Transcript of 506. The French Revolution: Massacre at the Palace (Part 4)

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An address to the French people. Your Constitution rests on the principles of eternal justice. A League of Kings has been formed in order to destroy it. Their battalions are advancing. Do you not feel a noble order arousing your courage? Would you allow foreign hordes to spread like a destroying torrent over your countryside, to ravage our harvest, to devastate our fire, and through fire and murder, in a word, to fetter you with chains, died in the blood of those you hold most dear? Make haste, citizens, save liberty and grasp your glory. The National Assembly declares, The homeland is in danger. That, Dominic, was La Patrie en danger, which was a decree published by the Legislative Assembly in July 1792. It was read out across Paris, alerting the people to the fact that their beloved country was facing invasion and defeat. In a previous episode, we talked about how France had declared war on basically everybody in a spirit of revolutionary excitement and overconfidence. It's all going wrong, isn't it?

It is going wrong. Tom, it was lovely to welcome back the right Honorable Jeremy Corbin, who appeared to be reading that. What was going on there?

Well, I did think that there was a Corbinite quality to the summons to arms. Okay. I wanted to evoke that. Yeah, you did. I didn't want to do it in a French accent because I thought for our listeners, it's about conveying the sense of urgency and passion that the legislative assembly are trying to evoke. So I thought it was quite subtle.

Well, yeah, it was lovely and subtle, actually. Thanks. So what is coming, as you rightly said, the 20th of April, they declared war in Austria, and they expect an easy victory. And what happens next will be a fatal blow to the French monarchy. And I think even more significantly, actually, it is the spur to a second French Revolution, a second insurrection. And that's what's the subject of today's episode. It will completely change the narrative of the revolution. Now, as you said, the big wigs with whom he ended the last bit of narrative. So that's Briceau, the abolitionist, the social justice activist, Metropolitan habitué of salons and things.

Yeah, he loves a high-brow bookshop.

He does indeed. So Briceau and Dumourier, who is the hard-bitten military man who is now the foreign minister, they expect that when their armies cross the border into the Austrian Netherlands, that's what's now Belgium, the locals will rise and support them. And basically, they win an easy victory. And what actually happens is a total and utter catastrophe. So in the preceding weeks, the Austrians had moved 50,000 troops to the frontier in readiness. And the French, as soon as they cross the border, it's as though they hadn't expected this at all. They fight two small battles in the first few days, 28th, 29th of April, and they lose both of them in absolutely risible circumstances with a As soon as the musket balls or whatever start flying, their troops are literally shouting,, every man for himself, and running away. So why?

What's happened?

Well, I think what has clearly happened, and this is something that Marie-Antoinette had been telling the Austrians for months, discipline in the Army had completely collapsed. A lot of the senior officer class had already left France. And because of the revolution, it's actually a very similar story to what happens in 1917 in the Russian Revolution, a lot of units just don't obey their offices anyway. So when their officers tell them to charge, they go the opposite way. Even though, presumably, the assumption on the part of the Legislative Assembly, when they voted for war, was that the people of the Austrian Netherlands would be so grateful to receive their fraternal Revolutionary Comrade.

They would rise up, but they don't.

Yeah, this basically doesn't happen.

But why are the troops not fired with revolutionary zeal?

I think some of the troops are, but don't forget, at this point, they're advancing onto foreign soil. They're not defending their homeland. So it's a bit of a different If you advance onto foreign soil, the expected rising doesn't happen. The Austrians are there en masse, and you're very distrustful of your officers. So there's one incident. So after these two battles at the end of April, outside Tournai, one of the units turns on their colonel, and they hang him, and then they fire him out of a cannon. A lot of the officers say, Oh, my God, I'm going to be fired out of a cannon next.

That's not good. Not good for discipline at all.

And then they turn on their general, and he's a man called Théobald Dian, and he was a liberal general. He was an ally of Lafayette. And he is basically taken by his men to Lille. He's beaten up by a crowd, and then he's bayoneted to death in the main square of Lille. And Simon Sharma Why was it very pithily in his book. Dianne's body was then hanged from a long turn. His left leg was severed as a trophy and paraded around town before the rest of his corpse was thrown on a bonfire. And Tom, unlike your brother's podcast, We Have Waze, which is the the Second World War, we're not a military history podcast, or indeed, a podcast of the history of war, but this strikes me as an unpromising beginning to a military campaign.

It's not a tremendous tribute to the discipline of the French troops, is it?

Not at all. Lots of officers at this point resign. They say, Oh, my God, I'm next. I don't want to be fired out of canon and have my leg paraded around the square. I'm out, including the commander of the entire army of the north, who's a guy called Rochambeau, who is a veteran of Yorktown.

Really, I mean, fair dos.

That's perietic justice, isn't it?

Well, I guess, of course- Helping rebels against their lawful king. What goes around comes around.

Yeah. I mean, I don't weep for him. Back the wrong horse in the tax revolt, and this is what happens. Now, the question, I guess, is actually, it's not why the French aren't doing so badly, but why don't the Austrians do even better? Frankly, I think they're taken by surprise at how quickly the friendship collapse, because if the Austrians had seized the opportunity, of course, Austrian armies never do. They're famously dilatory. They It could probably have surged over the border and made far greater memories than they do. Anyway, in Paris, already, as we have discussed, there is a very peculiar mood on the streets. There's a apocalyptic sense of expectation because of this sense of an ideological crusade. There is a paranoid style in politics already, a belief that behind everything, there's some grand conspiracy. And that, of course, has been there since 1789, if not before.

And there's this thing that you were talking about, about masks, the mask of patriotism.

Yeah, the mask of patriotism. Exactly. And so as soon as reports of these defeats reach Paris, people basically go completely beserk. And the radical papers, so Marat's paper, the People's friend, Lamy du Pepe. Or there's a paper of a guy called Hébert, called Père Duchesne.

