Transcript of 712. The Terror: The Fall of Robespierre (Part 6)

They call me a tyrant. If I were, they would crawl at my feet, I would stuff them with gold, I would give them the right to commit all the crimes they liked, and they would thank me for it. What is the faction I belong to? It is you. Yourselves. What is the faction that, since the beginning of the revolution, has struck down so many traitors? It is you. It is the people. This is the only faction to which I am devoted.

So that's a brilliant speech. Maximilien Robespierre addressing the National Convention on 26 July 1794. He's combating crime. He's defending the revolution. He is sneering at the very suggestion that he's a tyrant. Of course he's not a tyrant. And yet, Dominic, you have written here a characteristically rambling, self-pitying speech.

Yeah, it is a rambling and self-pitying speech. I've actually read the whole thing. You can find the whole thing online. And to try to find a bit for you to read was a Herculean undertaking that probably took longer than preparing the notes for the episode. Because it's so wordy, so rambling, so self-indulgent, his speech. Historians, I have to say, have given it an absolute tasting, by and large. It is worse than a bad speech, as we will discover. It is a terrible political mistake by Robespierre.

Yes, worse than a crime, a mistake.

Exactly. So, and what is more, this is his envoi to the French Revolution and to this podcast. This is the last speech he ever made. Well, as we will see, there is a later speech that he makes, but actually no one could hear what he was saying.

Yeah, he didn't have any strepsils.

Exactly. So, ladies and gentlemen, we are at the climax of this series. This is the 24th episode of the French Revolution. Now, initially we did it in one.

Yeah, we did.

We did it in one 45-minute episode.

And I think the average length of these episodes is about, what, four hours now?

Twice as long as that episode. Yeah, exactly.

Back then it was kind of 40 minutes, wasn't it?

So let's hope this isn't like the climax of Game of Thrones or something, that people say, "It was poor, they threw it away, and the wrong person won." So, happily, the French Revolution, as it's commonly told, ends with a narrative banger. Like the fall of the Bastille, like the flight of Arène, like the murder of Marat, like the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, or the fall of Danton. It is a fantastic story, and there is lots of narrative drama, loads of twists. What is interesting about this story is that we know more about what happened on the 26th and 27th of July 1794 than almost any other points in the revolution.

And that's the genius of Colin Jones' book, isn't it? That he makes what is a very familiar story seem exciting, unexpected. You don't know, as you turn the pages, you don't know what's going to happen.

He has a nice, it's a very simple trick, but by telling it in the present tense, he gives it a sense of immediacy, like Karl Lyle.

Exactly. The grand old man of British writers on the French Revolution.

There is a sense in his book that the end is not yet written. The end is not predetermined, which is as it should be. The other thing I think which his book reinforces, this really is a story about individuals and individual decision-making. It's actually so often in sort of textbooks about the French Revolution, you'll see the lines, you know, this couldn't last forever, there was inevitably going to be a backlash, and when it came, Robespierre fell. But actually, in this case, it becomes very clear this is not about a backlash against the terror, or at least if there is a backlash against the terror, it's not the sole cause. There was a nice line I thought from a Montagnard deputy called Marc-Antoine Boudou, which probably sums the whole thing up.

I suppose an obvious point would be that accusing someone of having the wrong principles is an excellent way of killing them.

It's exactly the same. So let's get straight into it and let's set the scene. We're in Paris, it is the 15th of June, 1794. It's a week after the Festival of the Supreme Being, and the reign of terror is at its height. So if you listened to the last episode, you will recall Tom describing the law of Prérial, which was passed five days ago on the 10th of June. And Prérial created this new category of enemies of the people. So these are, if you mislead the people, if you spread false news, you deprive public morals, you speak ill of the Republic, all of this.

That's good.

Yeah. Oh, in that case. And what happens in the next few weeks is that the terror reaches unprecedented levels. Now, onto the centralization agenda, which has always been a huge part of the terror. All suspects in the provinces are now being brought to Paris to be tried and guillotined. Probably as a result of that, the conviction rate rises from 50% to 80%, and the rate of killing rises tenfold. This is very deliberate. One prosecutor says at the time, "With this new law, we will purge the prisons in a single blow and rid the soil of liberty of this garbage, these dregs of humanity."

Well, he's very widely admired. I mean, he's seen almost as a kind of conscience of the early stages of the revolution. So to lose him is really quite something.

People who like science, Francis Greatest Chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, he's for the shop as well. If you like poetry, Francis Greatest Poet, André Chénier, is also guillotined. As are, of course, hundreds of ordinary men and women, as one historian puts it, who had muttered too loudly about the price of bread.

And the revolutionary behavior.

So that summer so many people are killed that there is a problem with the guillotine. The guillotine, as we described last time, for the Festival of the Supreme Being, it had been moved away. It had been moved from Place de la Révolution to Place de la Bastille. But at the Place de la Bastille, the shopkeepers complain that this is bad for business. They don't like the tombrils rattling past, and they definitely don't like the guillotine. They don't like the pools of blood in the square, and they don't like the rotting bodies, especially in the summer heat. So on the 14th of June, the government moved the guillotine out of the city. Well, they moved it basically into the suburbs, to a square on the edge of the city, to the east beyond the walls.

But Dominic, just to say that it will be brought back to the Place de la Révolution in about six weeks for reasons that we will be coming to.

Exactly right. Now, even at this point, there are people who say this has definitely gone too far now. There's a Republican bookseller called Nicolas Rouault. I think we've quoted him a few times in earlier series. He's often quoted in Histories of the Revolution, because he's such a great source. He wrote a letter to his brother. He wrote loads of letters to his brother about what was going on in Paris, and he said, "Our leaders are now making themselves hated because of the horror. No citizen can be sure that he will be alive in two days' time." So talking of the leaders, let's focus in on them. And let's, if you imagine, if the rest of history were an HBO series or a film, there's one day, surely it will be, the camera is swooping over Paris and it zeros in on one building in particular, on one room in that building.

He's having a lovely time. Very jolly.

He is having a good time. Well, it's going well, as we will discover. Now of the others, these are the men who are running France in the summer of 1794. And very roughly, you can divide them into three groups. On one side, you have Robespierre and his friends. So that's Robespierre, Saint-Just, the Archangel of Terror or Archangel of Death, and their friend Georges Couton, who's the bloke who's been.

