503. The French Revolution: Bloodbath in Paris (Part 1)
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God of the people and of kings, of cities, of the countryside, of Luther, of Calvin, the children of Israel, remember the times when the sinister tyrants crushed underfoot the rights of the French. The time not so long ago when wicked ministers deceived peoples and kings.

Princes, nobles, bishops swam in opulence. The people shuddered under their wealth. Their palaces were cemented with the blood of the oppressed, the tears of misery. That was the song of the 14th of July, which was written by the director of the Paris opera, François-Joseph Gossec.

and the words were by a poet called Marie-Joseph Chenier, and it was written to celebrate the second Bastille Day. So that's the 14th of July, 1791. And Dominic, I'm

guessing that most of our listeners will have realised from this preamble that we're back with the French Revolution, our old friend. Because we did our first series, didn't we, to coincide with the Paris Olympics, but they're long gone. But we're continuing the story because we want to do this in sufficient depth that we can give the subject the attention that it deserves, and which we didn't when we did our first treatment of it.

and we dispatched it in a single episode in 50 minutes. Yeah, not anymore, Tom. Those were very distant days. So hi, everybody. This is season two, isn't it, Tom? Yeah. It's the second season of The French Revolution. And so we're kicking off at the Champs-Élysées,

which is on the western side of Paris on the 14th of July 1791. So this was a huge public occasion, Bastille Day. And the Champs-Élysées had this kind of earthen stadium with this kind of great embankments with the grandstands. And they had an altar of the fatherland as they'd had a year before. And thousands of people turned up. But it was quite different this time, 1791.

And that hymn tells the story a bit. So it's all about, you know, shuddering under the wealth of tyrants and blood and people being crushed underfoot and stuff.

But a year before, in 1790, the same authors had just written a te deum. Yeah, so hymns and all very Catholic and stuff. Yeah, that's one element of change. And then the other is in 1790, so a year after the fall of the Bastille, Louis XVI had been there and he had sworn an oath to the Constitution and he had really been the star of the show.

In 1791, he's not there. There are no royal flags. There are no royal symbols. And on the altar itself, the word Hua, king, has been literally scrubbed out. So there's that big inscription which says, the nation, the law,

And then it says the, and then there's a missing word because they've taken out the word king. Yeah. I mean, just to say, I mean, one thing that immediately strikes me about those words, we still have this thing that it's wicked ministers deceiving the people and kings. So the king, he's not grouped in with that list of people who are swimming in opulence, the princes, the nobles and the bishops.

So there is still a kind of phantasmal sense of respect for the king. Yeah, they're very phantasmal, I would say. Very phantasmal, yeah. So the reason we thought it would be interesting to kick off here at the Champ de Mars is that just three days after this great celebration, there will be gunshots and screaming and bodies piling up.

And one of the bloodiest days of the revolution, a turning point in French history, the massacre at the Champs-Élysées. So that is to come in today's episode. But Tom, maybe before we get there, we should remind ourselves, we should have a sort of HBO style recap. What happened in season one? In season one of the French Revolution. So listeners will remember that at the heart of the revolution, there were three things that collided. So one was a financial and political crisis, France running out of money.

Number two was a kind of social crisis, people starving because of freak weather events and so on. And number three, probably the element of this interests you most, Tom, is the sort of cultural moment. Lots of abstract nouns. Yeah, people being obsessed with virtue, with the Roman Republic, with the idea of purity. And of course, Champ de Mars means, you know, it's the campus marshes. It's named after the place where...

the Roman people in the Republic would gather to celebrate their civic identity. And as we will see, running right through season two, is the same obsession with Rome and the lessons of Roman history. So important for the French revolutionaries. So,

Let us as well remember that to try and cope with all this, Louis XVI had very grudgingly recalled the Estates General, this sort of supposedly ancient assembly of the French people. That had declared itself the National Assembly while it was meeting. The disorder on the streets went out of control, culminating in the stormy of the Bastille.

Then we had an episode that you did, Tom, about these market women marching on Versailles, effectively dragging the royal family back to Paris. Then you have this great fever of reform, of rebooting France, which included, most controversially, this attack on the independence and the privileges of the French clergy. Yeah, people probably have been struck by the mention of Luther and Calvin in that passage that I read right at the start of the show.

And that's a reminder that I think that there are elements of the Reformation in what is happening in France. And that's what lots of devout Catholics think. There is an anxiety that the revolution is essentially a replay of what happened with Luther and Calvin. Yeah. And it's still current two years on from the fall of the Bastille. Absolutely it is. And it's extremely controversial out in the countryside.

So to move forward to the summer of 1791, by the summer of 1791, actually very few of these things have really got better. So prices are very high. People are still hungry. A lot of the problems have not yet been fixed. But there has been a definite change in the cultural temperature. Paris has become drenched in politics. People are reading out newspapers and cafes. People are wearing patriotic, tricolor cockades in their hats, all of that kind of stuff.

So that coincides with the tone of public life becoming much more fractious and polarized. And it's against that background, as we entered the climax of the first season, Louis and Marion Twinnett deciding that they would make a break for it.

and escape Paris, they decided to flee to the eastern border where they would collect troops and probably march on the capital. But they were intercepted at Varennes and brought back by this huge, jeering crowd. And then they arrived in the city to a sort of terrifying silence. Nobody taking their hats off. Yeah, nobody, no gestures of respect at all. And then we ended with the gates of the Tuileries Palace literally clanging shut behind them while the crowd marched

kind of lays into their bodyguards and tries to tear their bodyguards apart. So that's the recap. And now let's literally continue from where we left off. Season two, part one. Season two. So the gates have closed. And as Louis looks out at the city, what he sees is a city that has completely turned against him since the news of his attempted escape. So it's not just that he had tried to run away. It is they had left a letter in which he said, I was

I was lying all along. I hate you. I hate the revolution. I wish you nothing but ill. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. And while he's been gone, the press, which previously had been very much this kind of stuff about the king has been misled by treacherous ministers,

What do they call him? Papa. Le bon papa. Le bon papa, exactly. All of this kind of stuff. That has vanished. And now they call him a traitor, a coward, Louis the False. So if you look at some of those papers, the Annales Politiques,

which was the most popular newspaper in these clubs that sprung up around the provinces allied to the central Jacobin club, a kind of revolutionary club in Paris. He deserted the throne, the capital, the empire, and by this cowardly defection intended to come back with foreign executioners to rule over 25 million corpses. They're not wrong, really. No, they're not wrong. I mean, that was his plan. Yes. Effectively.

