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1:32

It's often been said that revolutions

1:35

devour their own children.

1:38

And in the early 1790s, it

1:40

seemed as though the French Revolution

1:42

was making good on that promise. But

1:45

what lay behind the bloodthirsty

1:47

spiral of state violence and

1:49

mass hysteria that became known

1:52

to history as the Terror?

1:54

In today's episode of our Everything You

1:56

Wanted to Know series, Danny

1:58

Bird puts your to David

2:01

Andris, covering everything from

2:03

the word surprising meaning to the

2:05

long shadow cast by the terror

2:07

on popular culture. David,

2:10

thank you for joining me for this episode of

2:12

Everything You Want to Know. We'll be looking at

2:14

the phase of the French Revolution known as the

2:17

terror. So to start us

2:19

off, a big but I think essential

2:21

question. What was the terror? Well,

2:24

that is everything, isn't it? Useful, I think,

2:26

to say beginning, that the idea of calling

2:29

it the terror is essentially

2:31

retrospective. It's a label that

2:33

people come up with very, very gradually to

2:36

explain a series of events which have

2:38

been essentially traumatic for the

2:40

people that have survived them. And there are

2:42

two dimensions to this. One is to think

2:44

of it as a sort of storm, as

2:46

a kind of political tempest that sweeps up

2:48

the whole country. Some people opt for that

2:50

kind of view. Another one is

2:52

the view that it's a system. It's

2:55

organized by a particular faction,

2:57

which we associate very overtly

2:59

with Maximilian Robspierre, to

3:01

have a sort of essentially conspiratorial

3:03

view of something called the terror

3:05

being inflicted on people. And

3:07

it won't surprise you to learn that neither

3:10

of those views are really accurate, but they're

3:12

useful to the people who've survived it to

3:14

try and explain to themselves what's going on.

3:16

But if we wanted to

3:18

talk about what does actually happen, then what's

3:21

going on in this period is

3:23

France, after several years

3:25

of revolutionary turbulence, in

3:28

which repeatedly the hopes

3:30

and aspirations of good patriots

3:33

have been betrayed, quite literal

3:35

episodes of real individual betrayal

3:37

at the top of politics,

3:40

massive evidence of real

3:43

counter-revolutionary conspiracy. And

3:45

this has gone on for years in which they've tried

3:47

to construct a state and it hasn't worked. They've

3:50

ended up having to overthrow the monarchy.

3:52

They've ended up at war with all

3:54

of their neighbors, effectively all the major

3:56

states of Western Europe. In

3:58

that context, there's then... a

4:00

double-edged process which constitutes the

4:02

essence of the terror, which

4:05

is on the one hand that they

4:07

have to furiously mobilize the whole

4:10

country to fight this unprecedented

4:12

war on all the frontiers. And

4:14

they will successfully do that. They

4:16

will create a massive army, nearly

4:19

a million men strong, and they'll feed and clothe

4:21

and equip it. They'll keep the

4:24

rest of the country alive while they're

4:26

doing it. And they'll become militarily successful

4:28

and dominant in Europe for the next

4:30

20 years, in fact, militarily. But in

4:33

the course of doing that, all the

4:35

alarms and concerns and paranoia that had

4:37

built up through the previous years of

4:40

problems and betrayals grind

4:42

away at the leadership of

4:44

the French Republic to

4:46

the point where they're almost accusing everyone

4:48

of actually being traitors.

4:51

And the end of the process, the end

4:53

of Maximilian Robespierre comes when he accuses everyone

4:55

else of being a traitor, essentially, and they

4:57

all turn around and say, well, no, actually,

4:59

you're the traitor. And they invent

5:01

this wonderful story at the end. In fact,

5:03

he wanted to crown himself king. And they

5:06

use that as an excuse to have him

5:08

executed and the people around him executed, and

5:10

that the terror sort of comes to an

5:12

end in it almost literally consumes itself. And

5:15

if this process is sort of

5:17

paranoid fear that's driving the political

5:20

class. And just so we're

5:22

clear, what period of time are we talking about

5:24

here when we discuss the terror? Let's

5:26

go back to 1787, because that's a

5:28

really useful starting point. That's the point to

5:30

which the French government under Louis XVI realises

5:33

that they really are going to go

5:36

bankrupt if they don't reform

5:38

the state, if they don't change the way

5:40

taxes are collected, the way the state is

5:42

administered. And there's a two year

5:44

period through to the end of 1788, sometimes called the

5:47

pre revolution, where

5:49

there's an effort at finding kind of

5:51

institutional solution that is reform, rather than

5:53

revolution. And why it ends up being

5:56

a revolution is that reforms impossible because

5:58

there are too many competing political,

6:01

social groups within society. It's this hierarchical

6:03

aristocratic society where being powerful and being

6:05

privileged are essentially the same thing. And

6:08

you don't want to give up your

6:10

privileges. You don't want to find yourself

6:12

paying tax just because it's the right

6:14

thing to do, because you don't want

6:16

to do this. And so

6:18

it's very, very complicated processes. And

6:20

you get to the beginning of Sevens of 89,

6:22

where they've decided to have a thing called an

6:25

Estates General, which is an

6:27

essentially medieval idea of a

6:30

consultation, that the monarch will

6:32

consult the people about how to create

6:34

reform. But this is also quite a

6:36

sense that this would be the modern

6:38

way to do this. This would have

6:40

legitimacy. So there's a

6:42

huge electoral process all across the country.

6:46

There's rising antagonism between the

6:48

nobility, the top 1% of

6:50

the population, and everyone else about who's actually

6:52

going to get some power out of this.

6:55

This pushes forward into the summer of

6:58

Sevens of 89, where this conflict between

7:00

the nobility and the everyone else, the

7:02

third estate, reaches such a

7:04

crescendo that the third estate decide to call

7:06

themselves the National Assembly in late

7:08

June. They start to talk

7:11

about making a new constitution, whether the

7:13

king likes it or not, a real

7:15

radical shift in the sense of where

7:17

sovereignty might lie. The king

7:19

and the queen and the king's brothers and

7:21

the royal court decide something has to be

7:23

done about that. There's an attempted coup d'etat

7:26

in early July. And it's

7:28

the resistance of the coup d'etat, the

7:30

inability of the government to carry that through

7:32

against the resistance, particularly of the Parisians, which

7:35

leads to the storming of the Bastille as

7:38

part of the Parisians defensive maneuvering. That's

7:40

how you get to the middle of July, Sevens of

7:42

89. And there has been a revolution, because

7:45

the king has lost power in the first

7:47

place and then failed to get it back.

