478. The French Revolution: Showdown in Versailles (Part 4)
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They hit at 7 o'clock in the morning of the 13th of July. Hit hard. Hailstones big as eggs. According to some reports, they were as big as bottles. Chunks of ice, as hard as diamonds, weighing a pound and a half. A hailstone that was weighed in one village outside Paris came to eight pounds. One weighed in another village came to ten.

The stones broke windows, smashed tiles on roofs, razed fields, destroyed vineyards, stripped bare fruit trees, struck horses dead, and even killed some peasants who were preparing to harvest what had promised to be an excellent crop of wheat." That is Robert Darnton in his wonderful book, The Revolutionary Temper, and he is describing the storm that hit France in the summer of 1788. Dominic, we do love a storm,

a gathering storm on the rest is history. But I mean, you could argue that this is possibly the most significant actual non-metaphorical storm in the whole of European history. You absolutely could, Tom. One would be quite justified in arguing that. So purely in its own terms, it's quite an extraordinary event, meteorological event. It sweeps all the way across France from Rouen, Normandy, all the way down to Toulouse and the Languedoc. There

There was a Scottish gardener, a great gardening writer and gardening expert called Thomas Blakey, who was travelling in France in 1788. And he said that the hailstones were so monstrous, so enormous, that the countryside was littered with dead hares and dead partridges. It wiped out budding vines in Alsace, Burgundy and the Loire, laid waste to wheat ripening in the fields of the Auligny, pitted young apples in the Calvado, shriveled young olives and oranges.

In the midi. What I like about that is that actually that was Robert Darnton. That was a quote from Robert Darnton. It wiped out budding vines in Alsace, Burgundy and the Loire. Okay, we don't need it again. All right, okay. But anyway, yes, it's a terrible storm. And of course, if you've been listening to this series, which we hope you have, you will know that it strikes at the worst possible moment.

when France is gripped by this political and financial crisis. And the storm is then followed by a drought. So a drought across France, then suddenly a very hot summer.

And farmers are writing to the court in Versailles, sending letters asking for help. A once ravishing countryside has been reduced to an arid desert. And there's a real sense of kind of catastrophe, which, of course, in the context of everything that we were talking about in the last episode. Not helpful, is it? It's not helpful at all. The interesting thing, actually, is that last time we were talking about the Ancien Régime.

how the stereotype of it is so misleading. And so it is with this case. You would think if you had read A Tale of Two Cities and all of the sort of, you know, you used the caricatures of the French Revolution and the French elite, that nobody did anything to help. And you would be wrong because actually the Archbishop of Paris launches this big charity drive. The king gives a million livres, even though, you know, the monarchy has pretty much run out of money. A national lottery is organized and it raises 12 million livres.

to pay for relief. But as we will see, it is not remotely enough to rescue the situation because, Tom, nature has more storms in store. Wow. So the elements are combining against the monarchy. They are indeed. And the Ancien Régime is invading.

is in a mess, I think it's fair to say. Were you trying to think of a meteorological metaphor for this? No, I've moved on from the meteorological metaphors. I was maybe thinking of a building one. I was thinking perhaps it's tottering on its foundations. It is tottering on its foundations. Because as we discussed at the end of the last episode, something looking very much like a French Revolution has already broken out in Grenoble and in Dauphine in the southeast of France and has spread to other provinces.

Louis XVI, in desperation, has announced that he will call the Estates General. And we ended last time with the bombshell that Archbishop Brienne, the Finance Minister,

has basically declared bankruptcy, his partial bankruptcy. And it's ironic, isn't it? Because he doesn't believe in God, but all these acts of God have now hit France. Yes, ironically. Well, he didn't believe in the deficit and then he was appointed to look at the books. He's on a learning curve. Yeah, he is. Well, his learning curve is abruptly terminated.

A week later, on the 25th of August, when he is booted out and the monarchy turned to the one person who everybody in France thinks can rescue the situation. This is a man we mentioned very briefly last time. His name is Jean-Jacques Necker. And he is not a courtier. He is not an aristocrat.

He is not even French. He is a Swiss Protestant from a Genevan banking family, and he is meant to be the great financial whiz kid of Western Europe. Because the Swiss even then have a kind of reputation for sobriety and the kind of man that you would trust to sort out your bank balance. Totally, they do. Necker is a, it seems odd now from our perspective all these centuries later, to comprehend how a Swiss banker could be such a folk hero.

across France. Yeah, I know. But absolutely, there was a sense in France in the late 18th century that Protestants, although they are weird, alien and heretical, are nevertheless very boring and they can be trusted. They're kind of black sober suits and all that kind of thing. So when I was reading up on NECA, I was reminded of how a lot of people in Britain thought about the Canadian national banker, Mark Carney. A listener to The Rest Is History. A listener to The Rest Is History, exactly. Exactly.

who ran the Bank of England. There was a perception, I think, in Britain that he was very measured, very Canadian, very controlled and apparently very sober. I'm not saying he wasn't sober, but- What are you saying, Dominic? The avoidance of doubt. That's how he appeared. If he's listening, Dominic is not accusing you of being a drunk. No, I'm not. But I'm saying people attributed him, people who knew nothing about Mark Carney, precisely because he was an outsider, not tainted by British politics.

People attributed him with sort of extraordinary powers and they saw him as a figure who represented stability and solidity. And also neutrality. Yeah, neutrality, exactly. And objectivity, not having too many vested interests. And I guess that's why people think Necker is a deus ex machina. They do indeed. Someone who can be introduced to kind of cut through all the Gordian knots that have been...

strangling the French economy. We love it. I mean, not just one Gordian knot, according to you, but multiple Gordian knots. All of them. And Necker, to be fair, is brilliant at... I mean, the one thing he had done is he'd got loans...

for the American war, you might argue with disastrous consequences, he's very good at getting loans because he has so many friends in the banking business. So as soon as he arrives, he says, I can do what Brienne could not. I can get my friends to lend you money at decent rates. I will be able to tide us over for at least another year until the Estates General can meet and we can actually sort this thing out and perhaps set up some new constitutional body or whatever it might be that will approve Brienne.

taxes. And so the stock exchange, which had been very jittery in the summer of 1788, kind of returns to normal. And there's a sense, you know, maybe we've got a bit of direction, maybe we've got a bit of calm.

But I think that sense, Tom, would be illusory. Well, because surely people know that there's an absolute catastrophe looming because the hailstones have wiped out the wheat harvest. They do indeed. And that, of course, has terrible implications for bread. It does indeed. There is a sense, I think, that all the time something is simmering. So when Brienne fell, there were celebrations in Paris that turned into rioting.

