Transcript of 544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)

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The homeland will be saved. Everything in motion. Everyone burns to fight. While one part of the people goes to the frontiers, a second digs our defenses, and a third, armed with pikes, will defend our cities and towns. We ask that whoever refuses to serve or to give up his weapons, shall be punished with death. The toxin that will ring out, will not be a signal of alarm, but a call to charge against the enemies of the homeland. To vanquish them, gentlemen, we need to dare, to dare, and to dare again. And then, France will be saved. That Dominic was not Winston Churchill, although many people from the excellence of the impression may think it was. It was actually a Frenchman, Georges Danton, Minister of Justice in 1792, the Dominic Sandbrooke, to my Robespierre.

That's kind. Thank you, Tom.

He's addressing the assembly on the second of September 1792. People will be able to realize from this that we are back with the French Revolution.

We are indeed, Tom.

Our ongoing series, aren't we? Can I just say why I chose to do it in a Churchillian tone?

Do. Yeah, please.

Because I think there is a Churchillian quality to that, isn't it? That is a very famous speech. It's all about defense of the fatherland, defense of the nation, determination to fight on, and there is a Churchillian quality to it. And I thought it subtly evoked a sense for British listeners of perhaps the resonance it has in France.

Yeah, it does have a huge resonance in France. Those words in French Il nous faut de l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace. We need daring, more daring, always daring, to dare, to dare, to dare again, or however you translate it. They're very famous. Lots of French school children will know those words. And That, I think, gives you a sense of the position that we're in as we begin season three of the French Revolution. This episode is very, very gory.

Listeners should be warned, it is absolutely revolting, particularly if you have children be warned.

Because in today's episode, we will be turning to, I would say, perhaps the most horrific episode of the whole revolution, the September Massacres. To give people a sense, this is a moment when mobs are going to storm, basically burst into the prisons.

Or are they mobs? I mean, we'll be discussing, won't we?

Mobs or death squads. They are going to club or hack a thousand people to death. Some of them in very gruesome circumstances. We'll be debating all that later, but Tom, perhaps first of all, we should remind people where we have got to. Now, obviously, by reminding people, we don't need to do the whole previous two stories.

That would be too meta.

But, yeah, it would. We'll never get out of it. Okay, to give people a sense, we're in 1792. Tuileries has been stormed. France is at war, and it's been at war since April, and it's gone incredibly badly so far. So France has basically lost, or there's little battles. So politics in Paris is defined by a feud between two rival groups of Jacobins. The first faction are called the Girandins, and they're under Briceau, who you really liked, as I recall.

Did like Briceau, yeah.

Yeah, a do-gooder. That's Briceau, isn't he? He's an abolitionist. He likes the literary Salon. He likes dinner with Metropolitan people. He's a good man. Yeah, that's Briceau. Then on the other end, another very Tom Holland figure, actually. It's like the battle for your soul this, Tom. I know.

This is why I find it so fascinating.

It's the Montagnard, the mountain, as they're called, under Maximilien Robespierre, the bony Ruso-loving. Another do-gooder. Bewigged. Yeah, bewigged do-gooder.

Hates capital punishment.

Yeah, like you. The streets of Paris are full of armed young men. So these are the Fédérer, from Marseille and elsewhere. Tom, last time, you talked about their importance in bringing the Marseillais.

That was the episode that we finished the last season on.

It was indeed. People will remember that the episode before that was the story of how these guys, the Fédérés and the sansculottes on the streets of Paris, the people who wear trousers, the artisans, the radicals, they stormed the Tuilerary Palace. They launched a second revolution. They slaughtered the Swiss Guard. They effectively toppled the King and Queen who've been carted off to a prison called the Temple Fortress. But they also crucially arrested about a thousand people who have since been crammed into the prisons of Paris.

This is a key point, isn't it? Because it's important to emphasize that although it's the Swiss guards who end up being massacred, the opinion across Paris, particularly among the sansculott, is that they were the victims.

Exactly right.

That it was the Swiss guard who had to blame for it, that the working people of Paris who were killed by the Swiss guards as they were defending themselves are martyrs to liberty, and that this is expressive of a pernicious royal attitude to the French masses, and therefore, there is a need for citizens to be on guard against something like this happening again.

Exactly right. That's exactly right. To give people a sense of the politics, with the stormy of the Tuileries, politics have been plunged into total chaos. The king and his family are in the temple. In their place, the legislate of assembly has set up this executive, which is basically dominated by the Girondin and by Danton, Minister of Justice. They have said, Listen, we are going to have to have yet another constitutional reboot. We're going to call for a national convention. Now, this will be elected for the first time in near universal male suffrage. Everybody knows this is basically going to call for a republic, that the monarchy is finished. But the Girondin who dominate this committee and who really dominate the assembly, it looks like they've got everything in their own way, but don't, because now they're having to share power in Paris with this new body that's been set up called the Insurrectionary Commune, which is the local council, which is dominated by much more radical people, and in particular by Robespierre. If all this isn't confusing enough, Robespierre says, the Girondin, who are the people who got us into the war, they're actually much too weak and too soft.

They're much too soft on the royal family and the enemies within. They may actually be part of the foreign conspiracy, which sounds bonkers, but that gives you a sense of the the faction fighting the paranoia that is around in this point in 1792.

I think there is actually quite an easy way for people to get a handle on this because this is the period where the notion of right and left comes in because it depends on where people congregate in the National Assembly. People on the right now, on the far right, as we might anachronistically put it, is the default position that had existed three or four years before, royalists. Then you have revolutionaries who have been trying to negotiate with with the royalists and with the king and queen. Then you have the Girondin, and then on the hard left, you have the Rospierris, the montignard. I think that's probably the easiest way to get a sense of where all these various factions are. They are now on a political spectrum that we in the 21st century, can recognize.

Yeah. Although, really, actually, you could argue that the fight is between two left-wing groups.

