709. The Terror: The Execution of Marie Antoinette (Part 3)

22:12Dominic Sandbrook:So the difference between Hebert and Marat, I would say, is, I mean, with Marat, it is pure vituperation, populist vituperation, incredibly aggressive, blood-soaked, all of this. Hebert is similar, but more kind of demotic, more vulgar. He's speaking much more, I think. You know, Marat strives for elevated language. I mean, not that it's terribly elevated, but Hebert doesn't do that at all. He's trying to reflect, as he sees it, the mood on the streets in the voice of the streets. So it's incredibly scatological, aggressive, pornographic. And of course, that echoes the tone of all those pamphlets that attacked Marion Trinette in the 1780s.

22:46Tom Holland:And I think crucially comic. I mean, he's funny. His abuse is enjoyable. He's taken on the persona of this guy, Pierre Duchesne, who is a foul-mouthed stove maker from kind of theatre. And he's taken on his voice. And Hébert himself, predictably, is from a bourgeois background. I mean, all these kind of citizen journalists are. But it enables him to be as filthy and shocking as he likes, kind of gives him a license. And the royal family have been his particular targets for years. So even back in the early months of the revolution, Hebert had been shocking and delighting revolutionary sensibilities by abusing the royal family at a time where it was not the done thing to abuse the royal family.

23:31Tom Holland:He's always having a crack at Louis XVI. He called him the royal cookhold, a fat pig. He's a man as timid as a mouse and as stupid as an ostrich. Hebert will give it to the royal children. So the things he says about Marie-Thérèse, who is just a teenage girl, describes her as being designed like the spiders of the French cape to suck the blood of slaves. slaves, unsurprisingly, the real object of his venom had always been Marie Antoinette, the Austrian monster, the royal whore, just kind of endless stream of fituperation aimed at her. And he targets her really obsessively. And it's been estimated that one in seven of the articles that he published over the course of the revolution was about Marie Antoinette.

24:12Tom Holland:She's very much inside his head, I think.

24:14Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. And we mentioned the sexual content of this. The sexual content is uppermost, isn't it? So this is pure kind of pornographic misogyny. What it does is it turns her from a flesh and blood human being that people might feel sorry for to a kind of creature of nightmares almost.

24:29Tom Holland:It completely dehumanises her. And it also serves to keep her in the public eye, even once she sees to be queen being bottled up behind these kind of eight massive doors in her prison. It keeps her in the public eye as someone who is so monstrous and cunning and fiendish that, of course, she is the person who is running this mass conspiracy. And so in the spring of 1793, when du Maurier goes over to the Austrians and the French Republic seems on the verge of collapse, Hebert is all about Marie Antoinette. He's saying she's the person to blame. She is the person who we need to dispatch. He says liberty is hanging by only a hair.

25:06Tom Holland:So Marie Antoinette, of course, always famous for her glamorous hairstyles.

25:09Dominic Sandbrook:At this point, however, the Committee of Public Safety don't take any notice of this. They've got much bigger fish to fry. Exactly. I mean, they're facing a massive crisis on the frontiers, national economic emergency. I mean, they've got better things to worry about than one woman locked up in prison, pretty safely in prison.

25:25Tom Holland:Yes. So they're not particularly anxious about Marie Antoinette. She's not the focus of their attention. But having said that, they don't completely ignore the warnings that Hebert and his fellow radicals are giving. As we've said, there are royal conspiracies afoot. Royalism has led to a mass counter-revolution. And so the issue of what to do with the surviving members of what had once been the royal family is an issue. I mean, it's not a priority, but it is a problem that does need solving. As we pass into the summer of 1793, various measures do start to be taken. So in April, the convention orders a kind of mass police sweep against possible supporters of the monarchy and particularly aristocracy.

26:11Tom Holland:And obviously, members of the House of Bourbon, the ex-royal family, are the key people who the revolutionary authorities feel need to be apprehended. And the most prominent of these is Philippe Egalité, the Duke of Orléans, as he had been, the cousin of Louis XVI, and who, as a deputy in the convention, had voted for his cousin to be executed.

26:35Dominic Sandbrook:I think we agreed, didn't we? He's one of the worst people who's ever lived. Isn't that right? Didn't we? With Boise Douglas. I mean, he's just a terrible person, Philippe Egalité. No?

26:44Tom Holland:Well, I think we've described him as the Prince Harry of the Revolution. Yeah, I mean, yeah, case closed. And the problem for him, and there's actually no evidence at all that he was involved in any counter-revolutionary conspiracies. I think he backed the revolution. He was all in favour of equality. I think he believed it. The problem for him is, as you said in the first episode, though when du Maurier went over to the Austrians, he took with him Philippe Egalité's second son, the guy who, in due course, is going to become King Louis Philippe. And that means that from this point on, Philippe Egalité is a marked man.

27:15Tom Holland:So he gets arrested in Marseille, gets in prison there, and then in due course, he gets brought to Paris. So things aren't looking good for him. Meanwhile, what about Marie Antoinette herself? So three months after those series of arrests, the arrest of Philippe Galate and other members of the elite aristocracy, guards come to her and it's the night of the 3rd of July. And this is the moment that Marie Antoinette has been dreading from the moment that she and her family were brought to this terrible prison because she is separated from her beloved son. So the guards turn up at 10 o 'clock in the evening while Marie Antoinette is sewing by candlelight and her son is curled up asleep next to her.

