Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
The representatives of the French people, formed into a national assembly and considering ignorance, forgetfulness or contempt of the rights of man to be the only causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of governments, have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, unalienable and sacred rights of man.
To the end, that this declaration, constantly present to all members of the body politic, may remind them unceasingly of their rights and their duties. The duties. Who saw that coming? So, Tom, that is the preamble to the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen. I'm now rethinking everything I thought about the French Revolution, because Margaret Thatcher, in our first episode, told us they forgot about the duties, but they
But they didn't. I'm in shock. Only in the preamble, though, they didn't include the duties in the list of rights that follow that. That is the giveaway. So people who are wondering what we're talking about, that is the preamble to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, one of the landmark documents in all human history. It was approved by the National Assembly on the 26th of August 1789 and
And Tom, they had been talking about it for about a month, hadn't they? This document that now we all think of as so tremendously important. Why did they feel they needed it? Well, you say that it's a document that we're all familiar with. I'm not entirely confident in the English speaking world that that's the case. You mentioned Mrs. Thatcher. We looked at the beginning about how she talked about how...
the French Revolution, the ideals, the values, the principles, all these were already evident in Britain's glorious revolution and the kind of the Whiggish tradition of parliamentary democracy and all that.
And I think also for American listeners, they will be thinking of the Declaration of Independence, that the Declaration of Independence came first. And I think for that reason that English speakers tend, perhaps, and I certainly speak for myself, it doesn't tend to kind of dominate my imaginings in the way that I think it does certainly for the French, but also for people across the world. Because I think until this point, Dominic,
In the previous episode, you portrayed The Fall of the Bastille as a story of bloodshed and kind of violence. And you've shown your respect for this totemic declaration of human rights by putting on a comedy French accent. But I think the French Revolution is a story of ideals and principles alike.
values. And that's not to say that there isn't incredible violence. There obviously is. I think that the violence and the idealism are intertwined. They're interfused. It's impossible to understand the one without the other. And so if you just emphasize the violence without saying, you know, there are a lot of abstract nouns that people take very, very seriously, then I think you're missing out on both why the French Revolution happens in the way that it does. And also, of course, very importantly, the enduring legacy right the way into the present day. I think that's fair enough, Tom, because the violence is driven by
by belief in the abstract now, it's not violence for its own sake. Sometimes it may be, but people genuinely believe in the ideology they're preaching. And that ideology, I mean, it gives them a faith, I suppose, that what they're doing is right. We will be exploring the degree to which it's a faith over the course of this episode. Yes. Because I think that for admirers of the French Revolution, and of course for the French state as well, it is the great...
manifesto and it's completely seismic in its implications and its influence. And actually in France, its significance is explicitly acknowledged to this day in the preamble to the constitution of the fifth Republic, the current kind of Republic. And if you think about all those world leaders,
who in the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989, who weren't Mrs. Thatcher, they were all praising the revolution for the values that they said it upheld, the kind of the liberal, secular, egalitarian values. And they were able to do that because, as you mentioned at the end of the previous episode, these values, although they are specifically French, they are also cast as universal. And so
And so the French Revolution is able to cast itself as a fire that has illumined the entire world. And so the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen has been massively influential on other republican constitutions around the world. And I think pre-eminently on the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted very tellingly, I think in 1949 in Paris.
So you can see why enthusiasts for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen make very high claims for it indeed. So I'll just read you what Jonathan Israel in his book on the French Revolution, Revolutionary Ideas, says. And Jonathan Israel is the great enthusiast and proponent of the notion that the French Revolution kind of emerges from what he calls the radical enlightenment, the enlightenment of atheism, of radical hostility to monarchy and religion and so on.
And he says, talking about the Declaration of the Rights of Man, for the first time in history, equality, individual liberty, the right to equal protection by the state and freedom of thought and expression were enshrined as basic principles declared inherent in all just and rational societies.
the bedrock of democratic modernity was in place. What do you make of that, Dominic? Well, that's the counter-argument, isn't it, to the slightly Burkean argument. Edmund Burke's argument is Reflections on the Revolution in France, which was published even before the Terror. Burke said this is terrible, throwing out traditions and customs. You'll be left with anarchy and horror. And even at the time, there were a lot of people who said to Burke,
You are missing the fact that this will genuinely bring in a new world, a liberal world governed by freedom and by the expression of human reason. Yes. And that's effectively what Jonathan Israel is arguing, isn't it? I think in the fundamentals, yes. So before we get on to the abstract nouns, which we will be looking at, because I think they are so important to understanding the course of the revolution.
Should we just go back and remind ourselves where we were? Yes, where are we? So we've got the National Assembly, which is the conflation of what had previously been the three estates. Now, the National Assembly is the embodiment of the will and the sovereignty of the people.
The Bastille has fallen. The first émigrés have fled. And Louis, who has not fled, is trying to reinvent himself as a constitutional monarch. But while all this is going on, everything that precipitated the revolution, so chiefly the fact that there's no money and that the bread price is very high, that hasn't really changed. Yeah. So there's still an atmosphere of panic and crisis, isn't there?
So here's the thing. Why are the deputies who are in the National Assembly, why would they spend all their time talking about a declaration of human rights when you would think their priority would be, you know, to be discussing bread supplies or whatever it might be? Because I think that most of the deputies who had assembled...
at Versailles in May 1789, say for the Estates General that then becomes the National Assembly. I mean, they thought that they had come there to give France a new constitution. And I think they operate on the assumption that you can't remedy the ills facing France unless you have set the country on new foundations. And the Democrats
the Declaration of Rights is an attempt to frame for both the delegates themselves, but also for all the people of France, an understanding of what henceforward will be animating the new France. And I think that that is actually an understanding that is turbocharged by the fall of the Bastille. Because you were saying how the people in the National Assembly are actually perturbed by what happens.