There was fighting between the Paris Watch and these celebrators, stroke rioters. Perhaps 20 people were killed in the fighting. I mean, this is fighting with kind of, this is your classic kind of, the Watch have sabres and bayonets. By the end, they're firing into the crowds. Soldiers restore order in the capital, eventually. But exactly as you say, because of the storms, everybody knows that something very bad is going to happen. And the reason is this thing about bread.

You know, it's the classic thing in the French Revolution is that you get great hordes of people chanting for bread. That's one of the kind of images. Yeah. And the reason for this is that three out of four people in France subsist almost entirely on a basically a particular kind of loaf, which is called the four pound loaf.

And if you've got a family of four, you need two of these loaves every day to feed them. Now, one loaf costs eight sous, and a manual labourer makes about 25 sous a day. So in other words, he will be spending half, maybe more than half of his daily income on these two loaves of bread. And if the bread prices rise, he's in a real mess.

So by October, the price has already gone from 8 to 12 Su, and eventually, as we will see, it will peak at about 15 Su. And it peaks, doesn't it, on the 14th of July, 1789? Yeah, 14th of July, 1789, day of the fall of the Bastille. Now you could say...

I mean, there's nothing anyone can do about this. This is a complete act of God. You know, the storms have destroyed the harvest. There are not enough crops, not enough wheat. There's not going to be enough flour. There's not going to be enough bread. Prices will rise. But this is an age of pamphlets and of rumours and therefore of conspiracy theories, right? Exactly. And so if something bad happens, someone must be to blame. Exactly. That's exactly it. Ever since the whole issue...

was opened by Calonne and obviously many ways going back even further, there has been this rhetoric of the king's ministers, the king's ministers who are despotic and they don't care and they just want to trample on our ancient liberties and all of that stuff. And now people start to say, well, this is all the fault of the king's ministers. They're not giving us any relief. They're probably hoarding grain themselves, to be honest. They're probably profiting from all this and driving prices up. Only the Estates General can save us. And then if that's not bad enough, I promised you that nature had...

More tricks up our sleeve, Tom. On the 26th of November 1788, there is an unexpected snowfall. Basically, winter has come unexpectedly heavily and unexpectedly early.

And this kicks off what Robert Danza describes as the longest, cruelest, coldest winter that anybody in France had ever known. So by December, Paris is completely covered with snow. The Seine is frozen over. People are walking on the Seine. There are frozen bodies lying in the streets.

By New Year's Eve, the temperature has fallen to the lowest ever recorded in France, minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit. The rivers are all frozen. Of course, the rivers being frozen means that the water mills, they can't create flour. The rivers are frozen. The roads are snowbound. They cannot transport supplies of bread to those areas that are suffering the most. And the snow is everywhere in France. It's as far south as the Languedoc in the southwest. And it falls pretty much every other day because...

between February and April 1789. I mean, this is a real freak winter. And so they must all be sitting in Versailles looking out of the window thinking, oh no. Completely they are, yeah. Because they're getting reports all the time that basically there's a lot of people in France who are kind of labourers with no land and they rely on seasonal work and they're all out of work and they're just starving. You know, they've no money, they have no food.

And dying, presumably. And dying, yeah. The majority of French men and women are peasant sharecroppers, smallholders. So they work their land, they owe the seigneur, the local landowner, they owe him for goods and stuff, and they owe him various exactions. With this winter following on the storm, they probably won't be able to pay him what they owe. This means that they will probably be evicted from their land

and they will be demoted to the class of those people who have no land. But at least they have the consolation of knowing that the senior doesn't have to pay taxes, so that must be a relief.

Yeah, that the seigneur is fighting for the liberties of France. Yeah, for the liberty of his right not to pay taxes. Tom, I think it's fair to say that in Germany and the rest is history, we deplore people who don't pay their rightful taxes, don't we? I think we do. We set out our position a year ago in the series on the American War of Independence. We did. And we're sticking to it now. Just pay your taxes for God's sake. French, American, what is wrong with you people? But this is such a hostage to fortune when we get investigated by tax authorities. That's true.

So now, anyway, you have a flood of people moving into the cities, desperate for relief. But if they manage to get there through the snow, there is very little there for them because France already is suffering from quite high unemployment in the cities because, as we said right at the beginning of the last episode, the Ancien Régime is a modernising regime

We're living in the age of the Industrial Revolution. Weavers, artisans are being put out of work by machines, by capitalism. And by Britain. And by Britain. More specifically. Yeah, because Calon, who we wanted to liberalize the French economy, had signed, this is very Brexit negotiations, he'd signed a free trade deal with the British. And he'd said, this will give us the shock we need, a bit of competition, a bit of a spur to our economy.

A flood of British manufactured goods. Cheap gloves and things. Cheap gloves that are putting the French out of work. That's what my ancestors made in Derbyshire. They were making gloves. Really? Yeah. So basically your ancestors are responsible for the Day of the Tiles in Grenoble. We played our bit. Wow. Tom, you kept that quiet during that whole incident when people, 12 year olds were being shot, but now you bring it up.

Oh, yeah. I've actually forgotten about it. That's even worse. It's the indifference to the suffering you've caused. Right. So over the winter of 1788, about a fifth of the population of Paris are unemployed. So that's what, about 100,000? 100,000 people, yeah. Or are receiving relief of some guy, like poor relief. So now we have the three ingredients that we talked about last time. The political and financial crisis, the kind of high politics.

The cultural moment, the cult of virtue, of passion, of living your truth, all of that stuff. And now the social unrest and the anger and the desperation. So this is a lot of pressure on the Estates General, which has been called and is supposed to resolve all this. And the thing is, they've called the Estates General and it's going to meet the following spring, summer. The date is a slightly movable feast.

But they don't really know, as we said, what it is, how it will be arranged. There's no institutional memory of it because it hasn't met since 1614-15. And the king has not decreed what it should be? No. There's a flood of pamphlets. There's a huge sort of torrent of argument in the final months of 1788.

And what people want, if they are kind of reformers, they say the third estate, which is the commons representing the great majority of the French people, should absolutely not allow itself to be outvoted by the clergy and the nobility. So the clergy, the first estate, nobles of the second estate. Exactly. The mass of everybody else is the third estate. Everybody else, yeah. The third estate should have its numbers doubled, so it should be equivalent to those two.

And they should all sit together so that a majority vote can decide all the big questions. Because even if its numbers are doubled, if it's outvoted by the other two chambers, if each chamber gets basically one vote, as it were, then they'll never be able to win. And can I ask, with all this talk about the general will of the people...

which is already becoming very current, is there already a sense that actually there shouldn't be three estates, there should just be the one national assembly which could speak and articulate the truth of the nation? Yes, and this is the moment when people start to say that. So people had not really been saying that so openly in 1780 or something, but now by 1788 they're saying it very openly. And the most famous example of that actually, Tom, is a guy called Siez, the Abbe Siez, Emmanuel Siez.

So he's from a commoner family and he had become a kind of church administrator in Chartres.