It is, yeah. Because the right is now, with the fall of the monarchy, is finished. It's now a fight between the left and the hard left.

You might put it like Yes, I guess you could make that point. It's really important to say the atmosphere in Paris is haunted by fear and by a sense of coming catastrophe and Apocalypse, because all the time, the Prussians, they have crossed the border, they are coming West, and the Duke of Rik, the Prussian Commander, has issued a manifesto in which he says, Explicitly, there will be an exemplary vengeance against the people of Paris. Paris is in the firing line. I'm coming for you, and I'm basically going to wipe the floor with you.

This is hence the Chachillion quality of Danton on this defiance, defying the German invasion.

Yeah, exactly so. Exactly. All through Paris, there's these mad rumors. People are saying there are loads of noblemen hiding in the sewers. They're poised to strike. They have hidden weapons caches in churches, in the Panthers, And particularly, one of these rumors is that there are criminals in the Paris prisons are going to break out. They're going to launch an uprising. They are in league with these foreign villains. The Commune, the Assembly, the neighborhood councils, which are called the sections. They are meeting almost permanently around the clock. The city is lit up at night. There are surveillance committees. There are troops in the streets. It is an extraordinary atmosphere. Everybody is waiting for something to happen. If we pick up the story on the 26th of August. On the 26th of August, 1792, terrible news reaches Paris from the Eastern Front. The Prussians have been advancing for seven days, and they have just taken the fortress at Lungi, After barely a fight. Lungi has surrendered, and there's only one fortress left, which is Verdun.

So it looks like treason.

It looks like treason, exactly. And it looks like the Prussians can't be stopped. Some of the Girondin at this point say, Listen, effectively, it's 1940. We need to evacuate the government to Tau.

Which is a terrible, I mean, a fateful decision for them to push because Tau is a very royalist and above all Catholic city, isn't it? So not a sensible place for them to choose if they're in a life or death struggle with people on further to the left. Yeah, it looks weak.

Well, it looks royalist. It looks like they're not invested actually in the defense of Paris. Rob Spears says, No way we should stand and fight in the defense of liberty. Of course, the Minister of Justice, this big, fleshy, corrupt, but very charismatic, systematic, revolutionary leader.

Another man with skin problems. People who've listened to our first two seasons may remember that skin problems feature throughout this.

I think it's fair to say, he's got terrible skin and he's got a taste for a brown envelope. He likes a backhander that he can spend-At a lady. Yeah, he likes a backhander that he can spend on a mistress and a massive selection of starters. That's Danton's modus operandi. Danton basically seizes the moment and he says, Close the city gates of Paris, put a barricade, I want volunteers. I want recruiting stations everywhere. His Charchillian charisma is really important, I think. Steadying the nerves. I mean, he really rises to meet the moment. But there is a dark side to all these preparations because the provisional government, with Danton as its leading light, issues an official proclamation at this point. And it says, Yeah, watch out for the Prussians, but also watch out for the enemies within. Citizens, you have traitors in your bosom, but for them, the fight would already be over. Your active surveillance cannot fail to defeat them. Now, what do they mean by the traitors within? They mean corrupt former advisors to the king, ladies in waiting at the court who they say are all lesbians, speculators, hoarders, criminals, the old Swiss guards, priests who have defied the civil constitution of the clergy, journalists who have written in defense of the monarchy, all these people, they think, are in the pay, effectively, of the sinister Austrian committee that is masterminded by Marie-Antoinette and her friends in Vienna.

I mean, that's pretty much the case, isn't it, Tom?

On the issue of Marie-Antoinette and her friends in Vienna, I mean, they're not wrong because Marie-Antoinette has been conniving with the Austrians.

That's the thing. I mean, it's important to say that. By the 28th of August, two days later, Danton has now ordered raids across the city, raids on people's houses. They're searching for guns, they're searching for enemy agents, stolen documents, letters. If you've ever seen documentaries or films about the French Revolution, you've seen this quite stereotypical image of a group of sans-culottes with their red hats and their pikes banging on people's doors. Thick stubble. Right. You've got an aristo hidden in the cellar or something. That's where this is coming from. Lots of historians at this point cite a diarist called Rosalie Julien. She's a brilliant diarist, actually, on this period, because she is married to a Jacqueminin deputy. Now, she is somebody who really complicates your sense of the French Revolution. She's a very likable character She's very well-read. She's very educated. She's a big fan of Rousseau, a massive do-gooder and reformer. But she is always writing in her diary, The city is full of traitors, we have to root them out. Still more traitors, still more treason. I think those words are really important to understand what's going to happen, because she and so many other people are saying, They're all in the prisons.

All of these prisons are stuffed with traitors. As soon as our troops, these volunteers, march out to face the Prussians, the traitors will seize their moment. They will break out and massacre the women and children of Paris.

About half a year ago, we did the Battle of Agincourt, and Henry IV is facing the French Army, but he's taken lots of prisoners. When he thinks that he's being attacked from the rear, he orders the prisoners killed because obviously, the enemy within is highly dangerous. There's a slight... I mean, comparing the French Revolution to the Battle of Agencourt, not probably something anyone's ever done before, but there's a slight element of that to it.

I think it totally is, Tom. Yeah, I think there's a sense of The stab in the back is coming, and there are all these rumors about breakouts in the prisons. All through August, actually, there had been rumors. The Paris police had been reporting rumors that people were about to break into the prisons, and I quote, render prompt justice to the people inside them. In fact, it's not surprising that the Paris police are reporting that because some newspapers and radical pamphlets and posters and things are very, very explicit about what they think we should do. And I'll just give you two examples. The One is a newspaper called The Orator of the People. It was edited by a guy called Fréron, who's a friend of Camille Demoulin, who we've talked about before. Fréron wrote this, The first battle we shall fight will be inside the walls of Paris, not outside. All the royal brigands clustering inside this unhappy town will perish in the same day. Their prisons are full of conspirators. Let the world see how we judge them. That's ominous, but not as ominous as this. This is from a guy called Fabre Deglontine, who was a great friend of Danton, and who was a poet.