7:50

And literally the king goes along to

7:52

the National Assembly on the 15th of July

7:54

and basically says, well, you know, sorry,

7:57

lads, it's over to you now. And, you

7:59

know, capitulates the political agenda

8:01

to this national assembly. You

8:04

then have a process which is going to last until the middle of

8:06

1791, where that assembly tries

8:08

to write a constitution, while

8:11

on the one hand discovering

8:13

how very, very difficult that is to

8:15

do, to start from scratch designing the

8:18

workings of Europe's most

8:20

populous, in some respects,

8:23

wealthiest country, and on the other

8:25

hand facing increasing resistance from

8:28

the aristocracy, from the nobility, who don't want

8:30

any of this change to happen, and

8:33

who are increasingly arguing there needs to

8:35

be a violent overthrow of this revolution

8:37

before it goes too far. That

8:40

pushes you towards the end of 1791, where

8:43

the king is popped on the

8:45

throne to be a constitutional monarch

8:47

despite having tried to run away the previous

8:49

summer, which is a whole other story. And

8:52

then within a few months, pressure

8:55

from radicals in the new electoral

8:57

politics sends France to

8:59

war against the Austrian Holy Roman

9:01

Emperor because the emigrated

9:03

aristocrats are under his protection, and they think

9:06

they can cleanse the frontiers

9:08

of this threat. France can become

9:10

dominant because it's been liberated. The

9:13

war goes very badly in the spring and summer of 1792. The

9:17

radicals blame the king for that. And

9:20

then in August 1792, you have the

9:22

decision that the only way France is going to

9:24

survive is if they overthrow the king and become

9:26

a republic. That happens.

9:30

In many ways, there's then a much more thoroughgoing

9:32

purge of French public life than had happened in

9:34

1789. Anyone

9:37

who's not now prepared to stand up and say, yes, I

9:39

was a republican all the time is likely

9:41

to be viewed with suspicion. There

9:43

are the infamous September massacres where dozens

9:46

and dozens of counter-revolutionary suspects

9:48

are bumped off in the Parisian

9:50

prisons. Meanwhile,

9:53

what has set in within politics is

9:55

this terrible suspicion of betrayal

9:57

that I was already talking about.

10:00

that some of the radicals become government

10:02

ministers before the summer of 1792. And

10:06

then they're afraid to overthrow the monarchy

10:08

because they think it will bring anarchy

10:10

and collapse. Other radicals are

10:12

determined that the monarchy has to

10:14

be overthrown and to suggest otherwise

10:17

is to express counter-revolutionary sympathies. And

10:19

when the Republic is created, you find these

10:21

two groups at loggerheads with

10:23

each other in the new national

10:26

convention, the now less radical

10:28

ones that we call the Brissletale, the Gendar,

10:30

the more radical ones that we call the

10:32

Montagnard for various tedious reasons. But

10:35

both sides sitting

10:37

in this revolutionary Republican assembly

10:40

firmly believing, as far as one can tell, that the

10:43

people on the other side want them

10:45

dead, you know, in

10:47

a very literal and gruesome way, want

10:50

them dead. And that's the

10:52

dynamic that then works itself out as you go

10:54

forward into 1793, that

10:56

the assembly splits almost down the middle of

10:58

whether to execute the king, for example. And

11:02

again, for the more radical side, not

11:04

to want to execute the king is

11:06

a terrible thing to think. It makes

11:08

you a counter-revolutionary. And

11:10

there is an acceleration of violence, an

11:12

acceleration of purging with

11:14

the help of a Parisian popular movement, the

11:16

Gendar thrown out of the national assembly at

11:18

the beginning of June, 1793. And

11:21

then they run off to the

11:24

provinces and foment civil war. And,

11:26

you know, this is where everything really does start

11:29

to break down. There's already a civil war that

11:31

just started a little bit earlier in the west

11:33

of the country, what we call the Vendée, on

11:36

where you have a essentially

11:39

religiously inspired conflict in resistance

11:41

to Republican intrusion and resistance

11:44

to conscription, which

11:46

gathers under the flag of Catholicism and

11:48

Royalism. And that's seen as

11:51

an existential threat to the nation. And

11:53

then these Yawanda run off and start a

11:55

second civil war on top of the first

11:57

one. And it's in that pond.

12:00

that the really kind of ruthless viciousness

12:02

of politics for the next 12 months

12:05

starts to play out that you have

12:07

to Get rid of your enemies every

12:09

time you fail to get rid of your enemies They

12:11

come back and cause more trouble, but

12:13

the trouble is your enemies used to be your friends And

12:16

that means you look at your current friends and you start

12:18

thinking which of them is going to turn out to the

12:20

enemies And and this is

12:22

very much a repetitious spiraling process that goes

12:25

on until as I say they decide that

12:27

in the end Rob spear

12:29

was was of the baddie all along But

12:31

it is this spiral of suspicion that that

12:34

pushes through these events that leaves

12:36

me on to my next question Which is what was the

12:38

Committee of Public Safety? This is

12:40

the organ of the National Convention

12:42

that elected body which is put in

12:45

charge of the government During this crisis

12:47

of early 1793 This

12:50

is the problem they face coming out

12:52

of what has been a constitutional monarchy

12:54

Monarchy where government ministers are essentially appointed

12:56

by the king. The king is the

12:58

chief executive And

13:00

you know and you can you can get the king out of

13:02

the way But you've still got those ministers who

13:05

are separate from the elected

13:08

national representation So

13:10

they try various iterations of having committees to oversee

13:12

things and things like a committee of general defense

13:14

that they have earlier on In 1793, but in

13:16

the spring of 90 they settle on this idea

13:19

of a committee of general security Committee

13:23

of Public Safety to committees that work

13:25

in parallel Relatively

13:27

small ten to twelve people

13:29

on each where they can really

13:32

function to give proper oversight of

13:34

the executive That the army

13:36

then you know front front still has a

13:38

government who has government ministers But they now

13:40

have these committees looking over their shoulders all

13:42

the time and also the

13:45

committee of public safety increasingly works by

13:47

Sending its own agents out into the

13:49

country Either other elected

13:51

members of the convention who are

13:53

called representatives on mission Sent

13:56

out with very wide-ranging powers to

13:58

organize the war and fight counter-revolution

14:00

and so on, or just sort

14:02

of appointed commissioners, bureaucrats, that

14:05

the individual members of the Committee of Public

14:07

Safety recruit and send out to do very

14:09

similar kind of intrusive roles, figuring out what's

14:11

going on in the country, making people work

14:14

harder, rooting out traitors. So

14:16

the Committee of Public Safety is, in the end,

14:18

through that year, through to Thermidor, a

14:20

group of a dozen men, several

14:23

of whom are not present at any particular

14:25

time because they've gone off personally on mission

14:27

to the frontiers or the battle fleet or

14:29

somewhere, but who literally gather round

14:31

a table when they can in the Tuileries Palace

14:34

in Paris and run France

14:36

from there, producing enormous volumes

14:39

of bureaucratic correspondence and paperwork,

14:42

signing off on countless

14:44

decrees. So they

14:46

are effectively the government, although

14:48

technically they're just the people who

14:51

oversee the government, but this is

14:53

the ambiguity that you've got when

14:55

they're still in the process of figuring out what

14:57

a constitution should look like. This

14:59

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17:06

I'm going to turn now to some questions

17:08

we've had from our followers on social media.

17:10

This one is from Max H

17:13

F Quigley from Instagram, and

17:15

he'd like to know, was it referred to as

17:17

the terror at the time it was taking place?