Too much sex.

Yeah. He's in a wheelchair. He says he's been having too much fun. I think historians generally think there are other reasons. To the public, these three men, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couton, are the faces of the Committee of Public Safety. They are the spokesmen for the terror, the champions of the terror. And that's actually how lots of sort of popular histories treat them to this day. Then you have the men who actually make things work. The technocrats, the bureaucrats who know how the machine works and are basically in charge of it. So three of them in particular, there is a guy called Lazare Carnot, who was a mathematician and military engineer.

He's the guy who proposed demolishing all the royal iconography in Saint-Denis.

Exactly.

Absolute trimmer.

Barère is the longest serving member of the committee. He's a fixer. He's a sort of Peter Mandelson figure, I suppose, isn't he? He's an operator.

But unlike Peter Mandelson, he's a survivor.

Yes, yes. He doesn't keep having to resign in disgrace.

He is the oldest living surviving member of the... He dies in kind of 1883 or something.

Yeah. Yeah. He advised Charles de Gaulle in 1940.

Yeah. He's the eternal advisor. He's probably there advising Macron now.

So Barère has become close to Collot and Bio, the two radicals. In terms of what they actually do, these guys, their workload is intense. The only thing I think it possibly compares to is producing a history podcast.

Wow, they must be shattered.

Yeah, they're exhausted. On average, the Committee of Public Safety send out between 800 and 900 letters and decrees every day, and each decree requires multiple signatures. Some of them start work at 7 o'clock in the morning. They work all morning, then they go to the convention in the afternoon for the debates. Some of them will go to the Jacobin Club to listen to the speeches in the evening. Others will just go straight back to work at the Committee of Public Safety's room in the Tuileries. By 10 o'clock in the evening, most of them are back at the table doing their paperwork.

So the fact that the guys who are basically running the French Revolution are getting by on three hours' sleep is perhaps an understated factor, the lunacy of what's going on.

Exactly. I totally, I mean, they are fraught. This is why they keep having nervous breakdowns, physical collapses, and so on and so forth. But who actually is doing all of this work? I mean, this is a key part of the story. We actually have, I think, 608 surviving Committee of Public Safety orders from May and June, from the month of Prérial, as it was called. And 90% of these were drafted by the three technocrats, by Carnot, Linday, and Prieur. So these are the guys who are basically running the war effort, and they are working effectively with a couple of hours' sleep here, a couple of hours' sleep there, and they're just constantly replying to letters, writing orders, and all this.

Now, now.

Maximilien Robespierre, a slightly different story. He only drafted 14 decrees of these 608, and his mate Couton only drafted eight. Saint-Just is a bit of a no-go, because he's, of course, away with the army. So you can't really blame him. So these guys are not really doing the heavy lifting. Now, it's true that Robespierre is away a lot because of ill health, but as Colin Jones says, actually, even before that, he wasn't really pulling his weight. He has provided the soundtrack, but his actual input has been minimal. There are a few people listening to this who have not worked with somebody like that, who does a lot of, you know, he seems very enthusiastic in meetings or whatever, but actually, when it comes to the heavy lifting, they're nowhere to be seen.

How long do I have to stay on this Papier-Mâché mountain? Is it urgent?

Exactly. And they have become increasingly restive in recent months. So when the arrest warrant was drawn up for Danton, Robert Linday refused to sign it. Carnot has had these blazing rows with Robespierre and Saint-Just. At one point, he called them ridiculous dictators. Now, anybody else who did this would risk heading to the guillotine. But these guys are so essential to the war effort and to the machine, they are effectively untouchable. You know, within reason, they can say what they like. The other people who are sick of Robespierre are Collot and Biouvarin.

Just to be clear, she is 80.

Yes, exactly.

So it would be a miracle.

It would be a miracle. So for years before the revolution, she was held in the Sault-Petrier Hospital. She was let out. She's now been hanging around in the Latin Quarter, and she's been saying that she is about to give birth to a new messiah and that Robespierre is his prophet. And this woman, Théo, has a small following. A few kind of semi-aristocratic women, but mostly poor local women from the neighborhood. Some of these women are informants for the Committee of General Security. I think what is pretty clear is that Valadier is hoping to use this against Robespierre.

This is such a kind of ludicrous expedient. It illustrates just how incorruptible Robespierre is, that they're reduced to peddling it. If you think that Danton was in that situation, there'd be no problem in finding some murky example of corruption. But they just haven't got anything on Robespierre.

Having to make mad stuff up. Exactly. And when Robespierre hears this, of course, Robespierre has no sense of humor. I think an important element, actually, in the story we're going to be telling, Robespierre has no sense of humor. Somebody else could have laughed it off or made a joke about it. Robespierre is very offended. He's furious, in fact. And it's clear to him that since this comes just a week after the Festival of the Supreme Being, which you described as the happiest moment of his life, he's really offended by that. He's outraged. They have a massive argument. Valadier says, "I would like to open a case against Catherine Théo at the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Brilliant fact.

So they sent people up on a hot air balloon. They could see where the Austrians were. Massive result for the French. In fact, such a massive result, the Austrians decide the low countries are lost, and they're going to pull out of the low countries. So with this win, basically two things. The road to Amsterdam is open. So the French are going to take over the Netherlands as well as Belgium. But also, it is clear now that France is not going to lose this war. The war of the First Coalition, as it's called. Yeah, the war's not over, but it will end on terms favorable to the French at some point.

I mean, that is a trend in his thinking, isn't it? He's kind of done that all his life.

Exactly. And Robespierre is shaking with anger. And he storms out, and he is followed by a horrified Saint-Just. And after this, Robespierre is so outraged that he stays away from both the committee and the convention for the next six weeks.

And so he is not hunting after his enemies. He's not kind of going after Fouché or whatever.

He is at home, the house of the Duplais family, licking his wounds and thinking. And what he's thinking, we don't know. Colin Jones in his book, I think most historians think this, what Robespierre is probably thinking is that the Committee of Public Safety have unfortunately let him and France down, that they are probably infected by the same corruption, possibly the same taint of treachery that Danton and Hébert and so many people before were infected by.

And there's only one way to deal with infection like that.

