robespierre. Yeah. And Colo says, no, not you. Surely, he says, no. Yes, he would. No. I say no. The time has not yet come. Thou shalt not darken the podium with thy presence. So he calls for Béo. Béo, Béo gets up, and Béo says, Saint-Just and Robespierre are the worst people in the world. Saint-Just promised us he would come and show us in

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  the committee his speech. He's a liar, he's a cheat, he didn't turn up. They spend all their time in the committee threatening us. They've been plotting, actually, to use the National Guard against us all. They're terrible people. Robespierre is horrified. He jumps to his feet, he's trying to get to the rostrum, but actually, there are now people shouting, down with the tyrant, you know, get rid of the tyrant. And Colo says, I now call Mr. Citéan Vadye from the Committee of General Security. Now, Vadye, who hated Robespierre, he, this is his, this is his, you know, the best thing that's ever happened to him. He goes to the, out to the rostrum, and he says, well, I remind everybody about this woman that I found, this, this prophetess. Oh, yeah, the, the 80-year-old woman.

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  Yes. They can't leave that alone. This woman, this is, have I not been telling you that this woman claims to be the mother of God and that Robespierre is the Messiah? This mad woman had a letter under her mattress telling Robespierre that his divine mission had been predicted by Ezekiel. And at this, everybody starts laughing, because they know this is obviously ridiculous. And this is the one time that anyone actually really, you know, in a, in a speech in the French Revolution, I think, used humour very effectively, because they're not great laugh-a-minute people, the French revolutionaries. And Vadye really twists the knife now. He says, oh, yes, well, to hear Robespierre speak, you would think he was the only defender

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  of freedom. Oh, he's so modest, isn't he? I'm so oppressed, I'm not allowed to speak. So-and-so is conspiring against me, and I am the best friend of the Republic. And that's not a bad parody. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Good stand-up, revolutionary stand-up. And I suppose the fact that it's all happening on a stage. Of course. Means that people are judging it as a kind of theatrical performance. Absolutely, they are. And, I mean, you're right, so-and-so is conspiring against me, I'm so oppressed, I'm so miserable. And everybody starts laughing at this. Robespierre cannot deal with this at all. So at this point, he is shouting at them, and he's really losing it. He's losing his voice, I think because of stress, you know, the shock of it and whatnot. Well, he's given his two-hour speech twice in a row.

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  That's true, actually. Oh, God. God-awful speech. So he's shouting hoarsely, and he's drowned out. His voice at this point breaks, and one of the deputies shouts at him, the blood of Danton is choking you. Amazing. What a moment. What a moment. And everyone's howling and all of this. At last, another deputy, an absolute nobody called Luché, shouts, I demand an arrest warrant against Robespierre. And a few people start clapping, and then the clapping spreads. People have sensed where the wind is blowing, and the clapping becomes universal. They vote to arrest Robespierre, to arrest the head of the Paris National Guard, who's a guy called

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  François Henriot, who is a Robespierre loyalist. At this point, Robespierre's younger brother, Augustin, who's a bit of a nobody, really. He'd been at Toulon, hadn't he? Yeah, he had, exactly. With Napoleon, when he does his stuff. Yes, and he was sort of Napoleon's patron, wasn't he, a little bit? Yeah. So Augustin Robespierre, he gets up and he says, if you are going to arrest my brother, you should arrest me as well. All right. And they say, brilliant, well, yeah, we will. And another person jumps on this, on this mad bandwagon, who's called Philippe Lebat, who was a young friend of Robespierre, who had married, what was Robespierre's landlord, Duplay? He'd married one of Duplay's daughters. And he says, yes, arrest me too. So they're like, brilliant, well, we're fine, we didn't

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  like you anyway. They arrest this guy, and then they add Saint-Just, and they add Couton. And rather cruelly, they save Couton when they, as they arrest him. Yes, he wanted to use our corpses as a staircase to ascend to the throne. But of course, Couton could not have done that, because he can't walk.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  It's harsh from them. So ushers surround these five deputies, and they take them out of the convention. They take them to a building nearby, which is called the Hôtel de Brion. And the Hôtel de Brion is the office of the Committee of General Security. And they'll be held here, and then they'll be taken to prison. So by now, it's actually late afternoon. And all the rest of the convention deputies, they're exhausted with the emotional drama of it, but also, they're thrilled, they're excited, and they're hungry. They're French, and they feel like now seems like the obvious time to break for dinner. So they all go off to the kind of local restaurants to have dinner. Now, what they have forgotten, the