27:55Tom Holland:And Marie Antoinette immediately realizes what is happening. And so she stands over her son and blocks the access of the guards to Louis Charles. And Marie Thérèse, who in due course, spoiler alert, is going to be exiled by the revolutionaries. So she gets expelled from France in 1795 And this enables her to write up reminiscences of what happened, which are crucial evidence for what's going on. And Marie-Thérèse wrote later that her mother told them they would have to kill her before they could tear her child from her. And the standoff continues for an hour. And only when the guards say, look, let him go, or we are going to kill you and we're going to kill him and we're going to kill your daughter as well.

28:35Tom Holland:Only then does Marie-Antoinette finally give in. And again, to quote Marie-Thérèse, bathing him with her tears and overwhelmed with a sense of foreboding that she would never see him again. She gave him into the hands of the guards and the guards then lead the little boy away and the door is slammed in his mother's face. And Marie Antoinette can hear him being led down a spiral staircase from the room directly below them, which had been Louis' room the day that he had been executed. That was the room that Louis had been taken to the guillotine from. And, you know, the little boy knows this entirely.

29:06Tom Holland:He is locked up in that room and Marie Antoinette can hear his sobbing rising up through the floorboards.

29:12Dominic Sandbrook:For any parents, just an absolutely horrendous, horrendous experience. I mean, you can't imagine anything worse.

29:20Tom Holland:Terrible. And all that she knows about his fate is that she can hear him weeping. She knows nothing else. She has no idea what is happening to him. It is a complete mystery to her. That's what's happening with the royal family. But meanwhile, in the convention, so effectively, the kind of, you know, the government of France. The deputies there are preparing a much more public assault on the legacy of monarchy. And on the 31st of July, 1793, a lawyer named Bertrand Barret stands up in the National Convention. And we have already met him because he is the guy who, in due course, on the 5th of September, will proclaim that terror is the order of the day.

30:01Tom Holland:And we didn't really say who he was then. So just a bit of detail on him. He's a man with a very formidable reputation. He'd been the first man to be elected to the Committee of Public Safety. So that's a kind of measure of the reputation that he has. And he's the chief spokesman of the committee in the convention. He'd been a lawyer, very celebrated for his eloquence. Robert Palmer, in his classic book on the Committee of Public Safety 12, who ruled, gives a fabulous character sketch of him. Barger could throw a spell of words over any usual topic. A battle, a conspiracy, a guillotining, a statistical report, a democratic idea.

30:39Tom Holland:Always fluent, always forceful, sometimes soberly expository, sometimes passionately excited. And this is a guy who he'd been on the kind of the outer margins of the aristocracy when the revolution began. So he's adapted himself very fluently and successfully to the new order. He's a very fluent, very plausible man, but also in the opinion of his detractors, you know, a complete opportunist. And so in other words, this makes him the most reliable weather vane in the whole revolution. If you want to know the way the wind is turning, see which way Barret is turning is basically the idea.

31:16Dominic Sandbrook:It's a brilliant politician. He basically works out where the centre ground is, where the momentum is heading, and he makes sure he's always there. He is the person who serves in your cabinet. You know, if in contemporary politics for kind of 10 years, he's reliable. He's a safe pair of hands. He's always there. And he miraculously always agrees with what the prime minister of the day believes. I mean, that's basically what he is.

31:36Tom Holland:And as prime ministers rise and fall, he's a kind of constant. And what he is pointing to in the summer of 1793 is the fact that it is time to eradicate from France every last trace of the monarchy, to remove all the symbols that still adorn the cities and the cathedrals and so on. They've all got to go. You know, France has to be a country that is recognizably revolutionary and Republican in its outward show. And this is a process that had already begun. So squares or streets that had previously been named after kings, they've been given new names. The statues of kings have been toppled. And above all, what he is proposing is the systematic elimination of every last trace of monarchy from the basilica that is and always has been its great shrine.

32:31Tom Holland:And this is the Basilica of Saint-Denis, which stands just to the north of Paris. And ever since Frankish times, it has been the royal necropolis. It had been massively expanded in the 12th century. Essentially, it's the first great masterpiece of the Gothic style. And it is essentially the Westminster Abbey of France. This is where kings for generation to generation after generation have been buried. Their monuments are everywhere. And the convention says, yeah, this is a brilliant idea. Let's crack on with this. And on the 1st of August, 1793, they officially approve Barré's proposal. Six days later, a crowd of workmen and soldiers in red liberty caps turn up outside Saint-Denis.

33:12Tom Holland:they break into the basilica and they begin the work of demolition and they begin at the beginning they go for the first king to be buried there who's a guy called Dagobert the first he'd founded the abbey he'd been buried there back in 638 so that was so long ago and then basically they work their way very systematically through what's effectively 1100 years of French royal history and there are so many kings there are so many monuments that it's not until October that the great task is completed. It's an incredible, incredible operation of destruction, isn't it? Absolutely massive. Every monument is smashed, every sarcophagus, every kind of casket containing hearts or whatever, and over a hundred royal corpses are exhumed.