Yeah, cut it out. Exactly. What was it? The National Razor?

Shaved by the National Razor.

And the author we've talked about a lot, R.R. Palmer, in his book 12, Who Ruled, is very good on the optics of this. That Robespierre cannot see that, quote, "by sitting virtuously at home or making self-righteous speeches at the Jacobin Club, he reduced himself in the eyes of men who continue to bear the burden of office." I mean, here's a way to think about it. Imagine you're part of a committee, a group of people who have so much work to do under so much pressure, and one of your number decides he's going to go off home for six weeks, and he will surface occasionally to make speeches accusing you in a sort of veiled way of letting everybody down.

I was going to give you credit, and now I feel that I've been tricked.

You have been tricked? I worked hard. I connived at that, and I've got the results I wanted.

You didn't have to tell me that. I would have just sat here thinking how brilliant you are. And now it's all crumbled to dust.

Yeah, but it would have been hollow. It would have been inauthentic. It would have been meaningless. I wouldn't have taken any pleasure in it. Now, Robespierre going away for six weeks, what makes this so dangerous is that he does have enemies in the convention. So just on the convention, convention in theory has 749 members, but it's been purged, and a lot of them have gone away as deputies on mission. So it's often half empty. Of the members, 200 of them are Montagnard. They're the kind of governing faction. Most of them, however, just are in the center. They're sort of woolly. They're hanging around.

Yeah, or mowing people down with grape shot.

Exactly. Talking of which, we met one of these last time. So the world's most ruthless physics teacher, Joseph Fouché. Fouché, as we heard last time, has offended Robespierre on multiple levels, slaughtering thousands of people with cannons, attacking churches. He's very corrupt. He has been rude about the Festival of the Supreme Being. And he stood for the presidency of the Jacobin Club and actually won it to Robespierre's horror. Robespierre then had him kicked out, didn't he? But Fouché is determined that he's going to, if he's going to go down, he's going to go down fighting.

A little list.

Yeah, I think you're on it, actually. How do you feel about that? So Fouché is very good at politics. Whether Robespierre is good at politics has been an interesting gray area. Fouché is exceedingly good at politics. Now, there's another man, probably on Robespierre's list, who's also very good at politics. He is a deputy who'd been at the recapture of Toulon. Recaptured it, of course, from the British, which is unfortunate. This guy is called Paul Barras. He has been also accused of going too far, of having rather let himself down with some mass executions.

An artillery officer.

An artillery officer.

Who catches scabies, doesn't he, in the course of the siege?

And Barras and this Corsican artillery officer will, in due course, share a mistress. Or at least Barras will give this bloke his mistress.

Would this mistress be called Joséphine?

Joséphine. Poor teeth.

Yes.

There's Barras, there's Fouché, and there's even more significant for our story, a third person who's probably on Robespierre's list. This is a young man, and he is called Jean-Lambert Talion. Talion is 27. He used to be a printer. He was very big in the Paris Commune. He was a mate of Danton. He was a radical deputy. And in late 1793, he was sent to Bordeaux to establish the terror in Bordeaux. And he got stuck in. He loved it. He was very zealous in feeding the guillotine. But then, Cupid's arrow struck. He fell in love with this Spanish-born woman who'd married a local aristocrat.

She's a hot dollar.

Yeah, I think that would be sticky, personally.

You have to have someone to lick it off.

Surely. And that man is Talion. Yeah. So they started an affair. He lost interest in the guillotine once he met Teresa and has become lax in his duties. So he's gone from one extreme to the other. He was guillotining people left, right, and center. He met Teresa, and then he said, "Oh, well, actually, forget that. I've found something much more fun." He was summoned back to Paris. She followed him. Robespierre had her arrested, and she is now in the prison of La Fosse. She is facing trial as an arrestor and probable execution. And she has been sending Talion, her lover, increasingly desperate letters.

She's a spitfire.

She is. She's tremendous. And she's obviously playing a lot on Talion's mind. On the other hand, Talion is very frightened for his life. He knows that Robespierre thinks he's corrupt. Of course, he did used to be a friend of Danton. Robespierre has kicked him out of the Jacobin Club as well. And Talion has been tailed by the secret police, which he knows. So these men, Fouché, Barras, Talion, form a little kind of anti-Robespierre alliance. Are they an organized conspiracy with a blueprint to bring him down? Not really. Probably they're all trying to save themselves. They are whispering to other deputies.

They're like all those councils that ban jubilee celebrations.

Exactly. That's what it is. So the street parties have been banned as counter-revolutionary, which is absolutely bonkers, but even more significant is the thing that kicked off the revolution in the first place. And if people remember, what really kicked off the French Revolution was the price of bread. Now, they've got this paper money, the assigné, and that's been tanking again. The shops are running out of food. The bread prices have gone up. There's been a wave of strikes and protests in Paris by the artisans who have always been the driving force of the revolution.

How many people is that going to affect?

Oh, everybody. It's going to affect, you know, it's a cap on wages. It's going to affect the lot. If you're a carpenter, your daily pay is about to be cut by half. If you're a blacksmith working in these big arms factories they've set up, your pay is going to be cut effectively by two-thirds of your living standards. On the streets, there is not much love for the Commune or indeed for the committees. Now, that said, if you're a smart politician, you can capitalize on this. It's not as though these people are desperate to jump into bed with Robespierre's opponents. By and large, they don't really know who Robespierre's opponents are.

Could be all of them.

Could be all of them, right? Could be anybody. So no one knows. Meanwhile, Robespierre, unbeknownst to a lot of these people, has actually been working on a big speech of his own. It's the speech, Tom, that you regard as an absolute banger and everybody else regards as rambling and self-pitying. He is going to come back to the convention where he hasn't been for weeks. He's going to come back with a bang. And that moment is scheduled for the 26th of July, two days later. It's a key turning point in this story, and it proves to be one of the most dramatic twists in French history.

We are in Paris, of course, and we're in the old court theater, the Salle des Machines of the Tuileries Palace, which is now the venue for the National Convention. And it is obviously a very theatrical setup. You've got a wooden stage structure with chairs for the president and for clerks, and it's adorned with captured enemy flags, speaker's rostrum. You've got that Ark of the Covenant, haven't you, with the Constitution inside it? Yeah.

