At the end of the 18th century, the most glorious kingdom in Europe would face a mighty foe, the power of its own people. One man would rise to inspire the nation to cast aside a reluctant king and a hated queen, and a new republic would be born in blood. The blood of the French Revolution. 1794. The Conciergerie prison in Paris.
An impenetrable fortress on the banks of the Seine. Dank, rat-infested. It is known as death's antechamber.
Inside, what was once the voice of the nation is about to be silenced. As his hair is shorn and his neck laid bare for the blade of the guillotine, Maximilien Robespierre is about to be fed to a monster of his own creation. The French Revolution has reached its pinnacle of violence. The French Revolution is this extraordinary moment when people began to believe that you could actually recreate almost everything in a society. That you could not only change the politics, the institutions, but you could change human nature itself through political action.
The French Revolution really does constitute the crossroads of the modern world where everything begins to turn in a different direction. The revolution saw a feudal land turn its back on aristocratic tradition. And chart a violent new course towards the future.
It would shake the very foundations of Europe, and its impact would be felt across the world. The French Revolution is the most important event in Western history. There are developments that can rival it, like the Industrial Revolution, like capitalism.
But if you mean an event, I can't think of anything more important. It was the revolution that... upset things the most. I mean again when you consider that it got rid of the Catholic Church, it got rid of Christianity, it got rid of the nobility, it got rid of the King, got rid of all these things.
The French Revolution would bring bread to the poor, democracy to France and would establish a whole new order of society. But progress would come at a price. It was really a moment of extraordinary hope, extraordinary ambition, and then it turned into this most horrific tragedy. Now broken and defeated, Robespierre, not two days before, had stood triumphant at the head of the greatest political revolution in Europe's history. So true to its ideals, he was called the incorruptible.
So powerful, his slightest utterance could cloak an entire city in fear. A master orator, Robespierre's words were his weapons. Now, silenced by a bullet to the jaw, he awaits the same swift and brutal end that he has ordained for so many others. The French Revolution is about to devour its chief architect. no one could have foreseen the turbulent times ahead on one spring day in 1770 the shadow of Versailles is packed to its gilded rafters with the glittering crowds of the royal court completed in 1682 Versailles was the vision of King Louis the 14th To put some distance between himself and his subjects, Louis XIV removed himself from Paris and established a new residence at this small town 12 miles west of the capital.
Here he ordered the construction of the most magnificent palace in Europe. For nearly 100 years, it has been the seat of the nation's unwavering monarchy. Today, it is host to a very important wedding.
King Louis XV's grandson, Prince Louis Capet, next in line to the throne, is about to take a bride. Just 15 years old on the eve of his wedding, Louis Capet is bashful and hesitant, with few of the characteristics expected of a future king. Louis was this pudgy, shy, painfully inadequate 15-year-old with absolutely no social graces at all.
Louis XV's mistress, Madame du Barry, called him a fat, ill-bred boy. Basically, he was just a schlub. It was very hard for Louis to come to decisions. He dithered incessantly.
He was always ready to be persuaded by the last person he had talked to. Again, those are usually not considered good leadership qualities. Louis'marriage is a political union between Austria's royal family, the Habsburgs, and his own, the Bourbons. The wedding symbolizes the end of an ancient rivalry and the birth of new alliances. The young bride-to-be arrives in France, a wide-eyed and pretty 14-year-old girl, Marie Antoinette.
Marie Antoinette is an archduchess of Austria. She's the youngest daughter of the empress Maria Theresa. And she comes to France as part of a marriage deal which represents a great reversal of alliances whereby for the first time in living memory, France and Austria become allies rather than enemies.
Marie Antoinette comes to France as a political gesture, but as a teenager, she has little interest in political affairs. Well, when Marie Antoinette came to Versailles, she was very young. She didn't know a great deal about the country she was coming to, she didn't know about the customs, she didn't know about the court. She was certainly a headstrong girl, a very lively girl.
But she was still a girl. When Marie Antoinette comes to Versailles, she is just a teenager. She is 14 years old, blonde with blue eyes. She is pretty, she likes being attractive to people, and she comes with the intention of winning over her husband and her new family. On the night of the wedding, there is an ominous storm.
