708. The Terror: The Reign of Robespierre (Part 2)

22:57Tom Holland:And so that means that when in 1764, when Maximilien was only six, she dies, the impact is felt, I think, by awful children as a completely crushing blow. And Maximilien in particular was devastated. And throughout his adult life, whenever his mother was mentioned, tears would come to his eyes. He would completely tear up. Their father basically by now has vanished. He is not the kind of man who is prepared to shoulder the burden of looking after four motherless children. He vanishes from the scene. And so the children end up being divided up between kind of various relatives. So the two girls go to live with their paternal aunts.

23:41Tom Holland:And the two boys, Maximilien and Augustin, go to live with their paternal grandparents who are the brewers. And Peter McPhee, in his biography of Rovespierre, brilliant biography, writes that although born into a long line of lawyers and officials, Maximilien was now to be brought up in a milieu of manual work with the sounds of carts and workers shouting in the local Picard dialect in the Rue Renville. So on the one hand, perhaps this is giving him a sense of identification with the workers, people who are working with their hands. On the other hand, you can understand why he would perhaps have wanted to hold on to the outward signs of respectability.

24:21Tom Holland:Hence the clothes. So I think there is a kind of intriguing tension there. Yeah. And definitely it generates a sense of insecurity in him, as also does the fact that the same year that his mother dies so when he's six he gets smallpox and it leaves his face kind of

24:37Dominic Sandbrook:pockmarked so he's a little bit marginal maybe it feels a bit out of an outsider in doesn't quite fit you know he doesn't fit with the brewers yeah but equally the fact that he's been brought up by brewers means he doesn't quite fit with the middle class people that he aspires to join and the other thing of course he's not a funster is he well i think unsurprisingly and when you

24:58Tom Holland:think of that you know all the kind of tragedies he's been through he's not a funster he grows up a very earnest, anxious, reserved little boy. He's definitely not one of life's party animals. So his sister Charlotte, years later writing about his childhood, recalled that he very rarely played games and that when he was involved in the games, the chief thing that he was into was clarifying and insisting on the rules.

25:25Dominic Sandbrook:Oh, no, the worst kind of child.

25:28Tom Holland:Yeah. so again whether there is a clue there as to the role that he will he will adopt for himself in due course he's also and i i like this about him he's a great fan of the pigeon so like gordon carrera and myself yeah um pigeons and sparrows and he keeps them and and feeds them and kind of looks after them and his sisters were always begging him to be allowed to look after these pigeons. And Maximilien was very reluctant because he didn't trust them. And finally, he gives in and the girls inevitably leave Roche-Pierre's favourite pigeon outside in the garden. There's a storm and the pigeon dies.

26:06Tom Holland:And Charlotte recalled how at the news of this death, the tears of Maximilien flowed. So all these tears, this is the age of sentiment. Yeah. Death of a pigeon. Roche-Pierre is totally buying into that kind of sensibility.

26:22Dominic Sandbrook:Why would the pigeon die in a storm? That's what baffles me. Pigeons don't generally die in storms. Probably struck by lightning, I imagine. Struck by lightning?

26:31Tom Holland:I'm offering a thesis there. Okay. I don't know. I think history is silent on that. So he's potmarked. He's lost his mother. He's very earnest. He doesn't play games. He's lost his pigeons. You might think things are looking terrible for him. But actually, it's okay because he is brilliantly intelligent. He turns out to be an absolutely superb student. And he wins a scholarship to an elite Jesuit foundation. It's not actually being run by the Jesuits at this point because they've been expelled from France, but it still maintains that Jesuit ethos of emphasising education. And this is a school called the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris.

27:11Tom Holland:And previous alumni of this school had included Molière and Voltaire and also, intriguingly, the Marquis de Sardes. So he'd been there too. And I looked this up and the list of alumni who followed in Robespierre's Wake is amazing. So Victor Hugo, Sartre, Roland Barthes, Jacques Chirac.

27:33Dominic Sandbrook:Jacques Chirac, friend of the show.

27:35Tom Holland:A man who loves a quick shower.

27:37Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. Mr. Five Minutes or whatever it was called. I think it was three minutes, wasn't it?

27:42Tom Holland:Shower included, remember? Jacques Derrida. Okay. Thomas Pinkety. So, I mean, absolute roll call of famous French writers and intellectuals. Wow.

27:56Dominic Sandbrook:And Jacques Chirac. Very good. And when he's at the – it's when he's at the school that this incredibly famous mythologized moment happens, which so many people see as the absolute key to Rob Speier's career and, indeed, to the course of the French Revolution. So this is when he meets the royal couple. Well, tell the story, Tom, and tell me if it really is the key.

28:20Tom Holland:So Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette have gone to Reims to be anointed with the holy oil and to be crowned. And they're returning from their coronation. And the boys of the college Louis Le Grand have been preparing what sounds an unbelievably dull reception with lots of verse declamation in Latin. in. And Robespierre, as the prize student, has been entrusted with the task of giving them a ceremonial speech of welcome. And he has to wait outside for the royal coach to arrive. And it's bucketing down with rain. And he's kneeling, waiting for them to arrive. And the coach lumbers up. And because it's raining, the royal couple don't get out of the coach.

29:01Tom Holland:They just sit in the coach and kind of smile politely. They listen to this bedraggled schoolboy give what I'm sure it's very, very dull talk. And when it's delivered, they acknowledge the speech with kind of polite smiles. And then, you know, they give a signal and the carriage clatters off. And that's the end of it.

29:19Dominic Sandbrook:Hold on. So the version that I read sometimes is they didn't look at him. They don't care. They splash him with mud and water.

29:26Tom Holland:No, they behave as politely as they can, but they don't want to get wet. That's reasonable.

29:31Dominic Sandbrook:I don't think that's unreasonable.

29:33Tom Holland:But you can see that those stories that, you know, he gets splashed with mud and everything. This is being used to explain his hostility to the monarchy and his desire to bring down the old-search regime. I don't think this is true at all. I mean, I think it probably didn't help make him into a monarchist or anything like that. But I don't think it explains what is inspiring him in the revolution, because there are much, much more formative influences, as we will see. So Robson does very well at school. He qualifies as a lawyer and he returns to his hometown where he makes a name for himself as a friend of the poor.