And looking down at it, you've got bank seating for 749 deputies, and you've got public galleries for almost 1,500 spectators. And in the chair is the radical atheist Collot from the Committee for Public Safety. And Dominic, he is not a Robespierre fan, is he? We've established this. And will this have any significance in the proceedings that are to follow?

It may well do.

Because Robespierre has come here, hasn't he, to give a speech, this banger of a speech.

Yeah. So as you say, a very theatrical setting. Collot, a former actor, is perhaps a little trace of makeup on his features, a little flourish as he sits down in the president's chair. And he is not a Robespierre fan because Collot is a very keen atheist, not a fan of the Supreme Being, among other things.

I call Robespierre.

Exactly. In the Danton film, the Gérard Depardieu film, there is a guy who I'm assuming is meant to be Collot, who is absolutely chewing the scenery. He's made up like a clown or something.

Brilliant.

Anyway, so Robespierre stands to deliver this tremendous banger of a speech. It's two hours long, and it is absolute textbook Robespierre bingo. So loads of virtue and loads of terror, which he describes as the thunderbolt of retribution launched by the hand of liberty.

I always thought I like.

I mean, the thing about the French Revolution, the French Revolutionary rhetoric is terrible metaphors. What did we have a second ago, Couton? The throne of virtue on the blood of traitors or something. Anyway, so Robespierre, I mean, people have heard this now a thousand times. But there are a couple of things worth noting about this speech, which I know you love. Even by Robespierre's own standards, this speech is crazily self-pitying. So he says, you know, "I'm the martyr of liberty.

He's probably not wrong though, is he?

There's a little bit of corruption, I think. But actually, to be fair, I think the finance committee have done quite a good job.

Yeah, okay.

As I'll explain in a second. The Committee of General Security, the secret police, he says they've been infiltrated by aristocrats and criminals. Even the Committee of Public Safety are no longer doing their job properly. So my colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety, they spend more time criticizing me than they do fighting the enemy within. And at the end of his speech, this very sort of, this very almost tear-stained rhetoric that people love in the 1790s, he says, "People have accused me of wanting to be a dictator.

How indeed.

Well, what's Robespierre thinking with this speech? So Collin Jones has a great analysis of this. He basically says, "Robespierre has been in the Duplais house, shut up in his bedroom for six weeks, and he's been brooding about all the slights and the criticisms. And he has come to the conclusion, struck him like a revelation, that all along he's been even more right than he thought."

Whoa, what a brilliant conclusion to come to.

Yeah, it's a conclusion that so often strikes me, actually.

Yeah.

God, I'm actually even better and wiser than I imagined. So Robespierre thinks the Republic of Virtue is not too far away now. You know, we've won that battle. The Revolt in the Vendée has been defeated. You know, Lyon has been brought back into the fold. But of course, that means that our enemies, you know, they will stop at nothing now. Their conspiracy must be reaching its absolute peak. So this is not the time to relax. It's time to intensify the terror. Let's double down to get to the promised land.

Because compromise is corruption.

Compromise is corruption completely. So what he's looking to do with this speech, I think, is to establish the ground for, in a few weeks, a purge of the convention. He would probably have thought to use the Son-Culottes, the commune, the municipal government, to do that much as he had done against the Girondins a year before. And this is, I think, what most of his listeners thought. So the very first professional historian in France to write about the revolution was called Alphonse Oulard. And he had this wonderful line that, "For all the talk of martyrdom, Robespierre, to his listeners, sounded less like a man determined to die for the cause than a man who wanted to kill for it."

You're picking off the stragglers.

Yeah. If he could bring down Abert and Danton, I mean, it's a question about how often you can, of course, pull off the same trick. But if you'd gotten organized support, if it appears that you have bayonets behind you and the streets behind you, you know, are there that many people who are going to go to the guillotine to defend Fouché or Talion or whoever?

Well, not if the risk of standing up for them is that you then become an object of suspicion yourself.

Yeah. I mean, as we'll see in the next half hour or so, you know, there are moments in parliaments or in assemblies or whatever where the outcome is uncertain and people could jump one way or another. And they make individual decisions on the spur of the moment based on who they think is going to win. And that's going to happen this time. But actually, the way that Robespierre has done this, by not naming names, everybody in the convention thinks, "Well, could it be me?" And instead of intimidating them into silence, he's actually scaring them into answering back.

Ah, blimey.

For somebody who is not, you know, in the sort of, in the thick of the factional struggle to be doing this, it's quite a big moment.

So he's like the little boy saying the emperor has no clothes to a degree.

A little bit, yeah, I think he is. There is unexpectedly enthusiastic applause at this. And some of Robespierre's enemies in the committees think, "Oh." So Bio gets up from the Committee of Public Safety. And he says to Robespierre, he says, "Well, if Robespierre had bothered to turn up for the last six weeks and actually do some work, he would know better than to make so many wild allegations." And then Vadier and Damar from the Committee of General Security, they pile in as well.

So they will be denied this banger of a speech.

Yes, exactly. Imagine that was a, what a fun evening that would be for somebody else to be reading out Robespierre's speech to your local jackabank club.

Come, children, gather around. I have some readings.

So Robespierre is very shaken and shocked by this. One deputy said afterwards, he saw him slumped in his chair, muttering darkly to himself in a rage, "I'm lost, I'm lost," all this sort of thing. Now, that evening, of course, the jackabank club are meeting as they always do. And they meet in Rue Saint-Honoré, which is just down the road, right in the center of Paris. It's just down from Robespierre's house. And Robespierre turns up and he says, you know, "Fellow club members, I'm among friends.

Fun evening.

Yeah, how's it going? How's it going? And Collot went mad at him. He said, "You really don't know. Aren't you great friends with the man who's behind all this, the man leading us to civil war? You, you're a coward and a traitor. You're scoundrels, the three of you, determined to lead the fatherland to ruin." And when people hear Collot, this is your classic sort of, I don't know, boys' boarding school or girls' boarding school, even worse. Everybody finds that they've discovered this new scapegoat and they're like, "Yeah, let's pile in." So everybody else piles in.

I mean, that's an ominous moment, isn't it? God, if Barère is swinging around.

Exactly.

The wind really is changing.

Saint-Just has been working on this report, just kind of looks up and he's pale and he doesn't know what to say, stammering.

