707. The Terror: How The French Revolution Collapsed Into Chaos (Part 1)

23:29Dominic Sandbrook:So, you know, he's only kind of got himself to blame to some degree. And that tells you how toxic the situation has become. And it's so toxic precisely because France in 1793 is gripped by two massive existential crises. So the first one is economic meltdown. So France has had a succession of absolutely terrible harvests. The nationwide grain market has broken down. the government is running out of money to pay for the war against the austrians and the prussians they've been printing paper money the assinia as it's called they've got four billion of these assinia on the market in early 1793 and that has triggered this colossal inflation bread prices sugar and whatnot going through the roof there are shortages there are protests almost every day at markets there are women marching in the streets of paris it's not great i mean women are are really

24:22Tom Holland:a vital part of this story is because they kind of emerge as a huge force on the streets of paris over the spring of 1793 but also dumb just to say that these are exactly the circumstances that led to the revolution in the first place and the storming of the bastille and i suppose part of what makes the situation so toxic is that people particularly those who are very poor those who are on the verge of starvation are thinking, well, we've had the revolution. Things should have improved. They haven't improved. Therefore, someone must be to blame for the fact that they haven't improved. You know, there must be traitors.

24:57Tom Holland:And so it's generating, you know, it's fueling that mood of conspiracy that Marat is harnessing so effectively.

25:03Dominic Sandbrook:It totally is. And there's the emergence of a group in 1793 who are exploiting precisely this sentiment. They call the enraged, so the the enraged or the madmen so basically people on social media yeah they basically go around saying the working class poor are being betrayed we need state intervention we need massive price controls massive redistribution of wealth you know the revolution needs to go much further and the really disturbing thing about these enrages is they have mustaches and this is seen as a sign of kind of virile working class militancy and a lot of the sort of more middle class revolutionaries are very shocked by these people's moustaches.

25:45Dominic Sandbrook:Now the other big existential threat is the war. So the war, I mean the mad thing is the French started the war.

25:51Tom Holland:And also particularly the Girondins were massively keen on it weren't they and people like Rospierre were massively against it. So if the war goes badly then the Girondins are in real trouble.

26:02Dominic Sandbrook:Completely. the jondas started it they thought they wanted to export the ideals of the revolution they thought it would bring france together under their leadership they declared war on austria in april 1792 then the prussians joined in and this has basically went badly for france and it turned into a struggle for national survival now so far france's deadliest enemy britain has stayed out but british public opinion more certainly high political opinion was shocked by the execution of the King Louis XVI. William Pitt, the Prime Minister, called it the foulest and most atrocious act the world has ever seen.

26:41Dominic Sandbrook:And there was a sort of sentiment, I think, among the British political classes at the beginning of 1793. The French Revolution is now totally out of control. It's going to spread across its borders. It's a threat to world peace. And at some point, we're going to have to stop it. The extraordinary thing is that even though Britain is a very dangerous opponent, you know, with its finances and its industry and above all its navy the revolutionaries in paris are absolutely gagging for a chance to have a crack at the british so even before the execution of the king bonjour and deputy told the national convention he said the british empire is basically just waiting for us to come and conquer it we'll take india we'll take the caribbean it is on the ruins of the tower of london that we will sign the treaty which will establish the freedom of the world And once again, it's the convention, it's France that declares war first.

27:33Dominic Sandbrook:They declared war on Britain and the Dutch Republic on the 1st of May, 1793. The Montagnard deputy, Georges Couton, we can liberate Europe in six months and purge the earth of all tyrants. I mean, this is the way they talk, you know, this incredibly idealistic, impatient, kind of restless rhetoric.

27:50Tom Holland:But also that weird thing about the French Revolution that it's simultaneously nationalistic and universal in its ambitions and never quite decide between the two. No.

27:58Dominic Sandbrook:Well, I think they see the two as the same, don't they? Basically, everyone will turn into France, and that'll be great for them. So in practical terms, what this means is that France is now at war on almost every frontier. It's fighting Britain, Holland, Prussia, Austria, and soon it'll be fighting Spain as well. It's fighting Britain and later Spain in the Caribbean. It's also facing a massive slave rebellion, slave revolution, on the crucial sugar island of Saint

28:24Tom Holland:domain future haiti and because it's taken on britain it now risks the classic british technique in a war which is to use the navy to impose an economic blockade so that's not going to help with the french economy and also the british fleet can move to areas on the coast in france

28:47Dominic Sandbrook:that are counter-revolutionary exactly particularly in the south and the south and the west so their advances in danger of being completely embattled surrounded encircled and so on and so forth and to fight all these threats the military desperately needs more manpower so on the 24th of february 1793 the convention votes to draft 300 000 more men and it issues quotas to officials across the countryside this is the number of people you need to get and in rural areas this is colossally unpopular and this goes back to a point you made about the economy so the historian Timothy Tackett says, puts it this way.

29:23Dominic Sandbrook:He says, in the eyes of many rural citizens, the revolution had taken away their priests, killed their king, and raised their taxes. Now, the convention wanted to send them off to die in a war hundreds of kilometers from their homes, while many of those who had started and supported the war remained in their towns to count the taxes. So if you're a peasant, this is very, very alarming. And nowhere is this more contentious than in a region. So it's just south of Nantes when you look on the maps that sort of rural west central France on the Atlantic and this is called the Vendée and the Vendée is a very distinctive part of the country it's got an unusual landscape kind of woods and fields separated by this very very high hedgerows and people live in these tiny villages scattered across this landscape or in isolated farms the local aristocracy in the Vendée lived on the land they were quite close to the peasants by and large they had good relations with them the church as well played a massive part in the social life of this region it was basically the only institution that brought people together the only collective institution that gave their lives a sort of sense of community and when the revolution attacked the clergy in 1790 1791 getting them to sign loyalty oaths or swear loyalty oaths to the revolution people in the vende were very upset about it they said well who are these people in to tell us and our priests what to do to come and disrupt our way of life and this conscription order in 1793 is basically the final straw and in the first weeks of march 1793 the vaudea explodes and attacks on officials and the national guard escalate into this mass uprising and you've got all it basically unites all sectors of society so you've got peasants you've got priests you've got owners.