And he writes a very famous pamphlet. If anyone has ever done this for A-Level like me, they will remember this. He wrote a pamphlet called Qu'est-ce que le tiers état? What is the third estate? Which came out in January 1789. And it started with these famous words. We have three questions to ask. First, what is the third estate? Everything. Second, what has it been in the political order up to now? Nothing.

Third, what does it demand? To become something. So this sort of idea that the third estate is everything. And he says, he says, the third estate is a complete nation. He says there are 25 million of us. There are only 200,000 of them, nobles and priests. We don't even need them. He says, we are the nation. If we want a total reboot of France,

We can have one. If we lack a constitution, we must make one. The nation alone has that right. I mean, he presumably, I mean, he's a member of the first estate. Yes. And we talked in the previous episode that there are nobles, members of the second estate who sympathize with this. Yes. That,

They would like to see their order, their estate, dissolved into the entirety of a single assembly. They absolutely would, yeah, they would. So we'll see a very famous example in the Comte de Mirabeau, who is one of the most famous spokesmen for the third estate, but is a nobleman. And of course also the Duke of Orléans, who again we talked to, the cousin of Louis XVI, who...

He's a member, obviously, of the second estate. Yeah. And actually, some of these people are very vitriolic about their own estates. So Sierre's an example. There's a real hint of menace in that pamphlet, What is the Third Estate?,

He says, if the nobility and the clergy, like me, want to become part of the nation, they must discard their privileges. And he says, people are always asking what place should they occupy in the social order. He says, this is equivalent to asking what place should be assigned to a malignant disease which preys upon and tortures the body of a sick man.

I mean, that analogy, your opponents are not even traitors. They are a disease. Yeah, it's very familiar, isn't it? I mean, that is very familiar and very disturbing. So anyway, in this argument, Necker suggests a compromise and he and the king issue a decision. The third estate will get its key demand. It will get 600 deputies compared with the 300 or so for both the clergy and the nobility.

Also, the third estate will be able to elect, choose as representatives, people like Siez who come from the other estates. So if you're, Tom, a liberal reforming clergyman like him or a vicomte or whatever,

And your own estate won't choose you, obviously. You could run in the third estate elections to get in that way. However, what NECA does not decide is whether the three estates are all going to sit together, which would allow the third estate to dominate, or whether they would still be stratified kind of hierarchically and be in their different chambers. So...

This kicks off these elections for the three estates. And they're very, very complicated. So let's try to steer clear of them as much as possible. Basically, it's a filtration process. You've got a parish assembly and then a district assembly and then a provincial assembly. It kind of varies from place to place, doesn't it? It does. It's all kind of random and very complicated. And all the time, people have been encouraged. And this is an amazing thing. The king says to them, I want to hear all your grievances.

I want to hear all your desires. So actually, the idea that the elite and the regime is totally indifferent and out of touch is not quite right. But this is the king. This is him playing his role of the father, the father of the nation. Yeah, the patriot king. Because, of course, I assume at this point...

The implications of all this identification of the third estate with the voice of the people, they're not yet discussing what implications that might have for the monarch. No, because they're all, by the way, they're all monarchists. Of course. I mean, there is very little, certainly in the books that I've read, there's no mention of any overt republicanism at this stage. Their dream, remember, a lot of these reformers is a British style system, not an American republic.

So the ordinary people are composing these 25,000 dossiers, they call it, exercise books, you could call them, in which they basically are saying, well, I don't like this tax. I don't like the senior does this. I would love to live with this or that or whatever this is. But no one in Europe has ever, I think possibly in the world, has ever done an exercise like this before. It is a monumental sort of public opinion survey.

And does it help stabilize the situation? Well, obviously the problem with it is that because it's unprecedented and extraordinary, it raises expectations. No government, even a revolutionary government, can possibly meet because people...

Then, as now, they want impossible and contradictory things. They want more food. They want more freedom. They want lower prices. They want less government on their backs and telling them what to do. They also want more government, a paternalistic government that is always there with relief and all this kind of thing. They're asking things that no 18th century government can possibly satisfy.

supply. And that will create, that's stoking their expectations to a pitch where the dissatisfaction will explode in fury and disappointment very shortly. Meanwhile, even as they are electing their representatives and drawing up their cahiers, the disorder in France is growing. And this is, again, this doesn't start with the revolution. It precedes the revolution.

So effectively, I think what happens is the snow melts as the ice thaws and people go back to the streets. The food prices are still very high. So the disorder returns to the streets and you get a series of reports by about March of food rioting across the country, all the way from France in the north to Avignon to Toulouse.

in the South. And in particular, there is a sense that in the countryside, which is most of France, authority is really breaking down at this point. So I know we've both read Sharma's book. He has this wonderful section, doesn't he, where he introduced this by saying the first mass casualties of the French Revolution of France is rabbits. Because he describes how people just, they're desperate. They form platoons.

And they go out with guns or whatever or bludgeons like British schoolboys and they're hunting game and rabbits and all this sort of stuff. And this is in contravention of very restrictive game laws. Yeah. And actually it's one of the stories of 1789 is the erosion of those game laws and it's bad news for rabbits and in a very short time it will be bad news for birds. Yeah because when game keepers try to stop them and

and say, oi, this is the seigneur's stuff, they're just shooting them dead. But you think the real victims in this are the birds, do you, Tom? I do, really, because they've remained victims, because it becomes a kind of principle of the new order in France that you can kill as many birds as you like. That François Mitterrand eating that bird. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, unbelievable. It's a slippery slope from bread riots to François Mitterrand biting the head off an innocent bird. Oh, no, what a terrible image.

So there's a real sense of a power vacuum in the countryside. People are attacking granaries and bakeries. Towns unable to defend themselves are forming their own militias. Yeah. So it's all kind of starting to crumble. But you know what you need in a situation like this? Tell me. You need a massive riot. Yes. Dominic, does such a thing happen? It does. So it happens in Paris. And I think, again, I said in the last episode that the French Revolution started in Grenoble. You could also say it.

I mean, if you want to choose an alternative date, it starts on the 28th of April 1789 in Paris, not at the Bastille. So this starts in a place, an area east of the Bastille called the Faubourg, that means neighborhood, Saint-Antoine, Saint-Anthony. And there's a rumor that goes around, there's a big wallpaper manufacturer in town.

called Réveillon. And there's a rumor that Réveillon had gone to a public meeting and had said that his workers should live on 15 sous a day, which is now the price of a loaf of bread, one loaf only. And actually, he hadn't said that. What he had said was that if they sorted out the economy,

and liberalized the economy, there would be lower prices. And then with lower prices, there would be lower wages. And one day, his workers would live on 15 sous a day because bread would be so cheap, or words to that effect. Now, Réveillon is very well known in Paris. He had made, in his capacity as a paper manufacturer, Tom, he had made the paper that was the first balloon, the Montgolfier balloon.