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  convention people, is that Robespierre still has a lot of support, and in particular, in the municipal government of Paris, which is based at the Hôtel de Ville, the commune. And as soon as the news about what's happened to Robespierre reaches the commune, the officials there immediately proclaim a state of insurrection, and they send messages to all the neighbourhoods, to the sections. Mobilize your local militia battalions, the battalions of the National Guard. And they're doing this, aren't they, by ringing the Toxins? Yes, so bells ringing. Which is never a good sign. No, it's always an exciting moment when the Toxin rings across Paris. So meanwhile, it's about 4:45 in the afternoon. The National Guard commander, Henriot, of course, there's

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  a warrant out for his arrest. He grabs a load of men, and he says, we're going straight over to the Hôtel de Brion, we're going to rescue our friends. And they've got their sabres drawn. They charge into the Hôtel de Brion, they break down the doors, and they say, give us the five prisoners. But in one of many twists, at this point, another group of guardsmen turn up, and these guardsmen are loyal to the convention, and they surround these guys, they grab their swords. Henriot is overpowered, and he is tied up, and he is pushed into another room in the Hôtel de Brion. So he's under arrest too now. About an hour later, 6 o'clock, the Committee of General Security agents take out the five deputies. They go out to take them to prison. They put each one into a different carriage,

• 1:09:15Speaker 02

  because they're going to split them up and send them to five prisons around the city. So Robespierre, for example, is destined for the Luxembourg Prison, which is a mile to the south across the River Seine. Now, the carriage rattles off, but in the meantime, the commune has sent orders to all the prisons, because the commune is in charge of the prisons technically in Paris. Don't admit any new inmates without our written approval. So when this carriage arrives at the Luxembourg Prison, and they try to, you know, the agents say, we've got Robespierre for you. The governor says, no, I can't accept him. We've been told not to accept him. And at this point, the carriage is surrounded by policemen who are loyal to the commune. And they say, we're heading back, we're taking him off.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  And they take Robespierre and his carriage off, back to the centre of town, to the police headquarters, which is in the Meri on the île de la Cité, in this very centre of Paris. The sun has just set, it's eight o'clock, and the carriage rattles into the courtyard of the Meri, the police headquarters, and Robespierre, who is now exhausted and pale and bewildered, is helped out of the carriage by police agents who are wearing tricolour sashes, and he's escorted into the building of police HQ. A messenger is sent off from the police headquarters, and at eight fifteen, he bursts into the Hotel de Ville, where the commune are meeting in emergency session, and he says, I've got

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  brilliant news, Robespierre is free, we have him. And there's great cheers, and they say, let's get an armed escort to go over to police headquarters, bring him here to the city hall, the Hotel de Ville, and, you know, we are the legitimate government now. So, while that's been happening, two other important things have been going on. First of all, the commune have sent out from city hall, an appeal, a call to arms to the whole of the city. Citoyens, the fatherland is more in danger than it ever has been. Villains are dictating and oppressing the Convention. They are persecuting Robespierre, the man who established the principle of the supreme being and the consoling doctrine of the immortality of the soul.

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  I mean, I think people have mentioned the immortality of the soul before, haven't they? Yeah, maybe. They're oppressing Saint Just, the apostle of virtue, who led the armies of the Republic to victory. Again, slight exaggeration. Exactly, my favourite bit. Along with Couton, this virtuous citizen, whose only living parts, his head and body, burn with patriotism. So poor Couton, who's forever defined by the fact that he's disabled, he's sort of very much an afterthought there, I think. Now, the appeal has gone out, but so far, the Songcoulot have been very hesitant to rise. And one reason for that, of course, is they're very bitter about their street parties. Of course, yeah, because these are the guys who banned them.

• 1:12:12Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Fun sponges. They have saw, they have hurt feelings about the street parties, you know, those sausage rolls or whatever that didn't get eaten. They're, of course, they're very bitter about the wage maximum, about the fact their pay is just facing a colossal cut, and that the commune has basically just been bossing them around and telling them what to do and all of this. There are a couple of other things. The machinery of street politics is not what it was a couple of years ago. And the reason for that is because, as we've described in this whole series, the terror was all about centralising things and putting power back in the government's hands, and actually stopping the sort of anarchic politics of the street. And so the habit of that has faded. The habit of that and the sectional assemblies have been sort of suppressed.

