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- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home? Or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward/. Subscribe. Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry
- [00:45]
Professor Marissa Linton
that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breath, breathe.
- [00:52]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Oh, sorry.
- [00:53]
Professor Marissa Linton
I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts.
- [01:05]
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- [02:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. July 1794 in Paris's Place de la Revolution, the crowd gathers before sunrise, drawn by the same grim force that has brought them here day after day. The wooden scaffold, the falling blade, the promise that justice will be swift Public and final. A cart rattles over the stones. Inside sits a man with a bandage wrapped around his shattered jaw, his powdered hair dishevelled, his pale blue coat stained with blood. Only months earlier, Maximilian Robespierre had stood above Franz like a prophet of virtue, of promising a republic purified of corruption, tyranny and betrayal. Now he cannot speak. The voice that had condemned kings, nobles, generals, priests, journalists and fellow revolutionaries has been reduced to a muffled groan. The crowd leans in. How did it come to this? Just five years earlier, France was ruled from Versailles by a king who seemed eternal, godlike. While ordinary people queued for bread in the streets, the treasury was empty, the harvests had failed. Taxes crushed the poor, while privilege shielded the rich. Then came 1789. The Estates General, the Tennis Court oath, the storming of the Bastille. What began as a demand for reform became a revolution that shook Europe to its foundations. And from the smoke stepped Robespierre. He was not the loudest man in the room, nor the most glamorous. He was slight, serious, incorruptible by reputation, a lawyer who believed politics was not a game of compromise, but a moral crusade. To his admirers, he was the conscience of the Revolution. To his enemies, he was something colder, a man so certain of virtue that he could justify almost any violence in its name. France was under siege. Armies of monarchs gathered at the borders. Civil war burned in the Vendee. Paris starved. Inflation spiraled, and suspicion became a national language. Who was loyal? Who was plotting? Who deserved mercy? The Revolution, terrified of being destroyed, began to devour itself. In 1793, the king was executed. The Committee of Public Safety rose to power. Revolutionary tribunals accelerated. The guillotine, once hailed as a humane instrument of equality, became the rhythm of the new Republic. Faction after faction fell. The terror was not chaos. It had paperwork, speeches, decrees, ideals. Robespierre called it virtue and terror. Virtue without terror was powerless. Terror without virtue was disastrous. But who would decide what virtue was? And what happened when the guardian of the Republic became indistinguishable from its executioner? By the summer of 1794, fear reached even the men who had wielded it. One accusation, for Robespierre, could mean death. So they struck first. Now, as the blade raised above him, the architect of the Terror becomes its final spectacle. His fall will end one nightmare, but unleash another. A question that haunts every revolution. When a people rise in the nation justice, how do they stop themselves from becoming what they overthrew? We all become what we don't forgive. All this month, on not just the Tudors, we're exploring the French Revolution. In the first episode, Dr. Charles Watson joined me to look at how ideas about liberty, equality and rights ignited in the minds of people who had never known them. Professor Marissa Linton. Professor. Professor Merita in History at Kingston University and one of the foremost experts on the French Revolution. Discuss the build up to and events surrounding the storming of the Bastille. Today I've invited Professor Linton back to chart the rise of Robespierre and the terror that engulfed France. Professor Linton, welcome back to Not Just the Tudors.
- [07:10]
Professor Marissa Linton
Hello, it's lovely to be here.
- [07:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So we're picking up the story. In August 1792, the constitutional monarchy that has been an experiment has faltered. A republic has been declared. The King has been captured and arrested and one of the key figures in the coming months and years will be Maximilien Robespierre. Could you introduce him please?
- [07:32]
Professor Marissa Linton
Maximilian Robespierre was a lawyer from northern France, Mars and he was really quite a non entity, not known beyond his small community before the revolution began. He had a difficult childhood in some ways. Both his parents died when he was very small, so he and his surviving siblings were brought up by relatives and they didn't have a lot of money. Things were quite tough. He went into a solid profession, the law, worked hard and became known as something of a poor man's lawyer who cared about poorer people who were confronted by need for mitigation. But that was it, fairly much. No one would have heard of him if it hadn't been for the revolution. But of course the revolution happens and he is desperate, like many others, to be part of it. And he is elected as a deputy to the estates general in May 1789. He's one of 1200 deputies in the Estates General. He's a deputy for the Third Estate. He's a commoner and because nobody knows him, nobody cares. It's very hard at first for him to make himself heard. And also the acoustics were really bad in the assembly and 1200 people wanting to speak. It wasn't easy, but he persisted. He was a very determined sort of man and he begins to make a name for himself for his speeches. He aligns himself on the left of that assembly amongst a group that form the Jacobin Party. He becomes one of the Jacobins and within that group he's on the radical end of it. There's about 30 of them in that assembly of 1200 who want not just the vote, but the vote for everyone. I say everyone, but not women because that was considered really quite beyond the Pale in 1789, I regret to say. But of course, true. But he wanted the vote for every man and not to exclude people on the basis of their lack of wealth or their religious beliefs. And he was also against slavery in the colonies. He was against the death penalty. As a lawyer, he knew what that meant, Something they had, of course, very much in place. He thought it was brutal, barbaric, and it didn't work as a deterrent. So in many ways, we would admire this man. In fact, right up until 1792, I think we would admire him and think he was very much a progressive. He was a progressive. I mean, he was. It was all very genuine. But then, of course, things happen. And what I want to say here is it's the revolution that happens. It's that experience. He is not the man driving it. He's one of many, many participants, but he's certainly not the lead figure. There is a lot going on, as you say.
- [10:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. He's part of a group called the Jacobin. Who were they? What was their ideology? Ostensibly, at least.