30:07Tom Holland:He is always taking on the cases of people who can't afford legal representation. And so he makes a good name for himself. People see him as a virtuous, principled person, an admirable person. But having said that, I mean, he seems destined for a life of the utmost provincial obscurity. except that Robespierre himself, I think, is daring to dream. He's daring to dream of a better life and a better order for France. And the reason for this is the very familiar one, that he's been reading a lot of books.

30:43Dominic Sandbrook:Oh, that was a bad sign. But he's been reading very particular books, hasn't he? We had talked about Charlotte Corday, reading Plutarch and Cornet in the previous episode. Basically, everybody in the French Revolution has read the same books, and Robespierre has read all of them.

30:55Tom Holland:So back in the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes said that he would ban the reading of histories by the Greeks and the Romans because it just fostered rebellion and revolution against kings. And I think that everything that happens in the 18th century would have confirmed him in that view. So Robespierre, like Charlotte Gorday and like so many other stars of the revolution, is obsessed by classical history. He becomes a huge admirer of the virtues of the Greeks and the Romans, their love of country, their determination not to allow their fellow citizens to succumb to conspiracies by evil aristocrats.

31:36Tom Holland:And the archetype of this is Cicero, provincial upstart who comes to Rome and saves his country from Catiline, who is the archetype of a seedy aristocratic conspirator. And he is obsessed by this in a way that so many people are. He takes it very seriously and clearly identifies with Cicero very strongly. But the person he really loves, again, a very familiar name throughout this entire series, is Rousseau, the favourite philosopher of an entire generation of revolutionaries. And Robespierre claimed that he had gone to visit Rousseau in 1778. So he wrote, I saw you in your last days and this memory is a source of proud joy for me.

32:20Tom Holland:So scholars are unclear whether this is actually true or not. Rousseau is about to die. So the only way that Robespierre could have gone to see him, he's only 19, he would have had to skip school to go and see him. So there are lots of biographers of Robespierre who think this is unlikely, but it's not impossible. And even if he made it up, I mean, it's kind of tribute to how passionately devoted to Rousseau Robespierre is. And the reason that he loves Rousseau is that Rousseau defines for Robespierre the kind of the core principles that will underlie his politics throughout his entire life. And there are really three key aspects of Rousseau's philosophy that Robs Pierre comes to kind of treasure.

33:05Tom Holland:And the ultimate one of these, the kind of the non-negotiable conviction that Robs Pierre holds to throughout his entire life is that the common people are the absolute embodiment of virtue. And if that is the case, then it follows, as Rousseau puts it, and this is the second principle that Robespierre holds to, that the first of all laws is the well-being of the people. Nothing that does not contribute to the well-being of the people should be allowed in a virtuous state.

33:35Dominic Sandbrook:And that idealization of the people, capital P, so important to the French Revolution. We saw a little bit of a Marat, but Robespierre even more so completely.

33:43Tom Holland:And what What Robespierre also holds to very passionately, and again, he gets this from Rousseau, is that history will throw up certain individuals who are peculiarly qualified to voice the will of the people. So the volonté générale, as Rousseau calls it, which in turn means that the will of the people isn't necessarily to be identified with the opinions of the majority.

34:12Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, I love that. So that's the very convenient. The will of the people and what the majority of people think are two very different things.

34:20Tom Holland:Yes. And this, I mean, this will be a kind of a trend on the left, I guess, throughout its subsequent history. The people on the far left, you might say, are often very impatient with the people for not entirely corresponding to their sense of what the people should be. And Rospierre identifies very strongly with this notion. And I think it's probably not pushing the psychologising too far to say that Robespierre sees himself potentially as being such a person, someone who is qualified to articulate the will of the people.

34:54Dominic Sandbrook:Of course. And actually, if you are the very bright boy who's a slightly unusual fit, but has been brought up among the people, that might give you a sense of combined loyalty to them, but also perhaps a tiny element. I'm sure he would never have thought this himself of contempt for their views and a belief that he was better equipped to articulate what was good for them than they are themselves. Don't you think? Yeah, I'm sure he would never have thought of that consciously. No, but unconsciously he thinks, I know them. They are not maybe the best judges of their own best interests, but I do care about them and I am better equipped.

35:36Dominic Sandbrook:I really understand them in a way they don't understand themselves.

35:38Tom Holland:I mean, it's a pre-Marxist version of worrying about the false consciousness that the working masses have, and that perhaps it takes a brilliant intellectual to penetrate this and to see what really matters. Yeah. And that the mass of the people are unqualified to do that. And I do think that Robespierre kind of sees himself in those terms. And this is, I think, what explains why when the French Revolution erupts in 1789, he is desperate to be a part of it. So Ruth Skur, who wrote another biography of Robespierre, Fatal Purity, which is wonderfully well written. His recognition of this opportunity and the ferocity of his determination to see it was amazing.

36:17Tom Holland:He is determined to go to Versailles to be part of this great assembly of the various estates that Louis XVI has summoned. And so he gets elected. He goes to Versailles as an elected representative of the people of his hometown. town. But even though he's an elected representative, he is, of course, relative to lots of other people who are assembling in Versailles, basically a nobody. I mean, he's very earnest. He's very stiff. He seems to be without much charisma at all. And yet, over the course of the four years that follow the eruption of the revolution, he emerges to become one of the most celebrated figures in revolutionary France, admired and hated in equal measure.

37:05Tom Holland:And the measure of his rise to power is something that you mentioned in your previous episode, Dominic, that on the 27th of July, 1793, France is seemingly on the verge of disintegration. Robespierre is elected to this proto-dictatorial body, the Committee of Public Safety. And this means that he is now one of 10 men, soon to be 12, who have been appointed to protect the nation from invasion, from counter-revolution, from economic collapse, and in effect, try and save the revolution from imploding totally.

37:42Dominic Sandbrook:And why him? I mean, we described him very prim, very well read, maybe a little bit priggish, not exactly an obvious man for a national military and economic emergency. So what are the qualities that have led Robespierre to the top? What do people see in him?