So Pierre Duchesne, he's a grumpy old furnace maker who's borrowed from theaters and becomes a mouthpiece for Ebert's politics. He's quite Trump-esque because he has a fondness for abusive nicknames. So he calls Marie-Antoinette Madame Veto, and he calls Lafayette, which I thought you would enjoy. General Blondinet.

Yeah, he does indeed. And this Invective, which has already been there, is reaching this pitch of aggression and scatological obsessions. And the reason that I think there's such an audience for it, and it's important to remember this, is that people are not just frightened now about the defeats, but they're still hungry. So with the Declaration of War, economic confidence has further collapsed. The, the paper money is completely tanked in value. Food prices are still very high. People are blaming the middle classes, hoarders, speculators. Marat specifically talks of the bourgeoisie. Austrians in French dress, the papers call them.

And of course, the ultimate Austrian in French dress is Marie-Antoinette, right?

Of course. The standard image now of Louis XVI is that he is a fat pig. I mean, that is literally what he's called. He's called a fat pig in a load of swil. Such chaotic and risible lack of tact. The Austrian empress had died, and he ordered his court into mourning, into official mourning, despite the fact that their two countries are at war. And of course, people say, look at Marie-Antoinette, and they call her the Austrian whore, and they say, she's probably passing secrets to the Austrians, and she is. I mean, this is the thing.

Yeah, that is the amazing thing, isn't it? Well, and the things that are written about her by Hébert at this point are vétuperative. He has this absolute fantasy of bringing her before the people. She has to make a public confession of all this, and then she is set to work sweeping the streets or as a cleaner in the Saint-Petrié Hospital, which is the place that beggers and prostitutes are sent to. He is fantasizing about a complete subversion of the social order as punishment for the corruption and crimes of the Queen and her fat, useless Yeah.

And this becomes increasingly widespread. So within about a month of the Declaration of War, the people who basically have dragged France into this war, the Girondin, that particular faction, Briceau's faction, they're already looking for scapegoats. It's their own fault, of course, but they're looking for scapegoats, and they point the finger at the king and queen. So on the morning, the 23rd of May, Briceau gets up in the assembly and he says, I can reveal an Austrian plot to destroy the revolution. The central agent is the And he says, I have no evidence of this. But of course, we all know that lack of evidence of a conspiracy is the ultimate proof.

That's the fiendish cunning of it.

That is the cunning. By this point, the panic has been given a further turn on the match it because two days later, on the 21st, Prussia had entered the war as part of a secret deal with Austria. So at this point, the French, who thought they would win within weeks, this easy victory, are facing The two most militarily powerful Central European monarchy is put together. In the assembly, they say, Right, we're going to emergency session. Deputies are literally sleeping in their seats. It's meeting constantly.

As you said before, how they The amazing thing throughout the French Revolution is that essentially everyone is shattered. No one's getting any sleep.

Yeah, from this point onwards. If you think of the politics of it, I think you have to assume the politics is happening constantly. I mean, around the clock, at any given moment, at four o'clock in the morning, there are people in the assembly, muttering in corners, and somebody's making a speech that no one can listen to because everybody else is asleep.

Yeah, and as Lafayette shows, if you snooze, you lose.

Yes, exactly. I'm glad you admit that now, Tom. Paris is lit up, and it will be lit up at night for a lot of the rest of this story. Citizens are told, burn candles in your windows because you will need to see the villains, the traitors, readying their attack. The assembly passes two emergency measures. One is a crack down on dissident priests, trying to deport them from France, and another is an appeal for tens of thousands of volunteers to come from the provinces to help to defend the capital. And Louis, disastrously, vetoes both of them. Why I can't quite explain why he would have such a lack of political sensitivity. I guess it's a last attempt to assert his authority, his role in the Constitution. And it's a sign of just how, frankly, how How uncalculating, how thoughtless he is.

He picks the wrong battles, doesn't he?

Always picks the wrong battles.

He picks the wrong battles, and he seeds vital points of self-interest with a wave of the hand.

He does indeed.

He's hopeless.

He is hopeless. In reaction to that, the Girondin publish an open letter. It was actually drafted by Madame Roland, who we talked about before, saying to the King, an open letter saying, If you don't change your mind, you will lose your throne. This is no time to retreat. She says, If you don't prove your loyalty to the revolution, local officials will take violent measures, and the angry people will add to them through its excesses. In other words, If you don't show yourself on our side, you are facing enormous, enormous problems. No king has ever been addressed publicly by his own ministers in such a way in French history. Louis is agaced at this. And two days later, he sacs the Girondin Ministry. He does have the power to do in the Constitution. But again, what a stupid thing to do. So he replaces them with royalists, loyalists. This provokes a massive, massive crisis. And after days of tension, on the 20th of June, you have one of the landmark days of the Revolution. What happens here is that the leaders of the Paris neighborhoods, the sections, as they're called, they organize a huge public demonstration against the king.

So we've had loads of public demonstrations, haven't we, Tom? And there are many more to come. But this is one of the most famous ones. So there are about 25,000 people. A lot of them are women. And these are a group of people that we've referred to maybe once or twice, but we'll be talking about them much more often. And these are the sans culotte. And Tom, I know you're going to be talking a lot about because you're a great historian of trousers. You love trousers and bridges and all that business.

I'm all about urban Parisian fashion in the late 18th century.

