482. The French Revolution: The Royal Family Escapes (Part 8)
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Under pressure. I always love the story about Churchill when he became prime minister in 1914. It's all kicking off. The Germans are invading in the east. And he says that that night he went back home and he slept like a baby because the pressure that this was the culmination of everything he'd been planning for. And actually, he was at his best under enormous pressure. This is the moment that he lived for.

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So this, my bon ami, is where the intrigues and the little plots of those reckless and guilty aristocrats have led. They have abused the weakness of the king to advise him to undertake so pernicious a deed. For their own selfish interests and the vengeance of their pride, they have exposed the patrie to the horrors of the most murderous civil war.

the king whom they say they love to the loss of his crown and all his family to the most frightful consequences. They have been undone as they always will be and their criminal efforts will come down on their heads. I won't complain of that. They deserve their fate. But the king, what humiliation.

So that was the Marquis de Ferriere, Dominic, who we heard from in the previous episode. He is the aristocratic deputy of the National Assembly. And that is a letter that he wrote to his wife describing one of the most dramatic episodes in European history, namely the attempt by Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette with their children to escape Paris in disguise in June 1791. They've

leave Paris behind. I mean, we'll be discussing what Louis actually hoped he would achieve if the attempt had been successful, but it wasn't, Dominic. And yet another turning point in the transformation of France from the greatest monarchy in Europe to a republic. It's a truly extraordinary story, this, Tom. So there are moments in the French Revolution where

that feel like the purest melodrama. And this is absolutely one of them. And it's a thriller, actually. It's a really thrilling story. And the climax, the way it unfolds, changes the course of French history, arguably European history. This gamble that goes, spoiler alert, horribly, horribly wrong. And I love it because it goes with the grain of so much of what we know already about France

some of the main players so Louis Marie Antoinette yeah some of their hangers on who

who we've been hearing about throughout this series, and they appear yet again. So it's a very dramatic story. But of course, as you say, I mean, really its significance is the impact it will have on the whole course of the revolution and therefore of French history. Yeah, definitely. So let's remind ourselves where we got to last time. So last time, actually, Tom, you took us through an equally extraordinary episode, the Women's March on Versailles.

in October 1789. And we ended with the royal family being brought back in that, an incredibly humiliating moment there, actually. They're brought back in this great procession by the fishwives and by the National Guard, with the National Assembly eventually trailing behind them to Paris.

And they're installed in the Tuileries Palace. So that was last time. And now let's move on 12 months to the end of 1790 and look at where the revolution has got to. The revolution proper, I suppose you could call it, has been going for more than a year. It's more than a year after the fall of the Bastille, the Estates General becoming the National Assembly, and basically the deputies seizing power.

Sovereignty, seizing power from the king. And the focus of the story now is no longer in Versailles. Versailles has been shuttered. It's kind of become a museum. It has. And the focus is in Paris. So if you'd gone to Paris as a visitor, you would have noticed straight away at the end of 1790 how for ordinary people, life looks different. So...

There's a sort of unbridled sense of political freedom. People are wearing tricolour cockades. There are newspapers everywhere that people are singing patriotic songs. They would sing them in the interval at the theatre and the opera. The revolution is a daily experience. It is a kind of living experience for people.

Paris is hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. And Dominic, this is, I think, when William Wordsworth, the great romantic poet, goes to Paris and he writes his feelings about it, the famous lines, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive."

but to be young was very heaven. So that sense of joyous expectation of the entire world on the cusp of a brilliant new dawn is absolutely what is animating people in the streets, isn't it? It is, absolutely, yeah. And there's a sense of people pushing all the time boundaries, people saying the unsayable, saying things they wouldn't have said a year ago or two years ago. It's a perfect example, actually, of a city that is living politics.

every day. And the tone is increasingly set by radical journalists. So you mentioned one, in fact, you mentioned a couple, Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat,

And the tone of their stuff is, I think, what we would now call populism. So they have, on the one hand, the people, the nation, who are virtuous, who are destined for greatness, but have been frustrated up till now by the machinations of conspirators. These could be foreigners. They could be priests, aristocrats. That sense of a hardening is

That goes along with, I think, with the egalitarian, democratic excitement that you get. There's also a sense that you also get in the National Assembly of excitement at the limits that you're pushing and the sense that actually everything could be new. So all traces of history could be effaced. France could be completely reborn and perhaps the world with it. And I guess that that sense of excitement...

is kind of what is new about the politics of the situation. Do you think? Yeah, I think so. And I think there's a sense of radical excitement that goes beyond anything that's been seen in previous revolutions. Of course, there's been a degree of excitement in the English Revolution, in the 17th century of the American Revolution. But this sense that everything that went before...

You can get rid of it. You know better now. You can do something new. And of course, for the deputies of the National Assembly, that's both very exciting, but also potentially very exhausting. Sure. This is a lot of work to do, isn't it? Yeah. They have been working now for the best part of two years on a constitution, on a new framework for France. And they're rethinking everything. Government, law, democracy.

you talked before about the most incendiary of all these things which is the relationship of church and state and all of these things have massive repercussions in the countryside and they're getting letters back the whole time it's actually the French Revolution is if nothing else it's a story about paperwork so it's a story about young men basically being overwhelmed with enormous quantities of paperwork and actually the

The people at the National Assembly, of course, they are very excited, but they're also unbelievably tired. So historians who talk about this period notice that in their letters, they say all the time that they're suffering from massive headaches. They're not eating. They can't sleep. They are just overwhelmed. And actually, more and more, it's a hard core who are driving the politics. So there are about 1,200 people in the National Assembly, but only 400 of them

are actually still turning up. The nobles and a lot of the priests are now staying away. And is that an expression of hostility to what is happening? Or is it nervousness? Or is it just they don't really identify with what's happening? I think it's all of those things. I think they're worried about where it's going. I think many of them are outraged at the course it has already taken. And I think there's a sense that suddenly these people, the old guard, if you like, are in a world that they don't understand. They no longer want to be part of it. And so they've gone back often to their states in La France Profonde.

There is also a sense, though, isn't there, that even as they are pushing into a bright new future, they are also increasingly starting to look to ancient exemplars, which are Republican.