38:02Tom Holland:Well, I think there are two in particular, and both of these have been on public display from his earliest days as a lawyer back in Arras. And the first of these is that he displays a remarkable consistency of principle. From the earliest days, he is kind of unswerving in his opinions. He doesn't trim, he doesn't tack, he doesn't alter them. And these principles are essentially a completely resolute commitment to popular sovereignty, to the will of the people, a profound sympathy for the people, a sense of identification with them, and an opposition to autocratic government. And the consistency with which he holds these principles makes him seem to both his friends and indeed his enemies very unusual.

38:55And it gives him a kind of austere reputation.

38:59Tom Holland:Even those who dislike him are forced to respect him. And this is then combined with an absolute commitment to his own ferociously high moral standards. He is unbribable. And again, this makes him pretty much unique among all the various French revolutionaries. Obvious contrast is with Danton, who is cheerfully, cheerfully corrupt. But basically, everyone is pocketing bribes left, right and centre. Robespierre never does. And again, this makes him seem so unusual to his admirers to kind of make him seem a unique figure. And again, it's kind of redolent of Plutarch, this idea of the heroes of the early Roman Republic, people who are completely austere in their personal habits, completely committed to principles of moral virtue.

39:50Tom Holland:And he serves, I think, the revolution as a model of what civic and revolutionary virtue could be and can be. And ever since May 1791, he's been given this magnificent nickname, the incorruptible.

40:04Dominic Sandbrook:And maybe this takes us back to his dress, doesn't it? Because, I mean, you talk about his consistency. Everybody else has changed what they, I mean, they've changed their principles, they've changed their politics, they've changed their factions, and they've changed their clothes to go along with it. Yes. He's always been himself and he'll never change. Hence the stockings, I guess.

40:23Tom Holland:He is not a man who is going to give up the fashions that he likes just to demonstrate his virtue. He doesn't need to do that. His virtue should be self-evident. And because he is seen as such an admirable person, he is the incorruptible. This reputation is going to prove an incredible asset for the Committee of Public Safety, because it serves as an assurance to good citizens everywhere that the committee shares in Robespierre's own moral probity. Robespierre's kind of complete commitment to the procedures of the committee, to its workings, is evident from the moment that he joins it. So he attends all its meetings assiduously.

41:01Tom Holland:He goes in at seven o 'clock in the morning to read and respond to dispatches. He returns after a long day of business at eight o 'clock in the evening. He often stays late into the night. And this is a huge commitment. And it means that with Robespierre as the kind of example of what these committee members are expected to do, the committee very rapidly becomes the kind of beating heart of the revolution. So its meetings are held in this green papered room in the Pavillon de Flore, which is a 17th century building that connected the Tuileries, where the convention had its kind of headquarters in the Louvre.

41:41Tom Holland:And inevitably, the Pavillon de Flore has been renamed. It's become the Pavillon de l 'Egalité, the Pavilion of Equality. And this room with its green wallpaper is basically now the nerve center of the revolution. and the mood in it is incredibly febrile. It's fraught. It's anxious. The average age of the committee members is 30. They're often absolutely tanked up on drink. There's a general mood of panic. Yeah. As well, there might be because basically everything that could go wrong seems to be going wrong. So we talked about it in the previous episode, military crisis, civil war, inflation, bread shortages.

42:21Tom Holland:Dominic, it's like Britain in 1974.

42:23Dominic Sandbrook:four uh that's fantastic tom that's a great comparison you're welcome who's marcia williams in this analogy uh the incorruptible doesn't have a marcy williams no he doesn't he's above all that i mean his incorruptibility is so useful at the time when people are looking for traitors because he is the one person nobody would ever suspect of being a traitor i mean at a point when you're saying you know du murier the girondin whoever behind the mask they were actually plotting all along finally we found a bloke that nobody would ever ever say that about yeah but he's not just there as a sort of um as a mascot is he he is there because he he has an idea of the way out of the crisis that is going to become incredibly potent in the next few weeks and

43:10Tom Holland:months yeah so he has an explanation for what's been going wrong but even more crucially he has a solution. So when you're in the midst of a crisis, you want someone who can give you what seems a plausible way out of it. And this is what Robespierre does. And it gradually enables him over the course of the weeks and the months that follow his ascension to the committee to take on an ever more preponderant role in it. And it will turn out that Robespierre isn't just a man of the utmost moral probity. Not just a man with an unrivalled insight into the pathologies of the revolution, but also, crucially, a man who is absolutely brilliant at politics, and in fact probably better at politics than any other revolutionary in France.

43:59Dominic Sandbrook:Crikey, that's a big claim. Well, we'll come back after the break and Tom will justify this extraordinary claim.

44:10Tom Holland:this episode is supported by anthropic the team behind claude now history's biggest leaps many

44:19Dominic Sandbrook:of them started as hard questions that people didn't want asked yeah there's a classic example of that tom at the end of the 15th century and the hard question in particular was what is out there beyond the atlantic ocean to the west and as you will know the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus, great pioneering voyage of discovery. And it is, of course, the Americas. So, you know, Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

44:54Tom Holland:Anthropic asked 100 ,000 people. And what came back wasn't just fear. There was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

45:11Dominic Sandbrook:Ask yours at claude.ai slash rest is history. And keep thinking.

45:20On that flight with 350 passengers.

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46:54Hi, everybody.

46:55Dominic Sandbrook:Welcome back to The Rest is History. It is the 26th of July, 1793. So we are 13 days after the murder of Merat. And this is the evening before Maximilien Robespierre joins the Committee of Public Safety. Let's zoom in on one house in Paris, in the rue Saint-Honoré. It's a small two-story house. It's a few minutes walk away from the Jacobin Club, where the radicals meet in the convent of the Jacobin. And this is the house where a cabinetmaker lives called Maurice Dupley and his family. He's a joiner, and he's also a very keen radical. And he has a lodger, and the name of that lodger is, of course, Maximilien Robespierre.

47:41Dominic Sandbrook:And Tom has been there for two years and he loves it, doesn't he? He loves the Duplets.

47:46Tom Holland:He does. He admires Maurice Duplet as a kind of example of the working classes for whom Ross-Pierre is fighting. But also there is a Madame Duplet. She has three daughters and they just fuss and fuss over Ross-Pierre. And he absolutely adores this. So to quote Charlotte, his sister, who was actually very jealous of the women in the Dupley family, they expressed towards him the most vivid interest and surrounded him with their thousand delicate concerns. He was extremely susceptible to all these sorts of things. So he doesn't just have one Marcia Williams, he's got three. But his relationship with them is above suspicion.