31:12Dominic Sandbrook:They arm themselves with scythes and pikes. They hide in all these woods and hedgerows, and they will kind of leap out in this kind of guerrilla insurgency to attack troops sent from Paris to put down the rising. But there's also an element of a kind of religious crusade about it. It reminds me a bit of, I don't know, the Pilgrimage of Grace and Under Henry VIII or something. You know, the Vondayans call themselves the Catholic and Royal Army. They wear religious images like the sacred heart on their coats and their rhetoric is quite moving i think quite stirring we are free men we want our priests back if we must die let them kill us in our own fields and all this kind of thing so the vondayans have risen up in paris however among the radicals who are in charge they are seen as barbaric and backward so one newspaper says they're an unholy alliance of vindictive lordlings wild priests game keepers without pity and fanatical peasants so this is basically everything the revolution is trying to you know eradicate that they cast the vondeans as a caricature you see that you the vindictive peasants is interesting though isn't it

32:26Tom Holland:because aristocrats priests um game keepers you can understand them being enemy of the people But if the peasantry aren't the people, then I don't really know what is. And there is, I guess, the kind of the emergence of metropolitan radicals feeling impatient with people in the country who are too conservative for their tastes. And that's a theme that will run through revolutions beyond the French Revolution, right? Yeah, completely.

32:56Dominic Sandbrook:I mean, Russia, 1920s, 1930s, exactly the same story. And it becomes a war, rather like, actually, in comparison with the Soviet Union. This becomes a campaign of horrific savagery, as we will see. We'll talk about this a little bit in future episodes. Massacres, reprisals, scorched earth campaign. I mean, to jump ahead, this campaign probably kills about a quarter of the population of the Vendée, maybe 200 ,000 people. And there's a long-running historiographical argument among French historians. Is it genocidal? Is it a kind of proto-genocide? Does it anticipate some of the horrors of the 20th century?

33:33Dominic Sandbrook:You know, it's a very, very impassioned debate. Anyway, so it's March 1793. You've got the economy. You've got the war. You've got the Vendee. The news from the Vendee has come in. Could things be any worse for the convention and the people running it? Guess what? They could, and they're about to get much worse. because as they're getting the first reports of the uprising in the Vendée, they're also getting news from the Flanders battlefront. So in the Low Countries, the French have done quite well. They've been pushing. Their commander is Charles-Francois Dumouriez. And Dumouriez used to be the Gérardin's foreign minister.

34:15Dominic Sandbrook:He was one of the great architects of the war. He saw it as a chance to kind of cement his own personal popularity. but he has been in bad odour recently with the convention because he has in when he's been conquering bits of what becomes belgium he's kind of seen as being soft on the local elites because he wants to kind of get them to cooperate he doesn't want to drive them away from his army and then a total disaster so on the 8th of march 1793 the austrians having been on the back foot launch a counter-offensive and they absolutely smash du murray's army at the battle of nevinden and du murray is pushed all the way back he has to withdraw all his troops from belgium and holland and at this point du murray thinks god this is a disaster and actually he thinks part of the reason we're losing this is because there's such chaos in paris and that these flipping oddballs are running the revolution he wants to do a sulla yeah or try to do what uh one of his old army colleagues marquis de lafayette general lafayette had thought of doing march on paris set myself up basically as a military dictator with restore a bit of order sort all this chaos out knock heads together correct he says it's the army's time now you know it's such a classic thing in history and he goes to his men and says will we march on paris and his men say no actually we won't I don't want to.

35:39Dominic Sandbrook:You're the problem, not the people in Paris. And so what Dumouriez does next confirms all the darkest suspicions of people like Marat and Robespierre. He rides to the Austrian lines on the 5th of April and he hands himself in along with a load of other senior officers, including the future French king, Louis-Philippe. So Dumouriez, the guy who was in charge of France's army has just gone over to the opposition and as one volunteer in the army writes to his mother who can we trust now this dumourier whom the french republic regarded as its savior has thrown off the mask so he's revealed himself to be a traitor so you might say well who could have seen this coming who indeed who indeed well we know who saw this coming the man who sees a traitor behind every mask and that is Jean-Paul Marat.

36:30Dominic Sandbrook:Marat had said two weeks ago I think Dumoury is probably a traitor and Dumoury has proved him right and so for Dumoury's allies in the Girondin faction this is a catastrophe. In Paris there are riots by the militants by the sans-gulottes attacking Girondin newspapers Girondin printers and so on. Georges Danton the earthy kind of Churchill figure Dominic Sandbrook of the French Revolution. Thank you. He'd been quite close to Dumouriez, he says, come on, enough of this now. The gloves have got to come off. There can be no further truce between the patriots and the cowards. And now there's a very telling moment.

37:06Dominic Sandbrook:So up until now, the deputies in the convention had immunity from prosecution. But the convention votes in the aftermath of Dumouriez's defection that their immunity can be lifted if they are suspected of plotting with the enemies of liberty, equality, and

37:23Tom Holland:republican government and danton plays a leading role in proposing and pushing that through doesn't he and a time will come when he may regret that there's there's a lot of irony in this series there's an awful lot of dramatic irony so dumourie has defected it's kicking off

37:41Dominic Sandbrook:in the vendee it's looking all bad with the economy and on the frontiers and everything there is this widespread sense of apocalyptic national emergency at this point march april 1793, an overriding obsession with enemies within, people like Dumouriez who are about to betray us.

38:00Tom Holland:When you say apocalyptic, I mean, this is still an unbelievably Catholic Christian country, even if atheists are starting to seize the commanding heights of the revolution. And the sense of an apocalypse of sheep and goats being divided up, good and evil, I think is hugely a part of the climate of the age. They don't think of it in overtly theological terms, but it is fundamentally theological, I think.