They're unsettled by it. And actually, I'm right in saying, aren't I, that as the weeks go by, so during the time they're thinking about this, the news coming in, not so much from Paris, but from the countryside, is more alarming than ever and arguably more alarming than ever before in French history. Because this is the year of what historians call la grande peur, the great fear. So this is coming in from the provinces. Yeah, I mean, I think there's hope as well as fear.
So we've already mentioned him, Arthur Young, this Englishman who's gone on a trip across France. Yeah, an ill-timed holiday. Yeah, an ill-timed trip. So he, two days before the fall of the Bastille, is in Lorraine and he meets a peasant woman and he
He asks her, you know, how are you doing? And he writes what she said. It was said at present that something was to be done by some great folks for such poor ones, but she did not know who nor how. But God send us better because property taxes and feudal dues are crushing us. And Arthur Young, as a kind of illustration of the way that the poor are being crushed by the weight on them, he assumes that this woman must be kind of 60 or 70. But he asks and she turns out to be 28. So...
Yeah. Oh, no. But then the Bastille falls. And that actually, it doesn't lessen the temperature in the countryside. It actually, you know, it sends it through the roof because people now start, they hear that one fortress has fallen and they start to attack other citadels of authority, don't they? And they're burning the registers. Yeah. Well, that's the key, I think. Yeah. I think the fall of the Bastille is reported as the fall of feudalism. Hmm.
And we, again, mentioned this in the previous episode, it's very Peasants' Revolt. There's this idea that if you as a peasant can burn the registers and the charters that condemn you to work as a peasant, then you will be free. Absolutely.
And so they start targeting chateaus and particularly abbeys and monasteries, which also, you know, as in the days of the peasant revolt, own large tracts of land. And this brings kind of feudal dues and tithes with them. So an example of an abbey that gets attacked is one in Burgundy called Sainazon. And this is completely leveled. And it belongs to a very distinguished local family, the family of Talleyrand-Périgord. And Burgundy,
The best known member of this family is actually a bishop, the bishop of the local town of Houton. And he had basically become a bishop because his nurse had not been looking after him and drops him on the floor and it damages his foot when he's about three.
And the foot never heals. And so he grows up unable to fulfill the military destiny that otherwise would have been his as a kind of swaggering aristocrat. And so he has no choice but to go into the church, which is an absolute mismatch between his talents. Right. Because he's quite Marquis de Sade. I mean, he's not that bad, but he's a kind of cynic. He's a free thinker.
He's definitely inclined to libertinism, I think it's fair to say. But he is unbelievably able, kind of cunning operator, kind of almost the embodiment of the Machiavell, isn't he? Yeah, totally wrong. Yeah, I mean, he's the great survivor of the revolution. The great survivor. So he gets elected as a member of the first estate, so that's the church, to go to Versailles.
And when he's there, rather than kind of bat for the church, he teams up with Mirabeau, who's the great spokesman for the third estate. And they are sat together kind of working out drafts for the Declaration of the Rights of Man as news from the provinces unfold.
is coming in. And the news is very, very alarming if you have any commitment to the integrity of the nation. The whole country seems basically to be disintegrating. And we talked about the importance of rumour and the anxiety of conspiracy in the context of the Bastille. This is exactly what's happening in the countryside as well. And there are kind of
terrified stories that the aristocrats are deliberately setting out to starve or poison the poor. And if that sounds mad, again, this is a staple of plots in the Marquis de Sade's novels. This idea that aristocrats have nothing better to do than to kind of plot starvation and ruin for the entire country is clearly part of the kind of the climate of paranoia
of the time. And even at this stage, there's a sort of, I don't know whether xenophobia is too strong a word, but there's a great fear of foreigners, isn't there? That there are foreign armies that are poised to attack at any moment, that there are foreign-sponsored bands of brigands. People attack foreigners, they attack Jews, they're looking for scapegoats, and this sort of mad paranoia
That there's somebody out there, maybe just over the hill, who's going to attack your town, burn your crops, steal all your food, all of that kind of stuff. And so the process of people then forming militias to guard against this fear, this will then get reported by a neighbouring community who will then see this militia as precisely what they've got to guard against. And so it has a kind of knock-on effect. People are raising militias against the phantoms of militias. And so it goes on.
And this is absolutely not what people want. You know, people are not demanding a kind of the disintegration of the country. Actually, they want greater control. They want people who can sort this out and give them bread and give them security. And Bahrain...
And back in Versailles, the delegates are themselves stressed that they're unable to provide this. And they get caught up in the mood of panic themselves. And so the more radical among the deputies think, you know, we need to do something dramatic here that will reassure people that we're on their side. So one of them calls it a kind of magic.
And this kind of magic happens on the evening of the 4th of August, 1789. And it's a time when the National Assembly is actually very thinly attended. It's the evening. And a guy stands up who you mentioned, Dominic, in the previous episode, the V-Compte de Neuilly. Yeah.
the guy who comes in and reports the fall of the Bastille to the king. And he's a man who has a foot in both the kind of the royal and the revolutionary camps. So his mother is Madame Etiquette, who was, you know, the guide to Marie Antoinette, who is always kind of scolding her for breaking the etiquette and so on. Oh, right. Okay. The embodiment of the rules and regulations of the court. Yeah, exactly. But he has served alongside Lafayette, who is his brother-in-law in the American Revolution.
And when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, he had been the official representative of France. I hate him already, Tom. Right. So he's interestingly positioned. And so he...
stands up and he says that the kingdom of France is floating between the complete destruction of society and a government which would be admired and followed throughout Europe. So in other words, we have to do something radical or it will be complete anarchy. And so the radical step he proposes is that all feudal obligations should be abolished, which of course,
essentially means that from that point on, people will not need to go around ransacking chateaus and abbeys. And the other thing which he proposes in a very kind of offhand manner is that everyone in the kingdom should pay taxes. And this is precisely the issue that had been inspiring people in the previous year to refuse to accept the king's kind of fiscal solution. This is the maddest thing, isn't it? This is the maddest aspect of this whole story. One delegate I see describes it as a moment of patriotic drunkenness. People throwing their distinctions on the bonfire and saying, yeah, let's all pay tax.