This is the thing, we'll be talking a lot about conspiracy theories in the next couple of episodes, about conspiracy theories and paranoid suspicions. And yet the truth is they're right. I mean, there literally was a conspiracy. Exactly. And that's so important in everything that follows, explains the climate of fear, of suspicion, and the belief that basically, you know, if you're living in a world where people are conspiring, you'd be better off killing your enemies before they kill you. That's a dynamic at the absolute center of what will follow.

And the aggression, the sheer aggression, which of course draws on what you talked about at the very beginning of the first season, the torrent of invective against Louis and particularly Marie Antoinette. This is now turbocharged by the flight to Varennes. So there's a radical paper called Père Duchesne, which was edited by this incredibly aggressive journalist called Hébert. Some people may be familiar with a faction called the Hébertistes who are going to run into trouble later on.

And he wrote, you are no longer my king. You're no longer my king. You're nothing but a cowardly deserter. We will stuff you into Charenton prison. But also a lunatic asylum. A lunatic asylum. Yeah, exactly. We will stuff you into Charenton and your whore into the Opidale and your whore

is Marie Antoinette, the queen. And the hôpital is where prostitutes are sent. Yeah, exactly. So during all this time, there's also been a sense in which the common people have been emboldened as never before. So we will hear a lot in the next few episodes about a group of people called the sans-culottes,

working class people who don't wear breeches and stockings but wear trousers and we have had in the last few days there's been so much panic about the flights of Iran there have been groups of them kind of impromptu militias armed often with pikes or with makeshift weapons taken to the streets

They had, while Louis had been gone, besieged the National Assembly, not aggressively, but because they wanted to be let inside to swear oaths to pledge their loyalty to the revolution. So on the one hand, they've done that. And on the other hand, they've been rampaging through the streets, smashing images of the king, his statues, his busts, ripping down pub signs, ripping down street signs, anything that has the kind of taint of

monarchy. So kind of virtuous and principled, but simultaneously quite fun. Well, simultaneously quite fun, but also potentially very frightening. Yeah. If you're a lawyer by, you know, if you're somebody who prizes authority, stability and all those kinds of things. But I think if you've been raised in the shadow of the authority of the crown to be intimidated by it, and then you have a license by the behavior of the king, but also the sense that you are

are part of a large number of people who feel this, there must be a kind of giddy sense of excitement. Oh, I think there is. Yeah. You know, the thrill of almost blasphemy in toppling these statues. I think we talked in the first French Revolution series about how...

If you miss the fact that for lots of people, this is quite good fun. Or these marches on Versailles, these great public spectacles. Yeah. You know, a lot of people, as we will see, treat these political moments as a kind of carnival. You can throw off the shackles of everyday convention and

And you can go around smashing stuff up and having a fine old time. And a lot of people, particularly young men, I think find that very invigorating. They always do in history. But the French Revolution is a really good example of that. Well, kind of high-minded vandalism. Yes. I mean, you get the best of both worlds, don't you? Yeah, you do indeed. So the question now is what will happen to the king? France has never been a very republican country. There have been republicans, but they have been a tiny, tiny minority. And republicanism, even in 1789, 1790,

has never been more than a real kind of minority sport. But now, in the last few days since Louis' flight to Varennes, more and more people have been saying, you know, maybe the whole institution, it's not just Louis that's the problem, it's the institution that's the problem. The club that has been instrumental in this is a club called the Caudillier Club. That met on the left bank

in the heart of the kind of publishing district and the theatre district. It had a very radical populist tone. Its most famous members were people who we've talked about before or will be featuring very heavily. So a guy called Camille Desmoulins, radical journalist, who we featured in the previous series. Exactly, who's the hero of Hilary Mantel's novel, A Place of Greater Safety.

A chap called Jean-Paul Marat, formerly of Newcastle. Skin problem. Skin problem. Another skin complaint person, Georges Danton, who we haven't really talked about before, who's this great Titanic guy.

earthy, brilliant speaker and organiser who will play a very big part in the revolution. He's basically Gerard Depodieu, isn't he? Well, he's also, to a degree, he's you, Dominic. Oh, Tom, so kind. I've got lovely skin, though. That's the difference. Yeah. Well, it's not on every point, but a man of great principle and appetite.

Don't say I was married to like a 12 year old or something when he was executed. So let's not go there. Right. So the Cordelia club within hours of the King's flight has been arguing, okay, enough. Now the national assembly should pull the plug and let's declare France a Republic. And in the next few weeks, the Cordelia club and other radical clubs bombard the national assembly with petitions saying you've got to scrap the monarchy. Now, you know, Louis has shown he can't be trusted. So,

The decision lies with the National Assembly, and we should perhaps recap a bit to remember what that was. Remember that Louis had called the Estates General, and that had met in 1789. They had declared themselves a National Assembly, dissolving the boundaries between the three estates. The priests, the nobles, and the common people. Exactly. But what's actually now happened is the nobles and the priests have all gone home. They're gutted about what's happening, by and large.

And not only have they gone home, most of the Commons have gone home because they didn't expect that they would be there for two years. Most of them are massively overworked, stressed, deluged with correspondence and petitions from their constituents.

And they've basically just given up. So there's only the 400 kind of hardcore deputies left. And they are trying to completely reboot France, to rewrite the government structures, the tax code, the law codes, and to write a new constitution. And they are absolutely worn out. In fact, from this point onwards, in this whole story running to when we finish the French Revolution, who knows when that will be, 2029, everybody is just constantly tired and half drunk.