And he had sponsored the first hot air balloons and they had taken off from the yard of his workshop.

So, you know, you will see his name if you Google the first hot air balloon flights. He is like a really modern, interesting person. It's kind of James Dyson figure. Yeah, exactly. Entrepreneur, technology. He's a really impressive person, this guy Réveillon. He had been an apprentice paper worker. He worked his way up. He bought his own paper workshop. By the 1780s, he's employing hundreds of workers. He's brilliant at making wallpaper and paper generally. He's so good, he exports it to England.

which of course, given that England is the sort of... Yeah, Colston, Newcastle. Yeah, it's Colston, Newcastle, exactly. He's also a very paternalistic employer. He pays his workers well more than his competitors. And he even pays them over that winter when it's so cold they can't work. He says, I'll sort you out. So he's a saint, a saintly figure from the end of a Dickens novel. A lovely man. Adopting orphans. Mr. Cheerable or something. Anyway, because...

Because he's a capitalist entrepreneur, basically everybody hates him because he represents a threat. He represents threatening modernity, putting sort of craftspeople out of work, like his rivals out of work. And so as this story spreads, people in the neighborhood say, yeah, let's go and smash up Réveillon's workshop. The first day they try to do this,

Some of the local sort of politicians managed to turn them away. But the second day, the 28th of April, the crowd is swelled by unemployed dockers and brewers and tanners and things. And about 5,000 to 10,000 people turn up outside. And do you think this is partly like in the election episode that we did a few weeks back? People, you know, they're told there's going to be a Barney. Oh, yeah. Turn up in front of it. Yeah. But that's the thing about people hearing there's going to be a Barney.

And turning up to see the fun of it or to join in is key to all riots and revolutions, I think. So all these people turn up and they basically, they lay siege to his house and his workshop. He and his family managed to get away. What then happens is extraordinary. It takes these people literally two hours to physically destroy every trace of his house and workshop. They pile up literally everything.

And I quote, the furniture, the woodwork, the doors, the linens, the stocks of paper, the carriages, even some poultry, and they set it on fire. So we've had rabbits and now chickens. Chickens, very bad news. A captain from Strasbourg of the guard who came to try and sort of sort out the situation, he described 1,500 or 1,600 of the excrement of the nation vomiting up brandy and presenting the most disgusting and revolting sight because these people have found what they think is Réveillon's cellar. Unfortunately...

What they thought was his wine cellar, he actually had thousands of bottles of very good wine that they left untouched. What they thought was the cellar of his wine is actually where he's storing the liquids that they used to make the wallpaper. So loads of these blokes drink this liquid and they're found dead the next day. So you can see why the French Republic...

celebrates the anniversary of the French Revolution on the 14th of July rather than on the 27th of April with this episode. The excrement of the nation vomiting up brandy. Vomiting up paint stripper. Yeah, exactly. The city guards arrive too late to sort this out. As in Cronoble, they are pelted with tiles and stones by the crowd and then they basically lose it and they start shooting into the crowd.

And estimates differ massively, but some estimates are that 300 people, that's about the middle ground, about 300 people were killed. And that gives you the bloodiest day of the French Revolution until 1792. So that's the September massacres? Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is a really, really...

serious business. But of course, completely eclipsed and forgotten now because so much worse is to follow. Well, and I suppose because the main event of the year is looming, or at least the scheduled main event, which is the meeting of the Estates General in Versailles. It is indeed. So after the Réveillon riot, Paris becomes basically an occupied city. Troops are sent in

There are infantry patrols on every street. There are sentries on the street corners. There's cavalry riding up and down the streets. And to the horror of the Parisians, many of these troops are people who have been specially brought in. They are the French armies, German and Hungarian detachments. Basically, of course, in the 18th century, you often recruited troops from elsewhere. As the British did in the American Revolution. As the British did, the Hessians. So to have foreign troops on the streets of Paris for ordinary Parisians is very, very unsettling.

There are all kinds of rumors. There's going to be a coup. There's going to be an insurrection. Something is coming. And then, as you said, Tom, at the beginning of May, the Estates General opens in Versailles. Well, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll see what happens.

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Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. It's all kicking off at Versailles, where the Estates General are meeting up. And Dominic, what happens? Is it all sweetness and light? Sure. It's all fashion, Tom. It's all fashion. So, in Star Wars Sports Citizens, he starts this section with a guy called the Marquis de Ferriere, a lovely French Revolution character. He wrote letters and stuff all through the revolution, so we know what he was thinking. And he's a great writer.

And he's a very cultivated, reasonable, public-spirited man from the nobility. So does he survive it? He does survive it, which is nice. It's a relief. He's a man of the Enlightenment. So he's kind of looking forward to this and he thinks, brilliant, we're going to sort out France's problems. But when he arrives in Versailles, what is on his mind is what he is going to wear. Because...

This is not a minor thing. This is an important part of the ritual and the politics of the States General. Louis has been giving this some thought, as has his courtiers. He's very anxious about this whole Estates General thing. His queen, Marie Antoinette, she thinks this is madness. Yeah. She doesn't like Necker either. She hates Necker. She hates the idea of the States General.

I mean, she's not wrong. She thinks opening the door to this, who knows where it will lead. I mean, she's not untrue in her political judgments by this point. No. And Louis is very depressed. He's been spending a lot of time messing around with his locks and stuff. And to run the whole thing, he thinks the ideal person would be this guy who's 23 years old. He's called the Marquis de Trebreze. He

He doesn't know anything about politics, but that's fine. He's really interested in court dress. Brilliant. And he and Louis decide that in the face of this instability, they need to reinforce a sense of tradition. So he's like the guy that you love on Twitter, who's a big fan of the King of Spain. Derek Guy, the menswear expert. Yeah. He would be a perfect person to run the Estates General. Absolutely. So the Marquis and Louis decide that the nobles, they must dress up. They must wear gold trinkets.

trimmed cloaks, black silk coats, lace cravats. And they have these special hats, which are made of beaver with white plumes. I mean, beaver fur, not kind of literally a beaver. No, beaver fur. Because that would be horrible. Yeah, it would be horrible. Disemboweled beaver on their head. Yeah, of course. That'd be ridiculous, Tom. Let's be frank. That would be absurd. Supposedly, these beaver fur hats...

are the same hats that were worn in the reign of Henry IV. Who's a great hero, isn't he? He's the people's king. He's the people's king. Now, actually, this is kind of made up. No one really knows what hats they wore, but they basically invented a tradition. Well, you never get that in the House of Lords. So, the Marquis de Ferriere gets his cloak and his hat dressed

And on the 4th of May, he joins all the other courtiers and they do a procession with the king and queen through Versailles to the church of Saint-Louis for the blessing, basically for the church service that's going to kick the whole thing off. And it could not be a more sumptuous scene. The streets are literally hung with tapestries sort of draped over the houses, gobbled tapestries everywhere.