38:30Dominic Sandbrook:When you read the rhetoric, I mean, it's all good and evil, purity and impurity, all of that kind of thing. Absolutely. So anyway, this moment, March, April 1793, the historian Timothy Tackett says, this is the major turning point in the coming of the terror. So if you think of the reign of terror, the tumbrils, the guillotines, this is really the moment that sets this in motion. So what's behind this is that for four years, people like Marat have been saying there is a giant conspiracy of aristocrats and priests. And they say now, well, look, we've been proved right. We know the king and queen were in on it.

39:05Dominic Sandbrook:We know some of our generals were in on it, some of our top politicians. It is time now to take extreme measures against this conspiracy. And Tackett quotes the Montagnard deputy, Lazar Karno, who goes on to be the great organizer of the army. Karno says, at this point, we can never hope for a genuine peace with our enemies, neither with those inside nor those outside the nation. Either we pulverize them or we will be crushed by them. Any weakness will be fatal. And so it's in the next few weeks that they set up what become all the key institutions of the reign of terror. There's no blueprint.

39:42Dominic Sandbrook:There's no plan. Yeah, it's ad hoc, isn't it? I mean, important to emphasize that. They are making stuff up as they go along, But all of these things, they're putting in place, perhaps unwittingly, the pieces of the machine.

39:55Tom Holland:I mean, I think definitely unwittingly, because as we will see, so many of the people who are involved in setting up these institutions... End up being devoured by it. Well, it's Saturn devouring his children, isn't it?

40:05Dominic Sandbrook:It is. Completely it is. So to give you some examples, they set up the institution of what are called deputies on mission. so these are people who are sent out from the national convention basically to impose the will of the central government on provinces by force if necessary so you're the effect of you know you're the equivalent of a member of the house of representatives or a british mp or something and you are sent out to god knows where with the maybe with the some of the troops your job is to impose the national order on this remote part of france there's that there is on the 10th of march a revolutionary tribunal.

40:43Dominic Sandbrook:This is a court that will try people accused of political crimes. When the result is the death sentence, the death sentence has to be carried out within 24 hours and there is no right of appeal.

40:55Tom Holland:Yeah, and that's set up in the Palace of Justice, isn't it? Just down from Notre Dame. And in the basement, there are pre-existing cells, the conciergerie. And so the conciergerie will become the great holding pen for people who are arrested by this revolutionary tribunal.

41:14Dominic Sandbrook:And they know that the revolutionary tribunal with no right of appeal is going to be very, very severe. But they lean into that. Danton says, let us be terrible so the people will not have to be. In other words, what they're saying is, we cannot afford a return to the anarchy of the prison massacres. We're going to have mobs running through the streets. So basically, we're going to have to do this ourselves, and we are going to have to eliminate all the traitors. they want to export this across the country so they have surveillance committees in every commune in the country these surveillance committees will make lists of all the foreigners they will also compile a register of all adult citizens to mark off when people have done their civic duty and they will encourage people to report all counter-revolutionary activity although of course that's not really very tightly defined so if you're fancy if you fancy your neighbor's pig or something and you want to denounce him, this is your opportunity.

42:10Dominic Sandbrook:And the most famous of these institutions, the 6th of April, 1793, the Committee of Public Safety. And this has been set up to handle the different military emergencies. It is the key driver of the reign of terror. It wasn't actually conceived that way. It was actually proposed, ironically, by a girondin called Isna. You would know this better than anyone. It was modeled on the temporary dictatorships of ancient rome so am i right in saying that when rome was facing an existential threat you'd appoint cincinnatus or somebody from his plow and he would take over as a dictator yeah

42:45Tom Holland:for six months it's short it's a self-confined period of time that's what's crucial but the has complete control of the state to end the state of emergency so the committee of public

42:57Dominic Sandbrook:safety is modeled on this um its powers are renewed every month so every month the convention can choose whether or not to give it another lease of life. It always does. It has nine members at first, and its meetings are secret. And the person that dominates it initially is Danton. And Danton actually, at this point, is not on the more militant wing of the Montagnard faction. He is much more pragmatic. So in the first three months of the committee's existence, Danton is saying, let's have a look and see if we can make a deal with some of our enemies, the Prussians, for example.

43:35Tom Holland:Or the Austrians, right? I mean, it's often said that he has channels of communication to the Austrians.

43:40Dominic Sandbrook:And not only that, but making a deal with some of the provinces. So this is anathema to some of the revolutionaries. But Danton is like, do we need to drive everybody against us? You know, if people aren't in actual revolt already, we can talk to them, as we would to the Austrians or to the Prussians. we don't need to fight everybody all at once so he's trying to find pragmatic solutions while d 'enton is doing that though so remember we're still in april or so 1793 the factional feud between the girondins and the montagnards is reaching an absolute peak a sort of frenzy and our friend maha is in the thick of it he is laying into the girondins he says they are the criminal accomplices of royalty who every day seek to kindle the flames of civil war and the gilandans of course they're on the back foot now now their mate du marie has defected well not just mate one of their shining stars their ex-foreign minister yeah we said about how they'd scrapped the rule on uh deputies having immunity from prosecution the gilandans think we need to kind of strike back we need to assert ourselves and they decide they would use this rule change against the person they hate more than any other which is mara and on the 14th of april when a lot of these deputies have gone away from paris to go on mission to the provinces to impose the new order the gendarme move an indictment they charge mara with inciting and uprising against the convention and they're able to get it through because so many deputies are away and so now mara is effectively facing a it's like an impeachment trial he's facing a formal trial in front of the revolutionary tribunal and his first instinct is to go into hiding but after three days of hiding he thinks to himself it becomes clear to him the mood on the streets of paris is very much in his favor and so he hands himself into the police he says fine bring it on i'll face the trial and his trial is held at the palais de justice on the 24th of april and for the girondin it's a total fiasco the prosecutor who's a guy called fukier tanville we will hear more about him in future episodes he's a montagnar supporter and he lets mara basically hold court you know speak at length rant and rave mara says you know i did say things against the convention but my remarks have been taken out of context i'm the people's friend i want nothing more than the good of the nation blah blah blah the courtroom is full of his supporters the jury 10 people in the jury and it takes them um a few hours and they acquit him they say this played marat's brilliant why have you accused him and he is chaired out of the courtroom you know on people's shoulders he is crowned with roses and he's carried back into the convention by about 800 people chanting vive la republic vive marat so for marat this is actually you know it was a dark hour but it has turned into a stunning success his star has never been higher marat's on top of the world but for the Girondins this has been an absolute humiliation and they've got a lot of enemies in the radical clubs on the streets in the Paris Commune the kind of city government who are itching to get at them they can sense the Girondins weakness and then the next few days