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  So it's just harder to get people out on the streets. But also, I think to a lot of ordinary people, this now really does seem like a very confusing factional struggle between two sets of Montagnard deputies who hate each other. And they're not really clear, what's at stake here? Who are the goodies, who are the baddies? Yeah, who's, who, who side are we really on? Yeah. So, so that's one thing. The appeal has gone out, but it hasn't really been answered. The other thing is better news for Robespierre and the commune. So the National Guard commander, Enrio, remember I said how he'd been tied up and held at the Hotel de Brion? But about eight thirty that night, the building is surrounded by 3,000 guardsmen who are loyal to him and to the commune.

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  And they overpower the gendarmes who are guarding him. They find Enrio, they cut his bonds, and now he is free as well. And what happens in the next few minutes is actually the turning point of this whole story. So it's eight forty-five in the evening. Enrio has 3,000 armed men who've just rescued him, and they've brought 30 cannons with them. And they are in Place du Carrousel. So on one side, you've got Hotel de Brion, but on the other side, you have the Tuileries Palace. And they have trained these cannons on the Convention. The Convention has no defenders at this point. The deputies have returned from their Caucova, and they're sort of hanging around, having a great chat about how well they've done, but they are at Enrio's mercy.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  If Enrio gives the order now, his, his troops will bombard or storm the Convention. They could conceivably kill everybody if they wanted to or arrest them. He would win. He can win the day in the next, you know, half hour. That would mean Robespierre wins, Robespierre lives, and the story of the French Revolution in the 1790s is very different. And had it been Napoleon, we know what he would do. He'd have done it. Surely he'd have done it. Of course, we know he does. Enrio has been locked up for three hours. He doesn't know where Robespierre is. He doesn't know what's going on at the commune. He doesn't really understand what's going on all day, to be honest with you.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  And he decides, hmm, I think we should regroup, go back to the commune, take stock, find out what's going on. And so he says to his troops, Vive la République, my friends, follow me to the commune! And so instead of attacking, they march off to the east, towards the city hall, the Hotel de Ville, and the moment is lost. So, by nine o'clock, this is the picture. There are toxins ringing across Paris, there are drums beating across the city, but it is not clear to most people what's going on or who's got the upper hand. The Convention is now, they've now finally got their act together, they've rallied their own forces. And what are these forces?

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  These are National Guards, loyal to them by and much. Right. And they place them under the command of the deputy Paul Barras. So he's the guy who'd been at Toulon, and a guy who was actually going to dominate the politics of France for the next five years. He's basically the link between this moment. The revolution and Napoleon. And Napoleon. Yeah. On the face of it, you would say the commune is still the favourite. The commune still has the upper hand. So they've tracked down Saint Just and Couton and the other people who had been arrested, they've brought them to the city hall. Enrio has now turned up with his troops and his cannons, and he's also joined there by hundreds more, those people who have actually answered the call from the sections. The thing is, outside the city hall, Enrio and co, they don't really know what to do.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  There's no clear lead, there's no one in charge. The minutes go by, but no one's giving any orders, there's no sense of direction, and actually, some of Enrio's men are like, do you know, it's quite late, I might actually just, I don't think anything's going to happen. I need a bit of a nightcap. I think I'm just going to go home. Have a snifter. At ten thirty that night, Robespierre is finally, he's been escorted from police headquarters, and he's finally brought into the council chamber at the Hotel de Ville. And there are great cheers, all his fans are there, huge cheers, finally the man of the hour, finally the man who will give us a lead. And this is a fantastic irony.

• 1:17:13Speaker 02

  If Robespierre had been the tyrant of his enemies' claims, if he had been the dictator, you know, if he'd been the power-crazed despot that people said he was, this was his moment, and he would have seized it. But Robespierre is exhausted, pale, shaken, he can't believe how he's been treated by the Convention. He definitely does try to say something, to make a speech. But he's lost his voice, hasn't he? He's lost his voice, and nobody could really hear what he was saying. Virtue. It's not my fault. Yeah, poor me, basically. But I think the fact that he's so uncertain tells its own story.

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  Robespierre, as we were talking about earlier this week, Robespierre's, in his own mind, is a massive goodie-goodie. He's the man who always follows the rules. And, you know, a more ruthless man, a would-be dictator, would say, sod the rules, let's kill all the, let's kill all the deputies in the Convention, and I will rule France. Robespierre doesn't want to do that, he wants to do the right thing, and he now doesn't know what to do. So no clear lead comes from the council chamber, and outside, you know, more and more of the troops are disappearing. The difference is that back at the Convention, Robespierre's enemies know exactly what they want to do.