He's not a great monument, I think, to the poetic profession when you read his words. Let us clear the ranks of these vile slaves of tyranny. Let the blood of traitors be the first Holocaust to liberty. He literally used the phrase, Le Premier Holocaust, so that in advancing to meet the common enemy, we leave nothing behind to disquiet us. Actually, Mara, one of the most outspoken of all these journalists- And has the worst skin. Not coincidentally, I think. Mara says, basically, citizens should go to the Abbey Prison, get the prisoners, and run them through with a sword. Some of Mara's defenders in the historical profession say, Oh, that's just Mara. He talks. He doesn't really mean it. But as Simon Sharma says, How do you know? How are people supposed to the difference. This is the climate. On the 29th of August, the Prussians reach Verdun. Verdun is the keystone of France's Eastern defensive line. If you get past Verdun, you're into the Valley of the Marn, Once you go through that, you are heading towards Paris. Verdun surrenders after three days.

So this impregnable fortress.

Yeah. The garrison commander who'd said he'd never surrender, either kills himself or is killed by the people of Verdun, who basically don't fancy a siege at all. We're like, Yeah, we'll let the Prussians in. Fine. Verdun surrenders, and the news arrives in Paris on Sunday, the second of September. The Prussians are broken through. Now you've got... I mean, it's an extraordinary scene. You have church bells ringing. There are cannons on the Revesseine, sounding the alert.

This is when Danton gives his Churchillian address.

Exactly. Danton gives his address. There are posters going up across the city to arms, to arms. The enemy is at the gates. Now, That afternoon, we can be pretty sure that something else happened, but we can't be exactly certain what, because the documents were later destroyed. They were destroyed in the events of 1870, '71.

It's ironic, isn't it?

Another Prussian day trip It's a Paris. What seems to have happened is that some of the sections, these are the neighborhood councils in Paris, discussed how we eliminate these people in the prisons. There are a lot of people saying it's an unpleasant necessity, but basically, somebody has to do it. Now, that's not to say the section's ordered it, but the tone has been set. At about this point, the chief prison inspector comes to Danton in the Hôtel de ville in City Hall, and he says, I'm genuinely worried about the safety of the people in the prisons. Danton says, Je me fous bien des prisonniers. I don't give a damn about the prisoners. Basically, let them fume for themselves.

But to be fair to him, one of the reasons for that is that he can't spare people from the barricades. There's only a finite number of people. Obviously, the main threat, from his perspective, is the approach of the Prussian.

Tom, I'm so surprised at this. I thought you were going to be on the other side of this equation, but it's very clear to me now, from the way you've conducted yourself in this whole episode, that you're going to take a very dominant Sandbrooke Princes in the Tower lying on this issue, are you?

Well, no. But I do think that there are reasons why someone like Dontor, people in charge of the revolution, might be unconcerned with prisoners and the security of the prisoners that relates to the overall situation in Paris.

Yeah, fair enough. Also, don't forget, everybody thinks the prisoners are total villains and traitors and all of that stuff.

Of course. But I think that saying we can't bother with them, it's justified by military exigencies.

Fair enough. Listeners can make up their own minds, can't they? I have to say Theo agrees with you. He's written in the chat, well said, Tom. That's nice. Let's get into the story. Sometime about 2: 30 that afternoon, the second of September, the news has come in from Verdun. There was a group of prisoners being escorted through the from the Palais de Justice to the Abbé Prison. They are royal officials, their courteors, and their Catholic priests. The streets are obviously packed with people because of the war panic, and a lot of people shout abuse at them as they pass in these carriages. As they get towards the Abbey Prison, which is in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, it's a former Abbey, hence the name, a group of people stop them. These people are National Guardsmen, Sansculottes, a mixture of characters. They stop the carriages, they drag the prisoners out, and they drag them into the near by section headquarters, which is a convent. There's a great crowd of people there, and the people are shouting, These are enemies of the people. Why take them to the prison? Why not just get rid of them now? Two or three of those prisoners try to break out, try to get away or fight for their lives or whatever.

There's a scuffle, they're beaten up, and they are hacked to death with knives, and their bodies are left in the courtyard. The rest of the prisoners are just 20 people or so, are just standing there absolutely traumatized in shock, wondering what's going to happen. An impromptu tribunal is set up and it declares them guilty. Then one by one, in a very methodical way, they're led down the steps into the garden and their group of men has assembled with knives, axes, hatchets. There's a guy who's clearly a carpenter because he's brought is saw, and one by one, they are hacked to death. It's important to say right from the beginning, this is the first incident. It is not a mad frenzy. It's not an orgy of violence. It is quiet. It's considered. The guys take their time. It takes about half an hour to kill all these men, and then it is done. And upstairs, the people who are still there, the room is absolutely full of people, and they are debating, now that we've killed these people, why don't we just go into the Abbey in prison and do the same with everybody who is in there.

But again, not necessarily to kill them, to sit in judgment on them.

As we'll see, not everybody is killed. You're absolutely right. While that crowd is all debating and arguing about how they're going to do it, a separate group breaks into another prison about a mile away called the Karm, it's a former Karmalite convent. A lot of these prisons are convents and abbys and religious houses that have been converted. In this prison, there are about 160 priests. Get this crowd Again, organizes a improvised tribunal. They call out the prisoner's names one by one. They take them out into the garden. Some of them are shot. Most of them, they were hacked to death again. Some of them try to climb over the walls, or they even climb trees to get away, but they are dragged back and finished off with knives.

Again, just to say, a quarter of them are spared.

Well, hold on, 115 people out of 160 are killed in this.

Absolutely, because I think it's easy to think that it is a total massacre.

Or you wouldn't take your chances with that.

Of course not. It's just really supporting what you were saying, that this isn't a frotthing at the mouth, mad mob frenzy. It's much more considered, and therefore, I think, actually much more frightening than that.