There are big crowds. I mean, they are cheering Marie Antoinette and the king. They shout, long live the king. And so it's a procession that visualizes notions of hierarchy. It does. The monarchy, the nobility, the clergy, the general mass of the people. I think, Tom, it's a bad message to send. It's the wrong message. And actually, Necker had said, could we not have the Estates General in Paris?

Because he wanted to get it away from the court for precisely this reason, to avoid giving that impression. But no, they have it in Versailles. They have all their finery. And then come the third estate kind of trailing behind all the commons. And they have been forbidden from dressing up in finery. And they have been told, you must wear plain black coats. So Sharma says they look like a convention of apothecaries. Because they look very kind of...

sort of solemn and they look like Puritans from a Lady Bird book about the English Civil War. Yeah, well, kind of Dutch burgers in a Rembrandt painting. Dutch burgers, exactly. But there's one of them in particular who seizes the limelight.

Sharma describes him as, and I quote,

A force of nature, pagan, dangerous and uncontainable within clothes or custom. So more bad skin action. Yeah. That's the key to the French Revolution, isn't it? Bad skin. And this monstrous figure is a fellow who I imagine you would really like this because you like Lord Byron and you like bad boys.

is Honoré Gabriel Ricetti, Comte de Mirabeau. So I would say that the history of the French Revolution could be written as being about Gérard Depardieu characters. Yeah. So Danton would be another example. Yeah.

This is a man who would be played by Gerard Depardieu and alternated with very thin, sinister looking people. Who are Robespierre and people of that ilk. So Mirabeau is such a, when I did this for A-Level, he seemed such a dull dog. Always talking about like... Constitutions. Electoral, yeah, constitutional procedures and stuff. I mean, I just couldn't wait to get past Mirabeau and onto Robespierre and Marat and stuff.

But actually, he's a tremendously interesting character. He's a really badly behaved, sort of posh wastrel. But he's also, Dominic, he's like your hero, Stanley Baldwin, because he's an enthusiast for writing pornography. Yes. I would imagine Stanley Baldwin's work was a lot more tame than Mirabeau's. So Mirabeau was a great philanderer, which Stanley Baldwin was not. He was very profligate. Again, a big contrast. His father had him put in prison.

His wife took him to court. So that's quite Marquis de Sade behaviour. He's very Marquis de Sade-like, actually. He's writing this pornography, but he's also writing very vicious political polemics. So he accuses his own estate, the nobility. He says, 30,000 calculating vampires who have sucked the blood of 20 million Frenchmen. And it will amaze you to know that having written that, he doesn't manage to win election. Yeah.

from the rest of the nobility. But the good news is that he can run for the third estate, which he does, and he's elected from Aix-en-Provence. The thing is that despite his appearance...

He's basically a huge man when he's got this terrible skin and he's shouting about vampires and stuff. But actually behind all that, he's quite moderate. He wants the kind of British constitution. He totally wants the British constitution. And that's very sensible and reflects well on him. But he is determined to be seen as the supreme champion of the people in this whole imbroglio. So when they have that procession, he walks in a peculiar way, throwing his head back so that everyone can see this huge head.

And sort of bobbing his head around in a slightly disturbing manner. He's like Harry Maguire. Yes, he's got Harry Maguire's head. Exactly. And if you don't know who Harry Maguire is... Harry Maguire crossed with a volcano. Yes. So people are interested in the football metaphor. My brother once described Martin Keown, the football pundit, as looking like a fish trapped in a meteor. And that is Mirabeau's face.

A couple of other good characters from the Third Estate. You've got Siez, the Abbe who wrote What's the Third Estate? There's our friend from Grenoble, Mr. Meunier, the first revolutionary. Yeah, the young judge. And there's an obscure young lawyer from Arras who's called Maximilien Crobespierre. So he is the counterpoint to Mirabeau. Yeah. Thin.

Pale. He's me. Mirabeau is you. Thanks, Tom. I'd take Mirabeau. Yeah, you'd rather be Mirabeau than Robespierre. I mean, it's terrible that my physical form means that I have to play Robespierre. Yeah. But Robespierre is more typical of the people in the third estate because they're basically all lawyers. Of 600 of them, 180 are lawyers and 220 are judges or magistrates. So in other words, this third estate people, the commons so-called, they're

They're not the common people of France. They are upwardly mobile winners. People who actually are not very representative of the mass of the French people, but people who are incredibly articulate and ambitious. And resentful of those above them. Yeah, and the trouble is that those above them don't make any effort to...

to hide that they're above them or to include them. Well, isn't that the whole point of the Ancien Régime? It's all about hierarchy. Of course it is. So that was 4th of May, the procession. And 5th of May, they meet in the Salle des Menus Plaisir, the Hall of the Lesser Pleasures of Versailles. And Louis is on his throne. He's got Marie-Antoinette at his side. There's a table for his ministers. Then you have the benches of the church and the nobility. And then the third estate are all shoved down to the far end of the hall.

And the king gives a speech and he says, ah, brilliant. You're all here. I've been looking forward to this. You know, everyone's great. Should have done it before. He does say there's been a lot of talk of innovations. I think this is much exaggerated. I don't want to hear any more of that. Then there's a strange business with his hat. Yes.

So he doffs his hat at the end of the speech. And then the nobility doff their hats. Their beaver hats. Their beaver hats, exactly. Now, the third estate are confused at this. Some of them take their hats off or put their hats on or whatever. Their hats are going on and off. And this is against all protocol. They shouldn't be doing anything with their hats. Louis is really confused.

He has to take his hat back off again. They all start putting their hats off and then on. But Dominic, it's fine, isn't it? Because despite all the confusion, there's then the huge excitement of Jacques Necker giving a speech on fiscal policy and finance.

So that must cheer them all up. Well, everyone's really looking forward to this. So this is the moment when the great man, the Swiss banker, is going to put everything to rights. And he stands up and he reads the first half hour of his speech. And then he says, listen, there's two and a half hours more of this to go. I can't be bothered to read it myself. And he gives it to the secretary of the Agriculture Committee and says, you read it. And the guy from the Agriculture Committee has been chosen just because he has a very loud and strident voice. And he reads, and Necker has basically written...

An incredibly boring speech about the deficit and about finance. Because the king starts yawning, doesn't he? And everyone starts falling asleep. People fall asleep. Everybody says afterwards, oh my God, it's so disappointing. What a useless person Necker is. I've totally changed my mind. So a bit like the British general election, the recent British general election. Very significant, but boring. Yes, I guess so. The next day, the 6th of May, they all have to arrive and they're going to begin their deliberations. And first of all, the various estates have to be registered, have to verify their credentials.