They're just absolutely exhausted. And also, I mean, kind of quite young as well. Yes. So it's increasingly becoming a young man's game. It is, exactly. It's young, drunk, inexperienced men. Yes, exactly. And also frightened men. So these deputies who had been elected in 1789, they didn't think they'd be there two years later. I mean, they thought they were going to Versailles, of course, not to Paris. So they're in the centre of Paris now, and they are surrounded by people with trousers on,

and pikes who are sort of smashing up street signs and things. There are constant bread riots and brawls in the markets and all of this. And actually the deputies, we can tell from their correspondence when they write home, they say, I actually don't feel safe anymore. I'm genuinely concerned about my personal safety. And to add to that, at the back of their minds from this point onwards,

summer of 1791, there is a lesson in what can happen when order falls apart completely. France has one really important and lucrative colony, which we haven't talked about at all yet, which is what is now Haiti or Haiti.

which is a place that was then called Saint-Domingue. And in August 1790, there had been the first signs of a kind of slave uprising on Saint-Domingue, people burning sugarcane fields and some breaking the machines.

Then at the end of 1790, the black freedmen on that island had launched an uprising. At the end of August 1791, there will be a mass slave rebellion, a sort of overnight rebellion that will plunge the entire colony into civil war. An extraordinary, extraordinary story. So Dominic, you said most of the deputies in Paris is slaves.

about order falling apart, but not for all of them. No, abolitionists. There are people who are very enthusiastic about this because one person's order falling apart is obviously another person's declaration of liberty and freedom. Yeah, exactly. That's certainly how the slaves feel about it, obviously. But there are people in Paris who feel this is perfectly in tune with the revolution. The revolution has proclaimed liberty

as one of its three founding ideals. There are indeed, yeah. You know, even this is furiously contested. It is, exactly. And you can feel conflicted about it, as some deputies clearly do. Some deputies think, well, I believe in the rights of man. And actually, you know, my sympathies probably do lie with the slaves.

on Saint-Domingue. But at the same time, they're getting letters from kind of merchants on the Western Atlantic seaboard of France saying, whoa, our town's entire economy depends upon this. You know, you've got to intervene militarily immediately. And also we said that one of the principles upheld in the Declaration of the Rights of Man is the right of property. Yeah. And if a slave is property, then that's in confliction with the upholding the ideal of liberty. So there's much to be resolved. So there are all these tensions. Yeah.

And even before the flight to Varennes, there had been some people who had looked at all this and said, okay, this has now gone too far. The revolution must now be brought to a swift conclusion and order and kind of normality restored to France. And their champion, and a person who's probably a bit forgotten now in accounts of the revolution, because he's not quite as colorful and charismatic as some of the other characters, but the man who's really the revolution's big star in the summer of 1791 is a very young man called Antoine Barnard.

So Barnab came from Grenoble. People who listened to the first season will remember the French Revolution began in Grenoble. And he's a Protestant, isn't he? And he's a Protestant. Yeah. And the Protestants do, you know, as the Luther and Calvin reference at the beginning, they do play a kind of oversized part in the kind of imagination of the revolution.

He's a classic revolutionary. He's a lawyer's son. He's a lawyer himself. He's very young. He's only 27 when the Bastille falls. He had become one of the great stars of the National Assembly. He was a founder member of the Jacobin Club. He drew up its first rule book. And he has a little faction allied to him, people who I suppose you might call, for want of a better word, liberals. So there's a couple of noblemen called Lameth. There is a magistrate in Paris called Duport.

And they think, by the summer of 1791, they think, and lots of people think, these are the people, this is the faction that are going to run the revolution.

And their attitude is this. They say, look, the disorder has gone way out of control. We need to end all this. We need to end all the chaos, the polemics from the clubs and from the radical press. We need to restore order in the army. The way we can fix the economy is by further liberalization. We need to scrap all the antiquated regulations and things. We need to have a proper laissez-faire economy. So scrap price controls, have a free market,

Let the free market work its magic. They reminded me when I was reading about this of the people who were around Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s. Well, that worked out well, didn't it? In Russia, yeah, it worked out equally well.

So they're kind of liberal reformers, think tank people who basically have figured out how they think they'll fix France. It'll be short-term pain, but in the long run, they think it will all pay off. But also, Dominic, I'm guessing a further example, which I know the revolutionaries themselves are aware of, is England after the Civil War. Yeah. And that sense also then of radical thoughts, opinions, incredible liberty of expression, and the sense that

there does need to be control at the center and there needs to be if not a monarch then a monarchical figure but i'm guessing that bernard i mean i well i know bernard is thinking we already have a king so let's try and work with him or more specifically let's try and work with the queen yeah you could see them as wigs actually in some ways tom you could see them as a little bit wiggish they're all about free trade they're all about a kind of liberal oligarchy

sensible people. With a neutered monarchy. Yes, exactly. So they've already, by the way, passed a law called the Le Chapelier law to clamp down on strikes and workers. That has made them quite unpopular on the streets. But as you rightly say, they think they can use Louis and Marie Antoinette. Now, Barnard had been one of the three deputies who had gone to get them back from Varennes. And he had sat, people will remember who listened to the final episode of the last series. He had been there sitting in the coach

with Marie Antoinette on the way back. And he had thought to himself, oh, this is brilliant. And with the queen, she's very charming. I think we can do business together. And this is so crucial about how both Benav and indeed Marie Antoinette come to be seen. Because the idea of Marie Antoinette as a manipulative whore

who only has to meet a man to work her wiles on him and seduce him and corrupt him. It's like Cleopatra with Antony. It totally is. And from this point on, the moment Benav is back, even while he seems the cock of the roost,

the pornographers, the satirists are getting to work and are portraying him as a kind of a dupe of the queen, like Louis, that he is the victim of this vampire-ess. But you know what, Tom? As with what we're saying about the paranormal and the conspiracies,

They're not entirely wrong. No, they're not. But it's not a sexual seduction, is it? No, it's not. It's a political seduction. It's a political seduction. He got back and he thought, I can do business with the queen. We understand each other. I understand now where she's coming from, her anxiety for her family. She understands that I'm the man. You know, she respects me. And they start exchanging coded letters. And basically, Barnard says, let's do a deal.

I will make sure the National Assembly go easy on you. You must give up all thoughts of escape. You must commit yourselves to making the new constitution work. Now, in return, I will make sure that the new constitution has a really good, solid role for the monarchy, that you'll still have powers, you'll still have your self-respect on all of that kind of thing. And actually, to begin with, he's pretty much as good as his word. When they wake up the morning after those gates have clanged shut at the Tuileries Palace,

They might be expecting they'll face a show trial. They'll face really aggressive interrogation. There's none of that. Now, they are under house arrest. They can't go out of the Tuileries. They can't even close the door of their rooms. They're constantly supervised, understandably, because they'll try to run away again. But thanks to Barnard and his pals, the National Assembly treat them with great tolerance. They send a committee to interview them, but they give them 24 hours to get their story straight.