17:20

No. I mean, and again, I think this is

17:22

something that historians have come back around to in

17:25

recent years. People like Marisa Linton and

17:28

Colin Jones increasingly emphasizing

17:30

that you're when you talk

17:33

about the terror, you're

17:35

using a label that only really evolved

17:38

in historical writing about it. It

17:41

starts to be called the reign

17:43

of terror as sort of something that's

17:45

remembered with a shudder in

17:47

the years afterwards. And terror

17:50

is used very interestingly, a lot of

17:52

different ways by the French revolutionaries. And

17:55

there's another very interesting recent by Ron

17:57

Schefter, which looks at how terror was

17:59

used. used in political vocabulary through

18:01

the 18th century and shows that

18:04

it's actually sort of attribute

18:06

to sovereignty, that God or

18:08

monarchs were supposed to be

18:11

terrible. They were supposed to be the

18:13

terror of their enemies. And

18:16

by the late 18th century, you also

18:18

had the sense that it was quite

18:20

legitimate to terrorize criminals, that

18:22

justice should be terrible and terrifying.

18:25

It was good for bad people

18:27

to be terrorized. And

18:29

when terror is used as an idea

18:32

in the revolution, it is very frequently

18:34

with that objective in mind that

18:37

we are only gonna win if we

18:39

can sort of paralyze our enemies with

18:41

fear. They have to see us marching.

18:43

They have to see a guillotine on every street

18:46

corner, ideas like this. And

18:48

it's only later on in hindsight,

18:51

having attention to that, all that

18:53

kind of paranoid mania that ensues,

18:56

that people reconstruct it as

18:59

something unambiguously bad. It's

19:01

the point in time at which the whole meaning

19:03

and sense of a term changes because

19:05

of how it gets associated with particular

19:07

kinds of events. And

19:09

we have another question from Instagram that's coming

19:11

from Aliluisa23. And

19:14

they'd like to know, was the terror felt throughout

19:16

France or was it concentrated in the big cities?

19:19

Not so much in the big cities,

19:22

although I mean, it's concentrated in Paris

19:25

because a lot of important people have been

19:27

detained in Paris and are tried there by

19:29

the revolutionary tribunal. It's notable

19:32

in Lyon and Marseille, for example,

19:35

not so much because they're big cities,

19:37

but because they were part of the

19:39

Federalist Revolt, the thing that the giandans

19:41

started, that second civil war. They start

19:44

that in Lyon and Marseille,

19:47

to a certain extent in Bordeaux,

19:49

because that's where they have significant

19:51

political connections. So it is

19:53

very strongly felt in the larger cities of France,

19:56

but it's even more strongly felt in some

19:58

of the rural areas. where

20:00

there's been significant counter-revolutionary

20:03

uprising. A lot

20:05

of the wider area of southeastern France

20:07

is harrowed by the terror in various

20:09

ways. The area that the

20:11

society is with the Vendée, which is essentially

20:14

the lower Loire Valley and to the south

20:16

of the Loire, is brutalized.

20:20

Hundreds of thousands of people are killed in

20:22

that area in suppressing a guerrilla war.

20:25

There's also a lot of guerrilla activity

20:27

throughout Brittany and parts of Normandy. So

20:30

again, there's a sense throughout this that there

20:32

is a sort of low-level civil war in

20:34

these areas. By the same

20:36

token, generally you can say that the

20:39

experience of the terror is very uneven.

20:41

There are lots of parts of the country where

20:44

if they just kind of nod and smile

20:46

when officials come through and say, oh yes,

20:48

please take a harvest, there you

20:51

go. It's all for the nation, hip,

20:53

hip, hooray. Then it's fine. Then the

20:55

officials just move on and leave the

20:57

village to its own business. There's

20:59

other places, infamously, places just to the

21:02

west of Lyon, for example, where

21:04

almost every village was sort of forced

21:06

to sort of agitate itself into

21:09

a frenzy of Republican passion just

21:12

because some local representative of the mission

21:14

wanted them to. When the representative

21:16

of the mission went away, they just all heaved

21:18

a sigh of relief and went back to doing

21:20

nothing. If you're kind of remote and you don't

21:23

threaten the revolution, then nothing

21:25

really happens to you in 1793-94, except

21:29

for the fact that you get absolutely

21:31

deluged with demands from the centre to

21:34

do things. Every village is

21:36

getting packets of letters every

21:38

week full of decrees and

21:40

orders, many of which

21:43

they literally cannot understand because

21:45

they're coming from this hotbed of

21:47

political consciousness in the centre using

21:50

vocabulary, referring to events, that

21:52

a remote village doesn't even know has

21:55

happened. There's wonderful examples in

21:57

the archives of just sort of complete

21:59

incomprehension. with which rural

22:01

communities greet the arrival of people who

22:03

come bringing the news of what's done,

22:05

what they should be doing, and just

22:07

doesn't mean anything to them. So

22:10

it is a very, very uneven experience.

22:12

Some places are harshly punished for not

22:14

knowing what they should be doing and

22:16

others are just gently chided into line,

22:19

depending again very much on the individual

22:21

personality of the representatives and

22:23

the commissioners that they encounter. Obviously

22:25

the name Maximilian Rolffia looms large when we're

22:27

talking about the terror, but I was wondering

22:30

as well as him, could you go into

22:32

some detail about some of the key individuals

22:34

who were involved in implementing the terror? Yes,

22:37

it is a very wide collective

22:40

effort as I was saying. You

22:43

have a series of figures on the Committee of

22:45

Public Safety. Maximilian Rolffia is not

22:48

in any significant sense the leader of the

22:50

Committee of Public Safety, which is again the

22:52

kind of blame that was put on him

22:54

afterwards. There are a few people

22:57

there with whom he's more closely associated. Louis-Antoine

22:59

Saint-Joust is one of them. He's noted

23:01

as this youth hero of radical republicanism.

23:03

He's much younger than most of the

23:05

other people involved. He's still in his

23:08

20s, but you know he's very much in

23:10

the same line, very much dedicated to the

23:13

idea that having created a republic you can

23:15

now create pure Republicans, that

23:17

you can change everything about daily life, everyday

23:20

routines, as it will almost

23:22

literally brainwash people into being

23:24

better citizens. He's very taken

23:26

with his ideas. He also

23:28

spends a long time at the front

23:30

with the armies where again he gets

23:33

this reputation from an extremely ruthless in

23:36

pushing units into combat, in

23:38

punishing officers of underperforming units,

23:41

very much this stereotype if you like of

23:43

a kind of purest,

23:45

cold dictator

23:48

in the making, lacking

23:50

real human warmth or sympathy for any

23:52

of these people. The Committee of

23:54

Public Safety in general has made up of quite

23:56

a variety of people there. People like Bertrand Barrere

23:58

is a slightly more the sort of land

24:00

buoyant southern figure from the sort of foothills

24:03

of the Pyrenees, who's been involved in revolutionary

24:05

politics from 1789. He's one of these men

24:07

who can make anything sound like a good

24:09

idea if he's given long enough to work

24:11

on a speech. He's the great sort of

24:14

spokesman of the Committee of Public Safety, which

24:16

means he's always going along to the convention and telling

24:19

them what's happened and telling them what he's to do

24:21

and telling them to get past new decrees and new

24:23

legislations to do this. In the course of

24:25

which sometimes again he makes up absolute

24:27

nonsense. There's a period in the summer

24:30

of 1793 where they're having

24:32

to justify some of this crackdown

24:34

by reference to English spying and

24:36

then the sort of fabricated spy

24:39

scandals that are announced as gospel

24:41

truth to the convention, which is

24:43

just fabricate, just made up out

24:45

of whole cloth. But that's

24:47

the kind of thing that he's good at,

24:49

the spokesman for what the Committee has decided

24:52

should be true. And now again,

24:54

I said there's a range of other people there.