Agreed. By the way, we both get different the figures. That's not because one of us is right and the other is wrong. It's because every history book gives different figures on this. So, yeah, there is a lot of confusion about the figures. Now, meanwhile, the Death Squad has got started in the Abbey Prison and also in some of the other prisons. In all of them, it is the same routine. I think actually, Death Squad is better than mob. They're often described as mobs, but these are organized teams of men. They almost always hold this tribunal. They bring people out into the courtyard once they've been found guilty, and then stab them or hack them to death. We only know one of the names of the people who organized this, a guy called Stanislas Maillard, who was a clerk. He'd been at the Bastille. He'd been a big figure in the women's march on Versailles. He seems to have been one of those people who's thrown up by these periods of revolution and chaos. So a bit of a bully. You could say the person who would be a paramilitary leader. He loves all this, and he's obviously this is his moment.

But it's interesting, isn't that actually so few names are known. In large part, that is because in due course, to be a septembre as they come to be called is highly dangerous because it comes to be seen as a terrible blot on the reputation of the revolution. Not immediately, though. I think that that reflects the fact that this is genuinely not being organized by the big names, by Danton, Robespierre, or whatever. It's coming probably from the sections. The people who are organizing it are not people who will go on to things to become famous names.

I think you're absolutely right, Tom. I think he is being organized. Insofar as there is a sense of organization, it's at a very, very low level. It's these neighborhood councils. The commune, we know that they talked about it. In Instructionary Council that's taking control of Paris. We know they talked about it and they said, your point, there weren't enough men to protect the prisons. We need them on the barricades. One of the communes committees issued a statement signed by Marat, the prisoners are brigands who will slaughter our children and our women. These acts of justice are indispensable to deter through the use of terror these legions of traitors.

But it's not like Marat is being named as a guy who's leading it.

No, he's not going in.

He inspired it. But I think these are basically the people who had attacked the Tuileries, right?

Yeah, I think that's right.

It's people from the working class areas of Paris. They are representative figures from the working population of Paris.

Yeah, I think so. We'll talk about in the second half about what the population of Paris think of it. But I think you're absolutely right. That basically, they are pretty representative of the city and of the streets, I guess. It is the vengeance of the streets. That's what historians who are more sympathetic to the September Mass say. On the big wigs, the big wigs know this is happening, but they don't do anything about it. Danton says to Briceau, Girondin leader, The deaths are an indispensable sacrifice to appease the people of Paris. The interior minister, Jean-Marie Roland, the husband of Madame Roland, the great linchpin of the Girondin social circle, He says the people terrible in its vengeance is exercising a justice. They're making excuses for it and they do nothing about it.

That association of terror with a justice, I think, is exactly what's happening.

Yeah, I think that was very French Revolution, isn't it? That's the first day. But of course, it's just the first several days. The next day, you get to Monday the third, the men at the Abbey Prison, the first prison to be targeted. They're there for about 24 hours working away. And Meanwhile, other men are moving on to other prisons. There's a seminary called Saint-Famain, which holds priests. There's a convent called Saint-Bernard. There's an asylum at Bicetre, which holds petty criminals. Perhaps most shockingly, the Saint-Petruc Petrière, women's hospice, which holds prostitutes. People have been joking, hadn't they? We should send Marie-Antoinette to the Sault Petrière. There, we're not talking about priests or courtiers or royalist journalists. These people are actually poor, petty criminals, prostitutes, and so on. This is, I think, where it gets particularly shocking. So be set. They killed probably 150, 160 people. A lot of them are very young, about 40 of them are probably under 18. One of them is 12, two of them are 13, three of them are 14, and so on. Saint Bernard, the people who were killed there, perhaps 70 of them, they're forgers. The Saint-Colat hate forgers because of the paper money They think the paper money is all a plot.

They think that the forgers have been working with counter revolutionaries to undermine it and to drive up grain prices. If you're a forger, you've got to go.

David Andress, who's written a wonderful book on the terror, He comments on this laconically, September 1792 was not a good time to be a captured forger, and that is putting it mildly.

And not a good time to be a prostitute. So the saw Petriere, probably 40 prostitutes.

Or indeed a criminal, generally right, because you were talking about how throughout the revolutionary period, people have been assuming that criminals are in association with counter-revolutionary forces. This basically seems to be why people are targeting people who are in for criminality rather than for political crimes.

Yeah. I think actually, Tom, since 1789, maybe I don't know enough about pre-revolutionary Paris, but I think certainly since 1789, we talked about the grand peur, the great fear of the countryside. That's a huge fear of brigands, isn't it? Who are going to ride over the horizon and trample your crops and burn. Because they're working with the local aristocrats. Well, I think in Paris, there has been the same thing with criminals, an anxiety about street crime and a belief that crime in some obscure way is connected with the court.

Well, again, David Andres, he makes the comment in his book on the terror, that there were always 30,000 of them for some reason. That again and again is his figure. There are 30,000 brigands, there are 30,000 criminals. They're all plotting. And clearly, Really, it's just part of the temper of the time. It's what people are obsessing about and terrified of.

Yeah, absolutely. Now, actually, you made a really good point earlier on. You were keen to emphasize that not everybody is killed. The single most famous insider account, the one that was best known in 1790s France, came from somebody who did survive. He was an army officer and a royalist journalist called François Jorniac-Sameya, and he was in the Abbey of Saint-Germain, a prisoner. He wrote a book afterwards with a brilliant title, My Agony, Any of 38 hours, I'd buy that. He says in that, basically, he was in the prison and he was in his cell and his cell had a little window and he couldn't see into the courtyard, but he could hear. He said, basically, that was the execution ground. For hours, he was just sitting there in his cell listening to people being murdered. He said the killers worked in silence, and that made him even more terrifying. He could hear people being led out and then the grunting and the hacking of the blows and all that thing. He said all that he would hear, The only speech was basically after everybody was killed, the killers would shout, Vive la nation, long live the nation, and then they would move on to the next.