And when Marion Trenet and Louis say, well, listen, we were just frightened. We were running away to where we thought we'd be safe. But we absolutely would never have raised an army to march on Paris. The very idea of it. And the idea that we would be in touch with foreign powers. Never. I mean, those are outright brazen lies. We were possibly quite sympathetic to Louis and Marion Trenet in our previous episode.

But they are lying about this. They were talking to the Austrians and they were thinking about marching on Paris. There are a lot of lies that the king is telling. I mean, he clearly feels that he's obedient to a higher calling. Yeah, he does. That would be his justification, wouldn't it? But he's still, I mean, he's absolutely fibber. He is a fibber.

So thanks to Barnard, the National Assembly decides that they will reinstate Louis as long as he promises to obey the Constitution. And when a few people in the Assembly say, I don't know about this, he has behaved very badly. Barnard gives a brilliant speech and he says, the next step that the revolution takes would be a very dangerous one. It would undoubtedly be an attack on your, our property.

It is time to conclude the revolution. It needs to stop. The nation is free and all the French are equals. So let's, you know, no more. Except they're not, are they? No, of course not. Because they still have a monarchy. I mean, that's the whole point. But from their point of view, their property owners, remember a lot of these deputies, they're like, you know what? He's probably right. Because I actually have always been a monarchist. I do have a fair bit of property. I have my country house. I have, you know, my parents have a whatever, whatever.

Yeah, he's right. You know, let's calm things down. So the National Assembly decides on the 15th of July. So the day after the thing that you began with, Tom, the Bastille Day, the day after that, the Assembly votes. Fine. Louis, swear an oath. When we finish the Constitution, we swear an oath and then he's back.

And of course, all the radicals, so the Cordulier Club, this club on the left bank full of artists and working class radicals and Desmoulins and Marat and Danton, they go ballistic. And the evening when they hear about this, there are people in there saying, listen, the deputies have been bought and paid for by the court.

Barnard and all these people are in bed with Marie Antoinette. This is unbelievable. The king ran away to the frontier to try to get a foreign army to attack us. And they're just going to let him off when barely even a slap on the wrist. And Dominic, when you look at the pamphlets that are produced in this period, the emphasis on Marie Antoinette as the agent of this is stupefying.

She's like the center of a whirlpool of blood. Yeah. Sucking everyone down. And it'll actually get worse. I mean, in the next episode, it will get even worse. So when the news that the assembly has made this decision hits the streets, so this is on the afternoon, the evening of the 15th of July,

People go absolutely ballistic. There are people shouting in the cafes. There are brawls. There's a huge protest outside the National Assembly with people chanting. They invade the theatres and they say that performances should be kind of closed, shut down because we should be in mourning for the death of liberty. Now, ominously, this is what they had done in 1789 just before the fall of the Bastille. So people have a real sense. Something is building. Something is coming.

And then on the next day, the 16th, is a day of extraordinary drama. First of all, at the main club that all the revolutionaries belong to, the Jacobin Club, there is this incredibly bitter session in which a lot of club members are accusing the deputies of treason.

and of selling out to the monarchy. And Barnav and his friends, the Lameth brothers and this guy, Adrian Dubourg, they say, okay, enough. I'm not standing for this anymore. This club has served its purpose. You know, it's time for us to go. And Barnav and co. say to all the other deputies, we're out of here. We're not going to stay and be insulted like this. And they all storm out of the Jacobin

Literally, they go across the street to another abandoned monastery. I love the fact that all of these factions are named after monasteries. So this was a Cistercian group called the Foyens. Of course it was. And they set up a new club called the Society of the Friends of the Constitution. And they are called, obviously, the Foyens Club after these monks. And only six deputies stay behind at the Jacobin Club.

And is there a particularly prominent member of these six deputies? There is a man who is going to become more and more prominent as the story goes on, and his name is Maximilien Robespierre. So he stays behind at the Jacobin while all the others have gone. Meanwhile, at the club on the left bank, the Cordillier Club, the people there say, right, big rally. Let's take this to the streets. Tomorrow is a Sunday. Perfect. People aren't at work. We'll get everybody to gather. They'll gather at the ruins of the Bastille.

And then we'll have a huge march across town and we'll go to the stadium, to the Champ de Mars stadium where the altar to the fatherland is, when there's a lot of stuff still hanging around from Bastille Day. And there we will sign this huge petition. It'll be the biggest such thing in history. The petition says, Louis abdicated when he ran after Varennes. France must be a republic. You know, this will be the turning point. And actually the one person who says, hold on, is Robespierre. Robespierre says, yes.

I'm not sure about this. A big rally and all that kind of thing, that will give the foillon

a pretext for a crackdown. We don't really want that. We don't want to give them any semblance of an excuse. I think he comes across from all of these narratives, today's episode, the next episode we're going to do and so on. He's a very, very shrewd and impressive political operator. The thing is, he is quite smart, isn't he? He really is. He's tactically cunning, Rob Spierre. He can see what's coming. But of course, people don't recognize that at the time.

They say, no, no, no, no, no. It'll be brilliant. We'll have this huge march. We'll have a great rally, all of that kind of thing. What could go wrong? Yeah, what can go wrong? They break up that evening, the 16th. They say, you know, there'll be so many of us, the deputies will have to give in. Louis will fall and France can walk into the new dawn of a Republican tomorrow. But Tom, it will not work out like that. Well, we'll find out how it does work in the second half. So please join us then.

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Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. And for those of you who are watching this on YouTube, you'll be delighted to see that I took the opportunity of the break to put a blanket up to stop the sun blinding my eyes and turning me very, very pale. So Dominic, high drama in Paris. It's the morning of Sunday, the 17th of July. Weather is clear. It's going to be hot. It's going to be sunny.

What happens? So as the dawn breaks everywhere across Paris, there are the members of these kind of radical groups called the fraternal societies and clubs and so on streaming to the agreed meeting point, which is the Place de la Bastille. But when they get there, they find that the entrances to the square are blocked by guards, by members of the National Guard. What's going on?