33:56Tom Holland:The workmen dig two great trenches beside what had been the chapel of the Valois, so the medieval kings who had fought Edward III and Henry V and so on. That chapel has been demolished and now there are these two great trenches and all the bodies of the kings and queens get dumped into them. And the older corpses have obviously, they've crumbled away. So Barère had described them as the impure ashes of tyrants. And these impure ashes, I mean, it's easy to dispose of them. But the more recent ones, I mean, that's a much more unpleasant job because particularly the Bourbons, the dynasty to which Louis XVI had belonged, they've been buried a few decades before, a few centuries before.

34:34Tom Holland:They are still in a condition of putrefaction and the stench is absolutely revolting once they start digging them up. It's an absolutely hideous scene. The workmen have to burn vinegar and gunpowder to combat the nauseous vapours that are rising up from these desecrated tombs. But eventually the work is done. Every last trace of France's royal past is erased from Saint-Denis. With this, the basilica can be put to a more practical and purposeful use. And so it serves as a warehouse for grain and for flour.

35:11Dominic Sandbrook:The irony, the one thing that the French didn't have enough of in the 1780s, and that they blamed the monarchy for not giving them. And now that's what the basilica is storing. All right, but they may have taken out the symbols, but there are some living people remaining, of course. There are the counter-revolutionaries and the Vendée, who are still proclaiming their loyalty to Louis XVII, as they call him. And of course, in the temple, there are those members of France's royal family still there, a standing living affront to the ideals of the new republic. We'll find out what happens to them, the tragic story of Marie Antoinette and her son after the break.

35:52Tom Holland:This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps, many of them started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

36:06Dominic Sandbrook: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?

36:36Tom 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.

36:52Dominic Sandbrook:Ask yours at claude.ai slash restishistory. And keep thinking.

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37:49Dominic Sandbrook:Welcome back to The Rest is History So, the Republican government in Paris is locked in a life or death struggle against what it sees as the forces of royalism and reaction and counter-revolution And as we have heard, the National Convention have stripped from the Great Basilica in Saint-Denis every last trace of monarchical history and that same day that they voted the 1st of august they moved marie antoinette from her prison in the temple late at night for the first time she's been there for a year hasn't she and there's an ominous moment as they take her out she bangs her head on the lintel and one of them says are you hurt and she says nothing can hurt me now there's a sort of sense that like basically she's fallen as low as it's possible to fall.

38:41Dominic Sandbrook:But of course, there's further to go.

38:42Tom Holland:Oh, there is. There is. So she is being transferred to central Paris. So she heads westwards across the capital and then over the Seine. And she's brought on to the Ile de la Cité, where Notre Dame stands. And it's here in the early hours of 2nd of August, 1793, that she arrives in her new home, which is the Conciergerie. And we mentioned it briefly, but just to give a bit more detail about it, this had served as a royal prison since the 14th century and it occupies the lower level of the building complex, the Palais de Justice, that also houses the Revolutionary Tribunal. So that had been set up back in the early hours of the 11th of March at the urging of Danton to try cases without appeal.

39:27Tom Holland:And the more prisoners that there are for the Revolutionary Tribunal to try, so the more the conciergerie comes to serve as the kind of the central holding pen for the terror and the widow cafe Marie Antoinette is one of these prisoners and she is processed in the conciergerie as a common criminal you know she's not being arraigned as a former queen she's just a criminal like anyone else she's kept in a small cell on the ground floor and the description of it it's small damp and fetted without a stove or fireplace there's also no window. And actually one way in which Marie Antoinette is an exceptional prisoner is that she's not allowed any exercise.

40:07Tom Holland:All the other prisons are allowed out to see the sky, to see the blue sky above them and to stretch their legs. Marie Antoinette is not. She's kept in her cell permanently. And the cell is very bare. There's a pallet on which she can sleep. There's a chair and a table and there's a bucket for her ablutions. There is a screen that runs halfway across the room, only barely five feet high. So very easy for people to look over it. And on the other side of the screen from Marie Antoinette are two guards who are constantly there. She's never without these two guards. And they sit there smoking, drinking, playing cards, you know, abusing her, whatever.

40:44Tom Holland:So she is never alone. And on top of that, there is a grill in her prison door. And so for a fee, visitors can go and open that grill and peer inside and gawp at the Austrian whore. So, you know, one of the great spectacles of revolutionary France, kind of see this monster reduced to the level, basically, of an animal. And there are a lot of people who are keen to do that, aren't there? Yeah, because even in the squalid depths of her downfall, Marie Antoinette remains complete box office. You know, she's still what she's been for decades, the most famous woman in France by far. And she is the one prisoner whom royalists dream of springing.

41:24Tom Holland:You know, there are various kind of chevaliers who make the attempt while she's in the conciergerie to zero effect. But she remains the queen of their hearts. And of course, she's the one prisoner whom true patriots, true revolutionaries want to see brought to the guillotine. So as at Versailles, so now in the depths of the terror, you know, she is still a star. However, I think for the Committee for Public Safety, she's still unimportant. She's a distraction. The head of the hydra that they want to cut off is not Marie Antoinette. It's the Catholic and Royal Army in the Vendée. That is the real royalist monster that they are anxious to see destroyed.