47:01Tom Holland:they sharpen their knives to strike although of course Dominic they are not the only people who are sharpening a knife and in the second half we will meet someone else who's sharpening a knife and that is charlotte corday um but before that we will be finding out um what this clash with means for jean-paul marat see you after the break push your limits train with precision see the results at equinox that's high performance loving iconic spaces that inspire personal training backed by real data, unlimited group fitness classes from yoga and Pilates to strength and conditioning. Elevate your post-performance ritual with saunas, steam rooms, cold plunges, and more.

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48:00Hello.

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48:53Tom Holland:Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans. Hello everyone and welcome back to The Rest is History where it is the spring of 1793. France is at war. The countryside is in rebellion and the rivalry between the Girondins and the Montagnards, the rival factions in the National Convention, is reaching fever pitch. So Dominic, we heard before the break that the Girondins tried to convict Marat at the Revolutionary tribunal and comprehensively failed so they've shot their bolt what now the mood in the capital

49:31Dominic Sandbrook:is now incredibly incredibly febrile so the assignat the paper money is losing its value all the time the bread prices are going up on the 1st of may so not long after mara's acquittal a load of working class women invade the convention is this the um the society of revolutionary republican women yeah i think it is i mean there's loads of these women's radical clubs now that will end up being stamped out but they're thriving at this point in 1793 and a female activism a big part of the revolutionary story and these women say you know you're wasting a lot of time when you could actually be fixing grain prices helping the poor when are you going to take action the girondins are dead against this because the girondins you said they're kind of free free marketeers really and they say you know it's insane to fix prices that will just make things worse but they're outvoted in the convention another sign that they're losing their grip in the streets of paris of course the juror's reputation is an all-time low and people are making lists already of saying you know which the deputies that we want kicked out of the convention and on the 26th of may the son culotte the militants on the streets get the green light from the only person who really rivals Marat as their great darling.

50:51Dominic Sandbrook:And this is the man who will, of course, become the personification of the reign of terror, and that is Maximilien Robespierre. Robespierre goes to one of the radical clubs, the Jacobin Club, and he gives a speech and he says, When good faith and decency are trampled underfoot, the people must rise in insurrection. So it's a spectacle of a deputy encouraging an insurrection against his own legislature. A common thing, actually, in the French Revolution. So that is the signal they've been waiting for. And four nights later, in the early hours of the 31st of May, 1793, it's the sort of dead of night, and you hear the toxin, the great bell of Notre Dame, ringing out across Paris.

51:31Dominic Sandbrook:This is the signal.

51:32Tom Holland:I mean, I think that if there is a lesson in French history, it is that when you hear a toxin ringing out over Paris, you probably better go and hide in a cellar.

51:41Dominic Sandbrook:Completely. Just get rid of the bells. I mean, that's what I did them. anyway the toxin summons out the sans-culottes they install their own man who's a bloke called francois henriot the new head of the national guard in the capital the issue a proclamation saying paris is in a state a formal state of insurrection they close the city gates they fire warning cannons across the river seine and they surround the convention the convention has now moved from the riding school to the old court theater at the tuileries palace and for the next two days the sans-culottes surround effectively lay siege to the national convention so inside are all the deputies including lots of the girondin leaders and this stalemate lasts for two days and then the 2nd of june it reaches a climax so you now have thousands of national guardsmen with fixed bayonets surrounding the national convention and a crowd of about 50 000 people and on rio the guy who's taken over as head of the national guard sends in an ultimatum he says we want the surrender of 22 girondin members and the president of the convention says no we're not going to give up our colleagues and on rio sends a reply the messenger is told tell your effing president that he and his assembly can go themselves and if within one hour the 22 are not delivered we will blow them all up so the president of the convention decides he's going to try and lead all the deputies out but they try to walk outside in a big group and they're blocked by these blokes armed cavalrymen and onrio actually brings up his cannons at that point and he shouts very loudly sort of performatively to arms cannoneers to your guns the deputies which is perhaps not surprising, he'll go back, troop back inside.

53:33Dominic Sandbrook:Marat, by the way, is there, and he's screaming at them, hand over the traitors, give them what they want, give them the traitors. And showing the backbone and courage for which politicians have always been renowned, they decide they will actually hand over all the traitors. So they vote in favour of a Montagnard motion to place 29 Girondin members under suspension and house arrest. and it was later said that Mara had personally chosen some of the you know he'd added some of the 29 names to the list impossible to say how whether this is true or not by the way but it was widely believed by his critics and actually one of the names on the list is that bloke Pierre Vergniaud the guy who had made the speech about Saturn devouring his children and he is the only one of them you know he's the he's the only one who really reacts in a memorable way because once the um the motion goes through he stands and he says shall i offer you a glass of blood to slake your thirst that is that is memorable so quite a good comeback from him also just to say that

54:43Tom Holland:there are a lot of the most prominent uh girondins are not in the convention because they're out in the provinces and one of the key figures is monsieur roland who is the husband of madame roland the salinista and who'd been a minister under lou the 16th so he is at liberty at this