24:56

Perhaps one of the interesting figures is Kouton, who

24:59

for generic health

25:01

reasons is confined to wheelchair. So he's

25:04

this interesting figure of a man who

25:06

is moving around

25:08

in revolutionary politics using a wheelchair

25:11

distinctive in that regard. But again, someone

25:13

who very much closely follows the Rowspirit

25:16

line, particularly towards the end of the

25:18

revolution, so the end of the terror of

25:21

seeing enemies everywhere, of seeing

25:23

corruption and conspiracy, even

25:26

within the committees themselves, and

25:28

being willing to root that out

25:31

compared to some other people that you've got.

25:33

There are two men called Priors, Priors

25:36

de la Cote d'Or and Priors

25:38

de la Marne, who are both

25:40

involved in the supply and armies

25:42

and navies and actually sort

25:44

of practical efforts to generate the war.

25:46

They're often not in Paris, often

25:49

involved very heavily in direct

25:52

sort of hands-on making

25:54

generals and admirals do the right thing.

25:57

There's a variety of people there. more

26:00

ideological, some more practical and these are some

26:02

of the things that are in the end

26:04

going to force the final

26:06

confrontation is where the pragmatists

26:09

are a part of the group that have

26:11

had enough of the ideologues

26:13

because the ideologues are locking

26:15

up so many people that it's actually

26:17

interfering with the war effort.

26:20

And we should of course reflect on Roffbier himself

26:23

because he is such a huge figure in this

26:25

part of French revolutionary history. Could

26:27

you tell me a little bit about his background and

26:29

how he became involved in these events? Maximum

26:32

Religemotir comes from Arras in

26:35

the north. He's still relatively young, he's

26:37

in his early 30s during

26:40

the revolution. He's a lawyer, he

26:42

has a sort of middle class background. I mean

26:44

some people have tried to make a lot about

26:47

an absent father and issues like that but again

26:49

this is not uncommon even if in the French

26:51

middle class he's in the 1780s. He's a

26:54

scholarship boy, does very well

26:56

educationally, so becomes a lawyer

26:58

and is always noted in his

27:01

legal career through the 1780s for being

27:03

a very outspoken partisan of

27:05

justice, you know, which is

27:08

frighteningly unusual in

27:10

the context of the late 18th century judicial

27:12

system. The French judicial system

27:15

is generally noted as being oppressive.

27:18

The criminal justice system in particular you

27:21

have very little chance for getting out

27:23

from under it if they decide that you did it.

27:26

Whether or not there's much evidence it doesn't really

27:28

matter and the civil justice

27:30

system is also in many ways quite

27:32

corrupt, complicated, many

27:34

layered, idiosyncratic in all kinds

27:37

of ways but there are you know there

27:39

are a lot of campaigning lawyers in the

27:41

late 18th century trying to to change things

27:43

or just trying to influence individual cases and

27:46

Rossbier is really quite obscure. He's

27:48

doing his bit for justice and

27:51

freedom but he's doing it up

27:53

there in northern France in Piccadilly.

27:55

Nobody else is really noticing and

27:58

he puts himself forward. elected to the

28:01

Estates Dremel at the beginning of

28:03

1789. And he's not anybody's first

28:05

choice, really, but he gets

28:07

elected as part of the local delegation

28:09

and he goes along. And very

28:12

gradually, he starts to distinguish himself

28:14

in these first years of the

28:16

revolution by his absolute commitment to

28:19

what is in the end a rather vague

28:21

and abstract idea of social equality and

28:24

political justice and how citizenship should be

28:26

something that people share equally and rights

28:28

should be something that everyone gets to

28:30

share in equally, which

28:33

puts him at odds with the general dynamic

28:35

of the constitution which is being developed, which

28:38

is sort of kind of liberal property

28:40

owning franchise, where really

28:43

they're trying to limit political power

28:46

to the respectable classes. Rolf

28:48

Spears is one of just a handful of voices

28:51

that stand out completely

28:53

futilely against that,

28:55

but he also stands out

28:58

very vigorously against corruption, against

29:00

counter-revolutionary conspiracy. And

29:02

he benefits again from this fact that

29:04

however paranoid you sounded at one point

29:06

in the revolution, something would probably

29:09

happen a bit later that made it sound like

29:11

you were right. You know,

29:13

there is again this escalation of genuine

29:15

betrayal, this escalation of conspiracy,

29:18

and Rob Spear threw into

29:20

1791-92, builds this reputation as

29:23

someone who's absolutely straight down

29:25

the line honest about

29:27

all of this, honest about what the

29:29

problems are, honest about

29:31

his own perspective on this at

29:34

a time when a lot of politicians are

29:36

fairly openly corrupt, even

29:38

as we go into the Republic, corruption

29:40

is fairly overt. And it's

29:42

Rob Spears' identification as this

29:45

sort of pure tribune of the

29:47

people that carries him through

29:49

the summer of 1792 into

29:53

the convention, emerging as this leader

29:55

of the faction that's determined that

29:57

there can be no compromise. counter-revolution,

30:01

that it's almost not even worth putting

30:03

the king on trial. He should be

30:06

executed just for being king on first

30:08

principles. He sort of prevented

30:10

the Republic coming into existence for too long

30:13

and has to be got rid of. And he's

30:15

certainly the leader in looking at

30:17

this other grouping, the barista town,

30:19

the Xwanda, and seeing them as

30:21

traitors. Not being in

30:23

any doubt that they have done all the

30:25

worst things they're accused of doing, that they

30:27

would have saved the king if they could.

30:30

This is what then carries him through to

30:32

the spring and summer of 1793. He's

30:35

not initially on the Committee for Public

30:38

Safety until late July 1793, exactly a

30:40

year before his

30:42

own death. And when he's brought on to the

30:45

Committee for Public Safety, it is

30:47

with the sense that he's a kind of moral figurehead,

30:49

that his actual job is going to be

30:52

making grand speeches to the National

30:54

Convention, explaining what needs to be

30:56

done, putting this gloss of sort

30:58

of moral purity on it. And

31:01

this is in the end where things will start to fall

31:03

apart for him, because in late

31:06

1793, he starts being

31:09

given evidence of corruption,

31:11

really quite high up in the structure

31:14

of the committees, as there's a

31:16

really big financial scandal which is brewing. And

31:19

that will kick start a whole process where

31:21

he and other members of the Committee for

31:23

Public Safety backed back and forth the question

31:25

of who to purge, who really needs to

31:27

be got rid of, how many

31:30

of these stories can we believe, right

31:32

through into the spring of 1794,

31:34

where some really quite significant figures

31:36

in the Republican leadership have been

31:38

sent to the guillotine after what

31:40

are basically show trials, very

31:43

little hard evidence. But this

31:45

determination, I need to get rid of more and more

31:47

people. And you have the

31:50

last sort of three or four months of

31:52

Ross Beers life then, where in some senses,

31:54

his belief in his own purity betrays

31:56

him, because he can't really see

31:59

any way. forward except to

32:01

carry on contrasting that purity with

32:04

the actual or potential corruption of others.