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  It's half an hour after Robespierre had turned up, Talion gets up in the Convention. I mean, he's now cock-a-hoop. His, his girlfriend is going to be so pleased with him after this. And he says, my friends, we must make sure that before the sun rises, the conspirators are flushed out from their lair. We must beat Robespierre to it. We will only sleep when the traitors have been annihilated. And there are great cheers, everyone shouting to arms, to arms, and Barras and some of the other deputies lead the Convention's troops off towards the east. At the Hotel de Ville, more and more of Enrio's men are drifting away now. Some of the local sections have decided, do you know what, I think we should sit this

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  out, I think we should just sit this out and see who wins. This is not going to be our fight. And so more and more of them are drifting away. By one o'clock, the square is now really visibly emptying, and of course, if you see loads of people going, you start, you decide that you want to go as well. And at two o'clock in the morning, which is when the Convention troops in two columns under Barras and a guy called Leonard Bordon, when they converge on the square, it's virtually deserted. Do you know what this reminds me of? Ironically, it's the failure of Lafayette to fend the royal couple at Versailles. Oh, yeah. You know, the march of the market women. He went for a sleep, didn't he? But it's that kind of vibe that...

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  If you've got passion on your side, your instinct will tell you what to do. And if you don't, you will either go to sleep or just sit there croaking hoarsely.

• 1:20:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true, actually. Joe, the whole series, the lesson it teaches me is

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  decisive action.

• 1:20:18Speaker 02

  Decisive, always decisive action. Indecision kills you. I mean, that's the case with the royal couple with Lafayette.

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  Business lessons from the French Revolution.

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  It's so true. If there are any corporate giants out there who would be interested in business lessons from the French Revolution.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  This excellent proposal.

• 1:20:35Speaker 02

  So on the way into the square, they meet a commune artillery unit. And this deputy called Bourdon shouts, do you want to fight for the tyrant? And the commune men say, no, actually, no, we don't want to fight with you. So they join him. They literally just walk through the doors of the city hall. They go through the doors, they go up the main staircase and upstairs they can hear this sort of panicked shouting from the chamber at the top of the stairs.

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  And a gunshot, right?

• 1:21:05Speaker 02

  And gunshots, yeah.

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  Maybe, possibly.

• 1:21:07Speaker 02

  Well, I think, I think two gunshots.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  Comes in a bit later, perhaps.

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  Probably.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:13Speaker 02

  When they get upstairs, they find a scene of utter chaos. So Augustin Robespierre has fallen out of a window. Either he was trying to kill himself or to escape, to jump out. And he's lying at the bottom, very badly injured. Henriot, the commander of the National Guard, has also fallen from a window.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  The general consensus, I think, was that the others threw him out because he just panicked, started drinking. And they were sick of him and they just threw him out the window. But he landed in a dung heap, so he's not too badly injured.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  But it's not been a good evening for him. I mean, let's not beat the other bush.

• 1:21:49Speaker 02

  Couton, who people have been kind of insensitive about all through this episode. Someone has thrown him down the stairs in his wheelchair, which seems very harsh. So he's lying at the foot of a staircase with blood streaming from his head. Philippe Lebas, who only entered the story, you know, 20 minutes ago. He's, he's left it already because he has shot himself, taken his own life. Saint Just is just standing there, very pale, very silent, you know, but quite calm.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  Archangel like.

• 1:22:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. And Robespierre is lying on the ground in agony. His face is covered with blood and his jaw has been shattered by a pistol shot. Afterwards, some of the convention deputies said, oh, well, he was the, he was shot actually by one of our heroes, by a trooper called Charles André Merda. But I think it's generally agreed that Robespierre probably tried to, you know, he, he wanted to be a Roman, didn't he?

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, he wanted to be Cato.

• 1:22:52Speaker 02

  I mean, he thought the Roman thing to do was to, yeah, to do a Cato, take his own life, that he shot himself, made a mess of it, shot himself in the jaw.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  I mean, how do you do that? He's not a natural military man, is he? I mean, you're trying to shoot your brains out and you shoot your jaw off.

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  Do you know who could have given him excellent advice?

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  Who?