55:00Dominic Sandbrook:point yeah we'll come back to him won't we in a future episode and indeed to madame roland so just to pause here this coup the surrender of the girondin this is a seismic moment really in the history of the revolution so not for the last time in this story you have people who only a year or two before were very close close colleagues members of the same clubs basically giving up their friends their old friends now enemies to the fury of the mob of course for mara who didn't have any friends this is a brilliant moment so only a few weeks ago his jure and our enemies were trying to bring him down and now they have been purged and he and his allies are in the ascendant and as we've described the institutional machinery for the terror is already in place so he's very close to getting what he wants but the interesting thing about Mara is that at this point he vanishes he disappears from the convention and he's not seen in public now why it's because of his skin so not surprisingly he's been quite stressed in the last few weeks his skin has broken out he's covered in kind of separating sores and blisters what does his wife make of this she thinks it's gorgeous she loves it you see i reckon she'd probably have said it's a sign that he is a martyr for the revolution it's a sign that he's suffering and he's not one of these polished fops you know manicured kind of dandies he's a real man a real man has has massive bleeding sores all over himself correct exactly Exactly.

56:38Dominic Sandbrook:So Marat is holed up in his apartment, his house, in the Rue des Caudeliers. And he's in his lukewarm bath full of kaolin solution, apparently very good for you. And he's working on his newspaper on a kind of plank across the bathtub. So he's in his house, in his bath. His influence, though, is very great. The Montagnards are now in charge of the government. Great. however in the big provincial cities where of course the administrations were much more sympathetic to the girondin the news of this effectively this coup provokes a horrified reaction the most famous example is in lyon in the second city of france famous for silk weaving the montagnard always said oh lyon rose up against us because of a royalist conspiracy this is just not true in lyon lyon turns against the revolution and the people who who lead the uprising in lyon are the artisans and shopkeepers and sort of middling people who had normally been the bedrock of the revolution and they think it's gone too far they've been provoked by local extremists who've tried to set up their own kind of tribunals and things and rig elections and stuff and this escalates into a full-scale rebellion against what the people in lyon see as the tyranny of the paris radicals so it ends well i mean we'll have a lot more about lyon it basically ends horribly with siege with lots of guillotining lots of shooting and all of this so the result of this right we're in the summer of 1793 yet another ingredient so the war on the frontiers the economic meltdown the revolt in the vendee and now what historians call a federalist uprising in lots of provincial cities so lyon marseille bordeaux and so on led by the mercantile middle classes who had once been

58:24Tom Holland:you know the motor of the revolution oh i've been riding on a crocodile and now the crocodile's

58:30Dominic Sandbrook:trying to eat me whoever would have thought it exactly exactly now one of these places is a place in normandy called camp so camp even before the coup had turned against the convention and actually for that reason this is where some of the Girondin deputies had fled even before they could be arrested so there's about 20 of them in Caen Girondin deputies by the middle of June 1793 and they are saying Paris has been taken over by nutcases and brigands we should raise an army march on the capital kick out these madmen and on the 7th of July the Girondin organized a parade through the center of con 2500 volunteers marching with a military band and imagine the scene handsome town the parade marching past with a band and you know the camera sort of pans upwards and you see people watching on the balconies and it focuses in on one person on the balcony in particular and this is a very pretty young woman very short actually five foot one i don't see like marat she's a bit more um becoming exactly than marat and her name is charlotte corday so charlotte corday who's watching this parade she's 24 years old and she comes from a kind of minor aristocratic family in rural normandy she's actually descended from the 17th century playwright pierre cornet who wrote all these very incredibly boring plays that i had to study years ago about duty and honor and all about the romans classical classical plays exactly and charlotte corday she's not an ultra reactionary by any means she's convent schooled and she had grown up reading plutarch voltaire russo all the same books all the lads yeah but all the same books that the revolutionaries read and at first she liked the revolution she was a girondin she became horrified by the lurch towards violence.

1:00:33Dominic Sandbrook:She was shocked when a local priest who had given the last rites to her mother was kind of stripped of his living and then he was hunted down in the woods and guillotined. And this wasn't a religious thing from Charlotte. She doesn't seem to have been particularly pious. It was actually a personal thing. You know, he was close to the family. She was horrified by what happened to him. Anyway, the Jeanne d 'Ave turned up in Caen. They're making all these speeches in the town. They've got their headquarters right in the centre. she's very impressed she loves the gendin and she thinks i'd love to strike a blow for their cause she's an idealistic young woman and the man she decides will bear the brunt of this blow is the man who has dominated today's story he is jean-paul marat now we've already talked about how marat is a massive hate figure for the gendin he's particularly a hate figure in con because when he heard that con had turned against paris he said to the convention we should send in the sans-culottes with pitchforks scythes pikes guns and sabres and crush them meaning the people in con without mercy so in the streets of con there have been attacks on mara circulating pamphlets saying what a dog he is so in simon charmer's book citizens he quotes one example let mara's head fall and the republic is saved purge france of this man of blood mara sees the public safety only in a river of blood well then his own must flow for his head must fall to save

1:02:00Tom Holland:200 000 others and i suppose the thing that is what troubling for the girondin is that the rhetoric of that exactly echoes the rhetoric that had been used in the trial of louis the 16th to justify his execution this idea that there is someone you kill him and then you you uh you save the revolution very very tempting but it there's a slight quality of the royalist rhetoric about it

1:02:27Dominic Sandbrook:there maybe is but having said all that i think if you're as you on down at this point you think yeah let's just kill him yeah for sure but retrospectively it's it's not going to look good no i suppose not i'll tell you who looks good too it looks good to charlotte corday because as we said she's a descendant of corneille and all his plays about heroism and sacrifice and she has read her plutarch so she's read all about people assassinating other people you know in the name of the republic and so on and she thinks well why not me i could be a patriotic heroine i could i could give my life for my country and she decides that she will and on the 9th of july it's very hot day she writes a note to her father and she says daddy i'm going to england papa je vais on angleterre and then she gets on the coach for paris and she's got her copy of plutarch with her you know you can imagine her earnestly reading about fruitus yes yeah so the coach journey from con to paris takes two days and she arrives about midday on the 11th of july and she takes a room at the hotel de la providence which is very popular with visitors from normandy and her original plan was you know she could go as a spectator to the convention so many people did she could confront marat before the representatives of the nation and strike her blow there but she asks around and people say well marat hasn't been to the convention for weeks he's vanished no one you know he's been in his bath however the good news for her people say omara still you can still go and see him basically if you need his help or you're coming to make a denunciation of an enemy of the revolution he will see you i mean he'll be in the bath but he'll see you so friday the 12th of july charlotte drafts a manifesto explaining exactly why she's doing what she's doing she calls on the people of france to wake up she says i'm I'm here to rouse you against this monster.