Well, what is going on is the city authorities have been busy overnight. Now, the city authorities, the two people who run Paris, they're both men of 1789. So they're what you would call kind of liberal reformers. One of them is the mayor, who is a guy called Jean-Sylvain Bailly. He's an astronomer, isn't he? He loves staring at the sky. And he's a fan of the tax evader, Benjamin Franklin. So he's a great pal of the Americans.

And the other fellow is also tainted by his association with North America. And that's the Marquis de Lafayette, the guy who runs the National Guard. The man described by the official dictionary of the French Revolution as an empty-headed political dwarf. He's back on the scene. Well, old Dominic, you could say he's tainted by his association with America. You could say burnished by his glorious feats in defense of liberty. And he's actually, I think, played a very, very difficult hand pretty well.

and is a rather admirable figure. Well, people who were persuaded by your defense of Lafayette in season one will be disappointed to hear that in season two of the French Revolution, Lafayette's career collapses in absolute shame and ignominy. Yeah, but he's not alone, is he? He's running up a down escalator and he does survive. He will live to see another revolution. All of these guys we're talking about, they're all going to end up dead. They are. I mean, this is the extraordinary thing. Whenever I do these episodes, I always think I'll

I'll just look at the names at the end. And I look through the names like, yeah, he was dead six months later. He's guillotined, whatever, whatever. So Lafayette has been moving rightwards all this time. Or you could say everyone else has been moving left. I suppose you could. Yes, you could. Of course you could say that because he has been using the national guard to implement the attempt to clamp down on strikes and worker unrest. So he's actually, he's gone from being the darling of the streets to,

to being drawn further and further into conflict with the streets. Well, it's his job to keep order in Paris. Tom, you are so Team Lafayette. What have they got on you, the Lafayette family? I'm just trying to see the world through his eyes and having some sympathy. I'm not criticising him, but of all the people that you know, I'm not talking about just in this podcast, but in life generally, can you think of anybody who's generally more in favour of using troops to break up street disorder? LAUGHTER

I'm usually all over that. Churchill? Yeah, but you don't know Churchill. I mean, you know of him. Oh, I see. Yeah, right. Yeah. Okay. So. Yeah, but the reason you despise Lafayette is he's not very good at it. Yes, exactly. I like competence. I like competence. But he's torn between his conscience and his duty. I like competence and the regular payment of taxes. That's what I believe in. Right. So the demonstrators have been blocked off by Lafayette's troops. So they say, well, we're not going to do the big rally. We'll

We'll just go by sideways to the Champ de Mars, which actually they do. And when they see the National Guard are there, some of them say, OK, we're in for trouble. And so they have like rocks in their pockets. Some of them even, I think, have pistols. They know that there is danger today in this Sunday. So at midday, the stadium is starting to fill up. And as it's filling up, people notice this sort of shuffling and moving going on under the platform where the altar is. OK.

And they go to investigate. Two very improbable figures. Yeah. So they find that hiding under the platform beneath the altar are a young man who makes wigs and an older man who has a wooden leg. And with them, they have like a picnic hamper with kind of a lunch, you know, a nice spread. And they have a load of carpenter's tools.

What historians think is that these two men hiding under the platform had a plan to use the tools to drill holes in the platform so they could, as women were crossing the platform to sign the petition, they would look up their skirts. Upskirting. Upskirters, exactly. But the rumor goes around that they had a bomb.

That they're terrorists, that they're kind of royalist terrorists or something. And they are dragged away by a group of laundry men who literally, they string them up on a lamppost. They hang them from a lamppost. And then, Tom, they cut their heads off.

I mean, that escalated very quickly. I mean, it's a good way to celebrate Bastille Day, isn't it? To string someone up and then chop the heads off and parade the head on a spike. It's true to the spirit of Bastille Day, I suppose you could say. But it's quite... I mean, I don't approve of the wig maker and the wooden leg man's behaviour, but it's a tough penalty, I think. Anyway, news of this travels across Paris. There's been terrorists or something or upskirters lurking around at the stadium and they've had their heads cut off.

It reaches City Hall, the Hotel de Ville, and Bailly, the astronomer, says, oh my God, this shows that this is totally out of control. He says, and this is a sign of the rhetoric that's going to be used throughout the revolution. He says to the city council, this whole rally,

It's a foreign plot, a conspiracy against the constitution and the nation financed by foreigners who are attempting to divide us. He flies the red flag, which is the flag of martial law. He declares martial law and he sets off with a small group of troops towards the Champ de Mars. When he gets to the stadium, the Marquis de Lafayette is there with hundreds of national guardsmen.

And they're like, right, let's go and break this thing up. Now, inside the stadium, there are perhaps 50,000 to 60,000 people.

And a lot of those are radical supporters, but of course a lot of those are just people. It's a Sunday, it's a very nice day. So it's fun. It's a fun thing to do, go out with your family, have a stroll, see what's going on. It's a day out and lots of people would have gone to the Champs-Élysées anyway on a warm summer Sunday. So there are tens of thousands of people there and of them perhaps 6,000 have already started to sign the petitions.

Lafayette starts to march his men in through the southern embankment of the stadium and people start booing and some of those people start to throw stones at the National Guard. And then, we don't know when, we don't know how exactly, a single shot rings out and it's the classic way that these things start. No one knows who's fired it, but the guardsmen immediately assume they're being fired upon by the crowd. They kind of drop to their knees and start shooting.

And suddenly it's all total chaos and there are more and more shots. There's no one among the National Guards who worry about this because that was an issue when the National Guard go to Versailles to bring the King Queen back a year or so earlier is that Lafayette can't be certain that his men will follow him. No, he can't. On this occasion, they do. They do. And maybe because they are being stoned by the crowd, I would guess. And there's a sense of camaraderie. I mean, it's

You're absolutely right. It's remarkable in some ways that the National Guard do stay loyal to Lafayette, given, as we'll see in the next few episodes, their loyalty cannot be depended upon. But at this point, yes.

Then there was total chaos. There are thousands of people screaming and running everywhere. Another detachment of guardsmen on horseback charges into the stadium, starts trampling people, running them down. Troopers are hacking at people with their sabres. Very Peterloo massacre. Yeah, but Peterloo massacre with knobs on. Because when the firing finally dies down, it's a few minutes only, but when the firing dies down, there are dozens of bodies everywhere.