But inside, the grandeur of the ceremony lights up the palace. As the newlyweds make their way to the royal bedroom, in a ceremony that symbolically ensures the conception of an heir, the king's courtiers are present, as the awkward young couple is presented in the marriage bed for the first time. The crowd is delighted and expectations are high.
But once the curtains are drawn, it's clear that an air will not be so easily produced. Louis was not only not interested in ruling, Louis wasn't particularly interested in loving either. And he paid her no attention on the first nights or even further into their marriage. Many years will pass before the marriage is finally consummated.
The lack of an heir will soon spark gossip across the kingdom that will plague the couple for years to come. The grand wedding gala continues for days, but outside Versailles there is less cause for celebration. Years of neglect by a royal government have left the French people deprived and hungry. Seven years earlier, Louis XV had lost the Seven Years'War, in which Britain had relieved France of most of her North American colonies.
The ill-fated contest nearly bankrupted the country. France's coffers were nearly empty, even though its population was growing bigger every day. With diseases like the plague a distant memory, fewer people were dying, but more and more were hungry.
France grew from 20 million to 26 million in the 18th century, after having grown only 1 million in the preceding two centuries. That put tremendous strain. on what was there and so there was a lot of anxiety. Four years after the royal wedding Prince Louis'grandfather, Louis XV, loses his final battle with smallpox.
The king dies defeated and unpopular and leaves behind a country on the brink of chaos. In a lavish ceremony, young Prince Louis ascends to the throne. And is crowned King Louis XVI.
Despite the grandeur of his coronation, Louis is aware that he is woefully unprepared for the job. Louis XVI, the moment his grandfather dies, and it suddenly is clear that he's king, he doesn't know what to do. He feels as if the world is falling in upon him.
So although he's been educated in the full expectation of becoming king, he doesn't feel ready for it. For a kingdom in crisis, Louis XVI is not the ideal pilot. The 20-year-old king prays, Protect us, Lord, for we reign too young. Ensconced in their royal apartments in Versailles, Louis and Marie Antoinette begin their new lives as young monarchs. While only 12 miles away in Paris, another new era is flourishing.
One that is on a collision course with the monarchy itself. It is a dangerous new age of ideas. The Age of Enlightenment. As the Royal carriage approaches the prestigious Louis-Legrand College in Paris, the crowds gather for a glimpse of pomp and celebrity.
The newly crowned King Louis the 16th and his young wife are being welcomed to Paris. At the head of the welcome party is a promising young law student, Maximilian Robespierre. When Robespierre was a schoolboy, the king visited the college and Robespierre gave a Latin address to the king. So he actually spoke to Louis XVI when he was a teenager.
Subtitles by the Amara.org community As Robespierre respectfully delivers his Latin soliloquy, the king hardly notices the boy. But years later, their fates will again intertwine under very different circumstances. It was one of these rituals that take place in every school, and yet of course it was so charged with irony, because here you had the young Robespierre reading this discourse in honor of the man he would later kill. For now, the welcome is warm and the flattery effusive. But although the grandeur of the monarchy can still excite adulation and loyalty, parts of French society are beginning to question its role.
Since the Middle Ages, French society had been divided into three classes, or estates, dictated by birth. There was a vast gap between the wealth of the first two estates, the nobility and the clergy, and the rest of France. During the 18th century, new thinkers began to use reason and science to challenge all such traditions. A new intellectual spirit of the age brings everything under fresh scrutiny, judging it according to criteria of rationalism and humanitarianism.
France is alive with new discoveries and debates. It is the age of enlightenment. The Enlightenment is a movement which says don't trust authority, don't trust...
anything that you've been told by anybody else at all, think it out for yourself, test it for yourself. In old regime Europe, you were told what to think, you were given information from above, by your rulers, by your priests, and so the idea that you could map out all of human knowledge and then have access to it was revolutionary. In exclusive salons across Paris, aristocrats gather to discuss Enlightenment authors.
the burgeoning age of reason Voltaire Rousseau fresh voices who champion liberty control of one's own destiny and religious tolerance the passion for this new literature is evident amongst the aristocracy but as enlightenment ideas trickle through all levels of society the drive for equality will begin to threaten the aristocratic way of life What makes it dangerous is it means you will eventually question why are aristocrats the ones with privilege? Can't we change the world to make it a better place? Isn't progress possible? All of that will eventually undermine the idea that monarchy is natural, aristocracy is natural, and hierarchy is natural. To see enlightenment ideals in action, one has only to look across the Atlantic.