That's true. And particularly in the kind of the clubs that we talked about, the Jacobin Club, at the end of the previous episode. The exemplars are becoming Republican, aren't they? Well, so the Jacobin Club that you ended with last time, officially the Society of the Friends of the Constitution that meets in this old monastery very close to the National Assembly. If you went into the Jacobin Club, they would have busts of Brutus, Cato,

Benjamin Franklin. They had framed copies of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. There is a sort of sense that you're in, I mean, it's a kind of metropolitan elite, but it's a Republican. It is. Brutus and Cato are both famous people who fought against an autocrat. But they don't see themselves as Republicans at this stage. That's the interesting thing. They're almost unconsciously Republicans, I would say. Actually, on the clubs, the Jacquemin Club, there's a network of them. It's a bit sort of Soho House. So they've opened basically subsidiaries

all across France. There were about 400 of them by the beginning of 1791. With spas. Yes. Swimming pools. Yeah. And they look very similar. And dare I say, the influences of the time go to the local Jacobin Club because that is where the aspirational, uplifting,

upwardly mobile, the people with momentum, with social and cultural momentum, where they go. But it's also a sign of a kind of factionalism and of a kind of radicalization, a radical ratchet, because there are lots of other clubs competing to outflank the Jacobin on the left. And the most famous one of this is a club called the Society of the Rights of Man, which is called the Caudillier Club. This meets on the left bank near the Latin Quarter. It's the sort of artistic, publishing, journalistic district that

The tone is set there at the Cordilliers by people like Desmoulins and Marat. And they are really pushing two things. One is saying the revolution needs to go much further. Democracy, egalitarianism, the people's rights and all that stuff. And then the other side of it is that very aggressive populist side. So it's at the Cordilliers that people are going on about conspiracies the whole time. And Dominic, the issue of democracy, because that then begs the question, which I'm sure people have been wondering about, who actually has the vote?

in all this. The constitution, as it's being structured, has come up with the notion of active and passive citizens, hasn't it? Yeah, that's right. That active citizens are basically males over 25 who pay a certain amount of money in tax or whatever each year. They have voting rights and everyone else doesn't. That of course includes women.

So there is scope there for a leftward push inherent in the kind of model of democracy that's being structured. There is, absolutely. So that's one of the things that is, as it were, pushing the revolution. A sense of democratic excitement and a sense that you can actually, there are always more boundaries to cross. Simon Sharma says of these clubs, so there are these kind of fraternal societies, as they call it, that are associated with Cordelia, that some of them in some ways become even more radical.

And he says their rhetoric was Rousseau with a hoarse voice and sharpened with bloody-minded impatience. And that bloody-minded impatience is very important because in late 1790, early 1791, bread prices are still very high. And in fact, inflation has gone through the roof because the government is now printing a lot of paper money, assignats, they're called. So when you have high inflation, you have labour unrest because people say their wages aren't high enough to meet their outgoings. So there was a wave of strikes through the winter,

1791 in Paris that basically it adds to the sense of unrest and anarchy and things being out of control. It's not good for the deputies in the National Assembly's blood pressure because they're living in the midst of all this. They're living in Paris and they look out of their window when they get up in the morning and they see crowds on the streets, people shouting, people saying, where are the fruits that we were expecting? All of that stuff. And they have sat in the assembly and had the poor and the starving burst in and defecated

kind of demand bread, haven't they? Back when they were in Versailles, the women from Paris who took the king and queen back to the capital. They have. So that's a warning to them that what's happened to the royal family could easily happen to them. Sitting on the edge of a volcano, Dominic. They are, Tom. They're dancing on the brim of a tinderbox, if that's possible. So some of the more farsighted members of the National Assembly had seen this coming, had actually said even years earlier in 1789 that

You know, actually, turning the Estates General into a National Assembly, having a new constitution, is not going to solve the financial problems overnight, nor is it going to give people cheaper bread. And actually, one of the people who noticed this was the Comte de Mirabeau, who we talked about before, this gigantic, incredibly ugly, very successful with the ladies. Yet another of the figures in the French Revolution with bad skin. Exactly.

He said in early 1791, the people have been promised more than can be promised. They have been given hopes it will be impossible to realize. In the last analysis, he said, they'll judge the revolution by this fact alone. Are they better off? Do they have more work? Is that work better paid? So he can see...

that you've got to give people concrete results. Now, Mirabeau, a lot of people have thought he would be the man to do that. He would preside over a transition to a constitutional monarchy in the British model. Certainly, he thought that himself. But actually, because he thinks that so conspicuously, a lot of people in the National Assembly opposed to him. And there's a sense that he's losing momentum

in early 1791. Not least because he's become very close to the royal family. So he's been taking money from them. Yeah. And do you know who the go-between was who established contact? Andy Caddick.

Tom. No, no. It was Monsieur Léonard again. The hairdresser. The hairdresser. Oh, no. He pops up in all kinds of unexpected places according to his own version. Okay. Well, that's who knew that was coming. But then Mirabeau dies in April 1791. So he's out of the equation. So he's basically the only major figure in the entire revolution who dies in his bed. Is he?

Pretty much, don't you think? There's the Abbe de Sierre, isn't there, who famously says, of the French Revolution, I survived. And Talleyrand. Yeah, and Talleyrand. But Mirabeau is, I mean, of all the kind of the titanic figures, he's the only one who doesn't end up. It's amazing how many people in this story basically end up having an appointment with a guillotine, isn't it? I mean, extraordinary. Yeah.

Anyway, so Mirabeau's out of the equation. There's a group of sort of moderate Jacobins, and the sort of totemic figure is a guy called Antoine Barnave, who's a lawyer from Grenoble. So remember how we said that Grenoble was the motor of the revolution? So this young man from Grenoble, Barnave, with his pals, is now basically directing the momentum of the revolution. And actually what they want to do, they're like, well, actually the revolution's gone far enough now. You know, France has had enough politics. Let's...

Let's calm things down. Let's bring in a few of the restrictions, calm the press down, calm the strikes down, all of this kind of thing. And actually, they think the key to this is really to get a deal with the king. Let's get the king back, get a constitution, get him back in his sort of rightful place, presiding over a constitutional monarchy. The Bon Père. Yeah, the Bon Père of France. Exactly. And hopefully the streets will quieten down and things will return to normal.

The question, of course, is, is Louis XVI somebody they can do business with? And they think he is. And they've got good reason to think that. Because, you know, when you did that amazing set piece about him being brought back and Marie Antoinette on the balcony and the terrible scenes. So obviously after that, they're pretty traumatized, Louis and Marie Antoinette. And they didn't go out of the Tuileries for weeks, for months. They didn't even go to walk in the garden.