And the madness is this whole situation would not have come about if they had just agreed to pay tax as the king wanted a year or two earlier. The extent to which they have swung and they're now seized with this almost hysterical, almost paranoid passion. I mean, it really is one of the great political turnarounds. Yeah. So Sharma calls it a cult of self-dispossession. And I mean, I think it is.
something that would be very recognizable today. It's people checking their privilege. Yeah. Standing up and saying, I have too much privilege. I must get rid of it all. But there's also, I mean, there's kind of tit for tat quality between the, say, the representatives of the church and the aristocracy. So a bishop proposes the abolition of all hunting rights. So essentially from this point on, anyone can just go and shoot anything that they want.
And so Duke then stands up and says, yeah, fine, but we'll get rid of church tithes. And by the end of it, I think it's not just feudalism that's been jettisoned, but the very notion of privilege itself. And so William Doyle in the Oxford History of the French Revolution, he says it proved to be the most sweeping and radical legislative session of the whole French Revolution. And it was all just the event of an evening.
night. People standing up and saying, let's get rid of everything. And isn't it crazy that all that fuss about the defense of privilege and privilege being part of liberty, and now in one evening, they're throwing them all away. It's amazing. And then of course, three weeks later comes the declaration, which is the second kind of monumental moment in this process of legislation.
And you said last time that actually the guy who originally proposes it is your mate Lafayette. An empty-headed political dwarf, as the dictionary of the French Revolution calls him. Or a dashing representative of Franco-American friendship. Yeah. And obviously he's been in America. He's very close to George Washington, has close relations with Thomas Jefferson, who is the American ambassador in Paris at this point. And so he basically proposes that it be on the American model.
just as the American Declaration had joined the various states in America together, he thinks that it will help unify a sundering nation in France. And it proclaims 17 rights. And the first of these, men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good. So that is egalité. That's the expression of all the feudal privileges that have been jettisoned. And this
And this in turn then defines what the purpose of good governance should be. So the aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, safety, and resistance to oppression. With an emphasis there, I think, on the first word, liberté. Yes. So that's the second article. And I think it's very obvious what the target of that is.
That article is. And the third article makes it clear. The principle of any sovereignty lies primarily in the nation. No corporate body, no individual may exercise any authority that does not expressly emanate from it. So the corporate body is clearly the church and the individual is clearly the king. Although...
neither are actually mentioned. And no supernatural authority there either, so no God, right? But interestingly, the nation, so a new abstract noun, no one questions what the nation might be or says, well, actually, that's quite hard to define. Who belongs to the nation? What does the nation even mean? The nation is a community joined in the bonds of fraternity. Yeah. So we have galate, liberte, fraternity. They've all been kind of name-checked. So that's kind of the more abstract end of the list.
But what you then have is a whole list of articles that are clearly very, very prescriptively trying to knock away the various props of the Ancien Régime. So Article 9, every man is presumed innocent until he's been declared guilty. That's targeting the lettres de cachet, the way in which the king could just have people arrested and put in prison. Article 10, no one may be disturbed on account of his opinions, even religious ones, as long as the manifestation of such opinions does not interfere with the established law and order.
So that's targeting the privileged position held by the Catholic Church. And, you know, this is in law. So ever since 1715, when the Huguenots, the Protestants, had been named illegal, Catholicism had been the only legally permissible faith. And so it's unsurprising that actually...
Even the clerics who have cheerfully jettisoned their privileges are very, very upset about this. And it's their opposition that delays the final agreement on this document for about a week. And then Article 11, the free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man. So no more censorship, whether that's coming from the king or from...
the church. So Tom, the question is, I mean, some of these things as an Anglo-Saxon, you could say, you know, we have quite a lot of this in Britain or in the new United States of America. So to what extent do you think this is genuinely, I mean, I can see how you feel a Frenchman
You think this is groundbreaking and a transformative moment in world history. But of course, to go back to the Margaret Thatcher argument, could you say, well, a lot of this exists already. What's so special and what's so groundbreaking about all this? I think it is an absolutely decisive moment in world history. And it's decisive because it is an overt rupture with so much that had gone before. And it's a rupture that's happening in the preeminent.
intellectual capital of Europe. But I think it's also significant as a reiteration of things that had gone before. So I don't think that the rupture is quite as complete as
as people say. So it's very self-consciously a new beginning. This is the great kind of manifesting principle that governs the whole declaration. But of course, as you pointed out, the revolutionaries aren't the first to attempt such a thing. And it's kind of implicit in the declaration because it's saying that the rights it proclaims are unnatural, unalienable, and sacred. Then it's mad to think that they can't have been proclaimed before. Or are the French saying they're the first people to discover them? And then there's the further issue of, is this a document that is targeted at foreclosures
France at a particular moment in its history or are the pretensions it has to be universal you know are they authentic? Well
Well, that's la nation. If you're talking about the nation, that raises that as a problem, doesn't it? I mean, this is an argument that goes to the core of the French Revolution. Is it universalist? Well, it obviously is universalist, but it is also the crucible of nationalism. And it's France that invents modern nationalism. Yeah. And so there's a massive tension there, which I think will run throughout the revolution and indeed throughout 19th and 20th century history as well.