- [10:34]
Professor Marissa Linton
Okay. The Jacobins come into being with the Estates General. They're called the Jacobins. The Jacobins because they meet at the Jacobin Club. It's basically a former Jacobin monastery in the center of Paris, on the Rue Saint Honore, or just of it. And their origins are in another club, the Breton Club. Politics becomes all about voices influencing people, open debate. So there are many such clubs that are founded because the idea of politics as somewhere where you can debate, where you can be, where you can be present, is a new thing in 1789. Up until then, they haven't had it. It's not compatible with an absolute monarchy. So all these clubs are being founded. The Jacobin Club was one of the most radical. It included a number of men who were also deputies in the assemblies. And they have a big following in Paris. The Jacobin Club also starts to set up. It's the mother club, the one in Paris, but they start to set up provincial Jacobin clubs. So all over the country, in big towns, small towns, there are Jacobin clubs. And this is where people try out their politics. They're known as being on the left. That the left is a variable feast in the French Revolution. By the way, our very terms, left and right, come out of the French Revolution.
- [11:56]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Do they?
- [11:57]
Professor Marissa Linton
How interesting. They are born out of that experience. And it's because at first, the deputies within the assembly, the more radical ones, happened to sit on the left, and the more conservative Ones, the more strongly monarchist ones and traditional ones sat on the right. And this is where the terms come from. So, yeah, the Jacobins are very much on the left. They invented it. They invented it.
- [12:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Fast forwarding now to this momentous occasion in 1792 where the Republic is formed. Can you give me a bit of a sense of some of the new ideas and political experiments that are part of this phase of the Revolution?
- [12:41]
Professor Marissa Linton
The Revolution is founded on the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. Liberty, equality, that's present at the very beginning in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which they write in August 1789. Actually, it's Robespierre who first puts that term fraternity into it in 1790. Puts the fraternity, yeah, their founding principles, the idea of popular sovereignty, that the people are sovereign, that they can make the decisions. The idea of religious toleration, so that everybody can have their own religious beliefs and not be discriminated against because of them. That's a founding principle. The idea that everyone is equal before. Before the law. That's huge. That's huge. But to understand that, you kind of have to go back and see what a mishmash the ancien regime had been, where there are many different laws and many different rights and rules and privileges depending on who you are, what your birth status was. The ASEAN regime is full of hereditary privilege, of people who think because they were born to a certain position that they're superior. The Revolution does away with all of that. They actually abolished nobility itself in June of 1790. So, you know, rather, rather longer ago than the. The British people decided to eradicate the title of prince for Andrew. They did that for all nobles. June 1790, as a principle, why should one person be better than another simply because of how they'd happen to be born? So these are all very founding principles. What else? Free speech, founding principle. That does go a little bit by the wayside during the period of terror, but we could talk about that. But that's certainly, again, a principle. Before the Revolution, you had censorship instituted so that you couldn't publish anything which seemed to challenge the authority of the King or the authority of the Catholic Church. But now they say that everyone should have a voice and be free to say what they think. But the trouble with wanting freedom and equality is how far do you go in practice? So the principles of 1789 I think we would find very admirable, but the practice is more divisive, more difficult. And that's where someone like Rob Speer comes in, because he's one of the people who says, you can't have the principle if you don't extend it to everyone. You can't have freedom of belief. If you say that Jews, who were the biggest religious minority at that time in France, can't have a vote, you have to extend this to everybody. And also, even for the people who have been enslaved in the French colonies, and also the people of color, this is something that some of the radical Jacobins were arguing, and certainly Robespierre is one who followed that line. So things we would. Yeah, I think. Yes, of course we agree with these principles.
- [15:44]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
What might seem ironic, and I find kind of fascinating, is that the symbol of the Terror, the guillotine, is related to this idea of equality, isn't it? How revolutionary is it as a form of execution?
- [16:00]
Professor Marissa Linton
The revolutionaries didn't quite invent it. There was in fact a Scottish version called, I think, the Iron Maiden, wasn't it? Yeah, I think so. If you go to the National Museum of Scotland, you'll see it, you'll see an example of it. So it's an apparatus which makes a blade fall down on somebody's head. And the idea about that is that it's quicker. Quicker than an axe.
- [16:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
More reliable, presumably, as well.
- [16:30]
Professor Marissa Linton
Yeah, of course, of course, before the Revolution, of course, as you know very well, same in England, there were methods of execution where they were a bit ad hoc, a bit hit and miss, but if you were a commoner, then you. You would be hanged. Very horrible, very slow. They didn't even have like a drop, you know, a trap door. They would just lift you up and you suffocated slowly. That was for commoners, horrible death. If you were noble again in this was in Britain and in France before the Revolution, you had the privilege of an act, but of course, an axe, as you know very, very well. Yeah, it was only as effective as the person who was wielding it. And obviously the person who was to be executed might move involuntarily or try and run away or do anything, and it just meant that you would have a terrible prolonged death. So, yes, the guillotine is invented in that context where they think that they should have the same method of execution for everybody, regardless of their privilege. Privilege is minimized. Same for everyone. And that it should be fast and that it should be reliable. Yeah, because if you're going to kill someone, you don't want to mess about, you want them dead and quickly. And they abolish torture as well. So, yes, I mean, of course, the guillotine seems terrible to Us, it is terrible and it's a spectacular death because of all the blood, basically. It's very dramatic. But then any form of public execution is dramatic. We're just not used to it now. But they lived with that. That was how the Ancien Regime worked. So what the revolutionaries do is they change that a little. They have this updated version. The innovation that they make is, well, the two. One is that the blade, instead of being horizontal, the Scottish version was horizontal. The French doctor, Pere Guillotin, where the name comes from, of course, he invents a blade that's slanted like a razor blade and it just slices more effectively. They also found it was. It works so much better if you could strap people down so they didn't move. And so they have a plank, which is a movable plank, which then. Can you strap the person onto it? They can't move. They're trussed up and then the slid under, the blade comes down and there you are. It is very effective in that sense. Curiously, I said about Robespierre, he had been opposed to the death penalty as a lawyer, he'd seen a lot of the death penalty, of course, in the Ancien Regime, and he said that it was barbaric and that it was ineffective. It wasn't necessarily a way to prevent future crimes. So the. This. You couldn't be sure you got the right person, obviously, in some cases. So if the evidence was circumstantial. So he campaigned against it. In fact, in May 1791, in the national assembly, he tried to pass a motion that would have abolished the death penalty. He was opposed. They thought he was bit far out, bit too lefty, bit too progressive. And a lot of the deputies said, we have to have the death penalty, of course we do, because how else would you keep criminals sort of under control? But he was against it, and I think that's really interesting. And maybe you will ask me about the death of the King in a moment, because when it comes to that, Robespierre changes his mind.