And if you look at estimates, they differ wildly. So at the bottom end is perhaps 50 people dead and hundreds injured. The radicals themselves said that hundreds of people had been killed and thousands injured. I mean, we can't possibly know.

But it is a very, very bloody afternoon and a terrible shock to the kind of body politic of Paris. Because this is the first outbreak of mass violence in Paris since the Bastille, right? It is, exactly. And it's the first outbreak of violence where the violence has been perpetrated by the forces of order against a defenceless crowd. I think that's what people find so shocking. But it's also the first example of repression.

revolutionaries on revolutionaries. Exactly. Yeah, it is. And the different groups of revolutionaries interpret it very differently. So for Barnard and the Foyon and Lafayette and Bailly the Mayor, this is a sign of the danger of disorder. An overdue warning that it is time to put all this to an end and crack down because this is going to become the norm if you don't stop it. For the radicals,

It's a sign that Bailly and Lafayette have joined the corrupt conspiracy being run by Marie Antoinette, and they hate the people. And actually, big spoiler alert, Bailly is going to end up dead. He's going to end up being sentenced to death. And as a special treat for him, they move the guillotine to the Champs-Élysées so that he can be executed on the very spot where he's accused of kind of carrying out this massacre.

So that's a kind of a sign of how bad things are going to get. But actually in the short term, the Champ de Mars does seem to be a victory for the moderates because the assembly immediately passes a very strict anti-riot decree and makes it retroactive. So they can

punish offences carried out before the rally on the Champs-de-Mars. So within days, more than 200 people have been imprisoned, some of them just for throwing stones or even shouting slogans. There are dozens of people who are held for weeks in solitary confinement without trial, without even being told the charges against them. And it is part of a much more general crackdown in the summer of 1791. But it still strikes me as strange that

that the general mood of opposition to the monarchy that seems to be manifesting itself, and the fact that the victims of this massacre are being widely mourned, that the Fayol should have had the tools for oppression at their hand, that the Lafayette's men should have followed him. I mean, I've already made that point, but it does seem quite... I suppose it suggests that we perhaps shouldn't assume that

the kind of the onward sweep of the revolution is as inevitable as it seems, do you think? I think part of it is that, Tom, you're approaching this knowing what we know, which is we know the revolution is going to continue and it's going to get worse and it's going to become more polarised, more radical, or better, if you like, that kind of thing. They don't know that. And so there are lots of people who think, oh, wow, this has now definitely gone much too far. You know, there are lots of people who do crave stability and they want the return of order.

You made the comparison with the English Revolution of the 1640s, 1650s. As then, there are a lot of people who are anxious about chaos and anarchy. But Lafayette famously didn't become Cromwell. Well, so there is a definite sense in 1791, in the summer of 1791, actually, that France could be moving towards a more authoritarian regime.

So for the first time now, the police are shutting down publishing houses and clubs. I mean, you talk about, could he have become a Cromwell? Lafayette census men across the city, they seize copies of radical newspapers like Maraz newspapers and they destroy them.

They even start to reactivate the old royal secret police, and they have people literally spying on conversations in taverns, writing reports, what people are thinking on the streets. The radicals are doing this as well, though, aren't they? They're also saying that it's the duty of a patriot if he or she suspects a traitor in their midst to denounce that person. Let's get into that now, actually, because that's such an interesting thing. So,

There's a brilliant historian called Timothy Tackett. I know you've been reading his stuff as well. His books on this period, so his book on the flight to Varennes and his book on the coming of the terror, they are brilliant on this period, so 1791, 1792. And he says in that, what happens now is that a sort of paranoid style of politics becomes completely normalized and institutionalized on every side of the political spectrum. Understandably, because Varennes showed

that you're right to think there's a conspiracy. There absolutely was a conspiracy. And that people might be telling lies. Yes. You can't trust anybody. If the king could tell a lie, then who can you trust? Yeah. And Tackett has this lovely section on a particular trope, a device, which is the idea of the traitor who wears the mask of patriotism. And this was a phrase that had been coined by the radical journalist Mara, the mask of patriotism.

And it's so toxic. That's an idea. Because the idea is the more patriotic you appear to be, the more keen on the revolution you are, the more likely it is that you're actually a traitor who's conspiring against the revolution. And you can see why they have this idea. A, because there have been conspiracies. But B, because their sense of history. I mean, you would know this better than anyone, Tom.

Their sense of history is rooted in the Roman Republic. The unveiling of plots and conspiracies, the Catiline conspiracy by Cicero, they've all studied it at school. And it's so central to how they view the world that, you know, Republican virtue is constantly in danger of being undermined by sinister, you know, Machiavellian, by liars like the king or like the Foyon or like Mirabeau before him or like Lafayette and all of this kind of stuff.

And that the more loudly somebody proclaims his patriotism, the more likely he is to be a traitor. And there is no greater service than to expose him, to denounce him. So in Hilary Mantel's novel, A Place of Greater Safety, the hero is this guy Kamil Demula. But he had already written, he'd published a declaration of the rights of the accuser. And he had said, you know, to be a good citizen,

is to accuse and denounce your neighbours. It's incumbent upon you. And the Jacquemin Club actually, from this point onwards, has a rule: all its members must swear an oath to denounce all traitors of the fatherland, even at the risk of our lives and our fortunes. I mean, it's very social media circa 2020, 2021. I mean, it's a feature of left-wing politics from this point on, right? That on the radical end of the left,

There's always been a tendency to denounce. Yeah, to call people out. To say they're traitors or they're lackeys of capitalism or whatever. Yeah. And even before the left has really come to power in the revolution, they're already at it. Oh, completely they are. Absolutely they are. So the Giacomacci sent a message to all their nationwide kind of sister clubs and they said, we would like you, each club, to send in regular reports on its village or town or area and report

At the beginning of the meetings in Paris, the secretary will read out the reports and he'll say, well, here's a report from Brittany. The people there say that such and such guy and this butcher and this whoever and that this town is full of counter-revolutionaries. And this sort of constant now institutionalized search for the enemy within

This is obviously going to be very bad news for all the revolutionaries because they will all end up being consumed by it. Again, I mean, they're not wrong. There are enemies within. There are still nobles present in their chateau across France. And of course, there are all these priests who have refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the revolution, who are seen as being in league with the Pope and

because of the Pope with the Catholic authoritarian powers. So, you know, I mean, they're not wrong about worrying about this. And there's a group of people we haven't mentioned very much today, the emigres, the exiles. There are 10,000 of them and they are literally just across the border in the Rhineland.