Now, a guard, he made friends with a guard, and the guard said to him, I'll let you watch some of the interrogations before the tribunal so you can work out the right answers. So eventually, fourth of September, at 1: 00 in the morning, it's his turn. Imagine that. I mean, that's terrifying. Somebody shouts out your name and you're led down the corridor, and then you go into this room which is packed with people, a lot a stubble, a lot of sweat, and a group of men at the end, you have to answer these questions. And he said, The men who took him in had blood all over their shirts. So he goes in. And if his account is remotely true, and of course, it may be exaggerated, he did really well. He was very calm. He said, Listen, I used to be a royalist, but I'm not anymore. The circumstances have changed. And of course, I've changed my mind, as we all have. I've never plotted and conspired with anybody. I've never been interested in politics. I was just a journalist. And it's bad luck that I'm here. And they acquitted him. They sent him home with an escort of Sontculott.

When he got back to his boarding house, his landlord, who saw him coming with these men covered in blood, got out his pocketbook to give these men money to basically pay them off. And the men said, Oh, we don't do this for money.

Because they see themselves as agents of justice. Just to emphasize this, that actually of the prisons in which the killings are taking place, over half of those who are detained in the prisons do survive this experience, which isn't in any way to underplay I mean, almost half the population of a prison being slaughtered is hideous, but it's a glass half empty, glass half full perspective, I suppose.

It's so interesting. It depends which book you read. I can tell you've been reading David Andrews' book because he's very much of the glass half full, isn't he? He's like, Well, look at all the prisoners who survived. Nobody talks about them. Anyway, so this guy gave the right answers. But of course, there are some people who cannot bring themselves to give the right answers. After the break, let's come to the most celebrated of all of those. That's somebody you talked about before, Tom, and I know you have a bit of a tondress for this unfortunate lady. I do. It's Marie-Antoinette's friend, the Princesse de Lamballe. We'll be coming to her story after the break and be warned things are going to get ugly.

That is a very serious warning. She received a saber blow behind her head, which took off her cap. Her long hair fell onto her shoulders. Another saber blow hit her eye. Blood gushed out, her dress was stained with it. She tried to fall down to let herself die, but they forced her to get up again to walk over corpses, and the crowd, silent, watched the slaughter. That is one of numerous accounts, and we'll be looking at the range of what is reported about this death, describing probably the best known of all the victims of the September Massacres, who is the Princesse de Lamballe, who, as you mentioned just before the break, Dominic, we've talked about before in in our very first episode. Episode one is season one in our episode on Marie-Antoinette, that she was a very close friend of Marie-Antoinette. She's of impeccable background, a princess of the house of Savoy. She was notorious for being a bit dumb, was said to have a tendency to repeat clever things that she'd heard people say and then pretend that she'd made it up herself. But against that, there are other people who rated her intelligence quite highly.

She was a friend of Benjamin Franklin. Again, a bit like Marie-Antoinette. She's not entirely opposed to the traditions of sentiment and fondness for the poor that are feeding into the revolution. But she becomes, like Marie-Antoinette herself, a symbol of everything that is most rotten and putrid of the Ancien regime. She is seen as a vampire like Marie-Antoinette. She's assumed to be having a lesbian affair with her. This reflects the fact that the princesse de Lombard, unlike, say, Madame de Polignac, another of Marie-Antoinette's great friends who had fled, the Princesse de Lombard had stayed with Marie-Antoinette and had served her as her mistress of ceremonies in the Tuileries. It is this loyalty to her which will doom her.

Yeah, that's right, Tom. Just to give people a sense of what is coming, we had a big debate, didn't we, about what reading we would come in with this half. That is actually one of the less bloodthirsty, one of the least horrible of all the potential readings that we could have chosen because nothing good is going to happen to her. She's 42 years old at this point. I'd always imagined her as being quite young. But of course, Marie-Antoinette herself is not terribly young at this point. She's been with Marie-Antoinette all this time. She'd had a pretty terrible life, the Princesse d'Alembert. Married at 16, widowed at 19. Her husband probably gave her syphilis, so she couldn't have children. And her father-in-law had banned her from remarrying. So she's stuck hanging around Marie-Antoinette. And as you say, she's extremely loyal. She's perceived as very haughty, isn't she?

I think that's because she's shy.

Yeah. She's a nervous person, sickly Socially maladroit.

Yeah, absolutely.

But as you've said, and as you've brilliantly described in those episodes about Marie-Antoinette at the very beginning of the whole French Revolution cycle, she has always played a very prominent part in the pornographic themonology of the court.

Yeah, absolutely. I think this is so important for understanding the things that will come to be written about her death, is that Paris has been saturated in appalling pornographic fantasies about Marie-Antoinette and about her female attendance and friends. This provides a terrible context for what will happen to her and what will be reported about her fate.

Yeah. On the third of September, which is the second day of the massacres, the killers came to a prison called La Force, where she has been taken with the other ladies in waiting and with the Royal Children's former governors, Madame de Thurzell. There's a tribunal set up. There are seven people. The most famous of them is a radical journalist called Jacques Hébert. He basically makes Mara look like a columnist for The Guardian. He's very extreme.

He's a bit Trump-esque, isn't he? He has nicknames for his opponents.

Yes, incredibly aggressive. This tribunal has been working its way through the prisoners of the Force. They have a very strange code. If they say at the end of your hearing, Vive la Nation, then you are spared, you're free to go. If they say, you're free to go, you are killed. So it's slightly confusing. Anyway, the Princess de L'Montbell is brought out, and it's all actually very quick. They say, did you know anything about the plot to kill the people by the Swiss guards at the Tuileries?

Again, harking back to the sense that it's the guards who are at fault and it's a royal conspiracy against the people.