48:30Tom Holland:So pure. Purely platonic. And his own room is very, very Spartan, which is exactly how he likes it. So there's a bed, there's a writing table, there's some bookshelves, absolutely nothing else. So it is a suitably ascetic retreat for the incorruptible. Nobody ever hints at any impropriety in Robespierre's relationship with the women of the DuPlais family. Just going to emphasise that. So he's in his room. And that evening, he sits down at his desk and he ponders the terrible crisis that is facing France and the revolution. So there are foreign armies on French soil, the Austrians, the Prussians.

49:07Tom Holland:There is a British naval blockade. There is a mass insurrection in Vendée. We heard about that in the last episode. There are counter-revolutionary uprisings, federalist uprisings, historians call them, in cities that include Lyon, Marseille, and crucially, the great naval base of Toulon, where the British Navy is hovering on the margins. And of course, there are food shortages in Paris. And so there are demonstrations in the streets all the time. Robespierre contemplates this, and then he draws up, well, let's call it a catechism, You know, the kind of the religious quality of the most radical revolutionaries, I think, is very evident.

49:45Tom Holland:And this is an example. And what Robespierre is trying to do is to define the precise challenges that he will be facing as a member of the Committee of Public Safety, which he's going to be joining the following day. And so he writes, question, what is our aim? Answer, to provide governance for the benefit of the people. And the people, of course, for Robespierre are the great embodiment of virtue. And this is a principle that he's absorbed from Rousseau and which he will never abandon. This assumption that the poor are intrinsically good. They can do no wrong. But there is a problem, which is that France is facing massive popular insurrections in the provinces.

50:27Tom Holland:And so this requires Robespierre to answer an obvious question. if the people are intrinsically good, why are they behaving in such a way? Why are they refusing to behave in the selfless and patriotic manner that they probably should be if they are intrinsically virtuous? And Ross-Pierre's answer to this puzzle is that they are being kept in ignorance and poverty by the rich and the corrupt.

50:55Dominic Sandbrook:So it's a sort of version of our old friend false consciousness, but one that has been much more deliberately and malevolently contrived by this coalition of the enemies of France. And specifically of the poor.

51:11Tom Holland:So he's saying, you know, who are the chief obstacles to the enlightenment of the poor? The paid journalists who mislead them every day by shameless distortions. I'm very familiar with that argument, I have to say. That is very... So in other words, if only people weren't reading awful columnists in the Daily Mail, everything would be perfect. That's absolutely Robespierre's vibe. Robespierre also blames turncoat generals like Lafayette and Desmouriers, both of whom have defected from the revolution to foreign enemies. The British, who Robespierre describes as an insolent and vile people, and particularly their prime minister, William Pitt, who is seen as flooding France with gold.

51:57Tom Holland:And the temptation to blame everything that is happening on France, on Pitt's gold is a very strong one, to which revolutionaries will repeatedly succumb. And Robespierre also blames traitors and conspirators. And these are perhaps the most pernicious enemies of all, because these are monsters who wear the show of patriotism, but who secretly, beneath the surface, are working for the overthrow of the revolution.

52:23Dominic Sandbrook:And just on that, here's a mad thing. It is often said in the final months of 1793, early 1794, the more keen somebody appears to be on the revolution, the more likely it is that they are a traitor.

52:37Tom Holland:They're protesting too much. And so Robespierre draws up this list of all the enemies that France is facing. And he comes to the conclusion that all these perils, they're not just a kind of concatenation of distinct and separate crises, but rather the expression of a kind of omni-crisis, you might call it. A singular conspiracy that has multiple tentacles and that these tentacles are reaching out to throttle the revolution wherever it can get a grip. And there is a clarity to this perspective, a kind of a purity and starkness, which when he goes to join the Committee of Public Safety and presents it to them, his fellow members find very appealing.

53:30Tom Holland:Yeah. And in fact, probably this is why they've co-opted him.

53:33Dominic Sandbrook:Well, this idea of the omni-conspiracy, you know, that everything is related and that absolutely everything comes back to this conspiracy. This is going to run through this episode and the next four episodes. You know, this is what explains his motivation and that of some of his colleagues, that they genuinely believe it, don't they? Yeah. They have fallen down the YouTube rabbit hole, and they genuinely think that these people, these people, these people, who actually don't know each other at all, are all working in one plot, and actually William Pierce is paying for it.

54:06Tom Holland:Yeah, that's exactly what he thinks. And because of his moral reputation, and because of the clarity with which he expresses it, I mean, he's not accepted immediately as the leader of the committee, and his fellow members don't agree with him on every point. But it does mean that his understanding of the crisis facing the revolution and what it's taken to fight it becomes increasingly influential. Well, it's very simple. It's very simple. It's very attractive. Yeah, because a simple policy is always the most welcome. Yeah. You don't want to faff around with dealing with multiple contingencies.

54:39Tom Holland:You want a nice, clear answer that explains everything.

54:43Dominic Sandbrook:Completely.

54:44Tom Holland:And so there are two men on the committee in particular who are massive Robespierre fans. And let's just look at them because they're going to play an important role in the story that we're going to be telling over the course of the terror. So the first of these, Dominic, you quoted him several times in episode one. It's a guy called Georges Couton. So he's 38, so three years older than Robespierre when Robespierre joins the committee. And he's a lawyer from the Averne in the south of France. And all his life he had suffered from bad joints, bad sinews. And unfortunately, by 1793, he's effectively paralysed below the waist.

55:20Tom Holland:So he's confined to a wheelchair. And what had caused this, his doctors had diagnosed meningitis. But Couton himself blamed this condition on having had too much sex as a young man. And whether he says that because it sounds slightly more glamorous explanation for his condition than meningitis, I don't know whether he genuinely believed it. Did that weaken his joints? Did that also explain the bad joints? I don't know. I wasn't aware that was a consequence of it, but maybe it is. Listeners can absorb that lesson as they wish.

55:51Dominic Sandbrook:I mean, you think he's a lovely man, don't you, this guy Couton?

55:53Tom Holland:I don't. I'm reporting the general consensus on Couton, which is people find him very, in private, charming, affable. Like Roespierre, he's a bit of a sentimentalist, but unlike Roespierre, he has a sense of humour. He's a fun person to be with.