They were so depressed, basically being turned into prisoners. But eventually they surface, and Louis actually seems like, you know, it seems like he will work with the revolution. On the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille in 1790, he goes to the altar of the fatherland, as it's called, and the Champ de Mars, and he swears an oath that he will, when they finally get round to doing the constitution,

he will uphold it. And he wears a kind of plain black coat, doesn't he? He does. There's no kind of Versailles swagger. Exactly. And people say, listen, he's not a bad man. No one's ever thought he was a bad man, by the way. They think he's a bit useless. He's a bit weak. He eats too much. He drinks too much. And he's much too interested in hunting. I mean, he's very, very fat by this point. He is very fat now. The more things go against him, the more he eats. But when this gigantic figure appears and swears the oath, everybody says, well,

Louis is a very religious man. Everybody knows that. It's the one thing people know about him. So for him to swear this oath, he would not lie. He must be determined to work with the revolution to accept the new order. He's a well-meaning guy and he's the father of his people. And isn't that great? But the reality is they are deceived.

So even in 1789, we know now historians found letters in the 20th century that he had been writing to other monarchs like the King of Spain, his relative. And he had said, I hate the revolution. Everything that they have extorted from me has been under duress. I owe it to myself. I owe it to my children. I owe it to my entire family, he said, to make sure that I rebuild royal authority. I don't let this get out of hand.

And of course, he's being fed in all this by Mary Antoinette because she is dead against the revolution. She's been completely traumatized. She has. You don't understand why she's dead against it. She's been abused. She's been mistreated. She says these people are monsters and what they represent is evil. But equally, it's not great advice, is it? No, it isn't great advice. I think you could say, Tom. But Louis is primed to believe it because...

He's horrified in particular about the religious thing. I mean, I don't think you can underestimate the importance of that. But Louis was, you know, he was an anointed king. I can't believe I'm the person saying this on the podcast. Carry on, Dominic. He's an anointed king. He takes mass every day. He had written in his journals when he was a boy that God had chosen him to be king and he took this really seriously.

And when it comes to the great hullabaloo about the civil constitution of the clergy, the fact that priests have to swear an oath to the constitution, and that the Pope then, at the beginning of 1791, says, don't do this, you're in danger of excommunication if you do it. For Louis, this is the most horrendous, horrendous dilemma. He's caught between his country and his God, and for him it's just an intolerable position to be in.

A different man, a more cynical character. A Tellarore type figure. Captain Bentine from the Custer series. He could absolutely have dealt with this. Louis XVI psychologically, and I guess because the institutional pressures of his family, his role, the weight of history, he just can't do it.

So why doesn't he run away? Why doesn't he make a break for it? Because that's, of course, what so many of his counsellors have been saying ever since 1789. And the reason he doesn't, as all his biographers say, he's well-meaning and he's earnest and he's... Indecisive. He's indecisive. He's a ditherer. He doesn't want to do the wrong thing. So he just sits there paralysed and paralysed.

Now, there seems to have been a change at the end of 1790. And he says, okay, we'll draw up a contingency plan. All these plans about going to the east, going to the frontier garrisons, and there were loyal troops there. Fine, tell me how this would work. And the man who's in charge of drawing up the plan

is our old friend, top Swedish sort of... Swath dasher. I was going to say a bounder, but he's not a bounder, is he? No, I don't think he is. He'd be played by Roger Moore, but he'd behave in a good way. And he's Axel von Fersen, the Swedish count and friend of Marianne Swannette.

And he draws up an excellent plan. He keeps coming to the Tuileries Palace and he's in disguise when they're making the plans. I mean, he's the kind of person who would love a disguise. Yeah, totally. Because he's a swashbuckling. He's the Scarlet Pimpernel, basically, isn't he? Yeah. So him and Monsieur Léonard are both clearly figures who kind of love the sense of conspiracy, dressing up, carrying secret messages, but in a slightly ostentatious way. There's a Sunday night BBC Two drama.

in Monsieur Léonard and Axel von Fersen solving crimes in revolutionary Paris. I don't think they'd do it very well. A camp hairdresser and a kind of dashing Swede. So Alexander Skarsgård could play Axel von Fersen. Yeah, he could. I don't know who would play Monsieur Léonard. Mathieu Amarric, the French actor. Anyway, that's by the by. Yeah, it is by the by. He draws up this plan to get out in disguise. The issue that he has is his plan was initially for Louis-Amarin Toinette

And he says, it would be better for you to travel separately. They say, there's no way we'll do that. We have to take our children. We have to take the king's sister, Elizabeth, who's hanging around in the palace with them. Marie Antoinette also says, I'd like to take two nannies for the children. And there are three sort of young noblemen who they want to take as bodyguards. So now the party is basically 11 people. And there's the hairdresser, but he's going to travel separately. But he gets sent out on a kind of scoping mission. He does indeed. So...

end of 1790, early 1791, they basically, they know who they want to take. And Axel von Fersen looks at this and he says, well, this is too many people for one coach. We're going to have to have more than, we have a one very big coach and another coach for the nannies. And he commissions the coach that will take them. So it's called a Berlin. It's a kind of luxury coach. It took three months to build it. It cost 6,000 French pounds to

A lot of books, a lot of general histories of the revolution say it was a carriage and it looked inconspicuous. It absolutely was not. It's enormous, isn't it? It was like a luxury limo of coaches. It's black, but it has a yellow frame, so it's very conspicuous.

And inside, Timothy Tackett, who wrote this wonderful book about the flight of the king, says it has a leather interior, padded seats, a picnic set, bottle racks, and a leather-covered chamber pot. So it's like a private jet of coaches. Absolutely. And it kind of raises the question that even at this point, do they understand what they're up against? They're not really taking the danger seriously. They could have done a kind of Charles II, you know, hiding in oak trees kind of approach. They could have...

really gone undercover they could have not traveled with coaches just for a week or something they could have foregone the luxury but they just can't bring themselves to do it i think there's three things there so i think the charles ii embarrassment is a brilliant one because of course charles ii faces i mean worse pressures during his life but here's all those things that louis isn't charles ii is very cunning he can be quite malign he's incredibly cynical and

And he wins, right? He plays his cards brilliantly. So there's that element to it. I think they don't understand France, as we will see. Of course, because they haven't been going out into the country at all, have they? I mean, they've just been in Versailles most of their lives. No, they don't understand France. They're such prisoners, aren't they, of their own upbringing? And they've lived in that extraordinary environment of Versailles, and they cannot conceive of doing a Charles II performance.

and just going completely incognito. And the irony of it is that Marianne Trenet, of all people, is the person who kind of loves the ideal of simplicity, of escaping hidebound convention. And yet, at the end, she is destroyed by her inability to realise what that might actually mean. Yeah, no, I think that's true. I mean, she loves the dressing up. Well, as we'll see. But I mean, it's kind of, you know, I want to be like common people. It's very pulp. Yeah. There's kind of real cosplay about it. So are they going to do it? That's the question.

And actually, it's still hanging in the air a bit in the early months of 1791. And then something happens that pushes Louis over the edge. He wants to go to, they've got a house at St. Cloud, sort of country house. And he wants to go there for Easter because basically there are priests there who have not sworn the oath to the constitution so far, who are sort of still loyal to Rome, as it were.