She says, No, I knew nothing about this. Will you swear to liberty and equality in hatred of the King and Queen? She says, Yes, I'll happily swear to liberty and equality, but I cannot swear hatred of the King and Queen. It's not in my heart. Now, at that point, by some accounts, there was a friend or an agent of her father-in-law or something like this who was in the room who whispered to her, just said, Say you swear it, and they'll let you go. She said, I have nothing more to say. It's indifferent to me if I die earlier or later. I have made the sacrifice of my life. The tribunal says, Very well. Let Madame be set at liberty, which means you're for the chop. Then she is led outside into the courtyard. Now, what happens next is the subject of innumerable, undoubtedly sensationalized, exaggerated, and probably entirely fictional accounts. Many of them exaggerated, and many of them, frankly, probably fictional. What do we actually know? What we know is that the same day, the third A group of sansculottes delivered her body, sans head, to one of the sections. Later, the head was retrieved, and these were buried privately by servants of her family.

That's what we actually know.

We know that her head was cut off and was not there to be taken with the rest of her body to the section notary.

Correct. There are a couple of issues on how she was killed, which is the subject of an enormous, very prurient, frankly, pornographic speculation in the 1790s and afterwards. Then there is what happens to her head afterwards, which becomes a very famous part of the French Revolutionary story.

The detail that you just mentioned about what happens to her head, which I think does happen, The story is that it gets put on a pike and it gets taken to the prison, the temple fortress, where the royal family are being kept. Of course, Marie-Antoinette, the friend, and in the opinion of the crowd, the lesbian lover of the murdered princess. There are various accounts of what then happened. Some say that Marion Tournet looked out of the window, saw it, screamed and fainted. This seems an exaggeration. The likelihood is that she didn't see it.

She wasn't actually there at the time. I think she wasn't in the room. There's a story that the governor of the prison's wife sees it and faints, and people thought that was married to an E. I think it's possible they put the head on the pipe, by the way, to the temple prison. I think that sounds like something they might have done.

Yeah, I agree. I think that, as we'll probably explore later in the episode, it's partly because parading heads on pikes has become a part of revolutionary justice. So the beheading of enemies of the revolution, the parading of their heads, this is part of the language of justice on the streets. So So you would almost expect that to happen. There's also there's a terrible story about the Duke of Orléans, isn't there? As was, who's now become Philippe Égalité, one of the worst people who's ever lived. But again, I don't believe this story.

There's a story that he's at the Palais-Ruel and he's having dinner with some English friends, English guests, and somebody brings in the head and he looks at him and he says, Oh, that's Lombard. I know her by her long hair. Anyway, let's have dinner.

Again, I don't think that happened.

I think he's such a terrible man that I'd like to believe it did happen. It reflects very badly on him.

The question of whether the stories are true, and I won't go into all the details, but there is one particularly notorious account of what happened that I'm going to quote. Anyone listening who maybe has children or who doesn't want to hear it, just block out the next couple of minutes. But this is a detail that was reported by a playwright. Again, it's intriguing how often playwrights and fiction writers crop up in these stories. He'd been sympathetic to the Revolution, but seven years on, when he wrote this, he turned radically against it to become a counter-revolutionary. He's a man called Louis-Sebastien Mercier. He wrote, When the Princesse de Lamballe was mutilated in a hundred different ways, so already there we have the escalation of the torture porn, if you like, and the murderers had taken of the bleeding morsels of her corpse. He's saying they're eating her. I mean, the charge of cannibalism there is being overt. One of the monsters cut off her virginal part and made it into a mustache. The reason for quoting this specifically Partly, it reflects the way in which counter revolutionaries are drawing on the libertine pornography of which the Marquis de Sade is the exemplar.

But it also, I think, points to one of the ways in which the September Massacres will be understood and have been understood which is as an efflorescence of literal demons from hell, monsters who have lost all trace of humanity and can perpetrate the most revolting atrocities. This will be a way in which, in the wake of the revolution, throughout the 19th, into the 20th century, counter-revolutionary traditions in France and beyond will interpret the September Massacres as being not a clinical, patient, methodical elimination of people who they not only as criminals, but as an orgy of destruction and murder.

Yeah, the stuff of a Gillray cartoon. Yes, exactly. My take on this is these stories are incredibly controversial among historians, and as we will see because we'll get into that in a little while. My view is a lot of these stories are clearly made up. The stories of the most grotesque torture, the stories of cannibalism, people drinking blood, all of that stuff. It's part of a tradition of political invasive. To invent these stories. But I think it's implausible to imagine that a thousand people were killed without, as it were, people overstepping the mark, without mutilation, without rape. Because there were suggestions that some of the prostitutes, for example-Yeah, in the suburb, actually. Were were abused or raped or raped. Is that inherently implausible? No, I think a lot of these are horrific killings. They're not entirely surgical. However, I do agree with you that a mad frenzy is the wrong way to think about it, that it is pretty clear from a lot of these accounts, like that account that we quoted before the break of that guy who let go, there is a semblance of justice. We know that the killers took these tribunals, that they're not all just dancing around wearing people's body parts hats or whatever are covered in blood, that they are actually trying to take these tribunals quite seriously.

We know that the crowds listened to the evidence, and we do know that the killings were carried out in silence because so many people talk about it.

Somber,solom.

Yeah, a solum atmosphere. Some people have talked about it. They've said it was almost like they were ritualistic killings. There was a dare I say to them, I don't want to give you a massive gift, but it's sacral dimension to it, that it was a purge. It was a purge of sin.

It's often said, I think, correctly, that there is a presageing here of the notion of cleansing a state of disease that we see in the 20th century totalitarian states, whether it's the fascists or the communists. But I genuinely think it is also drawing on those Christian traditions, because you talked about a Holocaust. A Holocaust is a burnt offering to the gods. That's originally what it was, transmuted into a Christian context because these are all happening in abbes, in convents. The sense the inquisitors had that they were doing God's work when they burn the deceased limb of the tree. This is very similar to the language that you were having with the September massacres. I'm sure that there must have been some sexual sadism going on, maybe particularly the Salpetriere. But just to say, on that issue, it's a Salpetriere where the fewest prisoners are killed. I think it's something like 40, did we say 35 to 40, but there are 280 or 90 there. So relatively speaking, it's not like they're breaking into a prison full of prostitutes and going mad in the way that rakes in a Sard novel would. So I think that is, for me, the most chilling thing about it.