But what it does very effectively is to provide a kind of legal imprimatur for the destruction of the Ancien Régime. So it is the intellectual parallel to the demolition of the stones of the Bastille. So just as the walls of the Bastille are being demolished, the appearance of these words and articles on a piece of paper that then gets passed is...
is doing something similar. It is eradicating, supposedly, the taint of absolutism. So this idea that sovereignty now lies with the nation and not the king, I mean, this is a massive, massive step. And the implications for what had previously been the two estates, the nobility and the church, are obviously also seismic. So the logical implication is that the nobility should no longer exist if they have no privileges.
then what's the point of them? And basically within less than a year, so on the 19th of June, 1790, all hereditary titles are abolished and all the kind of traditional symbols of nobility. So coats of arms, the kind of deliveries that are worn by servants, people with their own pews in church, all that kind of thing. They all go. But it's the church, I think, that actually loses even more because most of the aristocracy have so much land. And of course, property has been guaranteed.
under the Declaration of the Rights of Man. So they keep their lands. For the church, it's a much more crippling fact that tithes have been abolished. So tithes, the money that is raised to keep the church going, that's gone. So when that happens, particularly the poor parish clergy have completely lost their source of income. And the Catholic church has also been forced to conceive complete and total freedom of worship and thought.
And I think that in a way, in the context of France, this is the most revolutionary development of all because the church in France is an even older institution than the monarchy. Its privileges have been writ very, very large over the course of French history, going back to the very founding of the monarchy. So I think two scenes from the reign of Louis XVI kind of illustrate the way in which even the monarchy stands in the shadow of the antiquity of the church. So Louis XVI
Louis' coronation in June 1775, massively retro, even though actually Louis does make sure that Marie Antoinette has her own purpose-built toilet, which was very nice of him. Oh, yeah. Very gallant. So it's held in Rass, the traditional place for kings to be crowned. This is the key episode in The Life of Joan of Arc, where she gets to crown the Dauphin there. Yeah. But...
The reason why Reims is the place that you go is that in 496, the first Frankish king to convert to Christianity had been crowned there. And he had supposedly been anointed with oil from a kind of a flask, a casket that had been brought down by a white dove. And Louis standing there being anointed, being crowned, this is his oath. I swear to devote myself sincerely and with all my power to annihilating heretics condemned by the church in all lands under my rule. So there you have
everything that the Enlightened despise about the French Church. Kind of doves coming down with oil and sectarian hostility to Protestants. An oath that Louis would undoubtedly have taken enormously seriously. And as we'll see, the fact that he is now contravening that oath and what he sees as his loyalty to the Church more generally, that is going to have a massive psychological impact on him. It will.
And then Dominic bookending that at the beginning of his reign, the episode that you described in the previous episode where he comes to Paris after the fall of the Bastille. And, you know, he goes to the Hotel de Ville and he is given the cockade. Oh yeah, by Lafayette. Yeah, by Lafayette. And this will form the colors of the tricolour. So white for the color of the monarchy and blue and...
and red for the city of Paris. And why red and blue? These are the colors of the two saints, two of the patron saints of Paris. So the blue is for Saint Martin, Saint Martin of Tours, a man of very humble stock who in the fourth century had risen to become the Bishop of Tours. And he is famous, of course, for giving half his cloak to a
to a beggar who had no clothes, who you might describe as a sans-culotte, a man too poor to buy his own clothes. And Saint-Martin gives him the cloak to cover him. And the red is for Saint-Denis. And Saint-Denis had supposedly been beheaded in the third century on a great hill overlooking Paris that had then been given the name of Montmartre, the mountain of the martyr. And from Montmartre, Saint-Denis was supposed to have carried his head, preaching a sermon as he went. He
He then reaches a spot to the north of Paris where he finally dies and a great basilica dedicated to Saint-Denis is raised over it. And this is the French Westminster Abbey. This is where all the kings and queens of France are buried.
And it kind of beautifully exemplifies the historical ironies and tensions of the fact that this cockade that Louis is wearing in his hat, it's a symbol of a new order. It's the union of a patriot king, a constitutional king with his people. But it also, without most people even thinking about it, has these echoes of
a fabulously ancient past. And it focuses, I think, the big question, is it possible actually to have a new beginning that doesn't bear these trace elements of the past? Right. Can you have year zero? Or are you inevitably, in doing that, going to bear the kind of the marks of the contamination of the past, reaching back, you know, not just decades, but centuries and even millennia? And you can ask the same question about the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Is it a repudiation of
the Catholic heritage, the Christian heritage? Or Dominic, is it something more complex? Is it a reworking of it? So when people ask, is it a bit more complex? They never say no, it's actually much simpler. Have you noticed that? They never do that, Tom. I've never known you do that in 500 episodes. Because it never is, is it? Right. We will take a break and then we'll come back to find out inevitably how it is more complex.
Hey, we're invited to the Johnson Summer Pool Party this Saturday. Oh, Saturday? But that's when the Blinds guys come in to give us a quote. Oh, I already found everything we need at Blinds.com. They're totally online, so we don't have to wait around all day just to get a quote. And they're sending us free samples. Well, Blinds.com sounds like a no-brainer.
Shop Blinds.com now for summer savings up to 40% off site-wide. Up to 40% off at Blinds.com. Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions may apply. ♪♪♪
Inspired by the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the spirit of the Enlightenment, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 marked the beginning of a new political era. So that's the introduction to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen on the Elysee Palace.
website. Tom, shocking they don't mention the Glorious Revolution. Magna Carta. Astonishing, isn't it? How could they have overlooked that? And Britain's own wonderful traditions of liberty and freedom. Very weird. I mean, I'm sure American listeners would be thrilled to know that the French acknowledged that the American Revolution played some part as an inspiration. Yeah. And of course, the guy who's the link is Lafayette, who we mentioned. And we mentioned also that when he's drawing it up, he's assisted by
Thomas Jefferson, who is in situ in Paris as the American ambassador. But I think, and American listeners may want to cover, there is at this point,
I think what is striking about it is that the French Declaration is much, much more ambitious than the American one. You don't get a list of rights in the American Declaration of Independence. And the French Declaration, as we've noted, is much, much more kind of soaringly universalist. It claims to speak on behalf not just of the French, but of all mankind. The American one is just a lot of whining, really, about fake accusations against George III, isn't it?