And he wants to go and have Easter with them. And news of this gets out in Paris. A huge crowd assembles. When he and Marie Antoinette go to leave the Tuileries, they are blocked by the crowd in their carriage. And they have to sit there being abused by the crowd for almost two hours.

And Maritima is in floods of tears. Louis is really shaken. It is clear to them now that they are prisoners. And after this, actually, instead of feeling sorry for them, the National Assembly actually tightens up restrictions on them and basically sends a lot of their court away. So they are alone in this kind of echoing palace surrounded by guards. And understandably, psychologically, they're

Louis and Marianne Sweeney say, we can't live like this. We have to get out. And what then happens is he is very clever because the very next day he goes to the National Assembly for the first time in a year and reiterates how keen he is to work with them and to uphold the constitution. And the National Assembly, especially the more moderate deputies, this is what they want to hear. And they're like, oh, brilliant. Louis is really coming around. You know, he's really behaving well these days. Isn't this great?

But while they, the National Assembly, congratulating themselves that everything's going to be fine, Louis and Axel and Axel and co. are finalizing the plan. The plan is they will get out of the city and they will head for the garrison town of Montmedy, which is on the border of the Austrian Netherlands, now Belgium. And there, the Marquis de Bouilly

as waiting with Swiss and German troops who they think will be more loyal than French-speaking troops, and it will all be great. Now, there was a direct road that went through Reims, where Louis had been crowned, and it went through a lot of empty countryside and was a good road to take. And the Marquis de Bois says, go that way. And Louis said, no, no, no. Because I was crowned in Reims, there'll be people who will recognize me. So it'd be much better to go this other road, which admittedly goes through lots of small towns and villages.

But of course, Louis is very confident that in the small towns and villages, there will be no problem because even if he is recognized, those people will surely still be loyal to the king. These aren't the sort of urban freaks of the Jacobin. These are ordinary French men and women, decent people. Salt of the earth. Salt of the earth, exactly. But the real question is, you raised this at the beginning, Tom, what's the end game? What is the point? Let's imagine he gets to Montmedy and he rendezvous with the troops.

What then? I mean, does he have enough troops is the first question. There are attachments for Swiss troops and German troops, but we know that commanders had said to him in 1789, we don't really have enough troops to take. Paris is a big place.

We're not confident we have enough troops to take Paris if the population of the city is against us. Of course, the National Guard are in Paris and there will be French speaking troops who will rally shortly to the National Assembly. So there's that. The Austrian ambassador who was in touch with Marie Antoinette, who was what we now call a Belgian because he's a French speaker from the Austrian Netherlands. He had been writing to Marie Antoinette and he had said, don't do this because if it works, if you get out of the capital,

Basically, you're going to declare civil war and the French people will suffer immeasurably and you might not even win. But he then says to her, I don't think you will get out. I think every village and town you go through will be against you. And if you are caught, it will be a catastrophe for you.

and for the monarchy. And the Austrian ambassador had actually said, listen, I just think you have to wait this out. The mad creations of the revolutionaries will collapse by themselves. But for perfectly understandable human reasons,

Louis and Marie Antoinette don't want to wait. They don't believe the revolution will collapse. But more importantly, they have this, I think, this terrible sense of doom hanging over them that they're in this palace in the centre of Paris. Yeah, kind of echoing. Yeah. And the streets outside seething with tension. It's not easing. It is growing because people are angry that the bread prices are still high, that the conspiracies of their imagination are still fettered. Well, there is a conspiracy. I mean, let's be frank about it. And Marie Antoinette has heard people...

of the kind that she hears outside the Tuileries back in Versailles demanding that her guts be made into cocades. So I think she's entitled to feel a bit twitchy. Of course. And they've got their children. Just as parents, they would want to get their children out of this environment.

So the dais cast, as it were, Tom, the decision is made. Rubicon is about to be crossed. It is. There are various postponements and delays, but the date is set for Monday, the 20th of June. Wow. High drama. So let's take a break there. And when we come back, we will find out if the attempt by the royal family to escape succeeds. Massive tension.

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Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. Dominic, we are entering the final segment of this eight-part epic on the beginnings of the French Revolution. All is set for the attempt by the royal family to make their escape from Paris. How does it go? So the date, as we said, was set for Monday the 20th of June. And that day, to outside observers, everything seems perfectly normal. The Queen goes to mass as normal.

She goes and has her hair done, very important for her. She goes out for a drive around the city in a coach with her children. And then that evening, she has dinner with her family, and that includes the king's brother, the Comte de Provence, and his sister, Madame Elizabeth. And then when dinner is over, or so it seems, she retires for the night. But there have been three odd little signs that day.

First of all, the children's attendance had been sent away on the grounds that the children were ill, but they weren't ill. The children themselves noticed this and thought this was peculiar. Number two, if you'd been to the palace, to the Tuileries Gardens that day, you would have noticed an empty hackney cab, a fiacre, as they're called in French.

Sitting there at the Champs-Élysées, nobody in it, nobody really notices it, but there it sits. And there's another empty cab just across the River Seine on the other side of the Seine. Again, just parked by the side of the road, nobody there. Again, nobody really notices it. Now, while Marion Sarnett is having her hair done and all of that kind of stuff, Louis is putting the finishing touches to a letter. And this letter is a disaster for him politically. But of course, he doesn't know that at the time. He

He writes it himself. It's in his own handwriting. And it is a note explaining why he intends to flee the capital. He just pours everything out. It's a list of his grievances, justifications for himself. He said, I'm not being kidnapped. No one's making me go. I'm going my own accord because for two years I've sat here and I've seen, and I quote, the destruction of the monarchy, the subversion of all authority, the violation of properties, the endangerment of personal security, crime left unpunished and the establishment of a complete empire.

anarchy. And he says, everything I've done in these two years, my captivity, I didn't mean any of it. You forced it out of me. I did only under duress. I've had enough of living a lie. I hate you. I hate the revolution. I'm out of here. That's his letter. Now, you could say that's an admirably frank political testament. Or you could say it's mad,

You could say this is a political suicide note. I mean, it leaves him no place to hide should the escape attempt go wrong. Yeah, he's burning all his bridges. Of course, he doesn't think that it might go wrong. Now, we can retrace what happens next in some detail because there's a brilliant book by the American historian Timothy Tackett called When the King Took Flight. So a lot of general histories are a little bit sketchy about the details, but he basically does it minute by minute.