- [20:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, I certainly will. I just wanted to get a bit of context of thinking about this. I don't know if descent into terror is the quite right way of putting it, but anyway, this turn towards terror, what is the impact of war and economic crisis? Is that what catalyzes it, or at least a contributing factor?
- [20:30]
Professor Marissa Linton
Yes, absolutely. It is very much the war. Very much the war. And again, so the war breaks out. April 1792. It had been pushed by leading revolutionaries at that point in the assembly, in the Legislative assembly, and in The Jacobin Club. One of these was Brisseau, a man called Brissot, but there were many others. And Brisseau argued for war. He said if France went to war with her enemies, this would be a way to flush out all the conspirators within France. When he says the conspirators within France, he means the King and the Queen, he means the court, because by that point, the King had come under huge suspicion because of the flight to Varennes in June 1791. And people went from being loyal to the King very much, even many of the Jacobins, to thinking he needed to be deposed. So Brisseau's answer to this kind of problem, and answer to the problem that both the King's brothers had fled and become emigre, which means that they'd given up everything to leave France and were now outside France's borders, arguing for the foreign powers, particularly Austria. And of course, Marie Antoinette was Austrian, of course, arguing that they should invade France and basically overthrow the revolution and restore the absolute monarchy, just as it had been before. So a confrontation is brewing between the emigre, with the King's younger brothers at their head, and the revolutionaries. And then, of course, within France, people were not sure of the loyalty of the King King. So it was a very difficult situation. That was over the winter of 1791 into 1792. Jacques Pierre Brissot argues that the way out of this impasse is for France to take control and to go to war with their enemies with Austria. But snow Paul's to become to involve other countries as well. So he says this is a great thing to do. People will welcome us in these other countries with nothing. The leaders, of course, or the monarchs or the nobles, but the ordinary people, he said, will welcome us with open arms. They'll be so happy to see the French bringing all these principles of liberty and equality. Robespierre was one of the very few in the Jacobin Club who opposed this. And he said, very prescient thing. No one welcomes armed liberators. Isn't that topical? Isn't that.
- [23:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Isn't that topical?
- [23:11]
Professor Marissa Linton
He lost the debates, of course, and so France did go to war. April 1792. The King and the Queen were pleased, which is very significant. They anticipated that France would lose. And certainly the Queen was very happy with that idea. We think the King was too. He was more circumspect in his. In his secret writing. But yeah, so in that sense, Brisso was right. But it's a very dangerous thing to go to war, of course, with foreign powers. And it can escalate, which of course, is exactly what happened. That war that began in 1792, that Brisso said they would win in a few months. It went on well with two short breaks. There was the Peace of Amiens in 1802, busted a few months. And then the first time that Napoleon was deposed in 1814, began again when Napoleon returned from Elba. And it didn't finally end until Waterloo.
- [24:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Goodness me.
- [24:12]
Professor Marissa Linton
Yeah.
- [24:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So what pressure was it putting on at the sort of tail end of 1792, then?
- [24:19]
Professor Marissa Linton
But the war, contrary to Brisseau's expectations, went very badly for the French. This escalated fear and tension. Some of the officers became emigres. Some of the officers had been nobles before the Revolution. All the officers were noble. That the revolutionists had changed that, but many of them were still noble. Many of those became emigres. They crossed the border, left their own troops and fled. It was an incredibly precarious situation, a very volatile situation. And of course, the foreign powers invaded, which wasn't what the revolutionary leaders had been expecting. So, yeah, this was really, really not going according to plan. And they were. The foreign troops were within, at one point, within days, March of Paris. And the Duke of Brunswick, the Prussian Duke, very famously issues a manifesto, manifesto the Duke of Brunswick, and he says, if anything happens to the King and queen, if a hair on their head is harmed, that will raise Paris to the ground. So a big threat. And of course, Marie Antoinette was in on that. And of course, it backfired. Of course it did. Of course. Course it did. It's in that context, with volunteers lining up to go and fight the wars, including the troops from the volunteers from Marseille. And then, of course, that very well known Marseillaise is written in that context, becomes the French national anthem. Of course, it's a hymn, very much of defiance, of war and conflict. And it's in that context that there's a massive uprising organized on the streets of Paris and the King was and Queen are deposed. 10th of August, 1792. They're then imprisoned. A new assembly is called the National Convention. Robespierre is sitting on that one amongst almost 800 others. And when that convention meets, almost the first thing they do is declare that monarchy's deposed and they declare France to be a republic. Like about the third thing they do, which I just like to mention, they decree that divorce should be legalized. They hadn't had divorce. It's a Catholic country before. They hadn't had divorce before. Divorce is like the third law. They bring in just as they're in steel shooting Republic. And they also make it equal for women as well as men. You could get it simply because you were incompatible, because you weren't happy. And they made it cheap and they made it not something you didn't have to go through the Church.
- [26:52]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And that's only just recently been passed in this country. I mean, very recently.
- [26:56]
Professor Marissa Linton
Yes, yes, exactly, exactly. So. So awful things are happening, but many great things are happening too. I think it's important to remember all that situation. But yeah, then you have, of course, you have a king who has been deposed and imprisoned, and they have to decide what to do with him and the people deciding.
- [27:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Could you just one more sort of structural point. Can you tell me about the committees and their role? And then we shall kill Louis xvi.