Right. In contrast to the French Declaration of Rights, which Jonathan Israel sums up, the rights the French adopted for themselves were proclaimed universal rights belonging equally to all of whatever nation, station, faith or ethnicity. So you could see that either as universal
soaringly idealistic or as hilariously arrogant. Yeah. Or maybe both. Yes. So let's zero in on this Enlightenment issue and Jonathan Israel's argument. So Jonathan Israel argues that the Enlightenment is driven by human reason and scientific inquiry and all of that kind of thing, the skepticism, and that it has different phases and there's something that he calls the radical Enlightenment.
How does he distinguish the radical enlightenment? So the radical enlightenment is overtly hostile to religion, often overtly hostile to monarchy. And because the French Revolution will end up bringing down both, it's understandable why people should look to the kind of the underground writings of the enlightenment for inspiration. Yeah. And
There are indisputably figures who do bear the markers of that. And probably the most famous of them is an aristocrat, inevitably, called the Marquis de Condorcet, who is a philosopher.
He's a mathematician. He's an economist. And a bit like Lavoisier, who we talked about in the previous episode, he's a great enthusiast for cleaning up rivers. Right. It's a kind of Fergal Sharkey-esque quality. Our overseas listeners won't know who that is, Tom. So Fergal Sharkey is a campaigner against pollution in Britain's rivers. Yeah. And he and the Marquis de Conce would have gone on tremendously well. Yeah.
And his hostility to sewage in rivers is reflective of his hostility to the sewage of superstition and barbarism in public discourse, Dominic. Right. No one likes the sewage of barbarism, do they? Well, I don't know. I've got a slight soft spot for it, I'll be honest.
And so unsurprisingly, when the revolution kicks off, the Marquis de Condorcet is a huge enthusiast for it. And he casts it absolutely as it so often is to this day as being the triumph of progress over superstition. And
He's very, very into the idea that what you have to do is dig down deep, muster empirical data, don't rely on kind of mad stories about doves bringing down holy oil or anything like that. You know, that's not going to help in the battle with ignorance and poverty. Christianity is nonsense. It's objective reason that will provide the inspiration for people in the war against all the faults that the Ancien Régime had embodied.
And he sees the duty of the revolution to scour France and indeed more broadly the world free of the taint of specifically Christianity, which he detests. So he says the Christian millennium is an impressive demonstration of what energetic reactionaries can do to spread superstition, demote the intellect, prolong stagnation, secure tyranny, degrade man as a reasonable being, and thus hold back the march of mind for centuries. And again,
In saying that, he is echoing the kind of underground Enlightenment philosophers, but he is also echoing the most famous of all the French philosophers of the 18th century, who we've already mentioned, who's Voltaire. Oh, yeah. The great wit who had cast the Bastille as this terrible dungeon, who'd written up about the man in the iron mask. And he's very, very, I mean, he's probably the most famous writer in 18th century Europe. He's dead by the time the revolution started.
breaks out, but is a massive, massive influence on the way that Europe and France particularly has come to see the past.
And Voltaire's great clarion cry is, « Écrase l'infame », destroy the infamous thing, the thing of infamy, by which he doesn't just mean the Catholic Church, although the Catholic Church is the particular object of his hatred. He basically means Christianity. And so he was explicit about this. Every sensible man, every honorable man must hold the Christian sect in horror.
And he is a brilliant, brilliant writer, but he's also a brilliant activist. And again and again, he fixes on examples of tyranny and oppression that he knows will resonate with the French people. So his story about the man in the iron mask is one of those, but there's an even more vivid example because it happens in his own lifetime. So he's picking up on a live injustice.
And this happened in 1762. And it was a Protestant, a Huguenot from Toulouse in the south of France called Jean Calin.
who had been accused of murdering his own son. And he had been convicted under very dubious circumstances. Yeah, he obviously didn't kill him. So it turns out. Yeah. And he's broken very horribly on the wheel. And Voltaire picks up on this and he says he was broken on the wheel, not because people really thought that he killed his son, but because he was a Protestant. It's an example of religious intolerance at its
brutal worst. He casts Calais as a victim of sectarian persecution. And his campaign has such an impact that in 1764, so only two years after he had died, Louis XV, the predecessor of Louis XVI, had actually received Calais' family at Versailles. And
and the following year had issued a posthumous exoneration, you know, a pardon. And this is typical of Voltaire's campaigning. And it makes him someone that people, not just in kind of the radical wing of French opinion, but across the whole span of French society comes to admire very much. So in 1778, Talleyrand, the Bishop of Autun,
had actually gone and visited Voltaire. So Voltaire had been in exile in Geneva. He'd come to Paris and Talleyrand had gone to visit Voltaire there. And Voltaire
Voltaire, by this point, is incredibly old. He has this brilliant description of Voltaire. Every line of that remarkable countenance is engraved in my memory. I see it now before me, the small fiery eyes staring from shrunken sockets, not unlike those of a chameleon. And it's widely held by enthusiasts for the revolution, that he is the father of it. The glorious revolution has been the fruit of his works, one of them says. And in fact...
In 1791, so two years after the fall of the Bastille, Voltaire's remains are dug up and reinterred in what is an almost completed church, but has been re-consecrated as a temple to liberty, the Pantheon, the temple to all the gods. And Voltaire is buried there amidst great splendour as one of the presiding inspirations for the revolution. But obviously, you can see why all this stuff, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the
would appeal to the Marquis de Condorcet or somebody who sees himself as an enlightened free thinker. I mean, genuinely a kind of metropolitan intellectual. But obviously most of France is not populated by people like that. It's a very rural country where, you know, millions upon millions of people work the land. They're used to the old ways, the old parish church, the local curé, the rituals of the Catholic year, all of that kind of stuff. And they are not reading Voltaire.