It is murder done in the cause of virtue.

Oh, I totally agree with that. I think that the people who do it think they're doing the right thing. They think it's a necessary purge.

But that is also why it's important for counter-revolutionary propagandists to frame it as pornographic because that undermines the claim of those who perpetrated these executions to be virtuous.

I think actually the pornographic mode is the one that people instinctively reach for because Paris is a wash with it. I think it's the natural genre to pick.

But I think it is natural for those who repudiate the notion that this has anything to do with virtue.

Okay, let's just sum up the story. It takes four days. The massacres in the prisons last for four days. They die down on the of the sixth of September. To give you a sense of what Paris looks like, the place is absolutely full of bodies. There are bodies in the streets, there are bodies in the courtyards, there are bodies in the corridors of the prison. The rest of the prisoners, of course, have been set free. So the prison is empty, and the commune eventually sends in people and says, Please scrub them down and wash them with vinegar. Get rid of the stench, get rid of the stains. But in some of the prisons, La Force, for example, there's so much blood, they can't shift the blood stains. Of course, a Tom Holland would say, Some of the rooms are stained with blood, but some of them are pristine and perfectly clean. Why not talk about those rooms? Anyway, we'll get into this in a second, Tom, because we're going to talk about the historiography. There are copycat killings elsewhere in France. So there are 44 people, for example, that are killed in Versailles. A horrendous velocity, actually.

They are lynched, they are beheaded in public, and their heads are stuck on the spikes of the palace gates. Probably about 100 people are killed across France. But then in the next few weeks, things die down. In the future episodes, we'll talk about why that happens, the political transformation in Paris, and a very dramatic change on the battlefield. Just to move towards a close on the September massacres. One question is, what did people in Paris think of them? We know people in Paris thought they were fine. They were completely fine. David Andress, who you've mentioned before, he makes a very good point that Parisians are used to public violence. I mean, you talked about it, Tom, in that excellent episode you did on the guillotine, the hideous rituals of the public executions. The idea of humiliating, degrading, and destroying somebody in public.

But Dominic, also what we talked about in that episode was how the revolution equates itself with humanitarian impulses. It may seem mad to talk about humanitarian impulses in the context of the September Massacres. But I suspect that maybe a majority of the people doing the executions would say that actually they're not publicly tearing people apart with horses or anything like that. They're doing it expeditiously. The whole tradition of hanging people from lanterns and then parading their heads is seen as revolutionary justice, but it's already starting to be phased out. It's clearly a cause of embarrassment for the revolutionary authorities. That is why exactly as this is going on, the guillotine is starting to be introduced and is becoming more and more the emblem of how criminals should be dispatched. And the September Massage, I'm sure, must play a key role in that process. That people in the revolutionary authorities think, okay, fine. I mean, it's cruel necessity, but it would be better to do it with the guillotine.

Well, it's interesting that the papers at the time, they're not embarrassed about it at all. This is a moderate paper, the Courrier Français. The people made it their duty to purge the city of all the criminals to prevent a prison breakout that would have fallen on the women and children. More radical paper, Lucien de Paris. The people took the extreme measure, but the only appropriate one, of forestalling the horrors that were being prepared against them and of showing no mercy to those who would not have shown any to them.

But if you have a machine that can just slice a head off, you don't need courtyards full of peoples with butcher's knives.

Of course. We have diarrests, we have letter writers. There's a brilliant example of a guy, a merchant son, an 18-year-old in Peter McFee's book on the French Revolution. He wrote home and he said, There has been a horrible massacre. He says, wherever you go, you see the bloody remains of mutilated bodies in open graves. Then in the next line, he says, But it was the right thing to do. The prisoners were plotting with the Prussians. We had to do it. That diarrest, Roselle Julien, she said, Again, an atrocious necessity. The people terrible in their fury are avenging the crimes of three years of vile treachery. And she talks in her diary. She says people have had their heads cut off. Priests have been eviscerated, but it's the right thing to do because we had to save France. Now, the thing is, historians have grappled with this ever since because, of course, most historians, by and large, I would say, who write about the French Revolution, especially in France, have been sympathetic to the Revolution. Here you have an episode, which is, for me, much more shocking than the terror. I mean, the The victims in the terror, a lot of them are people involved in politics, players in the games.

They're players. These people are often young, very poor, the criminals, the petty thief, the women, the prostitutes, the prince de l'Empart. So From the 21st century perspective, I know Theo says, Oh, you're always harder on French exponents of violence than you are when the British do it. But I think even with that said, it's hard to contemplate this and to say, Oh, yeah, they had to go, as Theo clearly thinks.

I think you're being a bit harsh on Theo there. You say that it's not comparable to the terror. I mean, lots of innocent people die in the terror. The difference is that death by the guillotine is more clinical than being hacked to death by people armed with knives and choppers, don't you think?

I suppose so. I mean, I probably would choose the guillotine over being hacked to death by a carpenter with a saw.

At one o'clock in the morning? Yeah.

The definitive French historian of this was a guy called Pierre Caron, and he was writing in the 1930s. He who was the head of the National Archives in France. He said, you have to understand it in the context of two things. One is the fighting at the Tuileries and the thirst for vengeance, and the other is the mood of panic and hysteria as the Prussians advanced on the capital and that you have to understand the war, the pressure, and all this thing. And Caron, for years, everybody said, he's the top man in the September Massacres. He knows what's what. And then 50 years later, our old friend Simon Sharma wrote his book Citizens. Have Have you read the passage where he talks about Caron? I have. He says his book is, and I quote, a monument of intellectual cowardice and moral self-delusion. And he said, Caron is being far too kind. This is basically anticipating the genocides of the 20th century, the same themes we have to get them before they get us, the same emphasis on what Sharma calls an armed sanitation on purging France of crime and sin. You can see why Sharma writing in the 1980s, very conscious of what had happened in Europe 40 years earlier, why he looked at September Mastkets and says, Hey, don't make excuses for this.