Because it's come from nowhere.

It's come absolutely nowhere. He just asked them how they had a fun evening.

Yeah.

And Collot says, "I expect you're planning to have us killed, are you? Tonight or tomorrow? Well, we're going to stay at our post and we'll unmask you. I expect you're making plans against us right now. I expect that's what you're doing with all these papers. You're the enemy. You're the conspirator." And Saint-Just is so stunned. He can't get his words out. And he tries to show Collot what he's been writing. Collot says, "I don't want to look. You can take our lives. You can have us killed, but you will never delude the virtue of the people." This is the former actor, of course. He's having a brilliant time.

Oh. Oh. What wrongs are this?

Exactly.

Infernal villain. I can't take someone called Collot seriously, though.

Why not?

We've got a guy in our cricket team who's called Collot. That's his nickname.

Okay.

He's very much not a kind of revolutionary figure.

Okay. Well, that explains it. So anyway, Collot, like an actor, like a sort of volcano returning to its slumbers, he eventually subsides.

Enough.

Yeah, exactly.

I won't.

And we will meet in Chester or something like kind of Henry IV type scene. Anyway, he calms down. Saint-Just finally gets a word in. He says, "Listen, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll finish this. I'll bring it to the committee tomorrow. You can all read it, approve it. And only if you approve it, I will present it to the convention." Yeah, come on. Let's be friends.

Does Saint-Just, I mean, he is better at compromise than Robespierre by this point.

Yeah.

You know, he can see the problem brewing.

I think he is, actually. I think he is. But he will make a terrible mistake, as we will see. He goes back to his report, on which he's been working very hard, the poor fellow. He finishes his report at 5 o'clock in the morning. Probably he went to see Robespierre after that, which is why he changed his mind. We don't know. Now, while all this has been going on, clearly some of the people on Robespierre's potential enemies list have also been going around the city. The most obvious candidate to be on that list is probably Jean-Lambert Talion, the guy whose girlfriend is in prison.

Yeah, Spanish girlfriend who's bathing in strawberry jam.

Who's been sneering, sending mocking letters, saying, "You're no man at all. You're, you know, all this." Talion has been going around visiting moderate deputies. Now, most of the deputies live near the Tuileries Palace or on the Rue Saint-Honoré, so you can go and visit a lot of them. And he's said, "Look, Robespierre is totally out of control. He's clearly planning a coup against us. We've got to stand up to him." That's what Talion's been doing overnight. So dawn on Sunday, the 27th of July, which is the ninth day of Dermador.

Oh, folly of follies.

Exactly.

What a falling off with the.

Yeah.

The pigmies that have been sniping at Robespierre. He's going to, you know, say, "This is very unfair." So the committee wait for him. He doesn't turn up. Eventually, they go across to the Tuileries Theatre just before midday. And the deputies have been gathering for a couple of hours at the theatre for the convention meeting. The convention meeting would always start at 11 with a very boring reading of correspondence. So people would arrive during that. Collot, the actor, is going to be in the chair again, the president. And as they go in, Talion is there.

Yeah. So you're a traitor. You're thrown off this rock. That's the end of you. And he's just embarked on his Tarpeian rock metaphor, which is so beautifully crafted. And at that point, Talion jumps to his feet and he says, "I have a point of order. This has got to end." I'm going to have to really restrain myself from doing it all in this sort of ludicrous actor's voice. But they are all playing parts, aren't they? So it's appropriate.

Yeah.

And Talion says, "Robespierre and Saint-Just say they don't belong to any faction. But they're the most divisive people in the convention. They have come here to assail the fatherland, to aggravate its troubles, to hurl it into the abyss." Talion says, "Do you know what? Until today, I was frightened of the tyrant Robespierre." And he compares him, actually, to Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell, who he regards bizarrely as a bad man. And Talion pulls out a dagger. And he says, "But this morning, I armed myself with a dagger to pierce Robespierre's breast if the convention does not have the courage to vote for his arrest."

Yeah.

So he's absolutely exhausted. He seems to lose his nerve and he just sort of slumps into his seat in shock while Talion is speaking. Now, at this point, Robespierre jumps to his feet. He says, "I want a writer reply." And this is where it really matters that the person in the president's chair is Collot, who hates Robespierre.

Yeah.

And Collot says, "No, not you."

Surely he says, "No."

Yes. He would, "No."

I say, "No."

The time has not yet come.

Thou shalt not darken the podium with thy presence.

So he calls for Bio. Bio gets up. And Bio says, "Saint-Just and Robespierre are the worst people in the world. Saint-Just promised us he would come and show us in the committee his speech. He's a liar. He's a cheat. He didn't turn up. They spend all their time in the committee threatening us. They've been plotting, actually, to use the National Guard against us all. They're terrible people." Robespierre is horrified. He jumps to his feet. He's trying to get to the rostrum. But actually, there are now people shouting, "Down with the tyrant! Get rid of the tyrant!"

Oh, yeah, the 80-year-old woman.

Yes.

They can't leave that alone.

This woman, this is, "Have I not been telling you that this woman claims to be the Mother of God and that Robespierre is the Messiah? This mad woman had a letter under her mattress telling Robespierre that his divine mission had been predicted by Ezekiel." And at this, everybody starts laughing, because they know this is obviously ridiculous. And this is the one time that anyone actually really, you know, in a speech in the French Revolution, I think, used humor very effectively, because they're not great laugh-a-minute people, the French Revolutionaries.

I mean, that's not a bad parody.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

It's good stand-up, revolutionary stand-up. And I suppose the fact that it's all happening on a stage.

Of course.

Means that people are judging it as a kind of theatrical performance.

Absolutely they are. And I mean, you're right. So-and-so is conspiring against me. I'm so oppressed. I'm so miserable. And everybody starts laughing at this. Robespierre cannot deal with this at all. So at this point, he is shouting at them and he's really losing it. He's losing his voice, I think, because of stress, you know, the shock of it and whatnot.

Well, he's given his two-hour speech twice in a row.

That's true, actually.

Oh, God.

That God-of-all speech. So he's shouting hoarsely and he's drowned out. His voice at this point breaks. And one of the deputies shouts at him, "The blood of Danton is choking you."

Amazing.