1:04:18Dominic Sandbrook:I want to make the mountain, the Montagnard, tremble. I want to send a message that we won't stand for this sort of bloodshed, for this extremism, and I will be judged by posterity. My actions will be seen as legal because such a man is outside the law. And she also writes a note to Marat saying, I'd like to come and see you. And she says, I'm a massive patriot. I've come from Caen. I've got secret information. I want to do France's service. Can I come and see you? She gets no reply. The day goes by. The next day, the 13th of July, is a Saturday. And Paris, there are always loads of people coming at the weekends into Paris from the suburbs and the villages.

1:05:02Dominic Sandbrook:But they're expecting more people than usual, because tomorrow, of course, is the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, the 14th of July. The authorities have just organized a big festival they're launching yet another new constitution and they're going to have a big festival for it the city has been decorated with red white and blue you know the tricolor colors it's going to be a really hot day so it's sort of the temperature is rising people have started gathering early there are going to be executions uh there are nine people from orléans who had attacked deputies on mission and they're going to be guillotined so the crowds are very excited it's going to be a brilliant day basically great day's entertainment at about eight o 'clock in the morning charlotte corday leaves her hotel and she walks to the arcades of the palais royal lots of shops stalls she buys a newspaper and the newspaper tells her that the convention are likely to ask for death sentences for the the imprisoned giron their deputies she also buys a new hat she was wearing a white bonnet which was a characteristic dress of normandy she buys a black parisian hat with green ribbons and she goes into a shop called le cutelier badin a sort of cutlery shop and she buys a black handled kitchen knife with a big blade blade about 15 centimeters long between about 11 30 and 12 sometime at that point she arrives by a cab at mara's house in the rue des Cordilliers.

1:06:33Dominic Sandbrook:She doesn't though have an appointment and Mara's sister-in-law is there and Mara's sister-in-law says he's too ill to have any visitors today, I'll have to come back another day. So Charlotte goes back to her hotel and she writes a second letter and she says, I've come all this way from Caen, I actually have vital information about the security of the Republic. Furthermore, more I am being persecuted in the cause of liberty I am unhappy that should be enough to give me the right to your protection so she's written this letter the afternoon goes by and that evening at about half past six she takes another cab to the rue des cordeliers and she's got her letter and she's got the knife and as she arrives she sees the door to Mara's apartment is open and the reason is that a delivery man is taking in the newspapers and fresh bread baguettes surely and Charlotte starts to go upstairs and on the stairs she's intercepted by Mara's wife Simone

1:07:31Tom Holland:I mean you can understand why I mean if you find you know you're married to someone and there's a woman creeping up towards the bathroom where your husband is lying naked I think you'd feel justified and yeah but Mara often has visitors I think doesn't he I mean I suppose it depends

1:07:47Dominic Sandbrook:how beautiful the young Charlotte is Charlotte very beautiful of course I think we've established that so simon says what are you doing you know who let you in why are you coming upstairs and charlotte doesn't say she shouts she says i've got the names of girondin traitors because she notes she wants mara to hear and mara can hear the confusion from his bath and he says let her in let her in you know she goes into his bathroom this has always puzzled me i'm assuming he's mostly not visible under the you know the lip of the bath and the surface of the water because superating genitals it can't be a very attractive sight anyway he's in the bath he's tied a wet cloth around his head like a sort of turban and he's working on some paperwork on this plank across the bath and he says you know sit down my dear and charlotte sits down and she starts to tell him what's going on in Caen she says well they've turned up they're giving speeches all this and Simon his wife is a bit suspicious of all this unsurprisingly and she stays there as well listening so they're chatting for about 10 minutes and then 10 minutes in Marat says to Simon can you go and get me some more kaolin solution for my bath water I don't know why this is such a great thing but apparently it is and Simon goes out to get it and at this point Marat says okay let's cut to the chase give me the names of all the Jérôme d 'Incant and their supporters and Charlotte begins to recite the names of 18 people and when she's got to the end Marat says good in a few days I will have them all guillotined he's such a fun guy he's such a funster well as is Charlotte because at this point she gets to her feet from the chair she reaches into her dress she pulls out this kitchen knife and she plunges it deep into mara's chest and mara shrieks out he howls out to me my dear friend meaning to his wife but those are the last words he ever says immediately he sinks back into the water and there's blood pouring out of his chest and simon rushes back in with other people from the household there's a man called laurent who works on mara's paper and very ungallantly i think he he sees the opportunity to grab charlotte corday by the breasts and pushes her down onto the ground and holds her down while groping her which i think is poor from him and at this point either simone or her sister we don't know which starts basically punching charlotte in the face pummeling her but the neighbors then all rush in because they've heard the screaming and then the police rush in and basically drag them off charlotte the neighbors try to lift Mara from the tub to staunch the bleeding but it's no good the knife has gone through an artery it's pierced his lung and his heart he probably died within seconds basically just after he shouted out he probably died moments later now we'll come back to Mara first of all Charlotte Corday the police as I said were there almost straight away she's caught red-handed she's interrogated straight away and by an extraordinary coincidence one of the people who interrogated her is a guy called Jean-Baptiste Drouet.