• 1:23:10Speaker 02

  Teodros, the Emperor of Abyssinia.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, but he just grazed his ear, didn't he? The first time he tried to shoot himself. So practice made perfect for him.

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's a funny dinner party, isn't it? I mean, two people with enormous reserves of self pity, actually.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:27Speaker 02

  Who's the real victim in that conversation? Wow.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  Always Robespierre.

• 1:23:30Speaker 02

  So the prisoners are taken back to the Committee of Public Safety, the place, the room in which this episode began. And Couton is left lying on a stretcher. Saint Just stands in the corner in handcuffs. He's very calm, he's silent. One witness says he, he looked like a pickpocket caught red handed.

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  And Robespierre, who is unconscious, is laid on a table. His shoulder's soaked with blood, his stockings around his ankles, his breeches are kind of unbuttoned. Yeah. For somebody who cared so much about looking.

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  Such a humiliation.

• 1:24:04Speaker 02

  This is a complete humiliation. He wakes up.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  After, he's actually only been unconscious for an hour. And then he's, and then he wakes and he must have been in excruciating agony, but he, he doesn't make much noise. So he is playing the Roman. He's doing what Cato would do.

• 1:24:23Speaker 02

  They call for a surgeon and the surgeon took out some teeth that had basically come loose. And then took Robespierre's sort of shattered jaw and sort of bandaged it up so that it was in place. And Robespierre, of course, couldn't speak at this point. He can only really communicate by grunts. And there are people standing around him and they're mocking him the whole time. Is your majesty in pain? All of this kind of thing.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  But you know what? He, I, I think this is admirable on his part, that he does try to keep his dignity. Because about nine o'clock, he sits bolt upright from where he's been lying in agony. And he's wearing his sky blue coat, the one that he wore at the festival of, of the supreme being. So he's got it on. Smooths it down and he pulls up his stockings and he crosses to a vacant armchair and sits there to preserve his dignity, despite the unspeakable agony that he must have been, must have been in.

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, imagine.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  But I admire that.

• 1:25:19Speaker 02

  And when they carried him out, they carried him out in this armchair. And then some people said that he tried to, he tried feebly to kind of hit the people who were carrying him while he was, they were carrying him.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Well, it's such a, it's a bunch of shambles, isn't it?

• 1:25:31Speaker 02

  It is. Blood everywhere.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  I mean, he's physically broken, Couton's physically broken, his brother's physically broken. I mean, Saint Just is basically the only person who's, who's all right. What's his name? He's covered in dung. It's awful.

• 1:25:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  Blood and shit.

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  Henriot has completely let himself down, I think.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  He's not had a good evening, it has to be said.

• 1:25:50Speaker 02

  He's had a terrible evening. He threw away a brilliant opportunity and now he's paying the price. So, um, late that afternoon, they're loaded into the tumbrils for the journey to the guillotine. And, and you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, the guillotine has been moved back specially to plaster the Revolution in the centre of Paris. Because, you know, the winners, the convention want to make a big show of this. And as the tumbril passes, one onlooker said, it was a holiday. All the elegant people were at their windows to see them pass. They cheered and clapped their hands all along the Rue Saint-Honorat, the route, the, the street where Robespierre, of course, had been living. And when they, it says they cheered and clapped, they didn't cheer and clap because they were, you know,

• 1:26:35Speaker 02

  it wasn't friendly applause, put it that way. There's a lot of abuse, as so, as always with all executions, there's a lot of abuse, there's a lot of jeering and mockery. Sanson, the executioner, you know, he's had a, he's had a very busy few years. He got to work at about 7:30 and Couton goes first. Couton's body was so, I mean, he's not only, of course, is he disabled, but he's been thrown down the stairs. His body at this point is so bent that it apparently takes him fif, takes 15 minutes for the guards to basically straighten him out. Forcefully straighten him out.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  So he's howling.

• 1:27:11Speaker 02

  Oh, he's in unimaginable agony and the crowd, we're told, are loving every minute of it, delighted. Then Saint Just, who dies like a Roman.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  I would expect nothing less.

• 1:27:23Speaker 02

  Not quite like Danton with his, you know, his quips on the scaffold. But he's, he's impassive, he's calm, he's, he's brave, I suppose. And then there's some others, the, the usual thing where they've thrown in a few people for luck. And then after half an hour of waiting, Robespierre, and he's, you know, he's done his best, but he's still blood smeared, pretty ragged. You know, a wild looking figure.