56:08Dominic Sandbrook:So he's a funster. Great.

56:10Tom Holland:He's a funster, but as a politician, he completely buys into Robespierre's diagnosis and the cure. The other big Robespierre fan on the committee is perhaps the most glamorous of all its members. And this is a guy who's only 25, so the baby of the committee. And this is a guy called Louis Antoine de Saint-Just. And he's very dandy-ish, very handsome, kind of rock star vibe. He's like a kind of young Mick Jagger. Long hair. Long hair. Loves to sing an Italian aria. He's always doing that. But he's also very, very chill, very self-disciplined, implacably committed to his values, to his beliefs in a very Robespierre fashion.

56:56Tom Holland:And in fact, he has been very influenced by Robespierre. So he had written to the great man back in 1790, actually when Robespierre wasn't really a great man. He kind of talent spotted him at a very early age. And Saint-Just had written to Robespierre, I do not know you, but you are a great man. You are not merely the deputy of a province. You are the deputy of the republic and of mankind. And you can imagine how this goes down with Robespierre. He thinks this is brilliant. Yeah, of course. So he and Saint-Just become very close. But I think Saint-Just is actually much more intellectually formidable than Robespierre.

57:32Tom Holland:And he becomes the great ideologue of the revolution at its most violent. And he will come to be given this nickname, the Archangel of Terror, which I think brilliantly conveys the sense of glamour that comes to attach itself to him. And Saint-Just is the model for almost the kind of the Byronic terrorist that haunts the pages of Dostoevsky or people like that. The sense that there is a poetry in terror that risks consuming the world.

58:01Dominic Sandbrook:He's like somebody from the Bader Meinhof group or some American fringe group in the 1970s. Long hair, he's quite cool. He's terrifying. He's ruthless. He's cold-blooded. Well, he's simultaneously cold when it comes to condemning other people to death, but there is something about him that gets other people very excited.

58:20Tom Holland:But I think also in the 19th and then into the 20th century, what gives him this glamour is the sense that he, more than perhaps anybody else involved in the revolution, is a precursor of communist revolution. Yes, completely. He's an avatar of what is to come. So Rospier has these two very, very charismatic allies, and they obviously provide him with political support on the committee. Rospier has his own sense of destiny and of self-assurance. And so he comes to take an ever more commanding position on the committee. And already only a few days after he has joined the committee, an observer at one of their meetings, could describe Robespierre's colleagues, and I quote, as silent in the face of his words and his principles.

59:07Dominic Sandbrook:So these words and principles, I mean, what is he saying? He's talking about the people, presumably. He's talking about how much he believes in them. He's talking about the conspiracy. But what else?

59:17Tom Holland:Well, I think his fundamental principles are admirable ones. He has a firm faith in democracy and in constitutional government. And Dominic, you mentioned very briefly in the first episode that a new constitution was being celebrated as Charlotte Corday arrived in Paris. And this constitution had been drawn up by Robespierre, abetted by Saint-Just and Couton. And they'd done it in record time. They'd drawn it up in early June. And its provisions were ones that Robespierre absolutely believed in. It offers a commitment to universal male suffrage without any qualification, free public education, which is to be funded by progressive taxation.

1:00:03Tom Holland:And it declares as a matter of national principle that the state has a duty of care towards its most unfortunate citizens. So this is, and I don't think it's an anachronism to use this phrase, the most progressive constitution that history has ever seen up to this point. I mean, it's the kind of thing that -

1:00:27Dominic Sandbrook:Progressives in any Western state today would very happily vote for, I think. And the French people themselves vote for it, don't they? They have a referendum and by a massive majority, they endorse it. They do.

1:00:38Tom Holland:So this is held throughout June and July. And the results are announced on the 10th of August, which is the anniversary of the abolition of the monarchy. And it turns out that almost 2 million people have voted in favour of it and only 11 ,600 against it. And so Robespierre is delighted. It's now been proven that he is the voice of the people. They completely back him. And since he essentially is the author of this constitution, of course, he wants to see it put into action. The problem is that he feels that France is not yet ready for it, not with the revolution being menaced by a conspiracy that threatens to destroy it altogether.

1:01:17Tom Holland:And so he says, what we must do is first defeat the conspiracy and then introduce the constitution. And sure enough, in the event, so on the 10th of September, 1793, the constitution will end up being officially suspended. Yeah. And Robespierre completely backs this. And it's due reflection of the fact that the revolution is facing massive crisis of challenges everywhere. and Robespierre feels that the focus should be not in introducing the constitution, but rather on defeating this kind of hydra-headed conspiracy that is threatening to destroy it completely.

1:01:57Dominic Sandbrook:But this brings us, doesn't it, Tom, to the terror, to the reign of terror. So how to defeat the conspiracy. And his strategy here is implacable and ruthless. And I mean, am I Why exaggerating, do you think, to describe it as he's going to mobilise all the resources of society, effectively every man, woman and child, in a national effort to root out conspiracy and any deviation from the path of revolutionary righteousness?

1:02:25Tom Holland:Well, if you were going to defeat a conspiracy that is menacing the people, you need the people in their entirety to defeat it. So let me read what he wrote in the catechism that he was drawing up on the evening before he joined the Committee of Public Safety. And this is a very brutal prescription for ending the crisis. So he wrote, how can we end the civil war by punishing traitors and conspirators, especially those deputies and administrators who are to blame? By sending Patriot troops under Patriot leaders to reduce the aristocrats of Lyon, Marseille, Toulon, the Vendée, and all other districts where the banner of royalism and rebellion has been raised.

1:03:06Tom Holland:And by making a terrible example of all the criminals who have outraged liberty and spilt the blood of Patriots. And that is a potentially exterminatory policy. And it is very obviously one that contradicts Robespierre's deeply held and oft-expressed opposition to capital punishment. And so listeners may be wondering, well, what impact does this have on his reputation for unyielding principle? And the answer is, it has no impact whatsoever. And the reason for this is that even as Robespierre has been saying he's opposed to the death penalty, he has also right from the very beginning of the revolution back in 1789, been arguing that to live through a revolution changes everything.