1:11:03Dominic Sandbrook:And people who listened to one of our earlier French Revolution series will remember Drouet was the postmaster who had spotted Louis the 16th during the royal family's flight to Varennes. So he's now in Paris and he's on hand to interrogate her. And Charlotte is completely open. I mean, it's not like she can possibly deny doing it. She says, yeah, I did it. I came to Paris to Gilmarat. And they're like, well, who put you up to this and from the beginning she says i acted alone now meanwhile while she's saying all this there's this huge crowd gathering baying for blood and you know they really would have lynched charlotte on the spot had the police not been there one woman says is shouting i would like to rip her apart and eat her beat by bit by bit and drew a says no no no no no don't touch her because if you touch her, we will lose the links in the plot, which is an important point.

1:12:00Dominic Sandbrook:So they don't want a Jack Ruby style intervention. They don't. And so she's taken to the Abbey prison. The Abbey prison is where the September massacres of the prison inmates had begun. And she's questioned three times by officials of the Revolutionary Tribunal. They question her again and again. And it's always about this issue of the links in the plot. and this is because they are absolutely convinced that she must be part of a girondin conspiracy is that because she's a woman a young woman i think that's part of it unquestionably there's no doubt that they think that a mere woman cannot have acted alone it's just not possible for a woman to take the initiative in this way and to be so bold i suppose also they're massively

1:12:43Tom Holland:into conspiracy theories aren't they so it's like kennedy's assassination you know you can't have a lone actor it's got to be some sinister conspiracy behind it that but even more so

1:12:52Dominic Sandbrook:absolutely embedded in the political imagination of paris in 1793 is the notion of a foreign conspiracy and a conspiracy involving people enemies within as well as without so when something like this happens it must be part of the conspiracy in which foreigners aristocrats priests and girondin are all implicated there's a really telling exchange with a guy called montanay who is the president of the revolutionary tribunal and he says to her well who told you to do this and she says well nobody i alone conceived the plan and executed it and he says that's just not possible because you are telling us that you think marat is the cause of all the evil in france but marat is the man who has never ceased from unmasking traitors and conspirators so someone must have been lying to you about marat and who was that person and she says to this guy you're mad it is only in paris that people have eyes for marat in the other departments he is regarded as a monster but of course the revolutionary tribunal can't get their heads around that the failure of political imagination is such they cannot conceive that in the other parts of france people would think of marat as a bad man and they thought well it must be a conspiracy that's brainwashed this girl george cutan and montagnard i know we'll be talking about him next time he said it has been mathematically demonstrated that this monster to whom nature has given the form of a woman was sent by the conspirators of Kong.

1:14:18Dominic Sandbrook:Mathematically prove. I want to see that equation. So anyway, Charlotte's trial is on the 17th of July. The trial was six hours. The verdict have foregone conclusion. And it's a very moving moment, actually. They had gone through all her letters to try to find evidence of this conspiracy. and one of the letters they read out was a letter to her father. Forgive me, dear Papa, for having disposed of my existence without your permission. I have avenged many innocent victims. I have prevented many other disasters. One day, the people will lose their illusions and rejoice at being delivered from a tyrant.

1:14:55Dominic Sandbrook:Anyway, she's condemned to the guillotine. The sentence is going to be carried out immediately, as is the way with the Revolutionary Tribunal. But she actually has a last request. She's seen an officer of the National Guard, a man called Hawa, sketching her during the trial and she says could he paint my picture before i have my head cut off and permission is given and this guy how i came to her cell and painted her portrait before she was executed so this is the portrait that you see of her when you you google her and when the executioner sansan came to cut her hair before her death um she cut off one of the locks herself and she gave it to this guy how and she said take this as a souvenir of a poor dying woman and then she was loaded into the cart the tumbril taken to the guillotine at the place de creve and there's a huge crowd there to watch her die everybody said she died really well you know composed calm she'd known this was coming when the moment she got on the coach to paris she had known this would happen um people said you know her face was so calm that one would have said she was a statue not everybody dies well in the french revolution but she dies really well do you know

1:16:01Tom Holland:This fantastic story that's told about what happens when her head drops into the basket and the executioner goes to pick it up. And he supposedly holds it up to the crowd and gives her cheeks a slap because he's a Marat enthusiast. And it's said that she blushed. So still feeling, even though her head's been chopped off.

1:16:24Dominic Sandbrook:She's still demure. Still demure. Now, so that's Charlotte Corday. What about Marat? so Mara in death even more than life becomes this great symbol of revolutionary militancy he becomes a martyr for a sacred cause and I use those words very deliberately within hours of his death someone posted a poem on the door of his house people Mara is dead the lover of the fatherland your friend your sucker the hope of the afflicted has fallen beneath the blows of the withered horde Weep, but remember that he must be avenged. I feel it's always a bad sign in a revolution when people start writing poetry. Completely.

1:17:02Dominic Sandbrook:I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, there's a lot of artistic reaction, of course, to Mara's death. So the man they turn to is the artist Jacques-Louis David, who is a montagnard, who's the most famous, the most celebrated and influential painter in France.