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  And then a literally jaw dropping moment. Because Sanson rips the bandage off, which has been keeping his jaw attached to the upper part of his skull. And as they rip it off, the jaw drops and he gives this terrible shriek, which people describe as being like a kind of, you know, an animal being tortured or something. And then chop, that's it.

• 1:28:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's the end of Maximilien Robespierre, 36 years old, not even that old. And the funny thing is,

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  every sort of popular account you read says Robespierre fell because of a backlash against the terror.

• 1:28:28Speaker 02

  But that's just not the case. The people who brought him down, if you go through the people who brought him down, the people who are mentioned most, Collot, Bio,

• 1:28:37Speaker 02

  Barrer, Talion, Paul Barras.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  Fouchet.

• 1:28:41Speaker 02

  Fouchet and so on.

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  They love it.

• 1:28:42Speaker 02

  These had been enthusiastic and bloodthirsty operatives of the terror. You see, this is where I think it, it comes back to the question of how good at politics you are. And I said, I think last time, I feel like Robespierre was very good at politics until he wasn't, until he got found out, as it were. And this didn't have to happen. He made too many enemies. He was really poor at making friends. And his speech in particular was a catastrophic misjudgment. I mean, it's easy for me to say unnecessary. I mean, you could say that from Robespierre's perspective, it was very, or it was only too necessary. But a more canny politician would surely have played things differently.

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  I, I think he is driven mad ultimately by, his principles drive him mad. His principles inspire him for so long. And they combine with his native ability for, for outsmarting his enemies. But in the end, his, his own sense of virtue leads him to make catastrophic errors, as you say.

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. His sort of Manichean sense of good and evil, corruption and purity, virtue and, you know, treachery. I think once you're in the world where you see any opposition, any dissent, any disagreement as treachery or as a sort of existential impurity, then it's going to be very difficult to command the allegiance of your, I, I think there are worldly men.

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  Of course. I mean, the thing is that he is incredibly effective while he still has the power of surprise on his side.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  But once it becomes obvious, he really only has the one strategy.

• 1:30:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  It's driven by his, his own deeply held moral principles. Everyone knows what his strategy is going to be. And so it becomes actually possible to outsmart him.

• 1:30:33Speaker 02

  Yes, I think that's absolutely right. So after his death, nobody had a good word to say about him. People who just days earlier would have, you know, counted themselves as his loyalists, his partisans. Now say they were against him all along. And it's at this point, it's only after this point, after the coup of Thermideau, as it becomes called, that people start to use the phrase le régime de la terreur, the reign of terror, to describe his ascendancy. And they say, well, Robespierre was the tyrant, Robespierre was the dictator, and it was all because of him. In Peter McPhee's book on the revolution, there is a lovely quote from, it's great to get a, a British naval officer on the show, especially one with a tremendous name, Captain Watkin Tench. And Captain Tench was held to taken as a prisoner and held as a POW

• 1:31:19Speaker 02

  a couple of months later. And Tench said afterwards, he listened to people talking and he said, "Those who prostrated themselves like reptiles before Robespierre are now blaming him for all the assassinations and misery. To screen themselves from odium, all the subordinate tyrants fix upon him and attribute to his orders, the innumerable butcheries and acts of oppression which they have perpetuated." And I think there's a degree of truth in that, that, you know, Robespierre was the great spokesman for the terror, its most articulate defender. But he wasn't the sole proponent of it, and it probably would have happened.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  No, well, I mean, it's, it's the people coining this phrase terrorist to describe him are people who themselves were more enthusiastic practitioners of terror.

• 1:32:08Speaker 02

  Exactly right, exactly. So where's the sleeve of the revolution? And I think this is the biggest irony of the story. So as we've said, none of the men who brought Robespierre down really were that keen to dismantle the terror or to scrap the whole regime. So Collot, Bio, Barrer on the Committee of Public Safety, they thought with Robespierre gone, brilliant. We're going to run things, we're going to have things our own way. But actually what's happened is that they have unleashed forces they cannot control. And what this actually reminds me of is the fall of the Soviet Union, where you have unanticipated consequences of political decisions. And suddenly, without people quite understanding why, the whole thing is tumbling down. And the reason is that when the great mass of people in the convention

• 1:32:54Speaker 02

  look at the situation, they say, well, hold on. We've had, we actually have beaten all the rebels and we've beaten the Austrians and France is safe from invasion now. So although the war is still going on, it's no longer a massive emergency. The terror, you know, it's kind of done the trick. So why do we need it? Why don't, why do we need, we need to give the committees all this power? So they start to strip the committees of their power in the next couple of weeks. In August, they repeal the law of Prairieelle, so that basically brings the terror to an end. The Revolutionary Tribunal lasts for another year till 1795. But for the last year of its existence, it's really been used against the terrorists themselves.