Where the Americans struggle for independence from France's nemesis, Great Britain. King Louis wants revenge for his grandfather's defeats, and sees an opportunity in the American War of Independence. French military intervention costs the country 1,500 million livres, money raised from borrowing and taxing poverty-struck peasants. The enormous bill hastens an impending financial crisis.
America bankrupts France, in effect, because the debt which the French monarchy incurs in order to fight the American War of Independence turns out to be absolutely crucial in the financial situation of the French monarchy, because the French monarchy cannot pay those debts. As Louis sends money and troops across the Atlantic, Marie Antoinette is busy incurring debts of her own. Life at Versailles is a never-ending cycle of archaic ritual and formality.
There are ceremonies for the waking of the king and queen, for dressing, for dining, for retiring to bed. To keep herself amused amidst the drudgery of ritual, Marie presides over a parade of increasingly outrageous fashion. Marie was obsessed with fashion, especially these towering hairdos that were several feet high.
They took hours and hours in the construction and fit all sorts of ornaments and fruits. And to many people, they seemed like an obscenity. They came to represent what was all that was wrong with her and with Versailles and that culture. Marie occupies herself with court gossip, gambling and the staging of plays.
As her expenses accumulate, Marie earns herself a nickname. Marie is given the name Madam Deficit as the country is in economic chaos. And she continues to spend as if nothing's happened.
On dresses and jewels and shoes and... She was the Imelda Marcos of her day. In the popular mind, there is perhaps one way in which Marie Antoinette can repay the debt. In the seven years since their marriage, Louis and Marie have yet to produce a child.
Marie was finding herself in an increasingly precarious position. The job of the queen is to produce a male heir. It's absolutely essential for there to be a son. And during that time, people criticise, people are dissatisfied, people say the king should never have married this Austrian archduchess, and now she can't even produce an heir to the throne. Marie is desperate.
Louis'appetite for food is unquestioned. But sex is clearly not on the menu. Maria Therese, the mother of Marie Antoinette, questioned, if a girl as gorgeous as my daughter cannot get him going, then what's going on? Louis XVI and his young wife were not able to conceive for seven years.
This cast a pall on the beginning of his reign, and because his hobby as a locksmith was well known, There were all sorts of salacious songs circulating to the effect that the locksmith was having a hard time finding the keyhole. Louis'apparent lack of virility is seen as symptomatic of a weak king. After years of frustration and mounting pressure, Louis is diagnosed with a treatable condition called phimosis. Louis had a deformity that made arousal.
extremely painful therefore there was no consummation until there was a surgical procedure that could correct this but he was scared to death to have it and it took years for him to agree to have it and when he finally did uh voila after a simple surgery the couple is able to have their first child marie therese but there is no easy fix for the years of damage to marie antoinette's image since the early 1780s Libels have circulated throughout the country. Pornographic satire of the king and queen. Obscene pamphlets mock Louis'impotence and portray Marie as a promiscuous harlot in a debauched and decadent court.
The people's views on the monarchy are turning sour as the situation in the countryside worsens. There is a run of bad harvests, and attempts at deregulation only make things worse. The cost of flour rises.
There is a shortage of the very heart of the French diet, bread. But the hardships naturally stop at the gates of Versailles. As the court continue to live in extravagance, grievances are committed to paper. One charge is levelled directly at the royal court. Do you know why there are so many needy people?
it cried. It is because your luxurious existence devours in one day the substance of a thousand men. The man behind this charge is the same young man who, only a few years earlier, had eulogized the royal couple after their coronation, Maximilien Robespierre.