And they are conspiring against the revolution. And these are the people the king and queen were going off to hang out with. They were indeed. So there are local authorities across France who are now saying, okay, the revolution is in danger. France is going to be invaded. We need to read people's posts. We need to go and search the country houses. We need to detain all strangers, travelers, and so on and so forth. And in his book on Varennes, The Flight to Varennes,

Tackett has a section about Brittany and he says Brittany is a perfect example of where all this is heading. The local authorities there say absolutely clearly, quote, there must be no limit to the measures against the enemy's hatred and fanaticism. And he gives the example of a district called Londoano. And in Londoano, they organized mass arrests of all nobles and priests who hadn't sworn the oath to the constitution because they said, these guys can't be trusted. You know, they're a fifth column.

And when the people of London were challenged about this, isn't this a bit extreme? They said, and I quote, it's worth reading because I think it's so anticipates what's to follow. We had only one choice to seize our enemies before they commit crime and murder. We have served both humanity and the constitution in separating out those who would cause trouble and disorder. We will not cease pursuing them until the sacred fire, which we hold in our breast has purified every corner of the French nation.

I mean, that is pretty, you know, you can understand why they're saying it, but at the same time, it's pretty ominous reading given what we know about what will follow.

But of course, nobody knows in 1791 what will follow. In fact, Barnard thinks, you know, the momentum is still with me. He thinks like Robespierre, the radicals overplayed their hand at the Champ de Mars. And now I have the political space to launch the crackdown I always wanted and to get through the slightly more conservative version of the constitution that I wanted.

And so as a result of his deal with Marion Toinette, they come up with a kind of constitutional plan, which is when we have elections, there will be strict tax and property thresholds for voting and for holding seats. And the king will still have a fair bit of power. He'll have the right to veto, really important. He can veto things he doesn't like. He can choose his own ministers, ambassadors. And Barnabas says to Marion Toinette, what more does it take to be king? We're going to give him everything he wants. It'll be fine.

Now, he's starting to get now a lot of criticism from the Jacobin Club because people are like, he's giving away a lot. And he's clearly very close to the court. And, you know, there's this sort of sense that he's actually overreaching a bit. Well, he is becoming the corrupt minister of the king who is always the object of hatred, as mentioned in that song that we quoted at the start of the program. And as you say corrupt, so on the one hand, you have this young man

lawyer, very fluent, very articulate, clearly very ambitious, who is, you know, Marianne Twinnett's cat's paw. And on the other hand, you have a man who is literally now being called the incorruptible.

And that's Rob Spierre. And this really is Rob Spierre's moment when his star has been growing, but this is the moment when he comes out as the champion of the radical cause. So it's worth stopping for a minute and talking about Rob Spierre because Rob Spierre, in many ways, he's the anti-Barnard.

He's not interested in the trappings of power. He's not overtly ambitious for office. He seems to care only about the common people and the public good. So Robespierre is from a place called Arras in northeastern France. He's the son of a lawyer. Like you, Tom, he's a very earnest, very intense scholarship boy. He's obsessed with the Roman Republic like you. Like you, he's obsessed with Rousseau. Yeah, he's pale, thin, dark.

Bony. Yeah. Tall. Vaguely sinister. He's always perfectly turned out like you. His hair, his white wig, always powdered. I think if I wore a wig, mine would be perfectly powdered. And he has these little kind of glasses, kind of steel rimmed glasses. Some people said Robespierre was brilliant. There's a guy called René Levasseur who sat with him when they were in the National Convention. And many years later, he said of Robespierre, he was sober.

He was chaste. He had few personal needs or ambitions. He had no desire for economic gain. His only ambition was to acquire a reputation as the best and most honest citizen, which I know is what your cricket teammates say about you. But other people who worked with him closely, Tom, told a different story. Did they, Dominic? What did they say? Proud, prickly, priggish. Honestly. Cold. My sympathies are all with Rochefierre.

The thing is, both these things are almost certainly true. I don't think so, Dominic. He is honest and sober and earnest and all of this. But at the same time, clearly, Robespierre is a very cold fish. I mean, he has no private life at all.

As far as we can tell, he's totally obsessed with and devoted to politics. Because he's wedded to the good of the people. In a way, no one has a higher appreciation of his own probity and virtue than he does. You know, he's obsessed with his own virtue. He's one of those kind of political monomaniacs. We're very familiar with them. That this kind of radical politics often throws up somebody who's overpowering moral earnestness actually makes them a very chilly companion.

But he gives these speeches that at first deputies laugh at. They're very long. They're very earnest, intense, full of references to the Romans. Nothing wrong with that, Dominic. Incredibly emotional, though. So his emotionalism, people always talk about Rolf Spheer as chilly, and he's chilly in his personal relations. But his oratory is not.

Chilly at all. He will be talking about himself as a martyr. He'll be talking about giving his life and shedding tears for the people. He has these long tortured pauses in his speeches.

And all through his letters, his speeches, they're shot through. He's a total conspiracy theorist. So even before the revolution, it's an interesting thing. Historians have looked at the letters of leading revolutionists. And they said, you know, the funny thing about it is that before 1789, most of them weren't paranoid. They'd sometimes talked about conspiracies and stuff because that was part of the political imagination of the day. But they weren't obsessive about it.

Robespierre was always obsessive about it. He was somebody who had been on Reddit or something and spent all his time

arguing with people on social media and all that, that would have been his personality. Because I think that he has a Manichean sense of the world, doesn't he? That there is, in political terms, good and evil, and he's on the side of good. And the fact that good is being foiled can only be explained by the workings of evil. The fact that there might be economic problems or accidents or incompetence or whatever doesn't quite fit into that. It doesn't quite give it the edge in the drama.

that clearly Robespierre thrills to. I totally agree, Tom. And a lot of people, I think at the beginning, they listen to him and they kind of laugh. And they say, it's all very simplistic with him. There's always an easy answer. It's populism in a way. It's a kind of moralistic populism that a lot of more worldly people, your kind of Mirabeaus or whatever. Or Benave. Yeah, they think it's a bit déclassé and a bit kind of down-market.