1:03:59Tom Holland:That there might come a time when civilized norms would need to be suspended and that the end must justify the means. And because he has been arguing this since 1789, at a time where this prescription was unthinkable to most enthusiasts for the revolution, it gives him the moral authority to push this policy and not to seem like he's just kind of dreamt it up as a way of buttressing his own power. So as late as the trial of Louis XVI, for which Rob Speer had voted, he'd expressed his hope that Louis' execution would be the last that the revolution would require, that there would be no need for the state to mandate the putting to death of any further person.

1:04:50Tom Holland:But as you said in the previous episode, the thing that changes everything is the defection of Du Maurier, this former Girondin minister who had won great victories for the French Republic, but then had kind of turned coat and gone over to the enemies of France, and which had been interpreted by Robespierre as by Jacobin, Montagnard and people like that as a potentially mortal blow to the revolution. And because it's a potentially mortal blow, that means that those who are responsible for it cannot possibly be treated with mercy. So to quote Robespierre, for every attempt made against the security of the state or the liberty, equality, unity and indivisibility of the republic, capital punishment is now the only appropriate punishment.

1:05:34Tom Holland:And people understand that this goes against his opposition to capital punishment, but they kind of respect the fact that he's prepared to sacrifice that principle on the much greater principle, which is that the revolution must be saved. And so he's not seen as someone who is kind of shifting his position. He's being seen as someone who is cleaving to the ultimate needs of the revolution, even if that comes as moral cost to himself.

1:06:04Dominic Sandbrook:I mean, one of the points actually is that in the next few months, he and Saint-Jus spend a lot of time making speeches to explain their rationale. One of the points they make is that if you oppose the government, if you're undermining the national war effort, and therefore you're obviously working for the foreign conspiracy, you don't really count as a citizen because true citizens would be with us. And if you are not a citizen, then all our talk of, despite their idea that the human rights stuff is universal, they sort of have their cake and eat it. Because they say, if you're not a citizen and you're a foreign traitor, then all the right stuff doesn't apply to you.

1:06:38Dominic Sandbrook:You don't have any rights under the law. So we can do whatever we want to you. The citizenship depends on, as it were, political correctness.

1:06:45Tom Holland:Well, virtue, I think they do explicitly say that kind of virtue without teeth is worth nothing. Of course, yes. And that therefore, terror is a manifestation of virtue. I mean, we'll probably come to this when we look at what happens with Danton. But this idea that terror is a manifestation of virtue, this is a principle that is starting to evolve across the summer of 1793. And interestingly, its initial focus is in the field of military affairs, which is absolutely not Robespierre's vibe at all. I mean, he has no experience of military matters whatsoever. But he supports the sending on the 4th of August of twin armies to crush insurrections in the two key counter-revolutionary outbreaks, one in Lyon, one in Marseille.

1:07:34Tom Holland:And Lyon is invested on the 7th of August and the siege of that city will drag on for months. But Marseille is reduced to obedience very rapidly. So it's occupied on the 25th of August and there are mass reprisals and Marseille itself loses its name. And it's kind of renamed Ville Sans Norme, so kind of the town without a name. And two days before Marseille capitulates to the forces of the revolution, the National Convention had taken a massive, massive step, a step that will resonate not just through the history of the revolution, but through the entire future of industrial warfare. They enact a levee en masse.

1:08:15Tom Holland:So this is the first mass conscription of the modern age. And its prescription, I mean, is people who have read about the war efforts of the competence in the First or Second World Wars will recognise this. So it says the young men shall go to battle. The married men shall forge arms and transport provision. The women shall make tents and clothes and shall serve in the hospitals. The children shall turn old linen into lint. The old men shall repair to the public places to stimulate the courage of the warriors and preach the unity of the republic and hatred of kings. So it is a seismic moment for the first time.

1:08:51Tom Holland:An entire nation is being summoned to arms. And in the long run, this levee en masse will make France effectively invincible in battle for decades because France has by far the largest reserves of manpower of any country in Europe. And so by summoning it to arms, it makes itself completely irresistible in battle.

1:09:13Dominic Sandbrook:This is the bedrock, the foundation stone in the Napoleonic Empire.

1:09:16Tom Holland:Yes, it is. But the immediate circumstances in which this levee is summoned, it's not at all obvious that this policy is going to work. So as August turns to September in 1793, things in Paris are becoming very grim. There's no bread. Inflation is going through the roof. Even Roespierre can't afford to buy his beloved silk stockings. So you know that things are are getting very bad. And then on the 2nd of September comes completely devastating news. And this is news from Toulon, the great naval base on the South Coast. And this is that the counter-revolutionaries surrendered the great port to the British of all people.

1:10:02Tom Holland:So we talked about this in our series on Nelson, and we saw it from the British perspective. But from the French perspective the loss of this key naval base traitors have betrayed it to the royal navy of all forces it's completely devastating and so unsurprisingly in paris there is a massive new wave of paranoia and starving mobs take to the streets the enrage you talked about in the previous episode the enraged oh yeah mustaches people with their bristling mustaches terrifying And one of their particular leaders, who is a seasoned radical named Gaspard Chaumet, he puts into words their motivation in a great public speech.

1:10:45Tom Holland:Every day we learn of new trees and new crimes. Every day we discover the emergence of new plots. And these words carry massive weight with the sans-culottes and the enragé because Chaumet is not some nobody from the slums. He is effectively the chief legal and administrative officer in the Paris Commune, which is basically the municipal government of the capital. And on the 5th of September, Chaumet leads a march on the convention. So this is the day after he'd given that rabble-rousing speech. and a great crowd of mustachioed oragés follow him, cheering, singing patriotic songs, waving slogans and banners, war on tyrants, war on aristocrats, all of that.

1:11:33Tom Holland:And they arrive in the convention and Chomet leads them on a kind of invasion of the convention. And inside, he delivers a petition on behalf of the demonstrators who are massed at his back. And then he gives a lengthy speech. And when he finishes this speech, up stands Barret, and he gives that momentous slogan with which we began this episode. Let terror be the order of the day. And Barret goes on to say, let us be in revolution because everywhere counter-revolution is being woven by our enemies. The blade of the law should hover over all the guilty. Now, Robespierre, he is president of the convention at the time.