So when dinner was finished that evening, Louis embraced his brother, the Comte de Provence, and said, I'll see you at the frontier because the Count of Provence is going to go on his own to Brussels, escape to Brussels. And that works, doesn't it? Yeah. The Count of Provence, in due time, will become Louis XVIII. He will indeed. So he gets away. And this is, by the way, it's the last time those two brothers will ever see each other. And then...

Marie Antoinette and her friend, the Marquise de Torzel, who's going to come with her. Who's been very loyal, stuck by Marie Antoinette when others have left her. Yeah, so a lot of her friends, a lot of her favourites, a lot of the sort of petit trianons sets have fled, haven't they? But she's stuck with her. She's the sort of best friend. They slip away from the dining room and they go to wake the two children and to get their nannies.

Marion Toinette, who's really leading the way in this, she's planned this with Axel von Fersen. It's her scheme as much as anybody's. They go down these back stairs to the ground floor. There are disguises waiting there and the nannies help the children change into the disguises. They're both going to be dressed as young girls. We'll explain in due course about the disguise plan.

But then the nannies go back upstairs and it's the nannies. The nannies can easily come and go from the palace. They walk out of the main entrance and they are heading across the river to the cab across the river. So that was for them. Meanwhile, back in the palace, Marantuanetta, through their various subterfuges, she's managed to get a key to an outer door.

She gets the children and she unlocks the outer door. She's timed this perfectly. She's waited for the point when most of the palace servants will leave. Now, of course, it's June. So we're at the lightest time in the year. But even so, after 1030, darkness has fallen. So the courtyard is lit by torches. The servants are all leaving. And as they are leaving,

The door opens quietly and the Marquis de Torsel and the two children slip out

into the crowd and the guards don't notice them among the mass of servants. And so they then head to the cab and Dominic, who is driving the cab? So they get to the cab outside in the Tuileries Gardens and it is Axel von Fersen. And it is disguised. And this is why he'd be so good at solving crimes, isn't it? He is such a tremendous man, Tom. The Marquis and the two kids get into the cab

And then he says, you know, let's go for a little drive. And they go off because he's killing time waiting for the royal couple. He goes off for a little drive around the city. And he's kind of bantering away. Yeah. And when he comes back, he puts on the voice of a Parisian coachman. He exchanges banter with the other coachman. He stops and has a smoke with the other coachman. And he's whistling and humming a tune. He's really behaving well.

splendidly. I mean, everything that would make him, as you say, a brilliant detective. Brilliant. He's a tremendous man. Now, the next person out is meant to be the king. And I mean, the whole story is so Hollywood. He's about to go when suddenly General Lafayette and Jean-Sylvain Bailly, the mayor of Paris, arrive to talk to him about a minor political issue. I mean, so late at night, who would have imagined it? And he has to stop and chat to them.

And answer their questions and say, yes, I'll do this or whatever, whatever. All very sort of perfunctory stuff. And so that's basically an hour, isn't it? Yes. And that means that you're an hour closer to dawn. Yeah. So right from this point, actually, they're running late. Like nothing quite goes. Of course, it's the nature of these things. Nothing quite goes according to plan. So they leave at about 1130. He then has to pretend to go to bed. He dismisses his servants.

Then he gets back out of bed. He puts on his disguise, which is a very plain kind of coat and hat. And he goes out and he goes out through the outer door across the courtyard. I mean, to be fair to Louis, he is so calm and cool under pressure.

He gets halfway across the courtyard under the eyes of the guards. Then he stops, bends down and fiddles with the buckle of his shoe. And of course, this does not like a man escaping, right? This looks like a man who's just very relaxed. Quite impressive that he knows how to buckle his own shoe. Yeah. I'm sure he's like Churchill with a boiling of the eight. He's seen it done. Yeah, he's seen it done.

So then he crosses the courtyard to Axel von Fursten's cab. And the last person to leave is Marion Twinette herself. And as she's out, she goes round a corner and she virtually bumps into Lafayette, who is leaving the palace. But it's in the torchlight. There's darkness. He doesn't recognize her. And she sort of shrinks back into the shadows for a second and then continues. So it's now about 1230. They're all in the cab. They're about now, as you said, behind schedule already. Absolutely.

Axel von Fersen sets off and he drives very slowly and carefully through the streets, the darkened streets of Paris, all the way to the gate of Saint-Martin, the edge of the city. That's where he has parked this luxury vehicle, the Berlin Discrete. And now there's a little bit of a faff because he can't find the Berlin in the darkness.

because the Berlin is with these three guys who are the bodyguards. Finally, they meet up. They've lost another bit of time now. They basically park their first cab in a ditch, and they all transfer into the Berlin. They are now two hours behind schedule. However, they're at the edge of Paris. They've done well. They get in first and say, go, go, go. It's going to get light very soon. And off they go, east, heading out of the city into the countryside. The way they've planned this...

is that there will be relays of horses. That's the nature of any long-distance journey in France in the late 18th century. One set of horses won't carry the whole way, and they've planned the relay stops intricately. The first relay stop, a place called Bondy,

Axel von Fersen splits up with them. He has handled this superbly so far. He is now going to go off on horseback, rather like the Comte de Provence. He's going to head into Belgium, to the Austrian Netherlands, and then he will meet them again when they finally get to the border at Montmedy. So it's emotional farewells, and then off he rides. The next stop, it's a place called Clay. They meet the cab with the two nannies in it. So now there's two of them traveling basically in convoy, and the party is complete.

and they are heading east through the Ile de France towards Champagne. So they rattle east across these roads. This is a major highway. You know, it's not a tarmac road of the kind that we recognise. And just to reiterate, this carriage, I mean, is massively indiscreet. It is massively indiscreet. And it's painted like a wasp, basically. Yeah, it is. So, I mean, it's... Yeah, black and yellow. Agreed. It's sort of kind of Habsburg colours, actually.

But, you know, so far, so good. And the hours go by. Dawn breaks over the fields of Champagne. They're changing the horses at the relays as planned. You know, they're beginning to think. We could do this. We could do this. The king, Louis, remember with him, his fascination with his locks. Louis is basically a bit of a nerd. And Louis has brought with him maps and he's brought a very detailed itinerary. I love this about Louis. I admire this kind of behavior. This is what I would have done.

And he's got this itinerary. And when they go through each village, he says, this is such and such a place. And he's maybe got a few nice facts about it. And he can kind of plot it on his map. So really, he's a frustrated tour guide. He totally is. He's loving this. He's a travel agent. Yeah, he's loving all this. Now, while he's doing this, the Queen, Marion Trenette, says to everybody, now listen, remember our parts.