- [27:22]
Professor Marissa Linton
Okay, okay. The National Convention is set up in September. They meet 1792, and it's on the basis of an almost democratic franchise. There are a few sort of exceptions, but it very is very close for democratic still without women, of course. Sorry, that goes without saying. So it's a very egalitarian institution and there are almost 800 deputies. So many people, many voices. So the National Convention is faced with all these problems, of course, of fighting a war and fighting a war on several fronts at once. So there are also within and outside France, many people who are opposed to the deposition of the monarchy. There are a lot of people who didn't want this to happen. So in spite of all their principles, their egalitarian principles, they are faced with this very, very complicated and fraught situation. And in order to make things work, they set up a number of committees. Previous revolutionary assemblies had had committees. The Convention sets up more, I think 53 in total, because it's very hard to get things done with 800 people altogether. So some decisions have to be done by committee. So these committees are set up, the Convention. The deputies as a whole still vote in laws. So the committees don't pass the laws. They have to take anything they want to be legally carried into the Convention, where the deputies debate it. But a lot of the work is done by committees. So a number of these, the most famous is the Committee of Public Safety. And they are, I mean, I wouldn't call them a war cabinet, but they do handle a lot of the war, the conduct of war. And that also includes raising of supplies for the troops, directing people, handling many, many sort of fundamental things about how things work or don't work. So this Committee of Public Safety is set up. It sounds like an odd sort of name because they don't sound very. But in French it's the Comite de Salut Public, which means of public welfare. So the idea is it's public salvation to keep people safe. It's a crisis committee is what that really means, that term. It has 12 members and each of them is elected by the Convention and subject to re election within a month. So there could be in theory a high turnover of the membership of that particular committee. But what happens is that gradually the membership becomes more fixed. It starts out in the origins of it are in early summer of 1793 and Georges Danton. Danton is one of the first members, for example, but he comes off the committee about the time, actually the day before Robespierre enters it. So Robespierre enters it in July 1793 and he stays as a member along with the other 11 right up until his fall, which is in one year later, July 1794. There's one man who's deposed from the Committee after that and arrested on suspicion of being part of a foreign plot and he's executed. But forget about him, let's not confuse everyone. Otherwise there's 11 of them and they are at the leading committee and they get more powers as time goes on.
- [31:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So what brings about the decision to execute the King at the beginning of 1793?
- [31:10]
Professor Marissa Linton
What to do with the King is a big decision. And the French, of course, they have the example of what happened in England in 1649 when Charles I went to the block. It's a very difficult situation. They had a number of choices. They could have banished him, exiled him, but of course then he would have gone abroad, he would have had nowhere else to go, he'd have gone to the Austrians and then he would have been coming back into France whether or not he wanted to. He wouldn't have had much choice at the head of an invading army with a lot of people rallying to his side, because a lot of people still believed in him as the monarch. So that really wasn't a good option for them, for the revolutionaries to do that. They could have just kept him in prison, but they feared that if they did that, that still he would be a focus for rebellion because he still, although they deposed him, in many people's minds he's still a king and a king is a king, he's been sanctified, the revolutionaries desanctify him, say he's legally, you know, say that he has no status to be king, but a lot of people still believe in him and that belief is very important. And many of the leading deputies, particularly amongst the Jacobins, but not just the Jacobins, think that the king needs to die in order for the Republic to be safe. And for that, of course, he needs to be legally executed. They won't murder him. Lots of kings have been murdered in history when they were in the way, as it were. But no, they want to do this legally. So what they do is they set. Now, what court can you set up that will legally put a king on trial? So famously, a special court was set up to hear the case of Charles first in England. But the Convention says we will be the court because we'll be the spokesman for the people. We are the deputies for the people. We will be the court. So all 800 odd deputies become Louis Inquisitors. And in the end, they take votes on whether or not he should be executed. Now, certain leading Jacobins in the Convention don't want to confuse you, but they're called Montagnards because they sit mountaineers, because they sit high up and on the left. Some of them become leading voices to argue that the king should die. One of these is Saint Just, who is a Jacobin who's just entered politics in September of that year, and he's still only just 25 years old. And he becomes a very leading figure. And in his maiden speech in the Convention, he says kingship itself is wrong. The idea that one person is superior because of his birth is wrong. And he argues that if you keep Louis alive, he will always be against the people. He's always been outside the social contract. He remains your enemy whilst he lives there because of what he is, not because of what he'd done, because of who he was. Therefore Saint Just said, you need to execute him. Saint Just had also previously been against the death penalty. They changed. Robespierre then follows Saint Just and he also makes that argument. He says that the kings die so that people must live, so that people can live. But those two men alone are not enough, because you have to have a majority in the Convention. And I think this is really important to understand. The majority of deputies take the same decision when it comes to the vote. Some of them are a bit squeamish about Saint Ju's sort of principle. Kill a king because a king should die. And like, we should treat him like, you know, the Brutus and Cassius treated Julius Caesar. They think that's a bit extreme. They want a trial, they want to convict him of some treason, but they do convict him and they execute him under the guillotine. He's the first political prisoner to be sent to the guillotine. 21st of January 17 923.
- [35:22]
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- [36:50]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Spring nights can't decide if they're hot or cold, and neither can you.