Oh, of course you are. So we'll be talking about their clothes next week. But for now, they're basically urban workers, not the very poorest. A lot of them are actually quite skilled craftsmen and artisans, but they're very politicized, the sansculott. They're very populist. They're in favor of the revolution. They hate the monarchy. They want price controls. They're quite nationalistic, all of this business. First of all, they invade the Legislative Assembly, which is in the Manège, in this riding school next to the Tuileries. Their spokesman is allowed in, and he a petition and he says, The people have awoken. We are the people, and we have awoken. The King is betraying us. If he fails in his duties, he no longer exists for the French people. And then they demand a right to basically march through the assembly. I mean, imagine a scene like this in the US Congress. It's very January the sixth, actually. They want to march through the legislative assembly and the deputies basically give in to them and say, Fine. They have a military band playing songs. They're waving flags. They have a big tablet with the rights of man on the tablet.Un Unbelievable.So that's lovely if you like that thing.

But they also have a calf's heart stuck on a pike with a sign that says Heart of the Aristocrats. Basically, when they walk past deputies who are more moderate or centrist, they shake their fist at them and wave this heart at them and shout abuse.

Well, if there's one thing you can say about centrist ads, they don't like calf's They're not stuck on a pike being waved in their faces, do they? No.

They would hate that on the rest of politics, wouldn't they?

They wouldn't approve of that, no.

So the crowd goes to the assembly, and then it turns its attention to the twilery palace. There's this huge crush outside the palace. Actually, what happens here is the guards open the gates to prevent the crush. It's not that the crowd necessarily storm in, but they're basically allowed in. Then this giant crowd, or if you're Edmund Burke, you call it a mob, I suppose.

Yeah, a ravaging mob.

They pour into the palace. They're heavily armed. So a lot of them have muskets and pikes. Pikes become symbols of the Sónculottin of the Revolution. And they're even dragging cannons with them. I mean, what they think they're going to do with these cannons, I don't know.

Or indeed, cannon.

Or indeed, cannon. If you prefer to use the American-style plural, Tom. We've discussed this. This will mean nothing to our listeners, but this is an ongoing soar behind the scenes in the rest is history. They get upstairs and there they find Louis, the King, and he's with a few of his noble friends. Basically, the crowd sworn into this drawing room, and they force him back into this bay window. It really is an unbelievable moment. I mean, you think it's only, what, three years since he was in Gilded Splender at Versailles, surrounded by people with massive wigs. And now he's standing in this bay window, surrounded by representatives of the people.

But they haven't got a calf's heart.

To be fair, they haven't brought it with them.

So there is that.

Yeah, there's pluses and minuses. All historians actually say at this moment, Louis does really quite well. So it's a bit Charles I on trial or something. He shows in this moment of great extremity, a, a composure, because they are yelling abuse in his face. You're monsieur Vito. You obviously don't want France to win the war. You're not really the king of France, you're the king of the immigrés. A butcher called Le Gendre is right up in his face, and Le Gendre says, Monsieur, you must hear us. You're a villain. You've always deceived us. You deceive us still. Your measure is full that people are tired of this play acting. And the thing is, Le Gendre is not wrong. Sometimes listeners to the podcast have said, like so many British writers, you tell the story from the perspective of the king and the Aristos. Oh, dear, the great unwashed have invaded my palace. What a terrible shame. But the thing is, Le Gendre is right. Louis has deceived the revolution. He has been tricking them. So he does have right on his side to an extent. Anyway, Louis doesn't lose his cool. Somebody gives him a red bonnet, which is a symbol of the revolution.

He puts it on. Somebody pushes a bottle into his hand, says, Go on, drink a toast to the revolution. Drink a toast to the people of Paris. And he does, actually. He says, Here's to the people of Paris, here's to the nation. And because he's so calm, which is to his credit, actually, I mean, whatever you think of Louis XVI, he does show, I think, considerable courage at this point. And he's polite to them. He never apologizes for who he is, but he just says, This isn't the time to discuss this. I understand where you're coming from, all this thing. He seems to be wearing them down, but then suddenly somebody starts shouting about the queen, and they batter down these doors, and finally, they locate Marie-Antoinette. And again, the same thing with her. They're shouting at her, and she's cowering in the corner and all of this. And this goes on for a couple of hours. I mean, they're there. It's not like 20 minutes. This is probably a two-hour job.

It's amazing that she doesn't get torn to pieces.

Do you know what? I completely agree with you, Tom. To me, in a weird way, that's a bit of a puzzle. How does she escape her life?

I don't know what she's doing. Because you can't cower in a corner for two hours.

Well, clearly you can.

You can, I suppose. Yeah, because she does. It's improbable.

But actually, eventually, a delegation, the assembly sending numerous delegations to intercede, and eventually they managed to persuade the crowd to disperse, to leave them alone. Okay, you've had your say. Now, clear out of the palace. So by about eight o'clock that evening, the last the Soncolot is ushered out of the palace and silence falls. And you don't have to be a huge admirer of the royal couple to accept that this must have been an unbelievably traumatic and frightening moment for them. And the fact that they've escaped unscathed is something of a miracle. Now, they do actually get a bit of sympathy from the people of France for this, because there are petitions that start to come into the assembly, signed by thousands of people, including the people of Paris, saying, That was a bit much. That shouldn't have happened. The royal couple, they should better guarded. You can't have mobs bursting in and harassing them. But the person who is most shocked, Tom, is a great hero of yours. The man who you regard as the outstanding statesman of the revolution.

The Galahad of the late 18th century.

Yeah.

The Marquis de Lafayette. Marquis de Lafayette. He's not the Marquis anymore, is he? No. Lafayette.

General Lafayette. An empty-headed political dwarf for some, but for others.

A chevalier.

Exactly. The Marquis de Lafayette has been off command in one of the armies of France, the Army of the Center, which is in Metz. Now, Lafayette, who thought, by the way, that the war was going to be his ticket back to the top, he has slightly lost enthusiasm, hasn't he, Tom? Because after four weeks, he sends the legislative assembly a message and says, I actually think we should surrender. I think we should see for peace. We're not going to win the war. Absolutely textbook Lafayette behavior there. He's also, I'm pleased to report, been sending secret letters to the Austrian saying, I mean, this just shows Lafayette has no It shows that he's a master diplomat. A master diplomat. He says, How do you fancy pausing the war?Genius. To allow me to go back to Paris. Brilliant. To reasser control, and then we can consider restarting the war after that.