What a moment. What a moment. And everyone's howling and all of this. At last, another deputy, an absolute nobody called Luché, shouts, "I demand an arrest warrant against Robespierre." And a few people start clapping. And then the clapping spreads. People have sensed where the wind is blowing and the clapping becomes universal. They vote to arrest Robespierre, to arrest the head of the Paris National Guard, who's a guy called François Henriot, who is a Robespierre loyalist.

He'd been at Tulor, hadn't he?

Yeah, he had, exactly.

With Napoleon when he does his stuff.

Yes, and he was sort of Napoleon's patron, wasn't he, a little bit?

Yeah.

So Augustin Robespierre, he gets up and he says, "If you are going to arrest my brother, you should arrest me as well."

All right.

And they say, "Brilliant. Well, yeah, we will." And another person jumps on this mad bandwagon, who's called Philippe Lebat, who was a young friend of Robespierre who had married, what was Robespierre's landlord? Dupley. He'd married one of Dupley's daughters. And he says, "Yes, arrest me too." So they're like, "Brilliant. Well, we're fine. We didn't like you anyway." They arrest this guy. And then they add Saint-Just and they add Couton. And rather crudely, they say of Couton as they arrest him, "Yes, he wanted to use our corpses as a staircase to ascend to the throne."

Hmm.

It's harsh from them. So ushers surround these five deputies and they take them out of the convention. They take them to a building nearby, which is called the Hôtel de Brione. And the Hôtel de Brione is the office of the Committee of General Security. And they'll be held here and then they'll be taken to prison. So by now, it's actually late afternoon. And all the rest of the convention deputies, they're exhausted with the emotional drama of it. But also, they're thrilled.

And they're doing this, aren't they, by ringing the toxin.

Yes. So bells ringing.

Which is never a good sign.

No. It's always an exciting moment when the toxin rings across Paris. So meanwhile, it's about 4:45 in the afternoon. The National Guard commander, Henriot, of course, there's a warrant out for his arrest. He grabs a load of men and he says, "We're going straight over to the Hôtel de Brione. We're going to rescue our friends." And they've got their sabers drawn. They charge into the Hôtel de Brione. They break down the doors and they say, "Give us the five prisoners." But in one of many twists, at this point, another group of guardsmen turn up.

Yeah, maybe.

"They're oppressing Saint-Just, the apostle of virtue who led the armies of the Republic to victory."

Again, slight exaggeration.

Exactly. My favorite bit. "Along with Couton, this virtuous citizen whose only living parts, his head and body, burn with patriotism." So poor Couton, who's forever defined by the fact that he's disabled, he's sort of very much an afterthought there, I think. Now, the appeal has gone out. But so far, the sans-culottes have been very hesitant to rise. And one reason for that, of course, is they're very bitter about their street artists.

Of course.

Yeah.

Because these are the guys who banned them.

Yes, exactly.

Fun sponges.

They have sore they have hurt feelings about the street artists, you know, those sausage rolls or whatever that didn't get eaten. Of course, they're very bitter about their wage maximum, about the fact their pay is just facing a colossal cut, and that the Commune has basically just been bossing them around and telling them what to do and all of this. There are a couple of other things. The machinery of street politics is not what it was a couple of years ago. And the reason for that is because, as we've described in this whole series, the terror was all about centralizing things and putting power back in the government's hands and actually stopping the sort of anarchic politics of the street.

And so the habit of that has faded.

The habit of that and the sectional assemblies have been sort of suppressed. So it's just harder to get people out on the streets. But also, I think to a lot of ordinary people, this now really does seem like a very confusing factional struggle between two sets of Montagnard deputies who hate each other. And they're not really clear what's at stake here.

Who are the goodies, who are the baddies?

Yeah. Whose side are we really on?

Yeah.

So that's one thing. The appeal has gone out, but it hasn't really been answered. The other thing is better news for Robespierre and the Commune. So the National Guard commander, Henriot, remember I said how he'd been tied up and held at the Hôtel de Brione? But about 8:30 that night, the building is surrounded by 3,000 guardsmen who are loyal to him and to the Commune. And they overpower the gendarmes who are guarding him. They find Henriot. They cut his bonds. And now he is free as well. And what happens in the next few minutes is actually the turning point of this whole story.

And had it been Napoleon, we know what he would do.

He'd have done it. Surely he'd have done it.

Of course. We know he does.

Henriot has been locked up for three hours. He doesn't know where Robespierre is. He doesn't know what's going on at the Commune. He doesn't really understand what's going on all day, to be honest with you. And he decides, "I think we should regroup, go back to the Commune, take stock, find out what's going on." And so he says to his troops, "Vive la République." "My friends, follow me to the Commune." And so instead of attacking, they march off to the east towards the city hall, the Hôtel de Ville.

And what are these forces?

These are National Guards loyal to them, by and large.

Right.

And they place them under the command of the deputy Paul Bacchus. So he's the guy who'd been at Toulon and a guy who is actually going to dominate the politics of France for the next five years. He's basically the link between this moment.

The revolution and Napoleon.

And Napoleon.

Yeah.

On the face of it, you would say the Commune is still the favorite. The Commune still has the upper hand. So they've tracked down Saint-Just and Couton and the other people who had been arrested. They brought them to the city hall. Henriot has now turned up with his troops and his cannons. And he's also joined there by hundreds more, those people who have actually answered the call from the sections. The thing is, outside the city hall, Henriot and co, they don't really know what to do. There's no clear lead. There's no one in charge. The minutes go by, but no one's giving any orders.

I need a bit of a nightcap.

"I think I'm just going to go home."

Have a sniffter.

At 10:30 that night, Robespierre is finally he's been escorted from police headquarters and he's finally brought into the council chamber at the Hôtel de Ville. And there are great cheers. All his fans are there. Huge cheers. "Finally the man of the hour. Finally the man who will give us a lead." And this is a fantastic irony. If Robespierre had been the tyrant of his enemy's claims, if he had been the dictator, you know, if he'd been the power-crazed despot that people said he was, this was his moment and he would have seized it.

But he's lost his voice, hasn't he?

He's lost his voice. And nobody could really hear what he was saying.

"Virtue." "It's not my fault."