His voice is just one amongst a growing clamor for change, for equality, and for revolution. Versailles in the late 1700s is an oasis of extravagance surrounded by a land in despair and with an uncertain king at the helm France is charting a course for disaster after 19 years of marriage Louis has sired four children yet as a king he remains impotent as the financial crisis escalates All the king can do is hire and fire a succession of ministers, none of whom have the answers. By ancient privilege, the nobility and clergy are exempt from taxation. And so as taxes rise to cover the government's mounting debt repayments, the burden falls heavily upon the poorest.
To add to their misery, freakish weather arrives to decimate the harvest. If ever God intervened to make a situation worse, the summer of 1788 and the spring of 1789 is a moment when that happens. By the summer of 1788, you already have a burgeoning political crisis, and it's developing against the background of very serious food shortage.
For the people of France in 1788, bread is the essence of life itself. Most ordinary people in France ate at least two pounds a day of bread. Bread was all-important. Its price was immediately felt by everyone.
If the price doubled, you were in big trouble. Under the financial mismanagement of Louis'government, the cost of bread skyrockets. Food supplies are hoarded by profiteers, and the cost of a loaf of bread can soon equal a month's wages.
Hunger turns to rage. Bread riots break out across France. Bakeries are raided and shopkeepers suspected of hoarding bread are lynched on the spot. With the economy in shambles, Louis is forced to appoint Jacques Necker as his finance minister.
An enlightened thinker, Necker is popular with the people in a way that Louis can only envy. Jack Necker was undoubtedly the most popular minister throughout the spring of 89 because he's taken the line publicly in his writings that the government's duty is to make sure that there is enough bread and grain for everybody. Necker urges Louis to call a meeting of the traditional representative body of the kingdom, the Estates General.
It will be the first time the Estates General has convened in 175 years. France was politically organized in something called the Estates. The first estate was the clergy, the second estate was the nobility, and the third estate was everyone else.
And by contemporary reckoning, the first two estates occupied 3% of the population, and the third estate 97% of the population. A lot of people felt it was very unfair for this third estate, which... was most of the population to only have one third of the deputies.
They felt it was very unfair that this should be a three chamber parliament where two chambers, the nobility and the clergy, could always outvote the commoners. The 4th of May 1789 a skilled young lawyer and politician arrives at Versailles. Maximilian Robespierre comes to stand before the Estates General as a deputy to fight for a fair voice for the people he represents.
The Third Estate An orphan from the provinces, Robespierre had risen to academic prominence on a prestigious scholarship, becoming an eloquent speaker, prim in appearance, with never a hair nor a phrase out of place. Returning home to the town of Arras, the Enlightenment ideas he had absorbed as a student drove him to become a powerful advocate for the downtrodden. By the time he went back and started to practice as a lawyer, he was reading very widely in the Enlightenment.
And Robespierre was someone who, when he was practicing law in Arras, tried to actually bring the ideas of the Enlightenment into the cases he was fighting. In the Estates General, Robespierre and his colleagues are determined to make the nobility and clergy pay taxes. Louis feels threatened by the growing radicalism of the Third Estate.
After a six-week standoff, the deputies arrive to find that they have been locked out. On June 20th when the deputies come to their meeting and find the doors locked they suspect a plot. They move next door to what we call a tennis court which was really a handball court and gather together and swear they will not stop meeting until they have a new constitution. The deputies have declared themselves to be the National Assembly, the true representatives of the people of France.
The Tennis Court Oath is one of these great symbolic moments in the history of the French Revolution. You had these people assembled in this great open space of the Tennis Court, raising their arms in this sort of quasi-Roman salute. And for the National Assembly, this was a moment when they realized something of their power and their dignity and saw that they really could defy Francis King. In one revolutionary stand of defiance, the National Assembly is born.
It will be a parliamentary body. enacting the people's will and addressing their grievances. But grabbing power from the king would not be so easy as signing a simple proclamation. All of these early victories that take place at Versailles are largely paper victories and they have no teeth to back them up. And the fear that happens, that takes over the deputies at Versailles as we approach July, mid-July, is that the king is gathering his forces to disperse.