But as you rightly say, the moralism, the Manichaeanism, for some people, it's intoxicating. As early as 1789, he got a letter from a young man called Antoine de Saint-Just. And Saint-Just said to him in this letter, I don't know you, but you are a great man. You're the representative of humanity in the Republic. You'd love to get a letter like that, wouldn't you? I get them from Restors History listeners all the time. Robb Sphere has it.

towering ego, I think, and a sense of self. But a towering charisma too. I guess if you like that kind of thing. Well, Saint-Just does, and Saint-Just is, as we will see, I mean, he's a very impressive young man, if slightly frightening. Exactly. So for Robespierre, actually, the current political climate is a gift because every day in the autumn of 1791, he's getting up at the Jacquemin Club

Barnab and co have walked out of that club and he gets up and he says, what a load of sellouts they are. Why are people still hungry? Why is the king still hanging around? Why is this constitution much weaker than we thought? Well, we all know why. It's because they're part of the conspiracy. It's because they've sold out to the Austrian queen and to the forces of international tyranny. Which to a degree, Barnab has done. I mean, there's enough truth in that accusation.

that you can work with it. Absolutely. So the 3rd of September, the constitution is finally finished and there's a big procession, torch lit procession to the Tuileries Palace to deliver it to the king.

And Louis says, fine, thank you very much. I'll have a look at it. So what they've given him is he will be head of the executive. There'll be a single chamber assembly. Louis can choose his ministers. Louis is head of the army. Louis has a right of veto. Property owners, sort of taxpayers, can vote. But the very poor can't vote. Women can't vote.

And slaves can't vote. And so presumably slaves remain property. Slaves remain property, exactly. So we will get onto, in future episodes, some of the people left out of this story, for example, women. But the big question is, it's a compromise. So is it going to be the kind of compromise that basically doesn't really please anybody, but pleases enough people to get through? Or is it the kind of compromise that falls between every conceivable stool and pleases nobody at all? And will Louis accept it?

The days go by. If Louis doesn't accept that constitution, he is out as king. That is the deal. And his six-year-old son would become king under a regency.

So on the 13th of December, he announces his decision. He will accept it. And the next day he goes and swears an oath to maintain it and defend it. And there are great parades and fireworks and bonfires of celebration. There's a huge balloon, patriotic ribbons that flies over the Olympics. Yeah. Like the Olympics. And a scientist is in this balloon. He's throwing out copies of the constitution across villages, uh,

You know, it's a village that's all across the Ile de France. For the first time, Louis and Marie-Trinette are allowed out of the palace. They can go to the opera. They can go around the city and whatnot. And the deputies are like, it's over. It's done. We meet for the last time on the 30th of September. The new legislative assembly that will succeed them under the new constitution has already been elected.

They've agreed that none of them will sit in it, a self-denying audience. So one of their successors comes along and he gives a speech and he says, you have done the most amazing thing. And anyone who wants to succeed you, it will be what Alexander the Great said of Philip II of Macedon. You've left us nothing to conquer because of your amazing achievements.

A lot of them are saying they declare the revolution is finished. Brilliant. It's all done and dusted. One of them, a Protestant pastor called Saint-Étienne, he actually has already started writing a kind of semi-official history of the revolution. Brilliant. Yeah, it's finished. But the thing is, it clearly hasn't finished. And there are two shadows, Tom, of what is coming.

So the first thing is that the last sort of full day of the assembly's existence, so the day before they broke up, one of Bonneve's allies, this guy Le Chapelier, had tried to push through a law. He'd said, we don't need all the clubs anymore because it's done. The revolution is over. Now that the revolution is over and the constitution has been decided, order and public peace should prevail. We don't need this ranting and raving in the clubs. And at that, one of these other deputies gets up to interrupt him and it's Robespierre.

And Rob Spierre says, and I quote, for my part, I can see that the new constitution still has enemies within and without. I can see conspiracy and treachery sounding the alarm as they sow unrest and discord. And the leaders of opposing factions fighting less for the cause of the revolution than for the power to rule in the monarch's name. And when I see these things, I don't believe the revolution is over. And once again, he is speaking truth to power. That's it. And when he finishes...

When he goes out, there are loads of crowds waiting for him and they carry him through the streets. Hurrah for Rob Spear. You know, he's speaking for the people once again. So that's one shadow. And the other shadow is in the Tuileries Palace because... Fibbers, fibbers, fibbers, fibbers. Barnard has been completely double-crossed. Louis and Marion Toinette have absolutely no intention of...

of working with this new constitution all the time. Marie Antoinette has been sending secret messages to Vienna and she has been saying to her Austrian family, these people are brutes. They are mad men. She writes to her brother and she says explicitly, we are going along with Bonaventure quote, the better to double cross them later.

Louis writes to the Austrian emperor, Leopold II, I am a prisoner. I am under duress. I beg you to come to the aid of the king and the kingdom of France. So given that he is the center of this new constitution. He's the king of the French now, isn't he? Not the king of France. Yeah. And he's asking a foreign king to attack his own people.

Now, Tom, there's one thing we've had missing from this episode that listeners to season one will have undoubtedly noticed. There's been no Simon Sharma. So we should end with a little bit, because it wouldn't be a Restless History of French Revolution episode without Simon Sharma. Simon Sharma writes at the end of his chapter on this.

Poets of romantic weather forecasting like William Wordsworth continued to describe the revolution as a very cyclonic disturbance. But increasingly, it was no longer the storm that invigorates and cleanses, rather a dark and potent elemental rage moving forward in indiscriminate destruction. Its breath was no longer sweet but foul.

It was the wind of war. And if the wind of war comes, can the storm clouds of war be far behind? So Dominic, brilliant stuff. What a cliffhanger. And in our next episode, France will indeed be going to war.

And if you can't wait for that, then you can hear the episode right away by joining the Restless History Club at therestesshistory.com. So thanks, Dominic. Thank you all for listening. Bye-bye. Au revoir. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for girl, four for a boy.

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