Yeah. "Poor me," basically. But I think the fact that he's so uncertain tells its own story. Robespierre, as we were talking about earlier this week, Robespierre is in his own mind is a massive goody goody. He's the man who always follows the rules. And, you know, a more ruthless man, a would-be dictator, would say, "Sought the rules. Let's kill all the deputies let's kill all the deputies in the convention and I will rule France." Robespierre doesn't want to do that. He wants to do the right thing.

Do you know what this reminds me of? Ironically.

Go on.

It's the failure of Lafayette to defend the royal couple at Versailles.

Oh, yeah.

You know, the march of the market women. He went for a sleep, didn't he?

He did.

But it's that kind of vibe that if you've got passion on your side, your instinct will tell you what to do. And if you don't, you will either go to sleep or just sit there croaking horsely.

Yeah. It's true, actually. Do you know, the whole series, the lesson it teaches me is.

Decisive action.

Decisive always decisive action. Indecision kills you. I mean, that's the case with the royal couple with Lafayette.

Business lessons from the French Revolution.

It's so true. If there are any corporate giants out there who would be interested in business lessons from the French Revolution.

This excellent proposal.

So on their way into the square, they meet a Commune artillery unit. And this deputy called Bourdon shouts, "Do you want to fight for the tyrant?" And the Commune men say, "No, actually, no, we don't want to fight with you." So they join him. They literally just walk through the doors of the city hall. They go through the doors. They go up the main staircase. And upstairs, they can hear this sort of panicked shouting from the chamber at the top of the stairs.

And a gunshot, right?

And gunshots, yeah.

Maybe, possibly.

Well, I think two gunshots.

Comes in a bit later, perhaps.

Probably.

Yeah.

When they get upstairs, they find a scene of utter chaos. So Augustin Robespierre has fallen out of a window. Either he was trying to kill himself or to escape, to jump out. And he's lying at the bottom, very badly injured. Henriot, the commander of the National Guard, has also fallen from a window. The general consensus, I think, was that the others threw him out because he just panicked, started drinking. And they were sick of him and they just threw him out the window. But he landed in a dung heap, so he's not too badly injured.

But it's not been a good evening for him. I mean, let's not beat that out of the bush.

No. Couton, who people have been kind of insensitive about all through this episode, someone has thrown him down the stairs in his wheelchair, which seems very harsh. So he's lying at the foot of a staircase with blood streaming from his head. Philippe Lebat, who only entered the story, you know, 20 minutes ago, he's left it already because he has shot himself, taken his own life. Saint-Just is just standing there, very pale, very silent, you know, but quite calm.

Archangel-like.

Yeah. And Robespierre is lying on the ground in agony. His face is covered with blood and his jaw has been shattered by a pistol shot. Afterwards, some of the convention deputies said, "Oh, well, he was the he was shot, actually, by one of our heroes, by a trooper called Charles-André Merda." But I think it's generally agreed that Robespierre probably tried to you know, he wanted to be a Roman, didn't he?

Yeah. He wanted to be cato.

I mean, he thought the Roman thing to do was to yeah, to do a cato, take his own life. That he shot himself, made a mess of it, shot himself in the jaw.

I mean, how do you do that? He's not a natural military man, is he? I mean, you're trying to shoot your brains out and you shoot your jaw off.

Do you know who could have given him excellent advice?

Who?

Theodros, the Emperor of Abyssinia.

Yes. Well, but he just grazed his ear, didn't he, the first time he tried to shoot himself. So practice made perfect for him.

Yeah. That's a funny dinner party, isn't it?

Yeah.

I mean, two people with enormous reserves of self-pity, actually.

Yeah.

Who's the real victim in that conversation? Wow.

Always Robespierre.

So the prisoners are taken back to the Committee of Public Safety, the place, the room in which this episode began. And Couton is left lying on a stretcher. Saint-Just stands in the corner in handcuffs. He's very calm. He's silent. One witness says he looked like a pickpocket caught red-handed. And Robespierre, who is unconscious, is laid on a table. His shoulders are searched with blood. His stockings are around his ankles. His britches are kind of unbuttoned.

Such a humiliation.

This is a complete humiliation. He wakes up.

After he's actually only been unconscious for an hour. And then he's and then he wakes.

Yeah.

And he must have been in excruciating agony, but he doesn't make much noise. So he is playing the Roman. He's doing what cato would do.

They call for a surgeon. And the surgeon took out some teeth that had basically come loose.

Oh.

And then took Robespierre's sort of shattered jaw and sort of bandaged it up so that it was in place. And Robespierre, of course, couldn't speak at this point. He can only really communicate by grunts. And there are people standing around him and they're mocking him the whole time. "Is your majesty in pain?" All of this kind of thing.

But you know what? He I think this is admirable on his part, that he does try to keep his dignity. Because about 9 o'clock, he sits bolt upright from where he's been lying in agony.

Yeah.

And he's wearing his sky-blue coat, the one that he wore at the Festival of the Supreme Being. So he's got it on, smooths it down, and he pulls up his stockings and he crosses to a vacant armchair and sits there to preserve his dignity, despite the unspeakable agony that he must have been must have been in.

Yeah. Imagine.

But who wouldn't mind that?

And when they carried him out, they carried him out in this armchair. And some people said that he tried to he tried feebly to kind of hit the people who were carrying him while he was they were carrying him.

Well, it's such a it's a butcher's shambles, isn't it?

It is. Blood everywhere.

I mean, he's physically broken. Couton's physically broken. His brother's physically broken. I mean, Saint-Just is basically the only person who's who's all right. What's his name? He's covered in dung. It's awful.

Yes.

Blood and shit.

Henriot has completely let himself down, I think.

He's not had a good evening, it has to be said.

He's had a terrible evening. He threw away a brilliant opportunity and now he's paying the price. So late that afternoon, they're loaded into the Tumbrils for the journey to the guillotine. And you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, the guillotine has been moved back specially to Place de la Révolution, in the center of Paris, because, you know, the winners, the convention, want to make a big show of this. And as the Tumbril passes, one onlooker said, "It was a holiday. All the elegant people were at their windows to see them pass.