32:07

And ends up calling essentially for almost

32:10

literally everyone else at

32:12

the center of power to be purged.

32:16

You know, it was sort of bizarre paradoxical

32:18

consequences. There wouldn't really be many people around

32:20

to do the purging. And

32:22

this is what unites lots of forces against him with

32:24

the sense that other people who've

32:26

gone out, who've got their hands dirty

32:28

fighting these civil wars and now

32:30

being accused of not doing it properly, not

32:33

doing it honestly enough, and et cetera,

32:35

et cetera, et cetera. And these

32:37

are some of the leaders that turn on him at

32:39

the end of the day and say, well, actually, no,

32:41

you have to go or we're for the

32:43

chop. And you might

32:45

say they're very cynically turn the idea of

32:47

conspiracy and betrayal on him. One

32:50

of the guys who does it, Vadie,

32:52

very cynically remarks later on that they

32:54

were making up these stories about him

32:56

wanting to be king simply

32:59

out of political convenience, because that's the kind

33:01

of stuff they've been feeding to the mob

33:03

for months now. So now they just feed

33:05

Ross Beers to the mob with the same

33:07

story and then worry about

33:09

what to happen afterwards. But he becomes

33:11

this figurehead of

33:13

everything that's wrong with a

33:15

process that an awful lot of

33:17

people have been involved in. And then

33:19

after his death, the year after his death,

33:22

there is a furious demonization

33:25

of scapegoating, imprinting caricatures and

33:27

things like this that

33:29

really fixes that image for a very long time

33:31

afterwards. Now, this question may

33:34

draw on your literary knowledge. I don't know if

33:36

it's going to be something you can answer. But

33:40

this is a question we've received from George Haig

33:42

on Facebook, and he would like to know how

33:44

accurate is the depiction of the terror in the

33:46

Charles Dickens novel, A Tale of Two Cities. I

33:49

think it's fair to say that most of those

33:52

kind of Victorian constructions of

33:54

what happens in the late

33:56

18th century are more concerned with what the

33:58

Victorians think about themselves. with the

34:00

real detail of what happens. I

34:03

mean, there's various elements you can point to.

34:05

I mean, the whole sort of question of people in

34:08

and out of prison and what it means to be

34:10

suspect, and this rather kind

34:12

of odd, porous arrangement where someone can

34:14

end up taking someone else's place at

34:16

the guillotine. There is a certain

34:18

element of that. You know, French prisons during

34:20

the terror are very strange places, almost sort

34:22

of communities unto themselves. It

34:24

wasn't very hard or money to change hands if we were

34:26

to pass in and out. But at

34:29

the same time, there are also places which are riddled

34:31

with informers who will make

34:33

up stories about your counter-revolutionary aspirations and

34:35

sell them to the authorities and have

34:37

you whipped off to the guillotine. So

34:39

there's a lot of ambiguities there. The

34:41

sort of Madame Nefage element, the women knitting around

34:44

the guillotine and so on. That's

34:46

actually one of the sort of better

34:48

attested historical phenomena. The women who are,

34:50

in many cases, the

34:53

wives or mothers of men who

34:55

are away serving at the front are

34:58

very concerned with how

35:00

politics is developing, how it will affect

35:02

their husbands and sons fighting in these

35:04

wars. There's a

35:07

tradition that's developed over several years

35:09

of groups of women going and

35:11

occupying the public galleries of the

35:13

National Convention, its predecessors of

35:15

women spectating other political clubs and

35:18

events and very actively passing comments

35:20

and all of that. And

35:23

the guillotine was obviously a public spectacle that people

35:25

are expected to come out and see

35:27

what's happening and comment

35:29

and discuss this. That

35:31

would certainly have been a very

35:33

intimidating environment. Thousands of Parisians stirred

35:36

up by revolutionary fervor, shouting

35:38

and cat calling and in some

35:40

cases, people are going to their deaths. So

35:43

again, it's one of those things where you can

35:45

pick out elements where there's a certain verisimilitude to

35:47

some of it, but in

35:50

the end, it's colored by

35:52

an essentially melodramatic impression of

35:54

what was going on. Which

35:56

has its ancestry in these accounts

35:59

which emerge. very soon afterwards,

36:01

but are also contradicted by some of

36:03

the deeper research about just how kind

36:06

of odd and pragmatic a

36:08

lot of actual conduct was. And

36:10

Robert Keynes, also on Facebook, would like

36:12

to know, were aristocrats the sole victims

36:14

of the terror, or did ordinary people

36:16

make up the bulk of the victims?

36:19

No, it depends on point of view, really. I mean,

36:21

if you bear in mind that the

36:24

nobility is only about 1% of the population,

36:27

then you can say they're quite

36:29

significantly overrepresented in the

36:31

victims of the terror in general, in terms of

36:33

those who are officially executed. I can't think of

36:35

the percentage off the top of my head, but

36:37

it's significantly more than 1% of

36:40

those actually sentenced to death by the tribunal

36:42

would be nobles and family

36:44

members and so on. Significant number of

36:46

hundreds of people of that social background,

36:50

sometimes executed only for being the

36:52

relatives of other people who've emigrated.

36:55

But if you're thinking absolute numerical

36:57

terms, most of

36:59

the people who die, die

37:01

in the places where the civil war

37:03

is active. So in Leont,

37:05

Marseilles, in Toulon, in the

37:07

wider southeast, and in the wider west,

37:11

you're looking at a combined

37:13

death toll which is probably

37:15

approaching 300,000. But a significant

37:18

several tens of thousands of that at least are

37:20

Republican soldiers killed in the civil war. Several

37:23

tens of thousands are people executed

37:25

by military tribunals, captured rebels

37:27

who were just shot. And then

37:29

the rest is for the general casualties of

37:31

the Bonday and civil war and the repression

37:34

of the civilian population that comes afterwards. And

37:36

again, you're looking there at almost all

37:38

of these people being from

37:41

every other social class, peasants,

37:43

urban craftsmen, apprentice boot blacks, you

37:45

name it. There are lists of

37:47

these occupations and they really cover

37:49

the complete spectrum of what was

37:51

going on in the country. Because

37:53

I say, victims

37:55

of the terror in general, the

37:57

vast majority are people who don't. fighting

38:00

a civil war and as

38:02

captives in a civil war

38:04

where it had been decided that no quarter was

38:06

going to be given to those captives. So

38:09

the aristocracy are the kind of headline figures

38:12

but there is this much wider impact

38:14

on society at large. And

38:16

was there a philosophical framework or an

38:18

ideology that was guiding the architects

38:20

of the terror? It is

38:22

a very hard question to answer very clearly

38:25

because they believe themselves

38:28

to have a very direct

38:30

ideology in republicanism.