Madame de Torzel, she's playing somebody called the Baroness de Corfe. The two children are her two daughters. Marie-Antoinette and the King's sister Elizabeth are her two servants. And Louis, dressed in his kind of plain brown coat, is her business agent, is the Baroness's business agent. Monsieur Durand. Exactly, Monsieur Durand. So if anybody asks who

who we are, that's who we are. But again, it is, I mean, just to reiterate, there's a kind of slight sense in which it's symbolic rather than actual, isn't it? This attempt to be a common person. Yeah, well, as we will see. Because actually, Louis, as they get out, the further they get from Paris, Louis becomes more and more relaxed. Understandably, he's out of the Tuileries for the first time in ages.

And he just feels such a sense of liberation. He says to the others, when I'm back in the saddle, when everything is normal again, I will be such a different man. You won't recognize me. I'll be so different. You know, I will do such things. Exactly. Oh, the tragedy of it, Tom. The day breaks. It's a warm day. It's June in the center of France. They take off.

their hats. They look out of the windows. They watch the peasants working in the fields as they pass. Charming. So charming. And then when they stop every time to change the horses or to go to the loo or whatever, Louis starts to get out of the cab and he does a bit of an Axel von Fersen. He starts to chat to the people changing the horses. He says, lovely weather. How are the crops this year? I'm a land agent. Yes.

The bodyguards are sitting on the top and they are attracting a lot of attention because they are wearing yellow uniforms that match the frame of the carriage. But the yellow uniforms are unfortunate because they match the livery of one of the chief émigré counter-revolutionary leaders, a guy called the Prince de Condé, the Prince of Condé, who is one of the exiles who is most feared in all the conspiracy theories.

And his men wear yellow and these guys are wearing yellow. So people are staring at them. And the bodyguards say to the king, people are staring at us. You know, we should be a bit more careful, a bit more discreet. This is, I think, a really important thing. Louis says, stop worrying. You know, we're outside the capital now in the countryside. We don't need to worry about all this. It's very Tsar Nicholas II or even Charles I or something. The city people are weirdos and have been polluted by the woke mind virus and

But in the country, he says, La France Profonde, people actually love me. So it's fine even if I am recognized. And the thing is, he is being recognized. This is again something that I think some of the sort of briefer accounts skip over. They say, oh, he's spotted later on. He's already being spotted. So in Montmeray, a wagon driver spotted him when they were changing the horses in the

in the place called Chantrix. There was a postmaster who had seen him at the Bastille Day celebrations in 1790. And then as the day wears on, they get to the biggest town they're going to cross, which is a place called Chalon. They get there mid-afternoon. There will be a lot of people in this town by the nature of the town who will probably have seen them at Versailles. There will be notables and things like that. And by this point, because they've been gone so long...

Louis is incredibly relaxed. He doesn't take any precautions at all. I mean, it's just mad. And not least because back in Paris by now, people will have realised that they've gone, presumably. Of course, they realised first thing that morning when the servants went in and found their rooms empty. So it just seems mad behaviour. I mean, he could be hiding up an oak tree.

And instead he's kind of roaming around pretending to be a land agent. Mad. But he's got away with it so far, Tom. He hasn't though. We'll find out. Because nobody stops him in Chalon. People recognize him and people are whispering to each other and small crowds forming, but nobody stops them. They keep going as evening approaches. They're approaching the Argonne forest and the borders of Lorraine.

And they are very confident now that they have basically pulled this off because they've gone a long way. Because Lorraine is the home of Marie Antoinette's father, of course. Yeah, of course. And of course, on the eastern edge of France. So they're not that far away now. They are now three hours behind schedule, but they're confident that very soon they will...

rendezvous with a military escort that has been sent to wait for them under the duke de choiseul and as they approach the argonne forest they get to the place where they think they're going to meet this guy and he is nowhere to be seen and actually what has happened is this the duke de choiseul had arrived with a small group of cavalry but wherever cavalry go in france in 1791

are very alarmed because the peasants, of course, because of the revolution, have not paid their feudal dues, their seigneurial dues. Yeah, so that was the grand peur, the great fear. The great fear, exactly. And when men and horses, armed men on horseback arrive, the peasants panic and think they're about to be punished or that these men have been sent to steal their crops or to take their money or something. So, Choiseul is actually, and his men...

attract a lot of attention, angry crowds and people sort of throwing stones at them and shouting at them and stuff. And by mid-afternoon, because the king has fallen so far behind schedule, Choiseul is sick of waiting or is frightened and basically decides, he's probably not coming. You know, this is awful. It's very awkward and difficult situation. He's probably not coming. I'm actually just going to fall back to the nearest military encampment.

And what is worse, he sends a message to other cavalry detachments in the area to say, I actually don't think they're coming. And who's the messenger, Dominic? Well, the messenger actually delivers the message very competently. And the messenger, Tom, is the hairdresser, Monsieur Leonard. I love it.

I love the way he just keeps popping up. And he does this very well. And of course, it's a disaster for Louis-Americk Sarnet because Monsieur Leonard goes around the area, the neighborhood, riding or whatever to different cavalry groups and saying, the treasure's not arriving today.

You know, there will be new orders tomorrow. And this message. So Monsieur Léonard. And this message. Well, he's just doing what he'd been told to do. His mastery of codes. So with von Fersen's mastery of disguise and his mastery of codes. It's a brilliant team. They'd be an unbeatable combination. So darkness falls and the royal family have not met up with the escort that they hoped for. And they head on alone into the small town of Saint-Migneux, as it is called. And there they start to change the horses once again. The stable hands at the post station change.

are changing the horses and they've almost finished when the man who runs the post station, basically the postmaster, arrives from the fields where he has been working. His name is Jean-Baptiste Drouet. He's 28 years old and he used to be in the cavalry. He's a very ambitious, upwardly mobile, self-confident man. And he comes in and he sees his stable hands changing these horses and he looks into this huge carriage to see who's there because he's naturally curious. And the first person he sees is...

He recognizes her straight away. It's Marianne Twinnett. And then he looks at the man sitting next to her and he's this big, fat, heavyset man sitting

who he hasn't seen before, but he had seen Marion Srenette at Versailles when he was a cavalryman. But he hasn't seen this man, but he recognizes the man because the man has the same face that is on the new inflationary paper money. It's Louis XVI. The horses are now finished to change. And before Dray can do anything, the carriage rattles away out of the yard. And he's just standing there. And he says to the people around him,

That was the king and queen. I know that was the king and queen. And Saint-Menu is a small place. People start to gather. And Drouet says, there's no doubt in my mind, that's who they were. And the local bigwigs appear. And they're like, what are they doing? Now, in this world where the conspiracy theories have been circulating all this time, they immediately say,

He's going to get a foreign army. That's what he's going to do. He's going to invade this country and attack our revolution, stop our revolution. They might not be wrong. Well, they're right. Yeah, they're absolutely right. And the town bigwigs say, who's the fastest rider? It's Drouet, who had once been a cavalryman. They say, you would get your mate Jean Guillaume. You go after them. You must tell people in the next town and stop them. The next town is a town called Varennes.