What's wrong with that?

Obviously, the Austrons are not keen on this idea. And now he says to himself, like the hero of Tom Holland's dreams, he says, You know what? I probably am Julius Caesar. I will cross the Rubicon, return to Paris in glory, seize control. And so on the 28th of June, so just a few days after this twilery business, who should arrive in the legislative assembly in Paris, striding in the man of the hour, than Lafayette.

In his uniform? Yeah.

Sword, all that. His He left his army on the frontier, and here he is. And he says, enough is enough. Close down the radical clubs, close down the radical papers. I want order in the streets. I have the full backing of the army. The hour has come. And the deputies of the Legislative Assembly say to Lafayette, Where is your army? Where are all the troops who support you? And unbelievably, rather like the man who would go to sleep in the middle of a huge crisis, he's neglected to bring them with him.

That reflects very well on his trusting nature.

He hasn't got any men with him. And a lot of the deputies are absolutely appalled by this because they think Lafayette is betraying them. I mean, one of them, a former admirer of his, Jacques Pinet. I believed Lafayette to be the ardent and zealous defender of liberty, but now I had to face the reality, and I feel horror and hatred in my heart since I see him as a traitor who, in the guise of patriotism, there you have that conceit again, is leading us into an abyss. This is what a lot of the deputies say. Lafayette, the reason he hasn't brought the army is because he thinks he will just go to the National Guard, which, of course, he had been instrumental in setting up, and he will be able to rouse them to march on the Jacama and take control of the city. And this is an absolute and utter disaster. When he pitches up to the National Guard and says, Right, who's with me? Tumbleweed, long embarrassed silence. And unbelievably, even the King and Queen don't back Lafayette. They hate him. In fact, they're feeding information to the assembly saying, Lafayette is probably going to do a coup.

Don't listen to him. He's a terrible man.

We hate Lafayette. But they've always hated him.

They have. So Lafayette, in this incredibly pitiful scene, his coup doesn't So he goes back to Alsace to the army. Let's pretend that we'll never speak of this again. Let's pretend this never happened. Let's never mention it. So his own reputation has been torched. But of course, this thing about the guys of patriotism. If you already believe in this, then this is just more proof that basically everybody who was a revolutionary in 1789 has now been exposed as a fraud and a traitor. So this further amplifies this paranoid mood. So now we're into July. What are we? Two and a bit months into the war, and political authority has pretty much collapsed. Most deputies now are so frightened they don't turn up to the legislative assembly. There's probably only about 200 out of 750 who are still there. They're hard core.

So all the priests have gone, all the aristocrats have gone.

Obviously, they're long gone. But even this assembly, which was previously divided between and various kinds of jacobins, a lot of the moderates don't even turn up. They're too frightened. They've gone back to their estates.

Because they're tired with the royalist brush.

They're tired with the royalist brush, exactly. The economy is in meltdown. There are reports coming in from the south of France that there are lynchings, there are riots, rebellions, and all of this thing. And a lot of radicals say, okay, they're not wrong. This is clearly an unsustainable situation. We've got the Austrians sitting on the frontier. Total chaos. We have to change the record. This experiment in constitutional monarchy has totally failed, and we have to start again.

The resemblance to the rump parliament in Cromwelly in England, and Cromwell's coup, is quite striking.

It's very striking.

Except that Lafayette, I suppose, wanted to be that figure, the Cromwell, who clears out the assembly.

I know you think I'm very harsh on Lafayette.

No, it's not his best political moment. I accept that.

I think the trouble with Lafayette is he's just actually not very good at politics. Thomas Jefferson said of him, he had a... Thomas Jefferson liked Lafayette. He said his great floor was that he had a canine appetite for popularity. I think Lafayette wants to be liked. He doesn't have the steel, the steel that the stealiness, the cold-blooded shard of ice. In his heart. Yeah, that Cromwell has.

Or presenters on this podcast.

Right. Very good. But also he's just a bad judge. He makes bad calls. Anyway, in the clubs at this point, everybody is saying, Right, we need to scrap the Constitution monarchy, and the way we do this is on the streets. We'll have an insurrection. And they're completely open about it. It really does remind me the Russian Revolution and a bit in between the two revolutions in 1917, where everybody Everybody knows the Bolsheviks are about to launch a coup, but people are too paralyzed to do anything about it because the radical papers are absolutely saying, Let's take to the streets, kill, take prisoner, the royal family, and have effectively a popular dictatorship, dictatorship of the people, totally democratic system. The Girondin, the architects of the war, previously wanted to be seen as the champions of radicalism. This leaves them in a bit of a mess. Do So they go left and ally themselves with the sansculott? Do they tack back to the center and restore order. At first, Briceau's intention seems to be to go left. He launches a blazing attack on the king. He says, We should probably set up a committee to see if the king has been guilty of treason.

And yes, it is time to have a wider democracy and to think about, I mean, how old is the Constitution? A year?

Yeah.

If that. If that, not even that. But actually, yeah, this Constitution hasn't worked. Let's have a new Constitution. And then on the 11th of July, they have that proclamation that Jeremy Corbin read at the beginning of this podcast, The Homeland is in Danger, and they appeal for volunteers. And so from this point on, you get three weeks in which thousands of people are arriving in Paris from the provinces. And these are members of the National Guard. One way to think about them might be as paramilitary fighters. They are not trained soldiers, a lot of them. They are volunteers. They are very keen on the revolution. Some of have been involved in action already in their local provinces. For the Parisians, it's a bit of a shock. They have wildly different uniforms. They have great mustaches, a lot of them, because they've come from the countryside.