1:12:17Tom Holland:he actually finds the invasion of the petitioners unsettling rather than inspiring. He's a stickler for propriety. He doesn't really approve of this action from the streets. But with his kind of customary acuity, he's very quick to take advantage of this proclamation that terror should be the order of the day. As we said, it doesn't become an official motion of the convention, but it's

1:12:44Dominic Sandbrook:taken on board by the committee. And isn't this just a brilliant example of the way in which, rather than necessarily the whole business being directed from the top, there are radical images from the streets. And part of the process of institutionalising the terror is actually saying, well, we don't want mobs roaming around the streets, lynching people and stuff. We want to centralise it, bureaucratise it. We want it done on a proper basis. And that's what Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety are really all about.

1:13:10Tom Holland:Yeah, they're saying, okay, you want terror and we agree. The needs of the Republic demand it. Let's provide the legal instruments that will enable us to enforce it rather than having mobs going around murdering people in prisons. That's basically it. That's their rationale. And I think one shouldn't be cynical about it. They think that this is for the best, I think. So what does this mean in practice? So on the 5th of September, they split up the Revolutionary Tribunal, which had been established a few months previously to try political prisoners. They split it into four concurrent chambers, which means that they can expedite the processing of cases.

1:13:49Tom Holland:They decree that the judges and jurors who are trying these cases should be appointed by the committee themselves. So that means that they can vet who's going to be on these juries. And following this, unsurprisingly, the acquittal rate drops precipitously. So it increasingly becomes very unusual to be acquitted. And then on the 17th of September, the key development, the law of suspects, it's called. Very notorious process of legislation because it vastly broadens the category of person who is liable for arrest. So just to go through people who can now be arraigned under this law of suspects, nobles who had displayed a lack of patriotism and revolutionary zeal, émigrés, so people who had fled abroad, and government employees who have been discharged from office.

1:14:45Tom Holland:And so there are quite a few of those. Anyone who lacks a certificate of good citizenship, and this certificate was something that is issued by the revolutionary authorities to serve as an identity card. But inevitably, it has come to serve as well as a kind of an official stamp of ideological purity. If you don't have one, then you are, by definition, a counter-revolutionary. So you need one. Anyone who fails to demonstrate a satisfactory discharge of their civic duties. I mean, again, if you want to get rid of someone, you could apply that to almost anyone. And then most sweepingly of all, and I quote, those who by their conduct, relations or language spoken or written have shown themselves partisans of tyranny.

1:15:30Tom Holland:So this is a sweeping, I mean, literally terrifying law. But of course, for true patriots, that's the point of it. That's what it's serving. And Tackett draws on the diaries of this woman, Rosalie Julien, who's the mother of one of Robespierre's agents out in the provinces. And she thinks the law of suspects is brilliant. She absolutely loves it. And she writes to one of her sons, It is so necessary for the security of the state that even those who are innocent victims cannot complain if they are truly Republican. So in other words, you know, you get convicted, sent to the guillotine. You shouldn't moan about it, but just reflect that you're serving the cause of the people.

1:16:11Dominic Sandbrook:We've heard this so many times in history in similar circumstances. You know, if you are innocent, you have nothing to fear. And if you have something to fear, if you're frightened, well, that just shows you're guilty.

1:16:23Tom Holland:I think that reflects the mood of complete paranoia that is governing not just the committee itself, not just the convention, but the streets of Paris. A sense that there are traitors and conspirators everywhere and that it's only by really violent repression that the revolution can be saved. And again, I mean, anyone who has seen the operations of social media today will kind of recognize a very pale echo of that mood, I think.

1:16:53Dominic Sandbrook:When the mob moves, the mob moves. If you have been cancelled, it just shows that you were right to be cancelled in the first place. But you know what? The thing is, it works.

1:17:03Tom Holland:Yeah. The revolution is saved. The terror serves the purpose for which it has been introduced. A key moment comes on the 6th of October when Lyon, the second city of France, it's been under siege for two months. It finally falls. And the Committee of Public Safety decree mass executions and the destruction of all the buildings in the city that are not owned by the people. And Robespierre, echoing a line in Tacitus, declares epigrammatically, Lyon is no more. And Couton, so the guy who had too much sex and got confined to a wheelchair as a result, and he's the committee's man on the scene, he wants to go even further and deport vast swathes of the population, which he sees as kind of incorrigibly counter-revolutionary.

1:17:52Tom Holland:And he writes to Robespierre and says, you know, they're so counter-revolutionary that I feel they will be for generations. So we need to bust them out and kind of settle them in the depths of the country. But Robespierre refuses this. He says that's too extreme. And he continues to insist that the mass of the people are naturally virtuous. They're naturally good. So even in Lyon, they can be trusted. But the people who cannot be trusted are the counter-revolutionaries who had brought Lyon to such ruin. They have to be dealt with with extreme prejudice. And Robespierre knows precisely who ultimately are to blame.

1:18:32Dominic Sandbrook:Yes, so this brings us to the people that were beginning to be locked up in the last episode. And these are the people who were previously the dominant faction in the National Convention. And these are the Girondins. Now, if you were being more critical of Rob Speier, you would say, these are people with whom he once broke bread. These are people who were once members of the same radical clubs as he was. They were part of the revolution. They were just as enthusiastic as he was. But he doesn't see it that way, does he? And he has this long charge sheet that as he sees it leaves no room for doubt that they have actually been plotting to undermine France and its people from the very beginning.

1:19:12Tom Holland:Yeah, and I think this charge sheet does matter to the sense of Robespierre as someone who's personally virtuous, because even though he has broken bread with a lot of the Girondins, he has also been pursuing a venomous personal feud with the leader of the Girondins, Brissot, the anti-slavery campaigner, who's often seen as their leader. And so it is important to Robespierre that he lays out the charge sheet so that people won't say he's just engaged in a faction battle. So the charge sheet is that they had foisted this disastrous war on France. It was a Girondin who had pushed France into declaring war on Prussia and Austria.

1:19:48Tom Holland:And then in the form of General de Mourier had tried to betray it. So the evidence there to Robespierre seems clear. The treason is arrant. He charges them with being soft on nobles, soft on priests, and that their laxness had served to foster the rebellion in the Vendée. He then charges that following their expulsion from the convention in June 1793, which we talked about in the previous episode, their crimes become even more palpable. that those who had escaped house arrest, and among these was Jean-Marie Roland, husband of Madame Roland, the Salonista, former minister of the interior under Louis XVI, that they had all fanned out into the provinces, and that these were the traitors who had fomented the counter-revolutionary movements in Lyon, in Marseille, in Caen, in Bordeaux, that these were the traitors who had handed Toulon over to the Royal Navy, and that therefore only one punishment could possibly suffice for this abominable behaviour, and Robespierre is determined to see it enforced.