- [36:55]
Professor Marissa Linton
2.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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- [38:12]
Professor Marissa Linton
Within the Convention, factions have developed. All the deputies are meant to be public spirited, think any of the public good, not to form groups or factions. So that's against revolutionary principles, to form a faction. But they do form factions, because I think it's natural to congregate with the people that you sympathize with and to do that. And these factions become very, very entrenched. So much so that almost a war breaks out within the Convention between two rival factions in particular, both of these factions have previously been members of the Jacobin Club, but one group has left it or been deposed. This is the group led by Jacques Pierre Brusso, whom I mentioned before, who been in favor of the war. And this group become known as the Girondins, because then it's a nickname. They're named after the region in Bordeaux where some of the deputies had come from. So they become known as the Girondin faction. Another group of Jacobins that stay within the Jacobin Club, they become known as the Montagnard. These two factions within the Convention are loggerheads, and they're at loggerheads over a certain number of things. One of them is Paris, and the radical working people of Paris, the Sansculottes, as they are called. And the Girondins sided very strongly with the Sans Culottes, but they had become very afraid of them. The Sans Culottes were really quite a powerful force in politics at this time, and they put pressure on the deputies within the Convention to vote the way they wanted. And they called, you know, as far as the Sans Culottes were concerned, they were the people. But as far as the Girondins were concerned, they were dangerous marauders who needed to be opposed. The Jacobins within the Convention, however, still sided with the Sans Culotte and wanted to keep on board with the Sans Culotte. So a big faction develops over that, and a big moment of crisis had come off. After the overthrow of the monarchy, there was an uprising in Paris, September 1792, where Sans culotte broke into the prisons of Paris and massacred many, many people who had defended monarchy. And some of the Girondins deputies had almost been caught up in this massacre. And naturally, they were very unnerved by the experience. And once someone's tried to kill you, it's very hard to make friends afterwards. So this conflict became more and more tense. Also, the Jacobins within the Convention argued that the gendarmes were corrupt, that they'd sided with Dumouriez, who was a general, who basically betrayed the Republic and tried to lead French troops against the Republic. And they were very suspicious of the Girondins. So this conflict becomes more and more tense, and it's awful thing, really. It becomes very fratricidal, these two groups turning against one another. These men had previously been colleagues. They'd worked together within the Jacobin club for the revolution. And that all breaks down over that course of that time, over originally opposition to the war, but then all these other factors, and it leads to open conflict within the Convention. At the beginning of June 1793, a mass uprising of sans culottes demands the expulsion of the Girondin deputies from the Convention. So it's like people, if you can imagine, marching on our parliament, saying, no, you've got to turn out these MPs, we don't like them. You've got to put them in prison and other people in the Parliament going along with it. It's a very sort of dangerous moment. Yeah. Some of these gendarmes deputies are imprisoned. It's a very loose imprisonment. I mean, it's house arrest, actually, with just one or two police gendarmes to keep an eye on them. Some of them then escape imprisonment because it's not really very effective. And I think really, really unfortunately for them, they go and ferment revolts in parts of the French countryside, a revolt against Paris, so particularly in Caen in Normandy, but also down in Marseille, Bordeaux and various places. So they are leading or trying to lead an armed uprising against the Convention. And that makes things very difficult. And then July of that year, Jean Paul Marat, he's like the leading Jacobin. Very, very hard line. Very, very hard line. Much more hardline than Robespierre. He is assassinated by Charlotte Corday, a young woman who comes from Caen to visit him. And she manages to inveigle her way in to see him. He's in his bath. He had a skin complaint. This is why he was receiving a visitor in his bath. I know it sounds quite strange, but he was in his bath and she'd handily gone and bought her a kitchen knife on her way. She gets in to see him and she stabs him. He's there naked in his bath, and she kills him.
- [43:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Many people will be familiar with the image, the famous image from 1793 by David of the death of Marat. I mean, it's such an important image. So, I mean, how does that intensify the situation?
- [43:47]
Professor Marissa Linton
It's not Good. Curiously, she herself, she knew she was likely to be executed. Actually, she thought she'd probably be murdered by a crowd because she pinned her a birth certificate inside her clothes so that people could identify her. She knew she couldn't get away. So she's like. I wouldn't call her a suicide bomber, but, you know, she thought she was making the ultimate sacrifice. They put her in prison, she writes letters, she has her picture, her portrait taken. Bit of a celebrity. And I think she's an extraordinary woman. I mean, she knew she had murdered him and he was defenseless, whatever you think of his politics, and they weren't very nice, but she'd done this, so. So of course she was going to be condemned and she was okay with that. She thought. She thought that this would mean that the Girondin would win, but it means nothing of the kind. She's sent to the guillotine. And of course, the Montagnard become much more intransigent because they don't think a woman, a mere woman, would have had the bottle to do that, to go and murder this politician in his home. But they think that the Girondin leaders in court must have put her up to it.
- [44:56]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Talking of mere women, the former queen Marie Antoinette remains alive until we get to October. Why is she executed at that stage?
- [45:08]
Professor Marissa Linton
What's happened there? There'd been a lot of debate over whether they would put her on trial. There were many calls that she should be swapped for other prisoners, because as an Austrian by birth, you could essentially swap her for other prisoners and that would have been a way out. Some people wanted that way. Georges Danton, when he was on the Committee of Public Safety, he probably wanted that way out. But it became very hard, almost impossible really, to, if you were in government, to face up against the sans culotte. A lot of people wanted her dead. A lot of people in Paris wanted her dead, hated her. They'd hated her in 1789 when they'd gone into Versailles and they got to her bedroom and tried to murder her. They thought of. I mean, I can't tell you the words they used about her. They were so atrocious. But they thought she was a traitor, that she sided with the Austrians. It was actually, I have to say, fair enough, true in many ways. She had sent battle plans of the French armies in secret to the Austrians by the ambassador. She had done that with a view to the French army being defeated and to she and her husband being reinstated. She'd done that because obviously she hated the revolution and everything. It stood for. But people within France didn't have that evidence, didn't have those secret messages. But it's like a lot of things, you think that's what happened. Probably that happened. And actually they were right, but they didn't have that as evidence. So there was. But there were political demands to put her on trial. Basically coming from below. The revolutionary leaders capitulate in the end. So she's put on trial. The trial is a terrible travesty because rather than talk about this treason, which they didn't have a great deal of evidence, they attacked her as a mother, which was a terrible, I think personally, a terrible thing to do. And to suggest that she'd. This is Ebert. It was a spokesman. Oh, he was a terrible man. He was a spokesman, a self appointed spokesman for the Sans Culotte. And he at the trial said to her that accused her of having slept with her son, a little boy, in order to kind of seduce him and make him opposed to the revolution. It's a terrible thing to say of anyone. And she, she sort of says, I appeal to all the mothers present. Like, this is abhorrent. I can't answer this. This is such a terrible thing to say. And yeah, that was a big miscalculation. So from Abe, a vicious man, but yeah, they find her guilty. I mean, at that point, at that point, if you're a leading political figure and you're sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal, they're likely to find you guilty. It's a different thing with more ordinary people who work for the Revolutionary Tribunal, but those high political figures, yeah, it was a very fraught time.