Often, they don't even speak French, do they? So the ones from the south might speak Occitan instead of French.

Yeah, or Breton, or some of them speak German or Italian, or whatever it might be. These federe, as they're called, a bit like federate, Tom, in the Roman Empire.

No, I think it comes from the Fête de la Federación. Yeah. Because they're being summoned to celebrate that.

But that sense of them as auxiliaries. Yeah. As auxiliaries who are on the- Well, no, I'm not sure they are auxiliaries because I think that they are the embodiment of la Patrie. Of course they are.

Yes. Actually, as we will see because the most famous of these contingents of Federe come from Marseille, and they are singing a song that will be so associated with them, that will come to be called the Marseillais, and we'll be looking at the circumstances of that in the next episode.

Yes, we will indeed. That's to look forward to. So these people from Marseille, in particular from the south, they are very radical. They're billeted at radical clubs, so they're sleeping on the floor of radical clubs. And don't forget, the clubs are often going on all night, so they're literally listening to these speeches day in, day out, hour in, hour out. And a lot of them say, before we go out to fight the Austrians, we want to settle accounts with the traitors here in Paris, and in particular, the King. We will not go and fight the Austrians until we have confronted the King.

David Andres, in his fantastic book on the Terror, he makes the point that this does seem to be a genuinely bottom-up movement. He says, Rose Pierre does not seem to have been directly involved in insurrection preparations. He's a brilliant thing about Marat, that although he called in his pages for insurrections almost continuously since 1790, he allegedly took flight at the risks of a real one, sought protection from the Marseille in Fédérer.

I think it is bottom up. It absolutely is bottom up, because at the end of July, on the 31st of July, the first of the neighborhood groups in Paris, the sections, calls publicly for the overthrow of the king. For too long, a despicable tyrant has played with our destinies. Let us all unite to declare the fall of this cruel king. Let's strike this colossus. Let us say with one accord, Louis XVI is no longer king of the French. In the next few days, this is distributed around the city, and 39 more of the sections It follows suit. They issue a joint statement, and they say Louis is guilty of perjury, treason, and conspiracy against the people.

He has got to go. Okay, well, let's take a break there. When we come back, we will be moving from Paris because we have bombshell news from the Germans.

Exciting.

So back soon.

I'm Marina Hyde. I'm Richard Osmond. And together we host The Rest is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment, and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment. Com. That's therestisentertainment. Com. Hello.

Welcome back to the Rest of His History. At the end of the first half, we promise you bombshell news from the Germans. Dominic, what is the bombshell news?

On the third of August, news reaches Paris from the Frontiers that the Prussian commander, the Duke of Brunswick, has issued an ultimatum to the city of Paris. This was actually written for him by a French emigré, the Marquis de Limont. Brunswick's Manifesto, as it's called, says this, If you, the people of Paris, touch Louis and his family, we will wreak an exemplary and forever memorable vengeance on you. Paris will be destroyed and all revolutionaries will be executed without mercy. And the point of this from the Prussian's perspective is they want to deter. They're very conscious that the royal family are effectively prisoners, and they want to deter the revolutionaries from hurting them. But of course, what it does is it, instead of encouraging the moderates, it basically encourages the radicals to go all the way because they basically think we have nothing to lose. The Prussians have made it very clear they're going to fall on us like an avenging fury. Why don't we just might as well be hanged for sheep as for a lamb? Why don't we just go all the way? And Clearly, the King must be in league with these people because they want to protect him.

So we have to deal with him before the Prussians get to Paris. So in the next few days, they make their plans. As you said, Tom, it's a bottom-up thing. There are people making plans all over Paris in section meetings in the clubs, at the Commune, which is the municipal government of Paris. And the man who really, more than anybody, becomes the symbol of this, the man who coordinates a lot of this, or so it seems, is a guy who had been the President of the Cordelier Club, the most radical of all the clubs. He's now a junior prosecutor's assistant at the Commune. And this is a man we haven't really talked about yet, but is one of the great figures of the Revolution, a man called Georges Danton. Tom, are you a Danton fan?

I am, really. Ever since I saw the film in which Gérard Depadieu plays Danton.

Yeah, it's a great film. That's a great Polish film.

Yeah, basically about communism, wasn't it?

It's about solidarity and communism. Solidarity, yeah. I saw that film when I was doing this for A-Level, and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. One of my favorite films ever since. And I've always loved the character of Danton. He's got a bit of the Trotsky about him, I think, because he's somebody who, spoiler alert, he ends up with a guillotine. He goes from being the Trotsky of the Revolution. Well, he is the Trotsky of the Revolution. He's got a radical organizer, belligerent and all that, but he ends up as a martyr.

Although slightly larger than Trotsky.

Much larger.

Trotsky is He's quite scrawny, isn't he?

He is, but Danton is definitely not scrawny. Dantan is not scrawny. Dantan is from the Champagne region, born in 1759.

He's a Champagne socialist.

He's a Champagne socialist. Very good. He's 32 at this point. So a lot of these people are young. He's friends with Marat and Robespierre and Demoulin, a lot of the characters. He's very good friends with them, a lot of these characters. I think the thing that has always made him endearing to people who read about the Revolution or in here, in Mantell's case, write about it, he's much Much more human than Robespierre.

He likes his food, he likes his drink.

He's very ugly. He's got this smallpox scars, but he's very charismatic. He's very theatrical.

He's a generous man as well.

Yeah, he's a man with great appetites and human capacities, I would say.

Slightly Falstaffian quality.