42:03Tom Holland:And this is because all spring, all summer, the royalist army in the Vendée has been on an absolute roll. So we heard in our previous episode how this had helped to prompt the great levee en masse of the 23rd of August, this unprecedented introduction of mass conscription in France, the first great mass conscription of the modern age, and which in the long run will provide the revolution with manpower beyond the dreams of the Ancien Régime. I mean, kind of within a year, double the size of the army that Louis XIV had commanded. 700 ,000 men in uniform. Extraordinary. Vast, vast force. But in the immediate term, it's still proving inadequate to suppress this counter-revolutionary uprising in the Vendée.

42:48Tom Holland:And so accordingly, as well as the mobilisation for total war, the Committee for Public Safety mandate an outright policy of extermination. They say that forests have to be cut down, that all crops have to be burned, that livestock have to be seized, that the rebels basically have to be starved into submission, and that the rebels themselves, if they're found, have to be hunted down like beasts. They have to be exterminated without mercy as though they are wolves, burmin, to be eradicated completely. So this is the policy that's going on in the west of France, far from Paris. But to the mass of Saint-Culot in the slums of Paris, the enragés, the poor who are starving, hungry, their suspicions, their hatreds, they're being amplified by Jacques Herbert, people like that, these kind of incendiary journalists.

43:33Tom Holland:Even this policy of extermination is not felt to be enough. If you're an enrage in Paris, essentially what is happening in the Vendée, it's far away. You don't really have a handle on it. You've never been there. You don't really know what's going on. What you do know is that there are members of the royal family who are still alive and there are ex-aristocrats who are on the scene. And you have people like Hebert saying, these guys are conspiring against you. And so a mood of mingled panic and hatred is motivating the enrage, the sans-culottes, to demand the most extreme penalties against them, against these aristocrats.

44:09Tom Holland:They're demanding that every aristocrat in France be hunted down, be branded, be chained in groups of six and be used by the army on the Vendée as human shields. And obviously, they want Marie Antoinette shaved by the national razor, which is Hebert's phrase for a guillotining. And for them, this is the priority. And Hebert is shameless in kind of whipping it up. But just to say about Hebert, I mean, his role in all this, he's not just an agitator. He does also have direct political agency. Listeners to our previous episode may remember that on the 5th of September, a demonstration had marched on the National Convention.

44:47Tom Holland:And this was the march and the occupation of the convention that had inspired Barrère to stand up and say that terror should be the order of the day. And the leader of that demonstration, the guy who had led the enragé into the National Convention, was a man called Gaspard Chaumet. And he is not just a close friend and ally of Hébert, but his immediate superior in the Paris Commune. And the Paris Commune is basically the municipal government of the city. And both men have official ranks in the Commune. They rank as procureurs de la Commune. And this means that they are essentially the chief legal and administrative officers in Paris.

45:23Tom Holland:And this is why Chomet had been able to play the prominent role that he did in the events of the 4th and 5th of September. And it is also why Hébert has been in a position to do much more than merely abuse the royal family in print, because as a procureur, he has the prisoners in the temple under his direct charge. And even though Marie Antoinette has been transferred to the conciergerie, which means that she has now passed out of his authority, Hébert does still retain responsibility for the remaining three prisoners. So just to remind listeners who these remaining three prisoners are, there's Madame Elizabeth, the younger sister of Louis XVI.

46:05Tom Holland:There is Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, 14 years old, the daughter of the ex Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. And then there is her younger brother, only eight years old, who is to royalists Louis XVII and to revolutionaries Louis Charles Capet. And this is the little boy who, on the night of the 3rd of July, had been forcibly removed from Marie Antoinette, his weeping mother, led down the spiral staircase and placed in a cell of his own. And the person who had given the orders for this to be done was a bear.

46:38Dominic Sandbrook:And he did it for two reasons, didn't he? First of all, he's hoping that they will get the boy to talk, that they can get testimony from the boy. The boy will inadvertently say things that they can use against his mother in a future trial. So that's thing number one. And then thing number two, of course, I mean, we've seen it through history. There are lots of little boys in medieval English and Scottish history who have become pawns or puppets or have become the focus for rebellions and uprisings. And Hebert is not wrong to think that what the boy that he calls the son of the she-ape, you know, that he could be politically dangerous for the revolution.

47:12Dominic Sandbrook:He could be a focus for, you know, public uprisings and whatnot. Yes.

47:17Tom Holland:Well, I mean, I think there is a parallel from English history that haunts the revolutionaries, but it's not a medieval king. It's Charles II, who Charles I, his head had been chopped off, the monarchy had been abolished. But Charles II was always lurking on the scene. And of course, you have the restoration and the monarchy is restored. And I think that is the nightmare that haunts people like Hebert and actually all the revolutionaries. revolutionaries. And so the issue of what to do with this little boy is a very pressing political problem for the revolutionaries, because they can't really put him on trial as they put his father on trial.

47:48Tom Holland:I mean, he's just a little boy, nor can they adopt the Richard III approach. So to quote Deborah Cadbury, who's written a comprehensive and I have to say very harrowing biography of Louis Charles called The Lost King of France, a revolutionary led by high ideals, she writes, could not openly countenance the outright murder of a small boy. I mean, I think that's true. They can't behave like a kind of medieval usurper. So what to do? And Hebert has a solution, which he has agreed with Chomet, his immediate superior. So effectively, this now has kind of institutional approval. And the first kind of aspect of the policy that Hebert is introducing is to break the little boy, to brainwash him and to turn him against his parents and his heritage as a former dauphin.