38:33

But you are sometimes hard-put to understand what

38:36

they mean by that. A

38:38

lot of the things they come out with in terms of future

38:41

plans, you know, that sense of, you

38:43

know, that you would think

38:45

of a modern ideology as something that has a vision

38:47

of the future. What the

38:49

revolutionaries come out with is terribly

38:51

insipid and has no

38:54

kind of social vision at all.

38:57

Saint-Justo I mentioned earlier again is notorious

38:59

for this. He writes in his notebooks

39:01

a whole series of things that get

39:03

called republican institutions, but by

39:05

people who've dug them up later

39:07

on. But they're focused

39:10

on this very strange static

39:12

vision of essentially rural communities.

39:15

Kind of sort of utopianism that's looking

39:17

backwards to the classical world really and

39:20

concerned with personal relationships. You have this

39:22

very famous thing where people have to, well

39:25

men, essentially men, men have

39:27

to declare their friendships on

39:30

an annual basis. And if you don't

39:32

have any friends, you're not part

39:34

of the community and you get banished. And

39:36

then if these friends are people who support each

39:39

other through the life course and dig each other's

39:41

graves and weep at each other's funerals, sort of

39:44

rather sentimental effusions that start coming out

39:46

then. But it has nothing to do

39:49

with what these people do, what

39:51

they do economically. It's imagining, you know,

39:53

there's a sort of implicit imagined agriculture

39:55

going on in the background somewhere. Nothing

39:58

to do with France as what

40:00

France was, which was effectively

40:02

an industrializing country by

40:05

the 1790s. The Republican

40:07

leadership just don't understand that, and they don't

40:09

care about it, because they're

40:11

primarily interested in trying to get people to be

40:13

good. It's very

40:15

much a moral crusade, that the

40:17

sense that people are counter-revolutionary because

40:19

they're bad, they've been infected with

40:21

bad, wicked ideas. And if

40:23

you can root those out, well, everything

40:26

will be fine. They just don't know what

40:28

being fine will look like, beyond,

40:31

again, some sort of bucolic,

40:33

Arcadian sense of agricultural community.

40:36

Terror is an emanation of virtue. What did

40:38

Rob be I mean by this? Well,

40:41

that takes us to what I was

40:43

talking about earlier on, this sense that

40:45

the idea of terror has a kind

40:47

of genealogy conceptually. It goes back to

40:50

how it had been used in previous

40:52

generations. That sense

40:54

of terror on the one hand, of

40:57

this ability to impose a kind of

40:59

paralyzing fear on your enemies,

41:02

or the righteous thundering being struck

41:04

down from the heavens, this

41:06

kind of set of concepts there,

41:10

along with the idea of virtue, which

41:12

is something that people who have

41:14

invented neoclassicism in the late 18th

41:17

century have become obsessed

41:19

as Europe has periodically been obsessed

41:21

over previous centuries with

41:24

the ancient Greeks and Romans, with

41:26

the ideas of virtue that appear within

41:28

their societies, with the

41:31

idea that the ideal citizen is

41:33

someone who is always prepared to

41:35

sacrifice themselves for the

41:37

common good. Common good,

41:39

show of publique, public thing,

41:42

raise publica, republic. These are all the

41:44

same idea, and they go all the

41:46

way back to the ancient Romans at

41:48

least. So this idea of virtue

41:52

certainly has this very specific meaning that again

41:54

is coming out of the history of Europe,

41:57

which means this willingness to give up

41:59

your own. personal interests to fight

42:01

to die for the Republic.

42:04

And one of the things that

42:06

Rob Speer is gesturing towards when

42:08

he makes that remark in early

42:10

1794 is that a population of

42:12

self-sacrificing patriots, you know, 28 million

42:14

people who are willing to throw

42:16

themselves on enemy bayonets, will

42:19

overcome all obstacles and

42:22

will be right to strike down

42:24

its enemies because they are virtuous

42:26

in every conceivable sense of the

42:28

term. That it is political

42:30

vision, as I said before, driven by

42:32

moral purity, driven by the

42:35

idea that if you are good people,

42:37

you deserve to triumph, and your enemies

42:39

deserve to lose because they are bad

42:41

people. Were there any

42:43

notable foreign witnesses to the terror? There

42:46

are lots in one way

42:48

or another. A lot of them don't have a very

42:50

good time of it. I mean,

42:52

Thomas Paine is one of the most famous

42:55

ones who makes the

42:57

mistake of allying himself with the

42:59

gianda because when he arrives in

43:01

Paris, having been hounded out of England, and

43:04

Thomas Paine is, of course, the author of

43:06

the Rights of Man in the English context,

43:08

a great pro-revolution figure who makes his

43:10

name during the American Revolution, he gets

43:12

hounded out of England as a dangerous

43:14

radical. Turns up in France, he's

43:16

actually elected to the National Convention, associates

43:19

himself with the gianda circle

43:22

because they are, in a sense, the

43:24

most visible, active, higher-profile

43:27

Republicans until late

43:29

1792, and then discover,

43:31

in a sense, that he's backed the wrong horse. None

43:34

of this is very easy for him because he really doesn't speak

43:36

French and ends up in prison

43:39

and might have been guillotined

43:41

if the terror hadn't ended when it did, and

43:44

then rather struggles to make his

43:46

way again. Rather disillusioned later

43:48

decades. So he's involved

43:50

there. There's a whole diplomatic core which

43:53

has written very interesting, very

43:55

cynical series of correspondence

43:58

about what's going on in France. The

44:00

American minister, Gouverneur Morris, is a

44:02

very interesting character. He's actually the

44:05

man who drafted the

44:07

American Constitution. He's written

44:09

in 1787. He's the man who actually

44:12

came up with the phrasing. And

44:14

then he's in France watching the Revolution.

44:16

He's really quite a snob. He

44:19

doesn't think any good will come out of French

44:21

republicanism. So again, you get a very interesting perspective

44:23

there. And again, there are

44:25

other writers. There are both male and female

44:27

visitors who get caught up in things. There

44:29

are Irish republicans,

44:33

Wolf Tone, for example, the great leader of the United Irishmen, spends

44:36

a lot of time in Paris. And

44:38

by the time he's there, a lot of it is in

44:40

the later 1790s where republican politics has

44:42

become very corrupt indeed in the absence of

44:44

Robespierre. They fall back into trains of corruption. And

44:49

so the fights to get anyone to take

44:51

an interest in Ireland, to launch invasion is

44:53

very much mixed up there. So

44:56

it is an international phenomenon, but it's

44:59

not one that really produces

45:01

a coherent international movement

45:03

to actually emulate what's going

45:05

on. I suppose related

45:07

to that question, but on the flip side,

45:09

this is a question we've had from the

45:12

Golden from Golden on Instagram. And they want

45:14

to know, did other nations attempt to stop

45:16

the terror? Well, yes. This

45:19

is again, where if you think about it from the point

45:21

of view of the French revolutionaries themselves the

45:24

primary concern of all the other powers

45:26

is to stop the revolution and the

45:28

terror and everything. Their

45:31

vision, which is dominated by sort

45:33

of ideological conflict, is

45:35

that from very early on in the process, the

45:38

king and queen themselves have been trying to

45:40

stir up a European coalition for

45:42

the purposes of destroying the revolution. And

45:45

when war comes in 1792 and when it expands in 1793,

45:47

these are inevitable consequences of

45:52

being ideologically at odds with the

45:55

crown heads of Europe. If

45:57

you have a view which is essentially Franco-centred

46:00

as they did, then all the

46:03

conflicts of the 1790s are about stopping

46:05

the terror, but the revolution much more

46:07

broadly about putting the king back on

46:09

the throne with the power he had 10

46:11

years earlier, and everyone else strung up

46:13

by the side of the road. If

46:16

you look at it from the point of view of

46:18

the diplomacy of the different European powers, it

46:20

is a much more complicated picture than that. Many

46:24

of them are essentially dragged into the

46:26

conflict against their will by France because

46:28

of expansionary mania by the spring of 93.