He's greedy and he's very corrupt. Would it be ridiculous to say he's the Boris Johnson of the French Revolution? A large figure, untrustworthy, and a lot of people hate him, but equally, he's a populist, isn't he? I mean, populism is the point of Danton. So he is coordinating all this. Tension on the streets is rising. Why don't the Girondin do anything about it? After all, they're supposedly the people in charge. And the interesting thing about this is while all this is brewing, what really is preoccupying a lot of them is Lafayette. They think Lafayette is going to take the opportunity to launch a coup. Actually, what that suggests to me, Tom, we've made the analogy a few times with Charles I and Oliver Crom Cromwell. The Girardin are slightly imprisoned, I think, by that analogy. They're anxious about a Cromwell, and so they're missing the fact that actually the real threat to them is on the streets. And in fact, about this point, the Girondin, some of them start talking to the king, who previously they've been slagging off left, right, and center. And they're saying, Would you like to have us back? Can we do a deal before this spiral is completely out of control?

Now, when this comes out, this will be absolutely fatal for them, that after all this, they've been talking to the king. The king also knows something is coming. He's got messages from Lafayette saying, I can get you out of Paris. You are going to be in real trouble. But Marie-Antoinette hates Lafayette so much, that she's never going to do this. She says, Listen, if we get out of Paris now, we'll be Lafayette's prisoners, and that will definitely mean civil war. So for the time being, let's just stay put. So they're in the Tuileries Palace. He's agreed, Louis, with that, as you said, that catastrophic lack of judgment. He's agreed that his official bodyguard should be disbanded.

Because that's his Trump card. Yeah. And he just said, whatever, let's get rid of it.

Yeah, mad.

He agreed to the disbanding of his bodyguard at the same time that he vetoed those measures.

I mean, that's the wrong way around. So the Tuileries is defended, and it's maybe just worth stopping to say who by. There are about several hundred policemen. There are several hundred National Guardsmen. There are noblemen volunteers. But above all, there are about a thousand members of the Swiss Guards who are widely hated within Paris. Those are the Forces Guard and the Tuileries. And now let's move to the night of the ninth and 10th of August, because this is the moment of decision. This is the great showdown. And what happened that night, the chronology is incredibly confused and obscured by layers of gossip and rumor and mythology and propaganda. But let's start at the city hall, the Hôtel de Ville. Representatives of the Paris sections burst into the Hôtel de Ville overnight, and they say, We're dissolving the commune, the government of Paris, and we're setting up our own insurrectionary commune. And among its supporters are people like your Robespierre, your Dantons, the radical spokesmen, journalists, and whatnot. And they say, The time has come. The insurrection, the second French Revolution, effectively, has begun. And they start ringing the tocs in the bells in the nearby Cordeliers Church.

That is the signal to the rest of the city. At around about 4:30 in the morning, they get the commander of the guards at the Tuileries, who's a guy called the Marquis de Mondat. They examine him to the Hôtel de ville. When he arrives, Danton rants and raves at him and says, You're a traitor, you're a conspirator, all this stuff, and orders him to be taken away to prison, which he is. On the way, somebody from the commune, we don't know who, shoots him in the head and kills him. And in his place, they say that the Commander of the National Guard now for Paris is this guy who's a sansculotte. He's a brewer called Santerre. He is a real bruiser. He is a a revolutionary hard man. So he's now in charge of the National Guard. By now, dawn-breaking. There are loads of church bells ringing across Paris. We're on the 10th of August now. There are tons of people in the streets, National Guardsmen, and a lot of these fédérés, the people from Marseille and from Lyon and Brittany and elsewhere. And they are armed to their teeth and gagging for a fight.

They have weapons. They've stolen from the Royal Arsenal. There are loads of people rallied by the sections who have huge pikes, and they all advance towards the Tuileries Palace. They arrive at the Tuileries, and they find the defenders are drawn up as if preparing to resist a siege. It's very like the fall of the Bastille. Because remember the fall of the Bastille, the thing didn't start straight away. There's a standoff where the insurgence is saying, Come on, join us. This happens again. Actually, at this point, some of the National Guardsmen, supposedly, guarding the Tuileries, swap sides and go to join their Confederates among the radical group. So that's happening outside. What about inside? So inside, Louis and Marie-Antoinette have been up for hours and are very conscious that this could well be the last day of their lives. Louis went down early to the courtyard to review the guards. The Swiss guard, who are very loyal to him, applaud him. But a lot of the National Guardsmen either are silent, and some of them actually shout abuse at him, down with the traitor and this thing. Marie-antoinette, to her credit, everyone thinks of Marie-Antoinette as this simpering airhead at the pitty tree, and not pretending to be a milkmaid.

But she's quite Theodora at this point, isn't she, Tom?

She's been very tough throughout this. Too tough, one might say.

Yes, because She grabs a pistol from an officer's belt and she gives it to Louis and says, Now is the time to show who you are. I admire her for that. I think that is, well, it's impressive, and yet also- She's a fighter, not a quitter. She's the Peter son of the French Revolution. A fighter, but not a quitter. The people of Hartnipal would love her. But actually, you could say, if he'd followed her advice, I think he'd have died that day. He'd undoubtedly have died.

But maybe that would have been a better way to go than- It would have been a brilliant way to go.

I mean, he would have been a complete martyr. People would have said, imagine the biographies of Louis XVI. At the end, he found his courage.

Yeah. Rather than going rather tamely to the slaughter, as he ends up doing.

He hesitates, and he says to a Munis, municipal official, a guy called Röderer. What do you think I should do? And this guy, Röderer, says, I think you'd be mad to try and fight. The whole city hates you. The only way to save your family is basically to throw yourself on the mercy of the assembly. Take them to the assembly, throw yourself on their mercy. And he says, Yeah, actually, on reflection, I think you're probably right. I think that is better than the standing and fighting idea. So he takes his family, that's Marie-Antoinette, their children, his sister, Elizabeth, and they go through the gardens with a military escort to the riding school, the Manej, where the assembly is obviously permanently meeting. He's very calm, Louis. He says to Ruegera, All he says is they walk through the gardens. The leaves are falling early this year. Is that a metaphor?