At 11 o'clock, the royal coach approaches Varennes. It is an hour and a half ahead of Drouet, so they have a bit of time to play with. Varennes is about 1,500 people in the Argonne forest. Don't forget, they don't have their escort. Now, they were expecting that the army would leave horses for them on the outskirts of Varennes,

But of course, the message has gone around. The treasure is not coming today. So those horses are nowhere to be seen. The royal bodyguards get down. They look for them. They even knock on a few doors. No joy, no horses. There's a lot of dithering and arguing because the people with the current horses don't want to go on. They don't want to push the horses beyond the limits of their endurance. They've been specifically told not to go past Varennes. So there's then a bit of an argument. The drivers don't want to keep going until they've had a rest, until they've fed the horses and all of this stuff.

And while this argument is going on, by the side of the road, Drouet and Guillaume ride right past them without even noticing them towards Varennes. Finally, the bodyguards get back onto the coach. They agree they'll go into Varennes and they'll see what they can do. And the carriages roll into Varennes, which is in total darkness now. We're virtually midnight.

And then as they approach this inn in the centre of the town, the inn of the Golden Arm, they can hear people shouting voices. Somebody's shouting, fire, fire, which is the typical, the classic thing you shout to attract attention with any kind of emergency. And Madame de Torzel said later, she said, when we heard people shouting that, we thought we'd been betrayed. We drove down the street with a feeling of sadness and distress that can scarcely be described. And as they get to the Golden Arm, there are men standing there who stop the carriages and

And they think, oh, no. Oh, no. So what had actually happened was that Drury had got there before them. He'd burst into the inn.

And he had said, the king and queen are coming for the sake of the country, for the sake of the revolution. They must be stopped. People aroused the local councillors, the local National Guard, and the chief magistrate, who is a grocer with the excellent name of Jean-Baptiste Sauce, or as he would now call himself, Sauce. They're the people who are standing outside the inn when the characters arrive. You can picture the scene.

People holding torches aloft in the darkness. They ask for their papers. They hand over the papers in the name of Baroness de Corfin. And actually, Source and the others say that these papers seem perfectly in order. Maybe we should let them go on. They're kind of muttering while Louis and Marion are waiting in terror in the carriage. And Drouet says, I swear this is the king and queen. You can't let them go. You absolutely can't let them go. So the bigwigs of the town, the town fathers say,

to themselves, why don't we just play for time and wait till the morning? So they say to the travellers, look, it's very late. We'll need more time to check your documents. We'll do it in the morning. Also, the road is very dangerous at night. You'd be better off going in the morning anyway. Why don't you stay here? Jean-Baptiste Sos says, do you know what? You can stay in my house above the grocer's shop. I've got a bedroom for you.

And very, very reluctantly, they get down from the carriage and they go to the grocer's house. And the two children, who are, of course, exhausted, are put to bed and then they wait. While Soce is leaving them there, he says, there's a bloke in the town, actually, who's seen the king and queen, a judge, because he married a woman from Versailles, Monsieur Destes. I'll go and get him. He goes and wakes him up, bangs on his door, brings him to his house.

This guy, Destes, comes up the stairs, goes into the bedroom. As soon as he sees Louis XVI, drops to his knees and he says, oh, your highness, your majesty. And Louis stands up and he says, yes, I am your king.

I have come to live among you, my faithful children. I will never abandon you. And then he does this incredible thing. Timothy Tackett says, he took the members of the municipal council in his arms one by one and embraced them. And he told them his story. And he said, I've been living in the capital surrounded by daggers and bayonets, but I've come to the countryside and

to seek the freedom and tranquility that you all enjoy. It's a very Rousseau. Yeah, totally. But he's basically saying, please help me. My life and the lives of my family are in danger. He's framing it in a way that is with the grain of kind of revolutionary sentiment. I mean, that's the extraordinary feat. I mean, not bad, actually, in the context of the absolute meltdown of all his plans. Well, do you know what? It almost works.

Because they are dumbstruck that the king, I mean, he's in the upstairs bedroom of a grocer's house. It's an inconceivable that, I mean, 1789, this would have been beyond the realms of the wildest fantasy that this would happen. They're shaking with nerves and fear and emotion to be in the presence of the king. And they say they will help him.

For a moment, they say, of course, of course, if necessary, we will accompany you east ourselves, if that's what it takes. Then they all go downstairs. And it's actually while they're going downstairs that they're like, actually, yeah.

maybe we shouldn't do this. And Timothy Tackett, who I mentioned already, his book is brilliant on this. He says, you know, you have to look at Varenne itself, what had happened in Varenne to make sense of this. Varenne is a completely nondescript, ordinary town

But in towns like Varennes, there had been a degree of politicization that had never been before since the revolution began. They have sent delegates to the National Assembly. They've had meetings. They have their own little Jacobin club in Varennes that all the bigwigs belong to. And also, for two years, they have been subject to what you talked about, Tom, le grand peur, the great fear. Fears of brigands and foreign armies. Particularly being close to the frontier. Yeah.

They would be in the front line of any invasion coming. Exactly. And so they say, actually, now this is a terrible situation. Maybe he's raising a foreign army. And they start to panic. And they say, finally, ring the tocsin, ring the bells.

call the alarm. Now, this is a terrible situation. And suddenly it's one o'clock in the morning and the church bells are tolling the tocs in. People are banging on drums, shouting, fire, fire, alarm, alarm. People are pouring into the streets. They run to the town hall to get guns. And people are sending messages to the local villages, to arms, to arms. Everything's kicking off. And of course, Louis and Marion Tounette would be upstairs in that room listening to all this and just realising that it

it's all going horrendously wrong so if we just fast forward a few hours by dawn the street outside the grocery is absolutely rammed with people militia bands basically people with pikes and with sticks and with battered old muskets and all this kind of thing louis and marion have not slept a wink they're in terrible state the kids have been asleep i guess but about day break sauce and the other bigwigs come back to louis and they say um actually we've changed our mind

We can't let you go on. They say, we're like members of a great family who've just found their father, but we fear we may lose him again. And they say, you know, everybody loves you. You're in everybody's hearts, but your place is in Paris and we want you to go back to Paris. And Louis and Marietta are desperate. You can just picture the scene. They're desperately arguing with them. Please let us go. We'll die in Paris.