46:31

There's no real sense that Britain wanted

46:33

to be at war with France, as

46:36

it was from early William

46:38

Pitt had only just finished sorting out the

46:40

British finances after the American War. Didn't

46:43

really want to launch into another massive, unlimited

46:46

commitment of time and resources, but

46:49

they find themselves driven to it. They

46:52

are afraid of French ideas contaminating

46:54

their own country, and

46:56

they're all very quickly developing France

46:58

in the sense that Britain is

47:00

the primary ideological opponent, partly

47:03

because the British should be on their side.

47:06

The British are parliamentarians, they should

47:08

have had a revolution, everything should

47:10

have been fine there,

47:12

they're natural allies, so why are

47:14

they against them? Pitt's gold is

47:17

seen as travelling Europe, almost with

47:19

a mind of its own, stirring

47:22

up unrest everywhere. The

47:24

other side of it is to look into central Europe,

47:27

where the powers there are really

47:29

quite interesting, partitioning Poland throughout

47:31

this period, carving up Eastern

47:33

Europe. France is,

47:36

in some respects, almost a sideshow. Prussia,

47:39

for example, is only in the war from 1792

47:41

to 1795, pulls out very hastily when France

47:46

looks to be achieving some military dominance, so

47:49

it can safeguard its position further east.

47:52

The whole international process, the

47:54

closer you get to the centre of sort of

47:56

patriotic sentiment in France, the more it looks like

47:59

it's all about France. but it's also

48:01

all about other things as well. To

48:03

what extent was the terror a response

48:06

to pressure from ordinary citizens? It

48:09

puts itself forward in

48:11

that light. I think you can say one

48:14

of the things to bear in mind is that

48:17

there is what identifies as and

48:19

has been identified by historians as

48:21

a popular movement going on,

48:24

essentially in Paris, essentially

48:27

with taking on the image of

48:30

being the common people.

48:32

This is the idea of the song

48:34

to lot people who don't wear posh

48:36

people's knee bridges. But that

48:38

is a movement, not a social class. And

48:40

I think that's one of the, it's

48:43

a group of people who, certainly number

48:45

in the thousands, many of

48:47

whom are working for living, but

48:50

many in the leadership cadre of the group are not

48:52

working for living. Some of

48:54

them are prosperous businessmen and shopkeepers. Some

48:57

of them are people who are living off

48:59

of an independent income, rents and bonds and

49:01

things like this. Very few

49:03

of them are anything approaching what you would call

49:05

a working class in a

49:07

kind of proletarian sense. But they

49:10

can organize big demonstrations when they want

49:12

things. And the classic

49:14

example of this is the pressure over the

49:16

food supply. One of the things that's

49:18

gonna be the signature move of

49:20

the terror is to take control

49:23

of the food supply, to take control of

49:25

prices, to impose regulation

49:27

on all of this, to have what's called

49:29

from September 93, the

49:31

general maximum, where prices

49:33

of necessary goods and

49:36

the wages of the people who make them are

49:38

all controlled to contain inflation. That

49:42

is basically forced on the

49:44

national convention because it's absolutely

49:47

against their enlightenment

49:49

belief in free markets.

49:52

And the revolution since

49:54

789 has had this standing

49:56

conflict between politicians who believe

49:58

that these things are going to fall. have to be freed up and

50:02

crowds who know that

50:04

if you free things up there'll be

50:06

a famine, that there'll be speculation and

50:08

extortion and everything will be ruined because

50:10

that's a fixed part of their mentality

50:12

and has been for decades. So

50:15

you have a sort of irony in 1793 that there's massive

50:20

demonstrations, first in

50:22

August and then the beginning of September 1793, by this Parisian

50:26

popular movement, who've been able to stir

50:28

up very large numbers of people by

50:30

agitating for controls on

50:32

prices, which are in the

50:35

wider picture an essentially pre-revolutionary

50:37

way of doing things. They're

50:39

looking back to a paternal role of

50:41

the state which is very much

50:44

how it's understood from the middle ages onwards

50:47

and the political class, the people

50:49

in the convention, really

50:51

hate the general maximum. They

50:53

understand it to be an

50:55

illegitimate interference in

50:57

how economic things should happen. There's

51:00

a real back and forth with

51:03

this as they sort of try

51:05

and try and sort of slide around the general

51:07

maximum, sometimes in order to get

51:09

things done in terms of military contracting,

51:11

sometimes just because they oppose it in

51:13

principle, they oppose getting in the way

51:15

of private profit for the public good.

51:18

And that's the key area where there is

51:20

really a sense of a popular perspective. It's

51:23

a popular perspective that anyone in the last 50

51:25

years of French history

51:27

would have had because they've been

51:30

trying to institute free trade engrain since

51:32

the 1770s and everyone has always hated

51:34

it. So it's the

51:37

most traditional thing that radicals

51:39

could do is to agitate

51:41

for price controls and

51:43

they won't last very long. When you get past

51:45

the terror, they'll be abolished very quickly and then

51:47

there will be an actual famine just

51:49

to prove them right but it doesn't do them any good. If

51:52

one symbol comes out about the

51:54

tower which is synonymous for most people's

51:56

imaginations, it's the guillotine. And I was

51:59

wondering, if you could go into a

52:01

little bit about how that instrument of execution

52:03

came into being and why it has become

52:05

so synonymous in the popular imagination with the

52:07

terror. So the idea of

52:10

the guillotine, obviously the name is associated with

52:12

a chap called Dr. Guillotin, who

52:14

was a member of the original

52:16

National Assembly, a humanitarian, seeking

52:19

out a means to deal with the

52:21

fact that they couldn't agree to abolish

52:23

the death penalty in these

52:25

early years of the revolution. They agreed that

52:27

there shouldn't be sort of gruesome punishments,

52:30

fatal punishments inflicted on people of which

52:32

there were many. They agreed

52:34

that everyone should suffer the same penalty because

52:36

in the old days nobles were allowed to

52:38

have their heads cut off cleanly and everyone

52:40

else had to be very slowly hanged or

52:42

whatever. Robsphere was one of the

52:44

few people who spoke out for actually abolishing the death

52:46

penalty but didn't get very far. So

52:49

if they're going to have a death penalty, they

52:51

want it to be uniform and humane. And

52:54

so you get this idea that you can do this with a

52:56

machine. This is a very 18th century

52:58

idea. You just have a mechanism that does it.