And when they all arrive, the king's men say, right, you're going to go to your separate chambers. Nobility over here, clergy over here, third estate this way. And Mirabeau says, stop. We cannot go to a separate chamber because once we agree to that principle,

The idea of all sitting together and us dominating is lost. We must verify our credentials with everybody else. And he is really passionate about it. And one of the deputies says he's like a ferocious beast, an oranger. He speaks in convulsions. His face is contorted. He spits out his words in a fury.

And that obviously is the French revolutionary style. Everything is overwrought. You wear your sentiments physically and you turn your rhetoric up to the absolute maximum. And yet there is also a sense, isn't there, that you're trying to emulate a Roman style?

a kind of Ciceronian style. Yeah, definitely there is. Formal and faintly chilly. Well, I think there's a couple of things actually. So part of it is definitely these people have studied the classical period at school, haven't they? These young lawyers. Robespierre, the classic example. They've read all the speeches, particularly Cicero, and they're obsessed with Cicero and copying Cicero's rhetoric. So they see themselves as the new Romans.

But also there is an argument that it's been a great age the last 10, 20 years in France of the public theatre, popular theatre. Well, we talked about how massively important the theatre is a couple of episodes ago with The Marriage of Figaro. Yeah, The Marriage of Figaro is a perfect example because The Marriage of Figaro is very emotional, tear-stained, over-the-top, fun. You know, this sense of spectacle. And for the first time, really, politics is deliberately emulating that. So there is a public gallery of the deliberations involved.

The third estate are basically having a massive stalemate with the court and refusing to go ahead and be verified along with the other chambers. And this stalemate continues. And every day, thousands of people will get coaches from Paris come out to Versailles to watch the show.

The most famous one is an English traveler called Arthur Young, who is one of the great go-to sources on the early French Revolution. He's quoted in every single book. And he gets a coach out there. He has all the big names speaking. He's excited about all the oratory. And he says what's shocking for him, coming from Britain, is that the spectators in the galleries clap and cheer and boo as though it is a play. And he says this is very bad. This is reducing politics to mere entertainment. But actually,

This becomes central to the revolution. Emotional outpourings. And this idea of the orator who is copying Roman models like Cicero, commanding people by the strength of his voice. So Mirabeau had a really good voice. Perhaps bursting into tears while he's talking, which people think is brilliant. But also, presumably, it's because unlike in Britain where you have...

the House of Commons, you have the House of Lords, and you have elections where people go on the hustings. And so the traditions of political engagement are organic. They've evolved.

They're not suddenly being portrayed to people as something new. In this occasion, no one's seen anything like this. Yeah, of course. They don't have regular elections. They don't have the throwing of dead cats and the attacks with halberds that are such an important part of the British constitution. And so there must be a feeling that Mirabeau and everybody else is kind of feeling their way into roles differently.

that have not yet been defined. Yeah, making it up. What is politics? And what is the style of politics? What is the style of politics? Exactly. And they're drawing their style of politics in the theatre.

from literature, from the kind of cultural mood of the time. And so this is clearly very much true of the members of the Third Estate, that they are playing a role simply by not moving, by sticking to their guns. What about the First and Second Estates? They must be watching this performance as well and thinking, maybe we should join it. Yeah, eventually. They don't join straight away though. There's about a month before...

before the first dribs and drabs from them come to join the third estate. So the stalemate is quite long-lasting. And in all that time, the stalemate is being reported back in Paris. So Mirabeau, for example, his mistress owns a print shop, which is very convenient for him because he writes letters to his constituents telling them what's going on. And they go to the printers and they're released in Paris before they even get back to Aix-en-Provence. So there's this stream of stuff. So actually, it's not just a theatrical event.

It's also a media event. Yeah, of course. The first mediated, mediatized political event of its kind. Because there's this whole thing, isn't there, that Robert Danton mentions about how people wear buttons with images of top political actors and things. So there is a sense in which the responsibility

The relationship of the people to the theatre can be mapped onto their relationship to what is going on in Versailles. Yeah, I think that's definitely true. There is a sense that it's an entertainment, it's a spectacle, it's a sport, it's a fashion. And of course, it's of pressing importance because of the catastrophic state that people are in across the country and in Paris as well. Absolutely. So by the end of May, early June, there are really, really bleak apocalyptic reports coming in from the countryside. There

There are posters going up in Paris saying that if nothing changes, there's going to be an insurrection. You can imagine the scene, calling for an uprising, those kind of posters. And that lends an urgency to all this. So on the 10th of June, the Abbé Siez says, look, we cannot wait any longer. The courts seem determined to not let us sit with the other states. Here's what we do. We will give them an ultimatum.

You come and sit with us. And whether they do or not, we will declare ourselves the National Assembly. We will be the sole representatives of the nation and we will take the nation's fate into our hands. I mean, this is an unbelievable thing. It is. They're in Versailles. The monarch is only hundreds of yards away in some other room. And they're basically saying, we will take this into our own hands. But also they're laying claim to the sovereignty that traditionally has been that of the monarch. Exactly.

So, I mean, at this point, I don't think they recognize that, do they? Well, I think they still think this is kind of going to be a rerun of Britain's Glorious Revolution and it won't go too far. Eventually, Louis will give in and it'll be all fine. I think a lot of them still do think that.

You asked, Tom, and I didn't answer it properly, for which I apologize to you, hand on heart, about the first two estates. Some of them are now beginning to come across. On the 13th of June, there was a real breakthrough. Some parish priests come across. Actually, the first estate, the clergy, they are actually the ones who are closest to the mass of ordinary French men and women because most of the clergy's deputies are not archbishops with kind of sumptuous Cardinal Wolsey-style robes.

They're ordinary parish priests. Who are often very poor themselves. Very poor, and who actually understand the peasants better than some of the third estate lawyers do. So more and more of these priests come over in the next few days, rising to about 100 of the priests. And on the 17th of June, they say, enough, time has run out. We are going to now call ourselves, as it were, a National Assembly. The amusing thing is they can't decide what the name should be. So Siez says...

Our title, which will resound down the generations, is The Known and Verifiable Representatives. So this is very like us trying to decide what to call episodes of our podcast. It's actually like you wanting the podcast to be called Podpast. I still regret that.

Yeah. Yeah. You're about to stick with that. And this is the first time I've ever heard you say that you regret it. I just think it would have been a very good name, but whatever. Oh, sorry. You don't regret having come up with it? No, not at all. No, I'm very proud of it. Wow. So Amunier, the guy from Grenoble, he says that's a terrible name, the known for our representatives. He says, I've got a very catchy name. This is Tom Holland of the...

Third estate. You've still got a brilliant name. I think we should be called the Legitimate Assembly of the Representatives of the Larger Part of the Nation Acting in the Absence of the Smaller Part. No, I'm about compression. Podpast. Anyway. Let's not get into that. So they have a succession of terrible names, but eventually they decide, let's go for National Assembly. Let's cut to the chase. They eventually said, let's just call it the National Assembly.