So what on earth did they make of this move from August 1789 onwards, the kind of anti-Christian side of the revolution? I think lots of them come to be enthused by the spirit of the revolution. I think they come to accept the revolution on its own terms. But equally, lots of them are appalled. And the more devout among Catholics come to see the whole revolution basically as a massive Protestant plot. Yeah.
One of the reasons for that is that Protestants are actually, they have quite leading roles in the revolution. The moment that they're allowed to kind of practice their religion freely, they're busy building churches. They're often quite wealthy, so they have the money to hand. They're busy joining revolutionary committees in Paris and across the whole of France. And in March 1790, a Protestant pastor is actually elected president of the National Assembly. So Catholics who feel upset about what is happening
They look at this and you can find evidence for thinking, well, it's Protestants who are behind it. And I think what kind of really puts rocket fuel in that fear is the fact that there are clearly two massive echoes of the Reformation.
that Catholics find quite hard to miss. So the attack on the Catholic church again and again is cast as an attack on superstition. Very Thomas Cromwell. Yes. So the attacks on privilege are often very stridently anti-clerical. And just as in the Reformation, so now the end of censorship means that pamphlets and illustrations can flood everywhere. And you don't even need to be able to read to
to understand kind of anti-clerical, anti-religious pamphlets. It's immediately apparent. And anyone with any familiarity with the Reformation would, of course, immediately see the parallels. And just as Luther had kind of staged mocking ceremonies that symbolically cast contempt on the papacy, the same thing is happening in the revolution. The church and the aristocracy are both objects of kind of staged managed processions that make them out to be
kind of completely ridiculous. You get parodies of the mass plays that are very anti-clerical get put on in the Paris theatres, sponsored by enthusiasts for the revolution. And undoubtedly, lots of people are swayed by this. They find it very exciting, the way in which suddenly they're being allowed to think in ways that they previously had never thought to think. But there are others who find it unsettling. So that's on the ideological level. But of course, the reformation
isn't just about ideology. About money. It's also about hard cash and property. Yeah. And there is an attack that kind of builds up from the abolition of the church's tithes through the months and years that follow that is actually pretty Henry VIII. Because we've said the revolution hasn't really improved the fiscal crisis that had done so much to bring it about. France is still basically bankrupt. There's no money. So how to plug the gap?
And that's exactly the question that prompted Henry VIII to end up dissolving the monasteries. And it's the solution that the more radical elements in the National Assembly kind of start thinking, maybe we could do this. Yeah, because the church controls so much. Yeah. I mean, they own something like 10% of the nation's wealth.
And who's the guy who basically proposes this? Talleyrand. It's Talleyrand. The Bishop of Houton. But I mean, that bishopric is kind of slightly nominal, isn't it? Let's be honest. Slightly. So he does this on the 10th of October. So that's a few months after the abolition of tithes.
And I think actually, to be fair to Talarot, it's not just the kind of cynical proposal because he's saying, you know, we can take all this land and lots of the money can go towards helping the nation's finances, but we could also basically nationalize the church and we could use the money from all these properties to give all the people in the church a kind of flat fee, a flat income. And this isn't, you know, Joseph II, the Habsburg emperor, the brother of Marie Antoinette, had come up with a very similar kind of wheeze and that basically had gone through
So, you know, there are elements within the church who think, yeah, fine, fair enough. And obviously the radical elements, say Mirabeau and all his pals, they think it's a brilliant idea and they take it to the National Assembly. The vast majority of people in the National Assembly aren't clergy, so they think it's brilliant as well. And the proposal is voted through. But it has to be said that for obvious reasons, most of the clergy really, really hate it because the implication is that they will now be clerical.
kind of moral functionaries, state employees. And this isn't the sense they have of their own vocation at all. And isn't this interesting that when we were talking about the Estates General, which becomes the National Assembly, we were saying that, you know, some of the big drivers of reform are the parish priests who are the poorest people there who are the closest to ordinary Frenchmen who are often seized with a real idealism. Because they're the first to join the Estates General, aren't they? It's a few poor parish priests. Yeah, they're to go and join the third estate and become the National Assembly. But
within months a wedge is being driven between the revolution and probably the majority of ordinary priests. Even those who end up signing up to it are very, very conflicted about it. I think the poorest priests are the ones the likeliest to side with this because they stand to benefit.
But obviously, any priest with a relatively higher income is going to have to take a pay cut. And the people who are really in the crosshairs are the monks and the nuns, just as they were in Henry VIII's reformation. Because first they've been deprived of their income, and now they're deprived of their lands. And
The corollary of this is exactly as in Henry VIII's time. So on the 13th of February, all monasteries and convents, except those who are devoted to charitable work, are officially dissolved and it's forbidden people to start taking monastic vows. And how much is there in France, the same...
prejudice, the same preconception that monks and nuns are incredibly fat and corrupt and sexually depraved. You know, that classic kind of Protestant image. I think much greater, because I don't think that was the case in Reformation England, but it's definitely the case in 18th century France, that monks and nuns have been absolute staples of these kind of pornographic tracts that we've been talking about quite a lot, not because we're prurient, but because they condition how people see the establishment in quite a fundamental way. And
There is a feeling among enthusiasts for the Enlightenment that they are useless. They contribute nothing to society. They need to be turned into useful citizens. And so March and April 1790, you get all these kind of bands of patriots with their placades and their revolutionary sashes turning up.