1:20:59Tom Holland:And I think that even though Robespierre does have this kind of personal feud with Brissot and some of the other Girondins, he genuinely does not see himself as governed by selfish emotions. He genuinely sees himself as Cicero foiling the conspiracy of Catiline. He sees himself as the disinterested defender of the people of the revolution of France. And the measure of this, I think, is that enormous numbers of people agree with him. They agree with his self-estimation. And people in the committee, people in the convention. Yeah, they do. They completely. And they back him. And so because of this, he is able to nail the Girondins as the people who have to be punished for all the disasters that are overwhelming France.

1:21:52Tom Holland:And so those Girondins leaders who are still at liberty are declared outlaws. And when they're caught, they are guillotined. And some of them commit suicide. And so there's a kind of terrible story of two prominent Girondins who commit suicide out in the countryside in a field and their bodies are found a week later, half devoured by wolves. Meanwhile, in Paris, the trial opens on the 24th of October of Brissot and 20 other Girondins. And initially, from Robespierre's point of view, their trial does not go well. So the accused, unsurprisingly, are very defiant. They're very eloquent. They sound convincingly patriotic because, of course, they are patriotic.

1:22:32Tom Holland:And actually, it goes so badly for Robespierre that five days into the trial, someone in the committee stands up and proposes that the trial be abandoned, that it's clearly not justified or required. But Robespierre is having none of this, and he steps up to the tribunal, and he makes a really striking and, I think, sinister counterproposal, namely that the jury should be asked, and I quote, whether they have enough evidence to satisfy their conscience. And this is massively to move the goalposts, because basically what that means is that jurors are being asked to arrive at their verdict based not on evidence that might have satisfied a traditional court of law, but rather on their own intuition, their own gut feeling, their sense of whether the people who are being prosecuted are guilty or not.

1:23:27And that's adequate.

1:23:30Dominic Sandbrook:And this idea that you start a trial, it doesn't go well. So you then change the rules halfway through to rig it so that it will go as you want. We will see this again in this series, actually. It's a disturbing development. And yet, at the same time, Rob Speria is always anxious to give it the pattern of legality, isn't he?

1:23:50Tom Holland:I mean, I genuinely think he feels it's the right thing to do. If you're a revolutionary, he was right to do it. I think is his feeling and the feeling of his supporters. So unsurprisingly, in the wake of all this, the Girondins accused are found guilty and the verdict is brought in on the 31st of October. And one of the 21 Girondins who've been found guilty, the moment the verdict is announced, he reaches for a knife that he had smuggled into the trial and he stabs himself and kills himself. And his corpse is still loaded onto the tumbril, together with the 20 Girondins who have neglected to commit suicide in this way.

1:24:31Tom Holland:And on the way to the guillotine, the surviving 20 Girondins all sing the Marseillais. And if you're a Girondin, it's a very stirring scene, but it doesn't help them. They all lose their heads. and then soon afterwards on the 8th of november they are followed by the most famous female girondin and this of course is the wife of roland madame roland and she is very much a living reminder of happier times when her salon had been the most fashionable the most influential in the whole of revolutionary paris the great meeting place for the girondin throughout 1791 and 1792 but not just the Girondin because Robespierre himself had attended it.

1:25:17Tom Holland:And indeed, Madame Roland had praised Robespierre two years before her execution for ranking among the small number of courageous men who are always faithful to their purpose. Robespierre, of course, would say that he's still being faithful to his purpose. The irony. Madame Roland, however, does not because when she's brought to the guillotine, she gazes across the square and she sees this great plinth on which there had previously stood a statue of Louis XIV and that of course has been toppled and in its place has been erected a clay statue portraying liberty and Madame Roland gazes at this and then utters very famous words liberty what crimes are committed in your name and a few days later news of his wife death is brought to Roland and he leaves the place where he's been hiding out and he goes out into the countryside and he sits beneath a tree on a country lane he draws out his sword stick and he impales

1:26:20Dominic Sandbrook:himself that is the end of him yeah but Dominic uh Madame Roland although her fate is famous her

1:26:27Tom Holland:last words are very famous she's not the most famous woman nor even perhaps the most tragic to have perished in that autumn of 1793, because a month earlier, a woman whom Madame Roland had always hated and despised had gone to the guillotine ahead of her. And this was a woman who, for patriots everywhere, had come to seem the embodiment of everything that they were pledged to destroy. And that woman was, of course, Marie Antoinette.

1:27:04Dominic Sandbrook:Crikey. So in our next episode, we will be tracing how the revolutionaries seek to complete the final eradication of the last relics of monarchy. They'll destroy the symbols of monarchy. They will take Marie Antoinette herself to the guillotine. And we'll be talking about one of the most affecting stories of the entire revolution. This is the fate of Maritain and its son. So he's the boy, little boy, who royalists regard as Louis XVII, and his fate is a very, very sad story. So don't miss it. Now, that's not the only episode we'll be doing. We'll be doing the fall of Danton. We'll be doing the attack on Christianity, and we'll be doing the final showdown the climax of the reign of terror the fall of maximalia crobert's beer and if you want to hear all those episodes now and you're a rest is history club member you can so your next you know three or four hours are going to be brilliant if you are gutted because you're going to miss out fear not you can go to the rest is history.com you can sign up you can join the club immediately you'll get those episodes right away but also you can look forward to a whole load of supplementary benefits, the kind of thing that would make a Republican or Royalist weep with envy.

1:28:23Dominic Sandbrook:And you could also sign up, if you like, to our newsletter, which will have loads and loads of stuff about the French Revolution, more than you could possibly want to read. Surely not, Dominic.

1:28:33Tom Holland:Surely people want to read every last word of it. It's that good.

1:28:37Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, that's actually true, because it is really good. So there's loads of French Revolution content. next up Marie Antoinette do not miss that episode it is an absolute banger Tom on that note merci et au revoir au revoir

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