53:01

And again, people have looked into the prehistory

53:03

of this and you can find sort of

53:05

proto guillotines existing at various points in time,

53:07

various places. I think there's one in Scotland,

53:09

there's something Germany. It's not completely out of

53:11

the blue original idea to have a falling

53:14

blade that decapitates people.

53:17

But it's introduced in the spring of

53:20

1792, I think just before

53:22

France goes to war. Again, in

53:24

the context where the law

53:26

and order is actually in crisis because they've

53:29

spent two and a half years trying to

53:31

rebuild the judicial system from scratch. And while

53:34

they were trying to rebuild it, there wasn't very much

53:36

judging going on. So there is

53:38

something of a sort of crisis, a fear of

53:40

crime, a fear that these things need to be

53:42

dealt with, that certainly the worst criminals, the murderers

53:44

and the bandits. Death is

53:46

now the only punishment for anybody

53:49

who's guilty of the most serious crimes and

53:51

the guillotine is the only legal way of

53:54

executing them. The aspiration would

53:56

have become a kind of boring,

53:58

normalized bureaucratic. thing.

54:01

But of course the fall of the monarchy changes all of

54:03

that. Only a few days

54:05

after the fall of the monarchy in the

54:07

middle of August 1792, they set up a

54:09

special tribunal, which is supposed

54:12

to sentence to death the

54:14

conspirators that they think were behind the need

54:16

to topple the monarchy, which does actually succeed

54:19

in passing a few death sentences. And

54:22

other people start to be executed for political crimes

54:24

later in that year in 1992. And

54:27

then it's really the execution of the

54:29

king using guillotine in front of a

54:31

huge crowd, which really cements

54:33

its position in the imagination that the

54:35

guillotine is the thing which has beheaded

54:38

the king, which makes it

54:40

a Republican symbol in a sense. The

54:43

guillotine, which is actually not a

54:45

very large object. It's only about six

54:47

feet high. The blade doesn't fall very

54:49

far. It starts to

54:51

be seen imaginatively as something bigger than

54:54

that, you know, and you get

54:56

caricatures and cartoons where the frame just sort

54:58

of disappears into the sky. Again,

55:00

sort of the idea that the blade is falling

55:02

as if falling from heaven. You know, there's a

55:05

kind of sort of gruesome or

55:07

quasi-religious aspect to it. And

55:10

the idea of it being something into which you

55:12

can sort of push people, feed

55:14

them, appeals to

55:16

a certain sort of vindictive quality again,

55:18

particularly amongst the leaders of the popular

55:20

movement, who are very good at saying

55:22

what they think ordinary people would say.

55:24

And they think ordinary people are quite

55:26

bloodthirsty. So they come out in

55:29

journalism and things with lots of very

55:31

bloodthirsty pronouncements of how important it is

55:33

to chop people's heads off on

55:36

a regular basis. It becomes associated

55:38

during the terror with the idea of it

55:40

being something that can travel around, that there'd

55:42

be like a guillotine, an ombulon, and you

55:44

know, almost walking guillotine, literally, but you know,

55:46

a guillotine that can be carted around from

55:49

place to place. And when it arrives and

55:51

it's set up, you know, again, you

55:53

feed people into it and they came out the other end dead. And

55:55

that's, that's a local situation dealt

55:57

with. It is understood as a kind of

56:00

machine of death that

56:02

is very evocative in

56:05

a context where people genuinely believe

56:07

that if you don't execute these

56:09

enemies they will execute you sooner

56:11

or later. There's all that

56:13

aspect of it which really pushes on the sense

56:16

of the people that go under the guillotine really

56:18

deserve what they're getting. The

56:20

machinery of execution in general has always accreted

56:22

legends around it. You get all sorts of

56:24

things going on in Paris. Obviously

56:27

there's a whole series of very, very

56:29

high profile executions, the king but then

56:31

also the queen, who has

56:33

legend have it her last words are I'm

56:35

sorry I didn't mean to do that because

56:37

she's trodden on someone's toe, she treads on

56:39

the executioner's toe and there are people who

56:41

literally think that she did that on purpose

56:43

so people would remember it. That's

56:46

the kind of sort of weird, cynical, gossipy

56:48

stuff that you get going on even in

56:50

the context of an execution. Very

56:52

famously there's Charlotte Corday, a young

56:55

woman who assassinates Mara, the

56:57

radical journalist, when she

56:59

is executed one of the assistant

57:02

executioners holds up her head as

57:04

is common but then swaps it

57:07

which is not common and then

57:09

the counter-revolutionary legend is that she

57:11

blushes her decapitated head, blushes

57:13

in shame and he is actually punished for

57:15

that because he shouldn't have done it. It

57:18

was a breach of protocol and

57:20

generally the guillotine is seen as something

57:22

which does calm down the process of

57:24

execution except interestingly when they

57:26

execute a bear who is a radical

57:29

journalist, one of the leaders of

57:31

the sconky lot who has this persona

57:33

called the perducen who fills

57:35

the pages of his newspaper with this

57:38

kind of bloodthirsty ranting and he is

57:40

actually mocked and ridiculed by the

57:42

executioner when he goes to the guillotine in the spring of

57:44

94 but he's like the

57:46

exception that proves the rule because he

57:48

was so keen on mocking other people in

57:50

print for going to the guillotine. Most

57:53

of the accounts we have even at the height

57:55

of the terror of people going to execution stress

57:57

that everyone involved wants

58:00

it to be this curiously dignified

58:02

process that no one has anything

58:05

to gain from people

58:07

screaming and running around. And

58:09

again, the counterpoint to that is the

58:12

execution of Rossbier and his colleagues. Rossbier

58:14

had been shot in the face and

58:16

was bandaged up and they had

58:19

to tear the bandages off to get

58:21

his head into the machine. So he

58:23

makes this terrible noise, this agonized scream,

58:26

which is only cut off by the falling

58:28

blade. And then, again, they

58:30

have to force him onto the

58:32

guillotine platform. So again, he's tortured in

58:34

that sense, in the last

58:36

seconds before his death. Several

58:38

of the other people involved are also

58:41

injured. So the execution of the Rossbierist

58:43

is actually one of the most disorderly

58:45

and brutal and at the

58:48

same time highly emblematic passages to

58:50

the guillotine. That

58:53

was David Andress, professor of

58:55

modern history at the University of

58:57

Portsmouth and the author of The

58:59

Terror, Civil War in the French

59:02

Revolution, which is published by Little

59:04

Brown. Thanks for listening. This case

59:06

was produced by David. A

59:14

collision between a Chinese jet and an

59:17

American spy plane. He came

59:19

and ran into our left wing. With

59:21

relations increasingly strained, what are the chances

59:23

of things spinning out of control? The

59:26

Western world was asleep. I'm

59:28

Gordon Carrera. I'll be exploring the friction

59:30

in this most important of relationships and

59:32

asking, has the West taken its eye

59:34

off the ball? You cannot

59:36

ignore China. From BBC Radio 4,

59:39

this is Shadow War, China and the

59:41

West. Listen wherever you get

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