• 1:33:37Speaker 02

  You know, it's no longer being used to, to sort of punish, you know, housewives complaining about.

• 1:33:43Speaker 01

  Bad winemakers.

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, winemakers and stuff. Collot, Bio, Barrer. In September, they've been rebranded, not as Robespierre's assassins, but as Robespierre's accomplices. And they're voted off the Committee of Public Safety. In November, the Jacobin Club is closed down. It's a bit like the moment in, I don't know, 1991, when the Communist Party was outlawed in Russia. The Jacobin Club has been closed down. In December, the convention scraps all the economic measures, the wage and price controls. So now the value of the assinat plummets, massive inflation. A few people, well-connected businessmen and politicians start to make a lot of money.

• 1:34:26Speaker 02

  Most people don't, and the second half of the 1790s will be very tough economically for the French.

• 1:34:33Speaker 02

  By the spring of 1795, they've brought back the Gironde. So those Gironde who they haven't killed are released from prison and they are welcomed back to the convention. Let's bury the hatchet, you know, you might have overstepped the mark a little bit. There are now only about 70 Montagnard left. And actually, the convention is now dominated really by, I suppose, what you could call the right, by the moderates, I guess.

• 1:35:00Speaker 01

  And the survivors start having survivors' parties, don't they?

• 1:35:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  Where the women wear thin red chokers around their neck to emulate what might have happened to them had they not survived it.

• 1:35:12Speaker 02

  We talked about this, I think, in our episodes about the young Napoleon, did we not?

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  Episode 383, Dominic.

• 1:35:18Speaker 02

  Oh my word, that's good work. So maybe, I mean, the story of what happened in the late 1790s and the rise of Napoleon. We did do Young Napoleon, but maybe this, that's a story for another time. But I think the, the point to stop is March 1795. Cause that month, Collot, Bio and Barrer, as well as Vadier from the Committee of General Security, they were arrested as terrorists and they were convicted and they were sentenced to be deported to French Guiana. They didn't all end up there. And also put on trial that month, and this is a really ironic moment, was the prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Fouquier Tanville.

• 1:35:58Speaker 02

  The man who had sent to the guillotine as prosecutor, Charlotte Corday, Marie Antoinette, Ebert and Danton.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  He lamented, didn't he, that he was, he felt trailed by ghosts.

• 1:36:11Speaker 02

  Yes, he did.

• 1:36:12Speaker 01

  Eerie.

• 1:36:12Speaker 02

  He did. I actually feel a tiny bit sorry for him. His trial lasted, unlike theirs, it lasted 41 days. And more than 400 witnesses were called. And Fouquier Tanville defended himself, this will be very familiar to people. He said, "All I was doing, I was doing my job, I was only following orders." And he was sentenced to death nonetheless. And his last words before he headed to the guillotine were as follows. He said, "I have nothing to reproach myself for. I have always complied with the laws. I have never been a creature of Robespierre's assujust. I die for my country, I am satisfied. And one day, my innocence will be recognized."

• 1:36:57Speaker 02

  And that is the end of the story.

• 1:36:59Speaker 01

  So an epical moment. The end, not just of our series on the terror, but our series on the French Revolution. So we hope you have enjoyed it. Next week, we begin a four-part series on something very different. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. A mystery, a romance that has fascinated people for centuries and centuries and centuries. And now, for the first time on our podcast.

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  First time in history, right?

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  We will be revealing the site of Camelot, the location of the Holy Grail. We will identify where Avalon actually is, where King Arthur lies, awaiting to come and rescue Britain. He needs to get a move on.

• 1:37:45Speaker 02

  Incredible.

• 1:37:46Speaker 01

  And all four episodes will be available on Monday for the Rest is History club members. So if you'd like to get them, go to therestishistory.com. But for now, Dominic, thank you very much. Thank you very much, everyone for listening and au revoir.

• 1:38:00Speaker 02

  Au revoir.

• 1:38:09Speaker 03

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