There's a lot of abuse. As always with all executions, there's a lot of abuse. There's a lot of jeering and mockery. Sanson, the executioner, you know, he's had a he's had a very busy few years. He got to work at about 7:30. And Couton goes first. Couton's body was so I mean, he's not only, of course, is he disabled, but he's been thrown down the stairs. His body at this point is so bent that it apparently takes him takes 15 minutes for the guards to basically straighten him out.

Oh.

Forcibly straighten him out.

So he's howling.

Oh, he's in unimaginable agony. And the crowd, we're told, are loving every minute of it, delighted. Then Saint-Just, who dies like a Roman.

I would expect nothing less.

Not quite like Danton, with his, you know, his quips on the scaffold.

No.

But he's impassive. He's calm. He's brave, I suppose. And then there's some others. There's the usual thing where they're throwing in a few people for luck. And then after half an hour of waiting, Robespierre, and he's, you know, he's done his best, but he's still a blood-smeared, pretty ragged, you know, wild-looking figure.

Oh.

And then a literally jaw-dropping moment.

Yeah.

Because Sanson rips the bandage off, which has been keeping his jaw attached to the upper part of his skull. And as they rip it off, the jaw drops and he gives this terrible shriek, which people describe as being like a kind of, you know, an animal being tortured or something. And then chop. That's it.

Yeah. So that's the end of Maximilien Robespierre, 36 years old, not even that old. And the funny thing is, every sort of popular account you read says Robespierre fell because of a backlash against the terror. But that's just not the case. The people who brought him down, if you go through the people who brought him down, the people we've mentioned most, Collot, Bio, Barère, Talion, Paul Bacchus.

Fouché.

Fouché, and so on.

They love it.

These had been enthusiastic and bloodthirsty operatives of the terror. You see, this is where I think it comes back to the question of how good at politics you are. And I said, I think last time, I feel like Robespierre was very good at politics until he wasn't, until he got found out, as it were. And this didn't have to happen. He made too many enemies. He was really poor at making friends. And his speech, in particular, was a catastrophic misjudgment. I mean, it's easy for me to say unnecessary.

I think he is driven mad, ultimately, by his principles drive him mad. His principles inspire him for so long.

Mm-hmm.

And they combine with his native ability for outsmarting his enemies. But in the end, his own sense of virtue leads him to make catastrophic errors, as you say.

Yeah. His sort of manichean sense of good and evil, corruption and purity, virtue and, you know, treachery. I think once you're in the world where you see any opposition, any dissent, any disagreement as treachery or as a sort of existential impurity, then it's going to be very difficult to command the allegiance of your I think there are worldlier men.

Of course. I mean, the thing is that he is incredibly effective while he still has the power of surprise on his side. But once it becomes obvious, he really only has the one strategy.

Yeah.

And it's driven by his own deeply held moral principles. Everyone knows what his strategy is going to be. And so it becomes actually possible to outsmart him.

Yes. I think that's absolutely right. So after his death, nobody had a good word to say about him. People who just days earlier would have, you know, counted themselves as his loyalists, his partisans, now say they were against him all along. And it's at this point it's only after this point, after the coup of Thermidor, as it becomes called, that people start to use the phrase "le régime de la terreur," "the reign of terror," to describe his ascendancy. And they say, well, Robespierre was the tyrant. Robespierre was the dictator. And it was all because of him.

No. Well, I mean, it's the people coining this phrase "terrorist" to describe him are people who themselves were more enthusiastic practitioners of terror.

Exactly right. Exactly. So where does this leave the revolution? And I think this is the biggest irony of the story. So as we said, none of the men who brought Robespierre down really were that keen to dismantle the terror or to scrap the whole regime. So Collot, Bio, Barère on the Committee of Public Safety, they thought, with Robespierre gone, brilliant, we're going to run things. We're going to have things our own way. But actually, what's happened is that they have unleashed forces they cannot control. And what this actually reminds me of is the fall of the Soviet Union, where you have unanticipated consequences of political decisions.

Bad winemakers.

Yeah. Winemakers and stuff. Collot, Bio, Barère, in September, they've been rebranded, not as Robespierre's assassins, but as Robespierre's accomplices. And they're voted off the Committee of Public Safety. In November, the Jacobin Club is closed down. It's a bit like the moment in, I don't know, 1991 when the Communist Party was outlawed in Russia. The Jacobin Club has been closed down. In December, the convention scraps all the economic measures, the wage and price controls.

And the survivors start having survivors' parties, don't they?

Yes.

Where the women wear thin red chokers around their neck to emulate what might have happened to them, had they not survived it.

We talked about this, I think, in our episodes about the young Napoleon, did we not?

Episode 383, Dominic.

Oh, my word. That's good work. So maybe, I mean, the story of what happened in the late 1790s and the rise of Napoleon I mean, we did do young Napoleon, but maybe that's a story for another time. But I think the point to stop is March 1795, because that month, Collot, Bio, and Barère, as well as Vadier from the Committee of General Security, they were arrested as terrorists, and they were convicted, and they were sentenced to be deported to French Guyana. They didn't all end up there. And also put on trial that month, and this is a really ironic moment, was the prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Fouquet-Tanguil, the man who had sent to the guillotine as prosecutor Charlotte Corday, Marie-Antoinette, Hébert, and Danton.

He lamented, didn't he, that he was he felt trailed by ghosts.

Yes, he did.

Eerie.

He did. I actually feel a tiny bit sorry for him. His trial lasted, unlike theirs, it lasted 41 days. And more than 400 witnesses were called. And Fouquet-Tanguil defended himself. This will be very familiar to people. He said, "All I was doing, I was doing my job. I was only following orders." And he was sentenced to death nonetheless. And his last words before he headed to the guillotine were as follows. He said, "I have nothing to reproach myself for.

So an epical moment. The end not just of our series on the terror, but our series on the French Revolution. So we hope you have enjoyed it. Next week, we begin a four-part series on something very different, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, a mystery romance that has fascinated people for centuries and centuries and centuries. And now, for the first time on our podcast.

First time in history, right?

We will be revealing the site of Camelot, the location of the Holy Grail. We will identify where Avalon actually is, where King Arthur lies awaiting to come and rescue Britain when he needs to get a move on.

Incredible.

And all four episodes will be available on Monday for The Rest Is History Club members. So if you'd like to get them, go to the restishistory.com. But for now, Dominic, thank you very much. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. And au revoir.

Au revoir.