Now, there's a sense, I think, at this point of them self-radicalizing anything being possible. They say that basically all existing taxation is illegal because they haven't authorized it. But for the time being, they're happy to let the existing taxes continue until they

have drawn up the new... Remember, they, not the king, have drawn up the new tax system. So this is, as you said, I mean, they're seizing sovereignty. It is really an incredible thing. Louis is very, very deeply depressed during all this. I mean, he's got, as you said, Tom, quite large. He's eating a lot. He's messing around with his locks. He's...

He feels very sad that this is spiralling out of control. And then a terrible thing happens, doesn't it? The Dauphin, his son, his much-loved son, dies. On the 4th of June. Dies of TB. And actually dies... We won't go into all the details because I think it's actually unnecessary and horrible. But this little boy dies a very...

agonizing, lingering death from TB. He's just seven years old. And Louis and Marie Antoinette are understandably absolutely distraught. And in a weird way, actually, I think almost all the history books, even the best ones, underplay this. They just say, oh, by the way, his son died and he's very upset and he withdraws. But I mean, this for him is a loss of unbelievable proportions, just horrendous. Because I

unusually for a French king. He hasn't had a mistress. He's very much a family man. And Marie Antoinette as well is a very good mother. So they are engaged with their children in a way that is unusual, but reflects the kind of sentimental ideas of Rousseau. Yeah, absolutely. So he withdraws from public business. He physically leaves Versailles for his country estate at Marlis-le-Roi,

and there he is lost in mourning. So he's not taking charge of all this. It's spiralling out of control. When he finally rouses himself and comes back to Versailles, he has a big meeting with Necker and with his brothers who are much more hardline than he is and with the Queen.

What on earth are we going to do? And NECA says, I think we should probably give in to the third estate at this point. We've got to meet them halfway. And Marie Antoinette and his brothers say, this business has gone massively out of control. It's NECA's fault. We should shut all this down now. And Louis can't decide. So what he does is a typical Louis thing of a bit of change, but not too much.

which doesn't satisfy anybody. He says, I'll bring all the estates together in what he calls a seance royale, a grand meeting, and I'll offer them some reforms, but they have to abandon all this rubbish and tosh about a national assembly. This is no good. So I want to have this big meeting, and they're going to have it in the hall where the third estate had been meeting, and they have to set it up. They literally have to set up the room. On the morning of the 20th of June,

His workmen go in to build the platforms necessary for this meeting where he is going to lay down the law. Meanwhile, they put up signs outside saying, you know, the third estate can't meet here today. We're setting up the room for this big meeting. And he puts guards outside. The third estate all arrive to find the doors are closed and there are guards blocking the way and there are signs coming up about a big meeting with the king. And there are hundreds of armed guards standing around blocking their way.

And it is also pouring with rain. So they're all getting soaked and they expected to go into the hall and have their meeting. What are they going to do? And lots of them say, well, I'm not going to go home to bed. We should have our meeting on our own as the National Assembly as normal. And one of them, a man called Dr. Geek. Yeah.

You love this. Well, I love the way that much-loved characters and indeed implements of execution are kind of subtly introduced in unexpected angled ways. So what's the name of this doctor? Dr. Guillotin. Who is mindful of interesting devices, Tom. Rational devices for law and order. Dr. Guillotin says, oh, a friend of mine,

owns a tennis court around the corner. We could go and meet there. It's in the Rue du Vieux Versailles, the old Versailles Street. Now, often you read popular accounts and they say the Royal Tennis Court at Versailles. That's not right at all. The game that is being played is a game called Real Tennis.

Jeu de Paume in French. But it's not the king's court or anything like it. It's some friend of Dr. Guillotin's who owns the court. Anyway, they all pile into this tennis court. So a real tennis is a little bit like squash, but with a very hard ball. So it's indoors. It's kind of an echoey, very stark, like a squash court. They're all soaked with the rain. They all pile into this place. It's very plain, very drab, very stark, very

But actually, that kind of suits them. It does, because it's classical, isn't it, potentially? It is. And it gives them a perfect opportunity to swear an oath. Yeah, because Meunier, the man from Grenoble, he says, what we should all do is we should now swear an oath. Now, they've all used to this because the big hit painting of the last few years is

was by David, who you'll be talking about in a subsequent later episode, won't you, one day? Yeah. When we finally get around to finishing this huge French Revolution epic. David had done a painting called The Oath of the Horatii, hadn't he? About three brothers who sacrificed themselves for Rome, or offered to sacrifice themselves for Rome. So martyrs, patriots. And they all decide they want to copy this painting. So they swear an oath to God and the patrie, the fatherland,

They will never separate until they've written a new constitution for France. And they say, listen, we don't even need a palace or a courtroom because we are the National Assembly and the National Assembly will exist wherever we come together. And then they raise their arms as in David's painting. They stretch out their right arms, often not a brilliant look to be fair, tainted by subsequent misconduct in the 20th century, but that's by the by.

They stretch out their right arms. They put the other hand on their heart and they swear this oath. A great act of theatre again. Classic act of theatre inspired by a painting. The media. By paintings. By paintings and the subsequent engravings that reproduce the painting. There's incredible kind of meta self-consciousness about the whole thing. There is. Exactly. Everybody's, what do they call it? Cosplaying. Yeah. Yeah.

That's what they're doing, isn't it? They're basically dressing up and pretending to be Romans. Yeah. The news spreads very quickly. They've sworn this oath in this tennis court. There are printed copies of the oath on sale in Paris the next morning. Louis' brothers and the other hardliners in the court go absolutely ballistic at this. I love their solution to the whole problem. The Comte d'Artois, he just says, brilliant, I'll just go and book the tennis court. He does. He books the tennis court to stop them. It's really funny. The question that's on my mind that I haven't been able to resolve is, did

did he play tennis? Well, who knows? I mean, once you've booked the court, you're mad not to use it, right? What else are you going to be doing? Especially if it's raining. Anyway, the 23rd of June, so three days later, is going to be this big séance real, a big meeting, summit meeting where Louis is going to decide all this. And again, crazily, I mean, such a failure of statecraft, I suppose.

He humiliates the third estate. The church and the nobility are seated first. The third estate have to wait outside in the rain for an hour, and then they're brought in through a side door. When they get in, they find that Necker is not there. It is clear that Necker has lost the argument within the regime, and he is refusing to come or has been told to stay away. Louis speaks for just half an hour. He says, I'll give you some of what you want.