- [48:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Following in her wake quite closely. We have some of the key Girondins figures like Brissot and made a rolland. How pivotal is the death of these
- [48:14]
Professor Marissa Linton
people, do you think? The death of people like Brisseau,
- [48:19]
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it
- [48:19]
Professor Marissa Linton
marks a further stage in revolutionary politics of conflict between revolutionaries. I can't emphasize enough. These people have been friends in many cases. They'd certainly worked together for the same principles. They've been colleagues, they'd shared a great deal. This is totally broken down, an atmosphere of complete mistrust. And the Girondin had done this just as much as the Montagnard. Previously, I mean, they had been vicious in their attacks, but they were the losers. So they were the ones who end up going on trial. And it is a very, very fraught thing. In the end, a number of those Xirondin deputies that they hold in prison are sent to trial and they are without exception condemned to death. And that they are sent to their deaths the next day singing the Marseillaise because they consider themselves still to be good revolutionaries. They say they've been set up, really, that they're not against the revolution. But there's this whole idea that if you're not a pure revolutionary, you're a conspirator against it. And there's a lot of suspicion and doubt and sense that leading revolutionaries are being bought off by the foreign powers and are working for foreign agents, the agents of William Pitt, because by that point, Britain has come into the war after the death of Louis xvi, Britain comes into the war and there's British money on the streets. So a lot of people are saying we can't trust our own people, that they have to show that they can be relied upon. And people didn't trust the gendarme. They go to their deaths. It is a very, very terrible thing. And for those deputies who are left within the Convention, of course, there is an atmosphere of fear amongst the deputies themselves. And it's ironically, it's the Girondins who are called for the notion that the immunity from arrest for deputies should be taken away. And that's passed by the Convention. And what that means is if people don't like what you say and they can get a vote against you, they can arrest you for what you say and say this amounts to treason. So they are all, all terrified, particularly the ones who are towards the center of power, because the higher profile you are, the more at risk you are. And they're all living in that atmosphere. Insurance isn't one size fits all. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressives Name youe Price Tool for years. Now, with the name your price tool, you tell them what you want to pay and they'll show you options and that fit your budget. So whether you're picking out your first policy or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they make it easy to see your options. Visit progressive.com find a rate that works for you with the name your price tool. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law.
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- [52:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
How far they've come from freedom of speech by this point. But one of the things that you write about in your book, one of the key themes of your book is the idea of virtue in politics at this time. So what does virtue have to do with all this death?
- [52:17]
Professor Marissa Linton
It has quite a lot to do with it actually. The idea of virtue, it's a fundamental principle of revolutionary politics. It predates the revolution. It goes back to people like Montesquieu. It's the idea in a political sense that you need to be selfless. If you're engaged in public affairs, you have to be thinking only of the public good. You mustn't be in it for the money or to advance yourself or your family or your friends. Now that needs to be seen in the context of the Ancien regime, where venality, corruption is how things work. It's an understood way of how things work. So the revolution is very high minded. They've read their classics and they believe that a man who goes into public life should do it only for good reasons. And if he wants to be in public life, if he's ambitious, this is a really bad sign because why is he ambitious? He wants something for himself. So the ideal really was like Cincinnatus, you know, that you shouldn't, the Roman general, that you shouldn't want to be in this position of power. If you wanted it, you didn't deserve it. But of course people were in positions of power because somebody had to run things. They didn't want an anarchy and you certainly couldn't have that at a time of war and conflict. So there were some people who were leaders. But of course then the onus is put on them to prove that they were virtuous on a very basic line, to prove they weren't making money out of what they were doing. And that is a very big thing with them, to prove that they weren't open to bribes. And again here Robespierre has this reputation. His nickname is the Incorruptible. And how many politicians can you say that about? You know, even now he could not be bought. And certainly he wasn't interested in money. It's very clear he didn't. He didn't care about money, not even personal power that much. He was the kind of man who wanted to be right. Seems quite a self righteous sort of man. But yeah, this is very key to how they are. But of course you can't ever prove that you're entirely virtuous or that your motives are entirely selfless. And who is entirely selfless in politics? I mean, if you look at politicians now, they will never say they're in it for the money. Even now. I mean, this is not a vote winner. Say, well, I just want what I can get. You don't say it. It's understood that you will have a way of speaking that I'm a politician now. I might say, well, I want to do good, I want to make a difference. You hear those sorts of terms. They don't say I'm a man of virtue because that's an 18th century phrase. But they say similar thing. I'm not in it for what I can get. Of course, we don't necessarily believe them, do we? Because we're all very cynical about politics. We've learned to be cynical because we've lived through so much politics. But at the time of the French Revolution, politics was a new thing in that sense, the idea that men would be voted in and then have a position of power that they've been voted show us a new idea and a high minded ideal. And they're trying to live up to it, but they can't really, because who can?
- [55:36]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
This sense that the revolution is starting to eat itself is perhaps compounded with the arrest and execution of Georges Danton, who you mentioned earlier as had been a key figure on the Committee of Public Safety. You know, why, what is happening? How is this imploding?