48:38Tom Holland:So Hébert says the little whelp must lose the recollection of his royalty. And the plan is to install in the little boy the tastes, the language, the educational standards of a sans-culotte, and also to deny him all creature comforts, to keep him hungry, to deny him sleep. And if he should fail to survive the rigours of his new life, then, you know, what a shame, what a pity. You know, they won't have murdered him, but he will be removed from the scene if he just fades away. And so with these policies in mind, they appoint a new tutor for the erstwhile dauphin. And this is a guy called Antoine Simon, and he is a very different kind of tutor to the kind of tutor that the young dauphin had had at Versailles.

49:21Tom Holland:So Simon is a cobbler and he loathes the rich. He loves the revolution. And he had always, until this kind of bombshell appointment, been a complete failure in everything that he'd ever done. He can't even hack it as a cobbler. He's always kind of going bankrupt. He's always being evicted from his homes. He's not a very competent person at life, I think. Even his associates describing his manners as quite brutish. So he had a gruff, short way of talking and insolent gestures. He's also effectively illiterate. And so all of this makes him absolutely perfect from the point of view of Hébert.

49:53Dominic Sandbrook:I have to say from the accounts you read, he comes over as an absolutely dreadful man. But on the other hand, you might say, well, a lot of the accounts we read are coloured with royalist propaganda. So there is that slight issue, isn't it, that hangs over all this?

50:05Tom Holland:Not entirely royalist propaganda. So there are accounts as well from people who were there before and during the terror and survived the terror. Again, they might be party pre, but I think the consensus of witnesses is pretty clear that Simon is not Rory Stewart. Well, who is? He's not the kind of person you would necessarily appoint as a royal tutor. Rory Stewart, of course, tutored William and Harry.

50:31Dominic Sandbrook:He did, yes. His methods, I suspect, are very different from Simon's because Simon is very much a practitioner of tough love with the accent very much on the tough.

50:40Tom Holland:You say that. I mean, Rory Stewart went to Eton. And there is perhaps something of Eton in the 19th century about the education that Simon gives the poor prince. So he's obliged to wait at table on Simon and his wife to polish their shoes. Basically, he's a kind of lackey. He's a fag, I guess. These young boys who have to serve their superiors at Eton. You could perhaps frame it that. I think it's slightly more brutal than that. I mean, certainly it's a very different kind of education to what the Dauphin would have had at Versailles. He is also, his appearance is transformed. So his blonde curls, which Marie Antoinette had loved so much, they're shaved off.

51:15Tom Holland:He's put in trousers, so no culotte for him. And he's made to wear a red cap. Simon is delighted and he cries out, finally, Capet, you are a sans-culotte. And Simon also, I mean, he's not completely useless. He does teach Louis Charles some things. So he teaches him how to sing revolutionary songs, teaches him how to curse and teaches him how to blaspheme. And Marie Therese, she hasn't actually witnessed this. So again, this is probably hearsay, but it does seem to be true. Simon taught him to swear dreadful oaths against God, his family and aristocrats. And we have the report of a commissioner who visits him.

51:45Tom Holland:You know, this is not a royalist. And he reports, I think, what's quite a shocking detail. Louis Charles heard his sister and aunt scraping chairs in the cell above him. He cried out, haven't those women been guillotined yet? You assume that he's saying this because he thinks that it's going to please Simon, who otherwise will probably beat him. But I mean, it's still quite an upsetting thing to say about your sister and your aunt, I think. And of course, there is no maths, there's no geography, there's no history. And Mario Therese, again, he was permitted only the most unspeakable books and every effort was made to corrupt him.

52:18Tom Holland:And what does this mean in practice? Well, I think, I mean, I think trying to answer this leads us to quite a dark place. And so anyone who is listening to this with children, I would press the pause button. It also touches directly on the fate of Marie Antoinette, because you said that Hebert is keen to get evidence that can be presented against her in a criminal case. Hebert is the guy more than anyone else who's been pursuing her and portraying her as this kind of monstrous sexual deviant, a woman who has incestuous tastes. Listeners can probably imagine what it is that Hebert is trying to extract from her son.

52:54Tom Holland:So charges are officially laid before Marie Antoinette, the widow Capet. She's termed on the 3rd of October, 1793. And on the 14th of October, she is summoned before the Revolutionary Tribunal to answer them. And initially, there'd been multitudes of allegations. You can imagine, you know, all the things that revolutionaries might bring against Marie Antoinette. But ultimately, they've been boiled down to three charges. These are firstly, that she had dilapidated the French finances in a terrible way. And Marie Antoinette responds to this by acknowledging that perhaps she had spent more than was entirely wise on the petit trianon.

53:33Tom Holland:She has this brilliant phrase, I was dragged into expenses little by little. We're all familiar with that. We're all familiar with that. But the more grotesque claims, essentially that she'd been so extravagant that she'd bankrupted the French state, she repudiates a tone of great indignation. And the problem for her prosecutors are that there is no evidence for this. And the reason there's no evidence for it is that, you know, the evidence doesn't exist because Marie Antoinette hadn't bankrupted the French state. It was supporting the American tax rebels that had done that. They also charged her with betraying national secrets to France's enemies.