Taxes will now have to be approved by the nation's representatives. And I promise that the Estates General will meet regularly. But he says, this stuff about the National Assembly is gibberish and nonsense. I will not accept it. The distinction of the three orders of the state is not up for debate. The clergy and the nobility must run their own affairs and they can't be run for them by the third estate. Because of course, if the moderate position is to emulate the British constitution,

Britain does have that division, House of Lords and House of Commons. Yeah. I mean, it's not wholly reactionary in that sense. Yeah, it's not wholly reactionary. I mean, they're going well beyond the British constitution now, aren't they? And they're going well beyond the American constitution. So they are doing away with the checks and balances that were so important for the United States because they're all about the general will, aren't they? Which is not something that the founding fathers in America were so keen on. Now, had Louis said all this two years earlier,

Maybe the whole story would be different, but he didn't. And it's too late because as we said, they've self-radicalized. So when he gets up and goes out after half an hour, everybody else starts to file out and the workmen come back in to demolish the platform. And the third estate do not move. They're sitting there. They will not move. This is their hall and they're not going to budge. And the Marquis de Trebreze. He's the suit guy. The suits man. The correct thing you wear. Derek guy. Yeah, he's him.

He says to them, you've got to go. Right. We're trying to clear the room. You've got to go. And Mirabeau, by his own account, which is maybe a little bit self-dramatizing, says, go and tell those who have sent you that we are here by the will of the people and we will only be driven out at the points of bayonets. Very impressive stuff. And the Marquess says,

He retreats because he's such a stickler for protocol. He retreats walking slowly backwards. It's a very strange image. This man with a face like a crater has given this speech to him. Well, but etiquette is etiquette, isn't it? It is. And then Louis, poor Louis, he's just not a hard man.

He's not ruthless because when Marcus tells Louis this, Louis just says, oh, well, let them stay. If they want to stay, let them stay. Fair dues. So it's a classic Louis. He sort of parades his authority, but then he never, ever enforces it. He always gives him. So...

The next few days, more and more people join this National Assembly from the clergy and the nobility. And then on the 27th of June, only four days later, Louis does give in. His position has eroded. It's a classic example of how in revolutionary situations, momentum is all. His position has eroded. And he says, OK, yeah, I've changed my mind. I give up.

He orders the nobility and the clergy, join the National Assembly now. After all this, I've lost. There is an explosion of joy in Versailles in a very, very revealing scene. So people are chanting, the crowds are in Versailles, and they're shouting, Vive Necker, Vive Roi. And on the balcony of Louis XIV's bedroom, which overlooks the marble court of Versailles, Louis and Marion Srenak come out onto the balcony.

And they pretend to look happy and to wave to the crowds who are shouting long live the king. And actually, I always think it's a telling detail. People are very shocked at the appearance of Marie Antoinette. Obviously, she's a grieving mother. Yeah, she's grief stricken. And they say, lots of people said, she looks as though she's aged so much. Her hair is grey. She's not wearing jewels. She looks terrible. You know, it's understandable. And she seems to be forcing back tears. And she brings out her children, Marie-Thérèse and Louis. Marie-Thérèse is 10 and Louis is 4.

And she brings them out, which is the royal family have never done anything like this before. And the crowd go mad. They're cheering and all this kind of stuff. But I always think there's a sense, even here, that they have become prisoners.

of the crowd, that they're prisoners of the situation. They're parading. Yeah, they've lost agency. To appease the crowd. Yeah, exactly. Now, some people think, in fact, lots of people think this is probably the end of the story now. The French Revolution has come and gone. So Arthur Young, the traveler that I mentioned, famously wrote in his journal or whatever it was, the whole business now seems over and the revolution complete.

but not everybody. So that guy that we mentioned, the Marquis de Ferriere, the nobleman, the Enlightenment guy, he writes to his sister the next day. And he says, we've come close to the bloodiest catastrophe. The weakness of the government seems to allow for anything. People speak openly in the Palais Royal of massacring us. Our houses are marked out for murder. He goes on to say, he says, everything may seem tranquil,

but the troops are no longer obeying their officers. He says, the Estates General of 1789 may be celebrated one day, he says, but it will be by a banner of blood that will be carried to all the parts of Europe. So would it be fair to say, Dominic, that storm clouds really are gathering now? They are gathering because in the next few days, there are rumours that there are military units on the march out there in the provinces. People are swapping stories and they're saying they've heard that there are tens of thousands of troops gathering

coming towards the capital from the frontier garrisons and in particular German and Swiss troops who fight for the French king.

Mirabeau says, does the king doubt the loyalty of his people? And Louis has to issue a public statement saying, these troops are to reinforce the troops already in Paris, which are proving unreliable, which is true. Well, the French guard in particular in Paris, there have been stories about them disobeying their officers, fraternizing with looters, all of this kind of thing. And there is a sense as more and more of these stories mount,

that the crowds in Paris are getting ever more radical, the rhetoric ever more violent. Early July, there's a story that the crowd sees a suspected police informant and they beat him to death. There is this kind of latent simmering violence. And in Versailles,

Some of Louis' advisors say, sure, you gave in to the National Assembly the other day, but this is the last chance now. We have to act. This is the last opportunity we'll ever have to seize control of the situation. Sack Necker, put an end to all of this nonsense. Use these new troops from the frontiers to secure the city.

The question is whether the army will obey orders. The royal commander, the Duke de Broglie, says it is risky. He says, we don't have enough troops to secure all of Paris, to fight our way through all of Paris. Other advisors say, so tellingly, get out of Versailles now. You don't want to be a prisoner.

Let's go to Metz on the frontier out in Alsace. We're so close to foreign support. We can get foreign aid if necessary. Paris is gone. But then other people say, no, we can't do that because if we abandon Paris now, we'll never get it back. We'll be setting ourselves against the capital and we can't do that. Right. And a king leaving his own capital to go inside with foreign allies.

powers it's not a good look and that is true now and it will be true in due course as we will see of course it is Tom it's so ominous all of these conversations because they're anticipating so much of what will follow but anyway Louis finally makes up his mind and he says okay I know what we'll do

We'll go with your first idea. So on the night of the 11th of July, the plan is set in motion. Late that night, out of nowhere, Necker is dismissed. Louis tells him, you're sacked. You are exiled from France. You have to leave the kingdom immediately and you cannot go through Paris. You cannot visit the capital. You can't stop on the way. You must go to Switzerland. A noble deputy called Gaston de Lévis, who knows all about this business,

he sends a warning to his wife who's in the capital that night. And the warning reads as follows. Don't go out at all tomorrow. There will surely be a dreadful commotion and one cannot know how things will go. Well, Dominic, what a cliffhanger. The clock is ticking down towards one of the most famous dates in the whole, not just the French history, but of history full stop, the 14th of July, 1780.

89 the day the Bastille falls and we will be looking at that in our next episode and if you can't wait you know the drill you can hear it right now by joining the Restless History Club at therestishistory.com but if you don't do that it'll be coming very soon anyway so we will see you soon à bientôt au revoir