- [55:54]
Professor Marissa Linton
So Georges Danton had been very much at the heart of the revolution from the beginning. He is a leading Jacobin and then a Montagnard deputy. He had been Minister of justice briefly in 1792 after the overthrow of the monarchy. He's in it up to his neck, absolutely. Danton is also the man who called for setting up the Revolutionary Tribunal March 1793. He said, Let us be terrible to spare the people from being so. And what he meant by that is he didn't want a repetition of the September massacres where sans culottes took it on themselves to go and kill people in the prisons that they thought were conspirators against the revolution. He said, you have to give people a trial. We'll have a special institution to do it. And that is the Revolutionary Tribunal. And it's the Revolutionary Tribunal that puts him on trial in the end. So he's set up or helped set up and been committed to the very things that then turn against him. And this happens, you see it happen in many cases. But he had become, I think, sickened by some of the politics and what it was doing, Personally sickened. I think he hadn't wanted Marie Antoinette to die, but he certainly wasn't going to risk dying and save her. I don't think he wanted his Girondin to die, but he wasn't going to risk dying to save them either. This was the sort of situation they were in. But that search was coming quite close to him. He had a friend, Fabre d', Eiglantine, who had been arrested on suspicion of fraud, really, of using his position to get money through what he knew about the East India Company. And, yeah, he was. He was guilty. And Danton tried to defend his friend, but it was a tricky thing to do, because to be seen to defend a friend meant that you were putting your friend before the public could right this kind of circle of an argument, so you can't be seen to do it openly. And Danton and his friend Camille Desmoulins, who had also been a close friend of Robert Speer, they'd all been friends, all these men had been friends. They seem to be trying to set up a movement to wind down the terror. And Desmoulin started a newspaper. It's called the Vieux Cordier. And in it he argues that the terror's gone wrong. This is a man who'd been part of it, but he's saying, you can't do this, you can't do this. This is not effective. He said, you can't kill all your enemies by means of terror. If you kill one man, you will have 10 others who will rise up, his friends and his family. They will never forgive you. You can't kill everyone who is opposed to you. We can't kill everyone who is opposed to the revolution. This is not working. Now, he's right, of course, about that, but it's a very dangerous thing to say, and particularly dangerous is to be seen to be attacking the revolutionary government and the Committee of Public Safety. And the men on that committee are also afraid for themselves. That includes Robespierre, who up to a point had sided with Danton and Demlin and read the first two issues of the Vieux Cordier and approved of them. And he did make efforts to save Dimlin in particular. He did. But when push came to shove, he was not prepared at that moment to go down with them. So he becomes part of the group within the Committee of Public Safety, within also the other committee, the Police Committee, the Committee of General Security, that band together to arrest Danton. Desmoulins and two others. And they take the precaution of arresting them before the Convention can vote to agree their arrest. And that's so that Danton, he's a great public speaker, big man, big voice, big presence. They don't want him speaking in the Convention because he'll attack them. So they arrest him first and that's what they do. It's a really fraught moment. Some of Danton's friends stand up in the Convention, say, you can't do this, you can't arrest. This is against our own laws. You can't arrest a man without him, you know, being heard. And at that moment, Robespierre stands up and says, we're not having a special privilege for Danton and Demoulin. We've said, you know, that we will not have this exception. And we put all our confidence in the Revolutionary Tribunal and people are scared. They back down. They side with Robespierre, they side with Saint Just and they vote for the arrest of the Danton and Desmoulin. After that, it's just a matter of getting these men before the Revolutionary Tribunal, shutting them up, which is what they do quite effectively, and not letting them hear many witnesses, and then sending them before the. Yeah, yeah. Decreeing their execution, killing them.
- [60:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
The terror will wind to an end in middle of 1794, but it seems to be at its most intense in its last weeks. And then of course, we get what's grandly known as the Thermidorian reaction, Robespierre's own journey to the guillotine. What happens in these weeks and why is he considered no longer necessary?
- [61:21]
Professor Marissa Linton
So there are reasons why terror no longer seems so necessary in the summer of 1794. A big reason is that the war goes well. All this time, all the Girondins, the Danton, all of that Marie Antoinette, this had happened when the war is going very badly and people are very scared. But in the end of June 26, 1794, a big victory is won what is now Belgium. And from that point onwards, the French armies are not fighting a defensive war, they are fighting an offensive war. Very different thing. In fact, people like Robespierre think they shouldn't be fighting an offensive war. But that's by the board, but yeah, so that atmosphere really begins to ease. A lot of people had been. I mean, it's very difficult to live with a terrorist. It's a very fraught and horrible thing. And some of the men who had been in the Convention, who had been responsible for voting for it, they'd support it. They supported the laws, they are very uneasy about it and they want it to end. There are lots of indications that Robespierre himself wasn't happy with it. I mean, my personal view is that he was having a kind of breakdown. They don't use the word breakdown in obviously, 1794, it's not a term used. But he's exhausted, burnt out. And certainly since he supported the arrest and execution of Danton and Demoulin, he wasn't the man he had been. He really, really wasn't. There are others who are much more radical than he is who were suspicious of him. So it's very, very thought moment. And you say that the terror is winding down. What is actually happening is it's being more centralized. So a lot of the prisoners who previously would have been gone before provincial tribunals, revolutionary tribunals ahead of this, in various parts of the countryside where there were big conflicts and going before the military commissions, some of these have been closed down and more people being sent to Paris, which meant they had a blockage in the prisons in Paris. The prisons in Paris, all these places have been called into use, you know, to service, to put all these prisoners. So they're not meant to hold all these people. And so they have to make a decision about all these people. So many are released, in fact, but quite a number are sent for the guillotine. And this because it's so high profile, it's happening in Paris. This becomes known as the Great Terror. This is happening over about six, seven weeks before the fall of Robespierre. The Great Terror and the numbers killed in Paris go up and the number of people convicted by the Revolutionary Tribunal goes up from about half to almost three quarters. And yeah, it's a very fraught, terrible thing. Robespierre himself is no longer being very active. Ironically, he's kind of not attending meetings of the Committee of Public Safety. He's having business brought to his home where he's living, his lodgings. And in some ways he's taken a bit of a back seat. He still speaks a couple of times at the Jacobin