54:05Tom Holland:And here, she was definitely guilty. She had definitely done that. So she was guilty of treason, I think, by the standards of the court.

54:12Dominic Sandbrook:No question. She is talking to the Austrians all through, is it 1792? Absolutely no question that on the, you know, when it comes to the sort of national security angle, Marie Antoinette had encouraged her Austrian relatives to march on Paris. And had they got to Varennes, remember we did the episode about the flight to Varennes? If they'd got to Varennes, if they'd got out, and there's an episode that people often ask about, and they say, gosh, what would have happened? The result would have been a civil war in France. Yeah. So a lot of people would have died. I mean, a lot of people died anyway, frankly, but, you know, they'd have died differently.

54:42Tom Holland:But Dominic, here is the thing. This accusation must have come from one of her husband's former ministers. And it is hearsay because there is no written evidence for it. I mean, actually, there is written evidence for it in the archives of various monarchies across Europe. But the prosecutors don't have access to this material. So they kind of know that she's guilty, but they don't have any written proof. There's no smoking gun. There's the accusation that she had set alight civil war in various parts of the Republic. And this is plainly ludicrous because she'd been in the temple when the revolt in the Vendée broke out and everybody knew it.

55:15Tom Holland:So actually, the evidence against her is a little thin. It's not as overwhelming as the prosecutors had hoped. And this is why, recognising this, Hebert drops a bombshell. And it's an additional corroborative statement proving the fact that Hebert thinks Marie Antoinette deserves death. You know, it might seem as though it has sprung from the kind of the darkest, most depraved depths of his journalism. But it has been signed, and this is completely devastating for Marie Antoinette, by her own son. And this statement alleges, and I quote, The young Capet was surprised by Simon in an act of self-abuse.

55:55Tom Holland:It describes how he had been taught to masturbate by his mother and his aunt. And worst of all, again, to quote this statement, there is no doubt from what Capet's son has said that an act of incest was committed between mother and son. And Marie Antoinette is so stunned by this that at first she doesn't know what to say. It just leaves her silent. She's so appalled by it. And then she's pressed by the president of the tribunal to answer the charge. And she says, if I did not respond, it was because it would be against nature for a mother to reply to such an accusation. On this, I appeal to all the mothers who may be here, so the women who are watching in the gallery.

56:35Tom Holland:And briefly in the courtroom, astonishingly, there is a surge of sympathy for her. And that evening at dinner, Robspierre, who's been informed what's happened, is furious. And he cries out that imbecile Hebert enlivening her last moments with a public relations triumph. You know, to Robespierre, it seems a disaster, but actually it's not. Hebert knows his audience and the news of what he is alleging sweep Paris and they confirm all his supporters, all the enrage, all the sans-culottes in their darkest suspicions of her. And sure enough, Marie Antoinette is convicted and the guilty verdict is brought in in the early hours of the 16th of October.

57:15Tom Holland:And as the verdict is read out, she shows not a trace of emotion. And she's returned to her cell at 4.30 in the morning. And there she writes letters to her two children. In these letters, she tells them, you know, basically forgive your enemies. Don't harbor grudges. Then at dawn, a guard comes and orders her to change out of her widow's weeds, her black dress, into a white dress. And the guard insists on watching her as she changes. And then at 10 o 'clock, the executioner, Henri Sanson, arrives and he binds her hands very, very tightly behind her back, so tight that it's painful for her. and then crops her hair, which by now is white and tangled.

57:53Tom Holland:So very different to how she had looked at Versailles when her locks were being teased by Monsieur Léonard. And of course, the reason that Sansa is doing that is to expose her neck.

58:04Dominic Sandbrook:So at this point, Tom, she's 37 years old, so she's not an old woman by any means. But she must be after all these long months of incarceration, plus the years of stress. She looks really aged.

58:14Tom Holland:Yeah, she must cut a haggard figure. This brings her no sympathy in the court. because it is a staple of pornographic literature that roues, when they are uncovered, they immediately lose their looks. And so this seems to confirm Marie Antoinette's reputation as a kind of character from Dangerous Liaisons, something like that. All her hair has gone now, it's been cropped. And then she's led out into the courtyard and she sees that she is to be taken to the scaffold, not in a carriage as her husband had been, but in a tumbril, like the common criminal that she is in the opinion of the revolutionary tribunal.

58:49Tom Holland:So she's going to be, you know, this Habsburg, this former queen of France is going to be taken to her execution in a rubbish cart. And she's so shocked that she feels a violent need to relieve herself. It's at this point that the kind of the tight knots around her wrists are loosened so that she can relieve herself against the wall of the courtyard and everyone stands and watches her as she does so. And then she's put up into the tumbril. And it's not far to the Place de la Révolution where she's going to be guillotined. But so many crowds have gathered to watch and to jeer her on her final journey, but it takes her an hour to get there.

59:22Tom Holland:And the painter, David, watches her go by and draws a very famous sketch. If you haven't seen it, you can Google it. It shows her kind of haggard, aged, her hair cropped, of course, but weirdly, a kind of enduring defiance. Her face is composed, Her chin is slightly raised. And everyone agrees that when she mounts the scaffold, she does it with a kind of impressive show of cool, which some attribute to courage and her enemies attribute to what they see as her habitual insolence. Well, can I just make a contrast here?