It's the quality of a Baudelaire poem in its cryptic menace.

Yeah. Or is it the words of a fool who's just commenting on the gardens?

Well, I mean, talking of a fool, he doesn't leave orders for the Swiss girls, does he? No.

No, but how could he, though? I mean, he doesn't know what's going to happen.

He could have said, Surrender.

Yeah, but Marin Smonet probably is saying, fight to the last. Exactly. Anyway, they arrive in the legislative assembly, and it's a slightly awkward scene because he's not allowed constitutionally to be present in debates. So basically, he and his family are locked in the reporter's box behind a grill in this cubby hole. And there they wait. And they start to hear gunshots, gunfire, coming from the palace. Because what's happened at the palace is that the attackers have lost patience with the standoff. Some of the fédérés from Marseille have started to force their way into the inner courtyard. There's a generally very chaotic scene, a bit of a Scrum, and some of the Swiss guards start shooting. Now, some accounts suggest that actually the Swiss guard is shooting at some of their own men, stop them deserting. It's impossible to be sure. As soon as the shots ring out, it is very like the Bastille, the crowd, the insurrectionists, say, Oh, my God, they're doing it again. They've let us into the inner courtyard. It's a It's a trap. And at that point, they all pile in. They rush forward. The Swiss Guard just starts shooting indiscriminately.

Hundreds of people are killed in this crossfire. Louis can hear all this from the assembly, and he sends a message to the Swiss Guard, Stop shooting, stop firing. But the messenger can't get through the chaos or the message isn't properly delivered. It's not clear what happened. Outside the palace, the streets have gone beserk. People are shouting and screaming, the Swiss Guard are massacring our people. Our people have been tricked. It's a plot by the king, all of this stuff. Sent her this hard man, sends in a whole load of more National Guard who are maddened with rage. And then what happens is complete and utter bedlam. The Swiss Guard shooting wildly into the crowd, the crowd forcing them back into the palace, up the stairs, through the halls. And then you have this scene, which is your classic French Revolution stereotypical scene of a mob surging through the palace, gunfire, stuff being smashed up. They start to set fire to the building. They also, in this chaos, they find boxes and piles of letters.

See, why didn't they burn that before they went mad? Mad.

I mean, especially if you have been conspiring against your people, definitely destroy the evidence. That's the lesson of history. So they find all these letters to and from the royal family. That's going to be a disaster for them in the long run. Now, when they find Swiss guards, when they catch up with them, they kill them. And there's an incredibly, incredibly bloody scene. Some of the Swiss guard managed to make it out of the palace. They get into the Place de la Concorde. At that point, they run into another crowd. Some of them are literally torn to pieces.

It's not the Place de la Concorde at that point.

At this point, no. I don't think it is. Others start to tear off their uniforms. They won't be. They have these distinctive red uniforms. They tear them off in an attempt to disguise themselves and run into the streets. And there they are being, it is like something from a nightmarish Hollywood film. They're being pursued through the streets, down alleys and whatnot by small groups of people who, if they catch them, will stone them to death, club them to death, stab them. It's unbridled bloodshed. And there are these accounts. Some people would say they are from counter-revolutionary or Anglo-saxon sources. Indeed, they would. That the Swiss Guard are hideously mutilated. Women strip the bodies, they loot the bodies. And I quote, this is Simon Schama, Mutilators hacked off limbs and scissored out genitals and stuffed them into gaping mouths or fed them to the dogs. What was left was thrown on bonfires, one of which spread to the palace itself. And bits and pieces of the Swiss guards are then basically collected up and thrown into lime pits. Now, some people will say this is just Edmund Burke reheated. This is anti-revolutionary propaganda. But we have a very well-known eyewitness who saw all this.

You've already mentioned seeing it, haven't we? In an episode before.

In an episode before, a fellow from Corsica called Napoleoni Bonabate. And Napoleon is there. And Napoleon said later, Never have the piles of dead bodies on any of my battlefields affected me as much as the killing of the Swiss. Hatred was in people's hearts and could be seen on their faces. I saw even quite well-dressed women commit the most extreme indecencies on the bodies of the Swiss guards.

I think if this happens, the reason it does is because the mass of the people think that the Swiss Guard has been trying to trick and trap them and have been treacherous. And this theme that the people who die in this confrontation have been the victims of royal treachery is something that will blaze across Paris and ultimately across France over the next months and years.

Absolutely, it is. So the way this is remembered in the next few months in Paris and in France, as you absolutely rightly say, Tom, is not, oh my gosh, what a horrible massacre of the Swiss Guard. It is, oh, my gosh, what a horrible massacre by the Swiss Guard shooting on the crowd who were only there to show their... Exercise their rights as Frenchmen.

They're evil, they're treacherous. And even more evil and even more treacherous is the royal couple who gave orders for them to do this.

Yes, exactly. Because everybody assumes Louis and Marie-Antoinette were behind all this. They planned all this with their partners in what they're now calling the Austrian Committee, which is this shadowy conspiracy that they think is controlling everything. And the weird thing about that Austrian Committee is it does exist, doesn't it? I mean, you can be paranoid, but you can also be right. So anyway, in the assembly, Louis and the deputies have been listening with horror to hours and hours of gunfire and screaming and slaughter and all of this. It's very obvious, I think, to the deputies that the constitutional monarchy is now totally finished. There's no way they can just say, Well, they will draw a veil over this. Whatever.

Move on.

That afternoon, the Jurandin passed a resolution to have Louis suspended from office. And they agree, okay, fine, we need a whole new system. We will call a National Convention, and it will be much more democratic. It will actually be the most democratic assembly at that point in the world. Every single man who has a job, who is over the age of 21, and who is not a servant.

But not women.