Club. And this is why I think he's having a bit of a breakdown. He's really not at the center of what is going on. Of course, people are afraid of him. And then he makes this huge mistake. He goes to the Convention, he breaks his silence and he accuses people, says various people are against him. It's a very kind of. Well, I would say it was paranoid, but actually a lot of people are against him. So it's, it's kind of. And he Says there's a lot of people, but he won't name them. And people are thinking, well, you know, does he mean you? Does he mean me? And it's an untenable situation. And then he just kind of leaves the situation there. He says he's ready to die, he's ready to drink the hemlock. David, the revolutionary artist, leaps up and says, if you're going to drink the hemlock and kill yourself, basically I will die with you. It was all very, very emotional. But then Robert Speer just sort of goes home. Well, he goes to the jacking club and repeats his speech. Then he goes home. And this is not. He's not organizing a conspiracy. It's really something of a mess. The next morning, Sagi stands up in the Convention and while I think disapproving of some of the things that Robert Speer has been doing, tries to defend him. But a little conspiracy, a real conspiracy has been hatchling amongst a number of deputies who are afraid for themselves. And some of them are members of the Committee of Public Safety. And they leap up and attack Saint Just. And then Robespierre, they attack them, call them traitors. And then the whole thing sort of spirals the same pattern. They are accused of being traitors to the Republicans. Their arrest is decreed. They are briefly, I would say they were sent to prison, but the prisons won't hold them because the prisons are too scared. The jailers don't want to take Robespierre in because you know, what if the situation changes again? So the jailers reject them, say no, I don't think so. And these men are briefly at liberty. They go to the Town hall, the Hotel de Ville. They make a last stand. They try and call sans culottes together to, to make up a last stand to defend them. But not enough people come. A lot of people are afraid. You know, this is very much the situation and the Convention from being terrified for itself, rallies and send troops to take the town hall. And Rob Speer is captured, shot in the jaw, but taken alive. He and many others are sent for the healers team over next day, the next day without trial. And yeah, overall over those three days, many, many men are executed. And it's the end of that sort of that radical phase of the revolution. Ironically, people don't see it coming at the time. The men who overthrow Rubber Spear do not see there will be an end to the terror. They're not calling for an end of the terror, but very soon afterwards people are asking for it. They're clamoring for it and seeing which way the wind is turning that Thermidorians, as they become known, after the month in which they overthrew Robespierre, they say, yeah, yeah, we want to end the terr. And so it starts to wind down and people like Tallien say, yeah, we're not in favour of Tara. It was all Robespierre. He's dead, you can blame him for everything. It's convenient and it enables them to wash the blood off their own hands.
- [67:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So just to end then, just to reflect on what we've been talking about. Do you think that I sort of want to know why the violence was necessary, why they used violence to defend liberty? Was it an example of revolutionary ideas being taken to their ultimate conclusion or was it an aberration?
- [67:56]
Professor Marissa Linton
I think to understand that, you have to look at it in the longer term. Look at how men like Rob Speer was. He was against the Death Party, as I said, so was Saint Just. They didn't start out saying, well, we've got to kill these people. That's not how it begins. They're not these sorts of people, they're not psychopaths. I mean, there were some psychopaths, I think, who were involved in the provincial terror. When they're going out killing people, particularly around the Vendo, there were some people who really got into it, but most of the men who were behind it did it because they thought it was necessary. And that comes back to the idea of virtue and of the public good, the salut public. It's a very, very old idea. They don't invent that people do things in a time of crisis and they think it's necessary to save France. My own view is that it was helpful for a time for the war, to have the power of terror behind you, to coerce people. They threatened it much more than they did it, except in the Vendee, where there's a whole civil war. But they threatened it much more. But it also backfires for the very reasons that Camille Desmoulin had written in the view at Cordelier. That is, if you try and kill your enemies, other people will never forgive you and you create more enemies and where are you going to end up?
- [69:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I'm interested too, and I promise. This is my final question in the impact, the legacy of this. Because does the terror detract us from the ideas and achievements of this First Republic? Does it stain republicanism, even democracy, as an idea over the long term, do you think?
- [69:37]
Professor Marissa Linton
Yes, it does. It does. It's easy to see that in action, you Ask any group of people, ordinary people haven't studied the revolution or haven't gone to university and done it. You ask them what the French Revolution makes them think of, and I can almost guarantee you they will say the guillotine, won't they? Of course they will. The one thing they know, the thing that they know, and it's had a long last lasting effect. I think that's tragic, of course, but it's the revolutionaries who did it. They set up that guillotine. They did that. You know, they were the man. The men who wanted liberty and equality and fraternity. But they did also set up the guillotine, however, and they made it spectacular, too, because they wanted spectacular justice, the people's justice. They wanted it to look frightening because you have to if you're confronting your enemies. So they do do that, but it recoils against them and so it's used against them. And, yeah, I think this is really a tragedy. But I also think had I been in that position, trying to make those decisions with France at war with all these enemies, with so many things against them, I don't know what I would have done. I'm lucky. I've never been through a war and in power and had to make very hard decisions. So I think it's quite easy to sit on the sidelines and say, well, that was terrible what they did. Of course it was terrible, but would we actually choose differently if we were in that situation?
- [71:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, there's a question for us. Professor Marisa Linton, thank you so much for giving your time, your scholarship, your thoughtful answers to these questions. It's been an absolute pleasure for the mind to listen to you. Thank you so much. My thanks to Professor Marissa Linton. Next time for the final episode in this miniseries. Look. Looking into the French Revolution, how did ordinary people understand and describe what they were living through? Through journals and eyewitness accounts, we'll hear the revolution as it was experienced. Confusing, chaotic and deeply personal. What did it feel like to watch your world collapse, to cheer it on, or to fear that you might be. Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History hit. Thank you also to my researcher, Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line at not just the tudorsistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode of Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History.
- [72:23]
Professor Marissa Linton
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