59:55Dominic Sandbrook:Hebert, the man who hounded her to her death, he will be mounting the scaffold in the next episode and he cuts a very different figure. Balling like a baby.

1:00:04Tom Holland:Yeah, dies like a dog. She's executed. Her head is exposed to the cheers of the crowd and her clothes are stripped off her, according to an account published years later. So it may not be entirely reliable, but it has the smack of truth. Her clothes are sent to hospital where they are to be worn by women who are never to know whose clothes they had once been. And of course, her body is dumped in a porpoise grave. And to lots of patriots, with the death of Marie Antoinette, perhaps even more than with the death of her husband, it seems that a new world has been born. And so a pamphlet is published shortly after her execution, which expresses this in the most exalting terms.

1:00:41Tom Holland:Frenchmen, Republicans, you have purged the earth of a monster who was its abomination. And on one level, this is obviously a massive exaggeration because purely on the symbolic level, of course, it was the death of Louis XVI that had been the key moment. And you can see this in the way that Robespierre responds to Marie Antoinette's execution. So when Louis XVI had been taken to the guillotine, Robespierre had been in his room in the house of the Duplais and he had solemnly turned his back on Louis's carriage as it had rumbled past. Marie Antoinette, he pays no attention to it at all. It's a nothing event to him.

1:01:14Dominic Sandbrook:Well, politically, it doesn't have that much significance, does it? I mean, it doesn't change the balance of power in the convention. Marie Antoinette at this point has no political power. She's a leftover from a bygone age.

1:01:24Tom Holland:Absolutely. And as you said, for Robespierre, it's all about the Girondins. And actually, their trial is going to begin eight days after Marie Antoinette has been guillotined. I mean, that's the focus of all Robespierre's energies. And actually, even in the Vendée by this point, where royalism really had presented a serious threat to the revolution, the tide of war is at last starting to turn in favor of the revolution. So on the 17th of October, which is one day after Marie Antoinette's execution, Republican forces meet with the main Vendéan army at Cholet and they win a massive victory there.

1:01:55Tom Holland:So this is just south of the River Loire. Just to give a kind of a quick synopsis of what happens in the months after in the Vendée, in December, the Vendéans are beaten again at Le Mans. This kind of massive street fighting, the battle basically takes place in the town itself. And so huge numbers of civilians get slaughtered as well, an absolute kind of bloodbath. And then there's a final defeat for the Vendéan forces on the 23rd of December. And this effectively marks the end of the rebellion. So that basically is the royalist threat to the revolution out of the way. but in Paris, royalists do continue to be sent to the guillotine.

1:02:29Tom Holland:But increasingly, the more that they get sent to the guillotine, the less even the kind of, you know, the most anti-royalists among the sans-culottes feel that they're no real threat at all. So just to give the names of some of those royalists who are sent to the guillotine, Olympe de Gouges, the famous feminist, author of The Declaration of the Rights of Women and The Female Citizen. We did an episode on her. Her Declaration of the Rights of Women was a kind of celebrated plea for equal rights. And she had the famous and ironic slogan, woman has the right to climb onto the scaffold. She must equally have the right to climb onto the tribunal.

1:03:03Tom Holland:And this Declaration of the Rights of Women had been dedicated to Marie Antoinette. Olympe de Gouges had also publicly opposed the execution of Louis the 16th and the turn of the revolution to terror. So that was enough to condemn her. So she never climbed the tribunal, but on the 3rd of November, she did climb the scaffold. And that was the end of her. Then three days later on the 6th of November, Dominic, surely for you, the greatest moment in the entire French Revolution, Philippe Galité goes to the guillotine. And to give him credit, he has dressed very elegantly for it. I kind of like that in A Prisoner.

1:03:36Tom Holland:And he's supposed to have quipped that he had known better days. So I quite like that as well. So he dies well. And I think the saddest death and the one that is felt to be most pathetic, really, even the trickleurs feel a bit bad about this, is Madame Elizabeth, the younger sister of Louis XVI. She's executed on the 10th of May, 1794. For no good reason. For no good reason at all. She's part of a kind of batch of 24 prisoners who are being executed en masse, and they're executed in ascending order of rank. And so she is the very last person to be executed. So she has to sit there watching all the other prisoners being killed.

1:04:12Tom Holland:And I think even people on the street feel this is a bit much. And actually, Robespierre, he's blamed for this, even though he hadn't wanted Madame Elizabeth to be executed. And he complains about it the next day to Barrière and says, you see, it is always me. I'm always being blamed for it. I'm the real victim in all this. He's the real victim. Yeah. And by this point, you know, the reason that people feel that Madame Elizabeth shouldn't really be executed is because the job has been done. You know, there is no conceivable comeback for the Ancien Régime now in France. And I think that Hebert, by hunting Marie Antoinette to her death and by casting her at her trial as someone haunting the darkest fantasies of the Marquis de Sade, you know, he had actually known what he was doing, despite, you know, Rosbier thinking that it was mad behaviour.

1:05:00Tom Holland:because what it did was to brand the French monarchy as something monstrous, as something contemptible as well, something grotesque. And the mud of that does stick. And it means, you know, in the long run, I think it dooms the French monarchy. There are attempts to bring it back, but it never really succeeds. I think it has been made to seem kind of ludicrous.