But not women. So in the meantime, before the National Convention can meet, they have a basically provisional government, an executive council, and that has Girondin ministers. So they will be running France. Meanwhile, the Royal family are taken away to the Temple Prison, which is a medieval fortress, and they are now basically prisoners of the state. In this moment, the politics of France has decisively shifted. The moderates, the foil. Remember them? Yeah. They're totally out of it now. They're finished. And all that. They're gone. They've either left Paris already or those who are still in the assembly say, Okay, there's no point backing the king. There's no point being a moderate. The circumstances This has changed. We're all jacoban now.

Does the correspondence come out at this point?

Yes. So at this point, of course, people find... So what they find is that they weren't necessarily wrong about Louis. He was totally untrustworthy. He was corresponding with his brothers in the Rheinland. He was sending public funds to friends of his in the Rheinland, emigreys. He was even using public money to subsidize counter-revolutionary newspapers. So Louis is finished. Louis is done. Also finished, Lafayette. A week after the insurrection, Lafayette tries to rally his troops to the old constitutional monarchy. They mutiny. Lafayette realizes he's probably for the chop. He deserts, he crosses the border, he gives himself up to the Austrians. They put him under arrest, and Lafayette will spend the next five years in prison. Obviously, the revolutionists can't punish him, but they take his wax work from Philippe Curtis's wax museum, and they cut his head off of the waxwork. It was a symbolic blow.

They also confiscate his property.

They do.

Actually, very nobly in due course, when he's invited back by the convention, so long after the terror and everything, he refuses to go back because he's not going to swear allegiance to a Republic dominated by Napoleon. So I think that shows him a man of principle.

Tom, I just can't- Just to put that on the record. I'm just saying.

Yeah.

So I guess the question is, don't forget, they're still fighting a war. So who's going to fill the political vacuum? Well, on paper is the Girondin. The Girondin are in charge of the legislative assembly, and they're able in the next few days to have a flurry of laws like your revolutionary wishlist. All the last vestiges of feudalism, gone. Emigré property, seized. All religious houses in France, convents, monestries, whatever, shut down. Priests who haven't sworn the oath to the Constitution will be deported. Even if you have sworn the oath to the Constitution, you're banned from wearing clerical clothes in public. And interestingly, the most liberal divorce laws in Europe. So here is, as it were, your progressive side, I guess, to all this, Tom. But if you think this means that the Jury and I are really in charge, you're mistaken, because actually, the reality is total and utter chaos. There's this insurrectionary commune. There are the sections, there are the clubs. No one really knows who is... Since the Constitution has collapse, no one knows who's actually running the city. The only person who really seems vaguely in charge is Danton. Danton becomes Minister of Justice.

He recognizes that people want vengeance. He agrees to set up a revolutionary tribunal that has the first show trials at this point of royalists. Tom, you talked about the guillotine, that brilliant episode on the guillotine. We have our first political execution with the guillotine on the 21st of August, so 11 days after the insurrection. It's a royalist National Guard official called Colou Longroman. And another aspect, you read that Timothy Taket's book, The Coming of the Terror? Brilliant book. He's great on all this. This is the moment when you start to move towards, for entirely understandable reasons, they're facing a total national emergency, a police state. The sections are starting to set up surveillance committees. They're demanding more and more public denunciations. They're shutting down newspapers, plays even they don't agree with. And they also make mass arrests. In two weeks, they arrest about 2,000 people, not just in Paris, but elsewhere in France as well.

Because they think that they're a fifth column, don't they? Yeah. They think that as they're facing meltdown on the frontier, so also there is the risk of counter-revolutionary insurrection in Paris itself. The list of people they arrest, there are some very familiar names from previous episodes. There's Beaumarchais, the playwright who wrote Figaro, Antoine Bonnave, who He was the guy sent in the carriage to bring the royal family back from Varennes, who'd been carrying on with Marie-Antoinette. So he's locked up.

He was basically the big man of the revolution a year ago, and now he's been locked up.

Madame de Thuzel, who was the woman who was looking after the royal children who accompanied them to Varennes. And the Process de Lamballe, the woman who had been very close to Marie-Antoinette, a long-time friend at Versailles, the Trianor. Then unlike Madame de Polignac, Marie-Antoinette's other great friend, who had fled very early on in the Revolution, she had stayed and she had become Marie-Antoinette's mistress of ceremonies at Versailles and had shown great loyalty. But she is also notorious in Paris as the woman who is supposed to be the Queen's lesbian lover.

Yes.

So she gets locked up.

So all these people, a thousand people, Barnauve is in Grunow. So some of them are outside Paris, but then vast majority of these are people in Paris. The question is, what is going to happen to them? Because for them, time being, they are crammed into the Paris prisons, the Abbey Prison, La Force, all these prisons that are across the city, often in medieval fortresses or converted convents. But you've got all these traitors, these enemy agents, as you think they are, what are you going to do with them in the long run? Because in the meantime, there have been, Tom, dramatic developments to the east. Nine days after the insurrection, 42,000 Prussian troops have crossed the border into Lorraine, and there they team up with a 30,000-strong army of Austrians. Four days later, the fortress of Lungui, which which is directly in their path, surrenders after a siege of just three days. In the next week, the Prussians cover another 40 miles unopposed, thrusting into the heartland of France. By the 30th of August, they have reached the last big defensive citadel, the fortress at Verdon. Beyond Verdon is the valley of the Marn and the road to the capital.

And in Paris, Danton issues a call to arms. Now, he says, the terrible struggle begins, and in this combat, there is no choice but victory or death.

Limey, it's all kicking off.

We'll be back next time, won't we, Tom, with a genuinely blood curdling story.

Yeah, we will be looking at the Marseillais. If you simply can't wait for all this massive excitement, then you know what I'm going to say. You can hear it all right now by signing up at the rest of this history up at therestishistory. Com. Happy Anto. Bye-bye.