This is unbelievably horrible and bestial and He doesn't deny that there's a efficiency and a clinical nature to it, but he says that's what makes it all the more frightening.

But equally, he literally is repeating counter-revolutionary propaganda. To quote him from Citizens when he's writing about Cahron, Some accounts, including that of Mercier, so that's the playwright, whose account of the fate of the princesse de Lamballe, we quoted, insist on the obscene mutilation and the display of her genitals, a story which Cahron dismisses with the cloistered certainty of the archivist as intrinsically inconceived. Believable. But we know that didn't happen. We know that because of research that has happened since he wrote Citizens. So a French historian, Antoine de Back, he's the guy who went through all the records of the sections and found that the body of the princesse de was given to the notary of the local section, and he recorded what had happened, and none of these mutilations had happened. We know for a fact that that is counter-revolutionary propaganda, and that when Caron dismisses it, it's not because he's some cloistered archivist, but because actually he's right about that. That wasn't happening.

In this case, I agree with you, it didn't happen. The thing is, do you take all the revolutionary sources on trust and say the counter-revolutionary ones are propagandistic exaggerations, or do you say that the truth probably lies in between the two and that both of them are party pre? Actually, the truth is that we'll never really know, and this is the frustrating thing about this story. It's a classic example of historians projecting onto it their own political preconcept. So you give these... We talk about David Andress. David Andress is very much a man of the left. In his book on the Terror, he says the September Massacres are terrible. But then in the next breath, he has a sentence like this. This is where he introduces the September Massacres. The people in arms exercised their right of self-defense against those they felt were betraying them to the counter revolution. You cannot imagine Simon Sharma writing that sentence, can you?

No, you can't. But I think that's slightly to misrepresent what he's I mean, he is saying that that is precisely the horror. They think that they're doing justice, and that is precisely why it is terrifying. He's saying, I guess in the way that a Christian would say about what the Inquisition did, and I think that there is an absolute continuity there, as I've said, that it's the realization that you can launch a pogrom, execute people in cold blood, and feel that you are doing it in the cause of what is right. That's what's frightening.

Yeah, but I don't think that excuses it. I think that makes it all the more terrifying.

No, but I don't think David Andrews thinks that either. I mean, I think that I'm no expert in the historography of the French Revolution, but the reading I've done of writers who are on the left about this is that they do acknowledge that that is what is frightening. You can commit atrocities and feel that you're doing it in the cause of right. As I say, it's like a Christian having to face up to the executions that have been done in the name of Christ.

Well, are you not the person who did an episode about how the Nazis thought what they were doing was right, and they were on the right side of history, and on the right side of morality.

Yes. That's where the analogy, I suppose Sharma's point about the sanitation, kicks in.

It's absolutely the right one. There's another brilliant book on the French Revolution, the most recent English language survey. It's by a guy called Jeremy Poppkin, American historian that professed at the University of Kentucky. And he is much more positive about the revolution than Sharma is. And he says in his section on this, he says, Listen, if you think the French Revolution is better than the experiments of the 20th century, for example, communism or indeed, Nazism. If you think the French Revolution is more progressive, as he clearly does, he says, You should have a massive problem with the September massacres. Because he says, The thing that is so frightening about them is that they are so cold-bloodedly political, that they are people sitting down in committee rooms and saying, Yeah, these people have got to go. Go ahead and do it. Somebody organized the death squads. I mean, of course, they were bottom up to some degree, but there were people who led them. There were people who condoned it. There were people who didn't intervene, all of that thing. In his version, and indeed in Timothy Taket and other historians, they say this is a key step towards what we call the reign of terror.

The idea that maybe you'll make some mistakes and some innocent people will be rounded up and killed accidentally, but it's actually better to purge than to allow the evil, as they see it, to fester in your midst.

I agree. That is, I think, what is frightening about it. But I think that historians of all political persuasions would now see that as being what's frightening about it, I think.

Well, because obviously, we're going to be talking about this an awful lot when we get the terror itself. But let's We do not get ahead of ourselves. The elections to the National Convention have been happening all this time, and all the big names are standing. Bruceau, Robespierre, Danton, Marat. This new convention is going to meet on the 20th of September, and it is going to decide the future of France, and in particular, something I know you'll be talking about in a couple of episodes time, the future of the Royal Family. But the question is, will this convention even get the chance to do that? Because all this time, the Prussians have been coming closer and closer closer and closer. So Verdon fell. The Duke of Brunswick is coming on. He's got 80,000 men. Every day, he is coming closer to Paris. He is now being pursued by a smaller French army under General Dumourier, who is the foreign minister who got France into the war in the first place. And by the third week in September, the Prussians reach a place called Valmy, which is in the Argonne forest. It's about 120 miles from Paris.

And rain is falling, the skies are overcast, and it's against this very turbulent backdrop that the Duke of Brunswick and the Prussians turn to finish off the French and to clear the battlefield for their final assault on the capital. Tom, what happens next will change the course of European history.

Thank you, Dominic. Brilliant. What a cliffhanger. So much more to come. Lots more drama. Of course, if you are a member of the Rest is History Club, you can listen to the next three episodes of this epic journey to the climax of the French Revolution right now. We will be discussing in our next episode, Olimp de Gouges, the first feminist, the author of the Rights of Woman. We will be discussing the fall of the French monarchy and the climax will be the guillotining of Louis XVI. It's one of the great stories, not just of French history, but of history, full stop. If you're not a member of the Restes History Club, then you can listen to the next episode de Gouges this coming Thursday. Thank you so much for listening. Goodbye.

Bye-bye.