1:05:23Dominic Sandbrook:I'm not sure I agree with that, actually. French monarchy returned in 1815 and it lasted till 1848. I mean, that's 33 years. That's quite a long time. I think the foundations are rotten through. I know it's a different beast, but I don't think it's inconceivable that France could have a monarchy today.

1:05:37Tom Holland:I mean, 33 years is someone's lifetime. I think it's inconceivable. I think it destroys the mystique that ultimately a monarchy in the 19th century required. Even posing as citizen kings doesn't really help the years of it. The magic of it is gone. And that's basically what Burke was saying as well. I think that Hebert trashes it so completely that ultimately the filth can't be cleaned away. And not only that, he has also played his part in, if he's killed the French monarchy off, he's also played the part in another literal death. And this isn't an execution before the gaze of the people, but one that is silent and squalid and veiled from every human eye, actually.

1:06:18Tom Holland:And this is a terrible story. This is the darkest and one of the saddest stories in the whole revolution, I think. So on the 19th of January, 1794, the Cimor, the cobbler and his wife are dismissed from the temple. They are no longer the tutor of the former Dauphin. And two days later, the by now eight-year-old Louis Charles Capet is walled up in that room where his father had been when he was taken to his execution. He's walled up in a corner of it. So he's kind of imprisoned in effectively what is now a very small cell. It has no natural light. There's no windows. And in fact, there is only a single grill.

1:06:54Tom Holland:That's the only kind of access point through which meals can be handed. These meals are deliberately not very filling. They're basically a couple of bowls of soup a day with a husk of bread, perhaps a lump of kind of gristle and meat. No lantern is allowed after dusk. So he spends hours and hours in pitch darkness. He's allowed no change of clothes. so he is wearing the same clothes day after day month after month that he was wearing when he was first immured in this cell and there are no toilet facilities so people can imagine how as the months go by how squalid his living conditions are and in fact the room becomes so filled with vermin that there were occasions where the poor boy would not eat his meals because the food would attract the vermin.

1:07:49Tom Holland:The vermin would then leave him alone and allow him to snatch a few hours sleep. And a guard notices this and says, well, why aren't you eating the food? And the boy replied, well, what would you do, my friend? I want to die. And so in due course, he does, because he is kept in the for six months and then he's released but he never really recovers from the the kind of horrific experience of his solitary confinement for those six months he had been covered in his his own excrement his own waste his clothes kind of rotting away on his body and when he comes out he is so covered in sores and pustules and he's got tumors and parasites and his only joy really is his the tame birds that he keeps as pets.

1:08:35Tom Holland:And there's kind of bitter irony there because Robespierre, as a small boy, had kept birds as pets. And Robespierre had actually paid a visit to the temple. Very Robespierre. He paused and started looking at the bookcase, but he only speaks to Marie-Therese. He doesn't go and investigate what is happening to this boy. Perhaps if he'd seen him and seen him with his birds, it might have been a little spark of fellow feeling. I don't know. Louis Charles never recovers. He fades away. And on the 7th of June, 1795, so by this point, And of course, the terror is over. That's why he's been released. He starts crying, calling for his mother.

1:09:07Tom Holland:And he still doesn't know that Marie Antoinette has been sent to the guillotine. And then the following day, he starts struggling to breathe. And then he dies. And I suppose you could say that from beyond the grave, because by this point, Hebert himself is dead, that Hebert's work is done. The boy was 10 years old. 10 years old when he dies. Yeah. So nowhere of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette will return to Versailles. Louis XVII will never play the part of Charles II. He will not be restored to the throne. And I think that the monarchy, essentially, as it had been constituted for centuries and centuries and centuries, has perished more surely amid the darkness of that cell than it had done on the scaffold.

1:09:47Tom Holland:But Dominic, we've been saying how Hebert is going to be getting into trouble. So what about him? And what about Rovespierre? What's been happening to them and to the course of the revolution? Well, poor Louis Charles Capet has been fading away in the darkness of the temple. And those questions we are going to be answering, aren't we, in our next episode?

1:10:07Dominic Sandbrook:Completely. So next episode is a very, very dramatic one. It is the showdown between Rovespierre and Danton. a duel for the ages, a duel that's become a symbol of extremism versus moderation. And we are approaching, of course, the climax of the reign of terror. So a lot of guillotining, a lot of political drama, a lot of excitement to come. Now, if you want to listen to that episode right away, and indeed the next two episodes on the revolution's war on Christianity and the fall of Robespierre that brings the terror to an end, you can actually listen to those right away. but only if you're a member of the Rest is History Club.

1:10:44Dominic Sandbrook:And if you want to join the Rest is History Club, there is brilliant bombshell news. We now have a website never before mentioned on the show. It's therestishistory.com. And also for the first time in human history, we are offering a range of supplementary benefits that come along with ad-free listening and early access and all these incredible things. Absolutely incredible. So, merci Tom et au revoir. Bye everybody. A bientôt.

1:11:28Dominic Sandbrook:The Great Game. Strategic struggle between Britain and Russia. We assess, uh, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian. Holding the Russians accountable is World War III. They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people. Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. You've got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

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