1:17:19Tom Holland:Well, Dominic, we will be hearing about him in this week's bonus. with Laura coming and she'll be looking at David's career more generally because he is a remarkable figure and he's been kind of hovering on in the background of so much of the episodes that we've been doing on the French Revolution and so we're putting the camera on him the focus on him how can I hear that because I'd love to hear it you could join this thing called the rest history club and apparently there's a website the rest is history.com and you just go there and sign up and i gather there's a whole range of supplementary benefits as well i do like a

1:17:53Dominic Sandbrook:supplementary benefit to be fair so i'll probably do that i'll do that straight after doing this actually all right so david david organized the funeral and david wanted to turn it into this great political tableau a sort of roman public spectacle and his plan was he said i'm going to embalm marat and we will exhibit him in the cordelier convent uh former convent as a sort a classical martyr so we'll give him a crown of oak leaves he'll we'll design a roman style bed on which he will recline his pen will be in hand and we'll pin up his writings around there everyone says oh this is absolutely brilliant can't wait actually doing this is a nightmare marat that as soon as they get hold of the body david says oh jesus because basically it's covered in those sores in blisters and separating pusher and sores so they have to make him up to disguise his skin then when they prop him up on the uh on the bed mara is obviously dead he's a corpse and his tongue is lolling out madly from his mouth so they have to like cut his tongue cut it up and stuff just hold it in place they sew up his wound in his chest that started to gape and to sort of reek so they have to sew that up now there are also some claims i don't know how true this is actually that his arm had become dislocated in all the sort of toings and froings so they decide to just take his arm off completely and so on somebody else's arm an arm from another body

1:19:28Tom Holland:like frankenstein's monster it'd be a twist of it was charlotte corday's arm that is a massive twist with the knife with the knife yeah they sewed on this arm but when they

1:19:38Dominic Sandbrook:came back the next day the arm had fallen off and they kept having to sew it back on so they do that now that that's not even the biggest thing the biggest thing is that i've mentioned multiple times deliberately and people may not may have wondered why that it was very hot and mara's corpse has begun to rot in the heat so there's a terrible stench and they're having to spray Mara's body and indeed the surrounding room with perfume and vinegar the whole time but the stench is so disgusting that after a day and a half they give up and they say we're just gonna have to have the funeral now we're gonna give up on this so they have the funeral they have a torch lit procession there's loads of maidens in white robes they've taken out his heart and they have it in an urn one of the members of the club gives this massive rant and he lies down in front prostrates himself in front of the urn and he says i mean tom this is such tom holland bingo he says uh oh heart of mara sacri cur like jesus mara loved the people ardently like jesus mara detested nobles priests the rich the scoundrels like jesus he led a poor and frugal life their jesus was but a false prophet but mara is a god long live the heart of mara i mean that

1:20:57Tom Holland:is dominion bingo um and you know they suspend that urn with that with the heart of mara um from the ceiling of the cordelier club and the cordelier club was a franciscan convent so i mean the kind of the the christian undertows the french revolution when you look for them you see them everywhere

1:21:18Dominic Sandbrook:i mean they are everywhere i mean there's they have relics don't they have mara relics so you can buy all sorts of sort of locks of his hair you can buy merch you can buy plates you can buy little obelisks of mara women go and have the special mara haircuts which is insane because mara was such an unattractive person they renamed towns after him so montmartre was renamed Montmarat. Le Havre, the town of Le Havre, was renamed Le Havre Marat. I think the French should lean back into this, actually. I think visiting Montmarat. Montmarch was quite an annoying place with all sorts of people, caricature artists and things.

1:21:59Dominic Sandbrook:I think it was Montmarat. I know it's full of Marat impersonators. Sitting in baths. Yeah, mime artists performing the death of Marat. I'd definitely go to see that. So Marat is dead and now the descent into the terror becomes unstoppable. Because of course, if you are on the radical wing of the revolution, if you have this conspiratorial mindset, you say, look, this is it now. This is the final proof. We had the king and queen running away. We had the revelation that the king and queen were kind of plotting against us and the revolution. We had General Dumouriez defecting to the Austrians. Now, this proves basically no one can be trusted.

1:22:43Dominic Sandbrook:Any man or woman in the street that you pass could be part of the conspiracy walking around with a kitchen knife to stab a patriot. So in the next few days, the Girondin deputies who haven't fled the city are taken from house arrest and taken formally into prison. And everybody knows this isn't going to end well for them. However, the national emergency is far from over. So the Vendée is in flames. Lyon's in revolt the poor haven't got any bread the Royal Navy so finally Tom someone in this story that we can really root for the Royal Navy are blockading France's ports and the Austrians and the Prussians are advancing in the east so the question now is who on earth is going to save the republic now a year earlier France had been in a mess and they had looked at Danton but Danton is distracted.

1:23:32Dominic Sandbrook:His wife had just died. He's married again. He's married a 17-year-old. He's taken this child bride back to his native Champagne, and he's been out of town. Also, Danton's not quite in step with the new mood. He's a little bit too worldly, a bit too pragmatic, a bit too keen on deals and compromises.

1:23:54Tom Holland:Well, he's turned into a sentry's dad, hasn't he? relative to the more radical elements of the Jacobin Club.

1:24:00Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, he has. He doesn't have the icy pitiless clarity that the Montagnards are looking for. So actually, while he's away, they vote him off the Committee of Public Safety. Danton's a kind of busted flush. So the question is, who is going to replace him? And the answer comes 17 days later when a new member joins the Committee of Public Safety. And this man will become the embodiment of the reign of terror. And this man is, of course, Maximilien Robespierre.

1:24:33Tom Holland:So next time we will have a deep dive into his life, his character. Terror will become the order of the day. The carts will start rattling towards the guillotine in escalating numbers. And France will become ever more soaked in blood. And after that episode, we have another four epic episodes, one on the execution of Marie Antoinette, one on the fall of Danton, one on the attack on Christianity and one on the fall of Robespierre himself. And club members can hear all of them now and to join them just to reiterate the rest is history dot com. And you can also hear Leo coming, talking about the painting, David's painting, The Death of Marat.

1:25:21Tom Holland:And if you sign up at theresthistory.com, you will also be able to get our super soar away revolutionary newsletter absolutely free. But for now, au revoir.

1:25:31Dominic Sandbrook:Au revoir.

1:25:57Tom Holland:The Devil Wears Prada 2 is now streaming on Disney Plus and Hulu. We are digital. We are downloadable. We are streamable. The fashion event of the year is certified fresh. Pull yourself together. We have work to do. Critics say it's smart and witty and the perfect sequel. That's all. Get runway ready for The Devil Wears Prada 2 on Disney Plus and Hulu. Rated PG-13. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports.

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