And then at six o'clock in the morning, two men arrive from Paris and they're couriers with a message from General Lafayette. The morning of the 21st, when the news had broken that the palace was deserted, Lafayette and the National Assembly had sent messages all over France, stop them, intercept them, do not let them get away. And they hand these message, these decrees, the couriers to the royal family. Marion Toinette

just spits out. She says, what insolence? And she throws the message to the ground. But a very revealing little sign of their two characters. Louis doesn't react. He's not angry. He's just tired and sad. And he says,

There's no longer a king in France. So at 7.30, they're led downstairs and they're put back into these carriages. Huge crowds standing around. This is worse than when they were brought from Versailles to Paris. Oh, totally. Because they've failed. The October thing in 1789 was humiliating. But this is... They're guilty. They've been caught. That's the thing. They come down...

The crowds all pressing around them, people staring at them, all this. And people start to shout, Vive la Nation! Go back to Paris! And all this stuff. But not Vive le Roi. Not Vive le Roi. The journey west, they then head west again with this huge crowd surrounding them. It's a four-day journey this time. It's very tiring. It's...

It's very hot, incredibly dusty because the great weight of the people surrounding them brings up loads of dust from these kind of roads. And all the old kind of abusive canards that have been aimed at both Marie Antoinette and Louis are kind of wheeled out again, aren't they? So Marie Antoinette is this voracious vampire, sexually predatory, been sleeping around everyone. And Louis is the kind of feeble cookhold and voracious.

their characters are now absolutely being set in that kind of abusive cast. Totally they are. I mean, if you think about they're in this carriage, this kind of airless, horrible environment day after day. At least they've got their chamber pots. Exactly. And the picnic equipment.

And they are surrounded by thousands of people who, as you say, are shouting abuse through the windows, throwing stones. And the royal bodyguards, the three nobles in the yellow coats, are still sitting on the top. And people are like hurling earth at them and dung and all this kind of thing. Dead cats, exactly. So it's a really sort of horrible scene. There is actually one moment of violence. So outside Saint-Domingue, a local nobleman, a young count called Dompierre, tried to kill

tries to ride up to the carriage to shout long live the king you know he's wants to show his solidarity with them the crowd drive him off and he rides off into the fields louis is watching all this in the windows his own peasants pursue him they shoot him drag him off his horse and then stab him to death with their kind of knives and pitchforks and stuff so that must have helped set louis nerves since my arrest on the second day they were joined by three

three men from the National Assembly. The National Assembly agreed they would send three people of different ideological persuasions to ride back with them. A monarchist, a radical, and this guy, Barnab, that we mentioned, the guy from Grenoble, who's the kind of big

big man in the National Assembly and he sits next to Marie Antoinette and will have quite the relationship with her in due course. Yeah, he's got a slight, it's not really a crush, but basically they talk a lot as the carriage rolls west and he starts to think, she and I, you know, we understand each other, we can do business together and as we will see for Barnab and his faction who end up being called the Foyon, this is a very bad miscalculation because obviously it reminds actually the ground is shifting so quickly.

that even the person who now seems to have the kind of political upper hand doesn't realise. Yesterday's radical is today's centrist. Exactly. Well, that's exactly it. Finally, they approach the Paris suburbs and the mood now is very aggressive. There are attempts to storm the carriage, which the National Guardsmen have to kind of fight off. The scuffling between the National Guard escort and the crowds, which leave people wounded.

And finally, they get into the city walls. They're surrounded by Lafayette's cavalry, and the carriage comes into the city. All Paris has turned out to watch. Tens of thousands of people, people crammed into balconies. They're on trees, and they're packed into the pavements. And it's just a total silence. No shouting. They've been told. They've been ordered. No noise from the—the orders have come down from the authorities—

The hats remain stubbornly on their heads. They don't remove the hats when the royal carriage passes. It's an atmosphere that actually, it's not just silent, it is terrifying as the carriage comes along.

And at last they reach the Tuileries Palace. The guards are all crowding around them to protect them. Louis and Marion Ternet and the children are able to get down and to walk inside. But when the bodyguards, three noblemen, get down in their yellow coats, the crowd break through the cordon. They basically rip into the bodyguards and start to kind of tear them apart.

Lafayette's men have to kind of push back to intervene and basically drag away the battered, bloodied bodyguards to safety. And then the gates of the Tuileries clang shut and the doors slam shut by Marie Antoinette and Louis. They're back home again and it's over. They've failed. And of course, what's worse, he'd left that note and everybody has read it and it is patently clear that he will never work again.

you know, deep down, he will never reconcile himself to the revolution and that he has been lying all along. So Dominic, just before we end this episode and the series with it, I guess one obvious question, could it have worked? Could Louis have got away? Yeah, I think it could have worked. You know, a lot of contingencies go wrong. They fall behind schedule. He's recognised, you know, if he'd been more careful and if they'd kept to the plan, of course, you can argue that they would always have fallen behind and that by definition, he was always going to be a bit indiscreet.

But the thing is, it doesn't fail by accident. There is a lot of accident, but it's not just accident. So there are two reasons I think that are crucial why it fails. One is his indecision plays a massive part in the story of the French Revolution, but it also plays a big part in this story because if he had gone in 1789...

when all his advisors were begging him to go, or at least some of them, the chances of success would have been much higher. Even in 1790, they'd have been much higher. But by delaying and delaying, he makes it more likely that it fails. And why? This is the other thing. Because La France Profonde

The countryside has changed in ways that he doesn't ever anticipate. Even in two years. So he thought it was all, it's the classic thing, isn't it? It's Nicholas II in St. Petersburg. It's Charles I in London. Oh, it's just the people in the city. The other people love me, which is what Louis thought.

He didn't realize that even a tiny nothing place like Varenne had changed completely. And that actually when push came to shove, they would stick with the National Assembly and their own elected deputies rather than with him. So in a way, it's not just chance that stops him. It's the revolution that stops him because the revolution has changed everything. And the revolution in due course now will destroy him.

and the royal family and the monarchy. And the course is now clearly set for France to become a republic. But that is a story for another time. Probably in the autumn, we will continue this account of the revolution. But thank you for sticking with us this far. We will be back. Dominic, I've enjoyed doing this so much. One of the great, great convulsive episodes.

world history as we've been saying and lots more convulsions still to come yeah we'll be back in the autumn with the fall of the monarchy the outbreak of war guillotine the guillotine and the beginning of the reign of terror murder of Mara yeah so much to come brilliant stuff and our next episode will be something completely different namely the

the faking of a prehistoric skull in early 20th century Sussex we'll be looking at the Piltdown Man and then after that we'll be looking at the history of Italian food so a slight palate cleanser there definitely a palate cleanser so we will see you soon à bientôt au revoir one for sorrow two for joy three for girl four for a boy

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