and going full Thomas Cromwell, kind of chucking the monks and the nuns out. So you can see why by the summer of 1790, I think that there is a kind of increasing sense of alienation in the church from the revolution. This is not what the Abbé de Sierre thought that he was encouraging when he first proposed dissolving the three estates into a single National Assembly. And in Talleyrand's own sea of Autun,
You start getting letters from his flock kind of saying he's an absolute traitor. He's a Judas. What is he up to? But it's not just in Otay. It's across the whole of France. You get priests who, you know, they don't want to dissolve their sense of themselves as belonging to God's church and to just become the equivalent of kind of magistrates or officers in the army. Yeah, civil servants. The whole point of being a priest is that their primary loyalty is not to the
the patria, not to the nation. It is to God. Well, there you have that tension, the universalism and the nationalism, yet again. But talking of universalism, you know, Catholicos means universal, and the head of the universal church is the Pope. So that is the head of the church, not the National Assembly. And the Pope is saying, basically, I'm not going to put up with this, this kind of revolutionary stuff. So...
In secret, the Pope in Rome, Pius VI, he starts to condemn the Declaration of the Rights of Man and all the policies that are being pursued in France on relations to the church. And this obviously sets up a kind of massive tension within the church and by extension within the vast mass of the French people. Not least because the National Assembly, rather than trying to arrive at an accommodation with the papacy and with the church, just doubles down. They're not in a mood to negotiate with
superstition and absolutism. They're not going to allow privilege to flourish.
And so they feel we need to find a supply of committed citizen priests. The church as it stands is not doing that. So we need to push things forward. And their solution in July 1790 is to draw up what they call the civil constitution of the clergy. And by the tenets of this, priests and bishops are to be elected. And of course, the electorate by this point would include priests.
Protestants. It would include Jews. It would include self-professed atheists. And once they have been elected, everyone who is going to take up his position as a kind of state priest, citizen priest, will be obliged to swear an oath of loyalty to the nation and to its laws. And
I think that to most people in the National Assembly, this doesn't seem a big deal at all. You know, it's a process of legislative tidying up. But to lots of priests, it's a source of complete agony because they have now been put in the position that lots of them have been struggling to avoid, where they have to choose between swearing this oath, the oath to the revolution, or staying true to the authority of the Pope, of the church,
of God. It's a massive moment, isn't it? It's a really, really invidious choice. And just as the Declaration of the Rights of Man tends not to have perhaps the resonance in English-speaking countries that it certainly does in France. So likewise, the civil constitution of the clergy. I think if you said, you know, what's the key moment in the French Revolution, I certainly wouldn't have said this.
But it's amazing when you read histories of the revolution, English histories of the revolution, again and again, historians point to this as being the key moment that
that fractures the revolution, fractures any sense of kind of national harmony. So this is Simon Sharma. Civil constitution was not simply another piece of institutional legislation. It was the beginning of a holy war. William Doyle in the Oxford History of the French Revolution. The French Revolution had many turning points, but the oath of the clergy was unquestionably one of them, if not the greatest. And Peter McPhee in his brilliant Liberty or Death book on the French Revolution. The oath fractured both the church
and the revolution. I remember doing this at A-level, Tom, and the civil constitution of the clergy I regarded as incredibly boring and dry and everybody kind of skipped it because we couldn't wait to get onto the terror.
But I think you're quite right to emphasize it because this does feel like the moment when what has been kind of one process carrying a lot of people along with it, when it really divides. I mean, that tension has always been there and that sense of an incipient kind of division between us and them, between the people who are on the side of the patrie or the nation and those people who are traitors or conspirators. But this is the moment that drives a lot of people who might otherwise have gone along with the revolution into
against it because they are being asked to rip up everything they held, not just dear, but everything they held sacred. And a lot of people just will not do that. There are the faintest echoes of the Brexit referendum for us in Britain. Right. Because effectively it comes to serve as a referendum because priests obviously pay attention to what their flock think. And the division is quite kind of Brexit-like. So 54%
of priests end up taking the oath, which means that 46 don't. And there are very clear geographical divisions. So in Paris, the oath-taking is very high in the regions around Paris. In Provence, it's very high. But in the countryside, and particularly in the West, essentially you have what has now emerged as a counter-revolutionary bloc. And you
you have people who are defining themselves as citizens and you have people who are defining themselves as Christians, as communities of souls. And both sides come to increasingly cast the other side in the darkest possible light. So it's
enthusiasts for revolution see their opponents as people who are clinging onto superstition and privilege and all kinds of things like that. Whereas enthusiasts for priests who've taken the oath see revolutionaries as bloodthirsty fanatics who are destroying everything that has made their life precious. And it's the moment where you get counter-revolution as kind of the opposite to revolution.
And it poses the question of could it have been different? I mean, might the revolution have been able to take the vast mass of Catholic citizens with them? And I
I know of no better kind of teaser for that question than a famous painting. It was done in 1789 in the wake of the drawing of the Declaration of the Rights of Man by a painter called Jean-Jacques François Le Barbier, who had actually been a court painter to Louis XVI. And in the wake of the signing of the Declaration, he is
is employed to give it a visual representation. So he gives all the kind of the favorite symbols. So there's, you know, broken chains and there's a Liberty cap and there's great Masonic eye gazing down. But the thing that's striking about the portrayal of the declaration itself is that it is written as though it is carved onto stone tablets. And the stone tablets, of course, are an echo of the tablets that were given to Moses on Mount Sinai, which is the kind of the definitive symbol
expression of divine revelation, not of human law. And of course, a prefiguring, Tom, an important and interesting prefiguring of Ed Miliband's stone tablets in 2015. Yeah, so the echoes of the French Revolution reverberate everywhere.
So when Le Barbier is doing that, what is he doing? Is he saying it's possible to synthesize the Bible and the Enlightenment? You don't need to choose between them. The two can merge. And if that's what he's saying, I mean, it's not completely mad because actually it's very clear when you look at the Enlightenment that a lot of the values that the Enlightenment assumes are universal.
that everyone would accept are actually bred from deeply Christian assumptions. I mean, people who've listened to this podcast regularly will be aware. Have I ever heard you use that phrase before? Like you should have a Tom Holland generator where you just press a button and it says bred of deeply Christian assumptions. I know, I know. But just to give an example, say Voltaire, his horror at the fate of Jean Calin
Why is he so upset by this? Why is he upset by the torture to death of an innocent man or an instrument of torture? It clearly reflects kind of deep psychological response to the figure of Christ that Voltaire would have absorbed as a child, I think. Maybe, or maybe he just doesn't like people being broken on the wheel by torture. I mean, is that not possible? But there you're assuming that that's something instinctively that people react against. I mean, I think the evidence suggests contrary wise, I think plenty of societies have been perfectly happy with that. Okay. And Calla himself on the wheel, I should add,
kind of makes this parallel explicit. I die innocent. I do not pity myself. Jesus Christ, who was innocent, died for me by even more cruel torments. And I think what kind of brings this home is the fact that Calas is exonerated by the French king, the anointed king, Louis XV. And he's exonerated not
because Louis XV has become an Enlightenment philosoph and not because the vast mass of people in France who feel sympathy for Calais have become Enlightenment philosoph and in sympathy with Voltaire's skepticism. But because they see Voltaire's campaign as being entirely concordant
with Christian principles. So just to quote David Bien, who wrote a brilliant book on the Calafere, the view that the impact of the Enlightenment polarized French thought, creating two large, mutually suspicious groups, one clerical and the other anti-clerical, is to read back the developments of the revolution, where it definitely does happen, into a period when they simply were not present. And we talked about the role that priests play in the early weeks and months of the revolution. And
And at the Bastille, you know, this storming of a place dank with chains, if the stories are to be believed, and the funerals that are given for those who had taken part in the storming of the Bastille. The text that is preached by the Archbishop of Paris comes from Paul. You, my brothers, were called to be free. And this is a sentiment that is
is perfectly in tune with the call to liberté in the revolution. So Tom, are you effectively saying, and some listeners may consider this the classic Holland gambit, that the ideological struggle within the French revolution of revolutionaries against counter-revolutionaries is basically a struggle between two different kinds of Christians? Yes, I am basically saying that. And it's about the attempt, I think, of the revolution revolutionaries
to appropriate much of its inheritance from the Christian past. And I think that's the other way of interpreting Le Berbier's picture, is that it's not in any way saying that the Bible and the Enlightenment, Christ and Voltaire can be synthesized. It's saying that a revolutionary order has to appropriate what it can of previous revolutionary orders. And the truth is that there is something distinctive, I
I think, about European society in the West that reaches right the way back beyond the Reformation, back to the 11th century, when Europe's primal revolution happens, where you have the Catholic Church directing it. You have a pope who humbles kings. The humbling of kings is a vital part of the dynamics of what is going on in the 11th century. You have an emperor kneeling in the snow before a pope
You have a notion that society itself can be born again, can be bred anew, can be washed in blood and emerge as something new. And it creates a kind of division within society that by the time of the revolution has been framed as being religious and secular. Yeah.
And of course, the Catholic Church is the universal church. So that instinct on the part of the revolutionaries to preach universalism is a highly Christian one. And finally, just on the declaration that we began with, the Declaration of Human Rights, where did the idea of human rights come from? If they're universal, they are not evident in religion.
antiquity. They are not evident in parts of the world beyond Latin Christendom. They emerge in the 12th century as a product of the cultural ferment of that first revolution in Italy in the 12th century, and that's where they come from. So if the revolution is to proclaim that these are universal and that the revolution embodies them, it needs to utterly incinerate
and obliterate the memory of that. And I think that what the revolution demonstrates is actually the one thing a revolutionary hates more than a reactionary is a rival revolutionary. And I think the hostility between the revolution as it will emerge over the course of the period that we've been talking about, so into the period of the terror, is that the
The hostility of the revolution towards the Catholic Church is similar to the hostility that Protestant reformers felt towards the papacy. It's kind of a rival church. It's a rival. Yes, exactly. Yeah.
Interesting. The Holland gambits are never more brilliantly deployed, Tom, than just now. Oh, you're very kind. So all of that lies ahead because we will get to the terror and the sort of civil war within the revolution. But obviously, right from the start, go back to the Declaration of Human Rights. That was what, August 1789? And right from that point, Louis...
and Marie Antoinette and the people who have not fled, who are still around them, they don't like this kind of stuff at all, do they? Of course not. Because it has implications for the monarchy as well as the church. So Louis published a response to the declaration in September and he said, yeah, I love the spirit of it. Great. And then he went through all the specifics and said, don't agree with that. Yeah. So like the Serbian reply to the Austrian ultimatum. Yes. Very good.
And I think for me, the obvious problem that they have with their constitution building and their desire to set France on a new sort of even keel is
is that they have a huge hold at the centre of their constitution, which is the king. Because they've been talking about a British-style constitutional monarchy. But is Louis going to play that part? I mean, is he ever psychologically ready? And particularly once the church, which he has sworn an oath to uphold, once that comes into the kind of firing line, I don't think he's ever going to adjust himself to this new world.
And obviously we're going to get back to the narrative because just a few weeks after that, after his response to the declaration, that tension will reach a climax, won't it? With one of the most dramatic, exciting, tragic episodes of the entire revolution. And that's what we're doing tomorrow, Tom. It is. It's the Women's March on Versailles. Very exciting. I can't wait. So we'll be looking at that and the way in which the revolution has to work out what it's going to do about the monarchy. So we will be back with that tomorrow.
Au revoir.