...them to overthrow them. By July, 30,000 royal troops are taking position around Paris. To defend themselves, the people form a national guard.
Les Invalides, the military hospital, is raided, and 28,000 muskets distributed. The only thing missing is gunpowder, but the people know just where to get it. Near the centre of Paris, there looms a massive stone keep, an infamous symbol of tyrannical government, the Bastille. The prison houses the city's stores of gunpowder and is legendary as a place where enemies of the Crown disappeared.
The Bastille had been the great symbol of royal despotism, the great symbol of the kings of France running beyond the just limits of their own power, a symbol of horror for the people of France. Amidst the rioting, news spreads that Louis has sacked his finance minister, the people's beloved Jacques Necker. The court holds him responsible for the revolt of the Third Estate. To the people of Paris, it appears their enemies at court are striking back. On the 14th of July, crowds band together, identifying themselves with a rosette, red and blue for the colours of Paris, separated by white, the colour of the House of Bourbon.
The tricolour is born. From the feverish crowd, a voice cries out, to the Bastille. Attacking the Bastille means that the people of Paris are saying you cannot get rid of the new National Assembly. The people are acting, they're arming themselves, and they're basically saying we take the side of the revolution.
The governor of the Bastille, the Marquis de Launay, tries to secure the prison when he learns of the approaching mob. He mounts a hopeless defense with only 32 guards. The marauders storm the fortress. and tear into the soldiers with knives and pikes.
Finally, Governor Delaunay surrenders, but the enraged mob engulfs him, dragging him into the streets. The jeering horde kicks and stabs at him, until his pleas for death are answered. Before the end of the day, the mayor of Paris will meet a similar fate. A revolutionary tradition is born.
Delaunay's severed head is paraded on a pike to the delight of the crowd. Word of the bloody revolt quickly reaches the deputies at the National Assembly. The deputies in the National Assembly do not immediately condemn this act of violence.
In fact, they accept it. And it was this acceptance of popular violence that, in some people's view, created a pattern that was to have catastrophic consequences for the unfolding of the revolution. With the smoke still clearing over the Bastille, Louis XVI returns from a hunting trip. In his diary, under the date 14th of July 1789, he writes, Nothing.
A reference to his unsuccessful hunt. Then an aide brings news of the fall of the Bastille. Is it a revolt? asks the king. No, sire, he is answered.
It is a revolution. The victory at the Bastille marks a crucial moment in French history. The people had defied their king and won. There would be no turning back. As a symbol of the defeat of oppression, the people dig with their bare hands and tear apart the Bastille brick by brick.
They are beginning to dismantle the past itself. The French went about the process of tearing down the Bastille as quickly as they could. In the absence of powerful explosives, this was done very painstakingly, but with a tremendous amount of vigor.
And the bricks were given away, sold as emblems of the demolition of despotism. The energy of the streets invigorates the National Assembly. A revolutionary manifesto is adopted, called... The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It calls for an end to tyranny, and for a representative government to protect the freedom and equality of all men.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man was a declaration promulgated by the National Assembly, which said in its text that the sovereignty belongs to the people, belongs to the nation. The king is nowhere mentioned in this document. Therefore, by issuing this document, the Assembly was effectively seizing power for itself.
With the new National Assembly as their voice, the people of France set out to change the very fabric of their world. They demand a constitutional monarchy, equal rights for all men, and justice under reasonable laws. Robespierre demands increased freedom for the press, which had been muzzled under the old regime.
The resulting free press is spearheaded by l'ami du peuple, the people's friend. A fiery newspaper full of vitriolic rants and provocation, it is the brainchild of a former doctor, Jean-Paul Marat. A controversial author of tracts on science and philosophy, Marat was rejected by France's Académie des Sciences.
It left an enduring bitterness against the French establishment. Later, whilst on the run from royalist police, Marat contracted a painful skin disease that left him confined for long periods to a medicinal bath. Marat finds in the revolution the perfect outlet for his venom. Jean-Paul Marat was just one of these professional malcontents.
And unfortunately, revolutions do offer opportunity to professional malcontents. Marat took all of that bile, all of that resentment. and funneled it into a newspaper that became extraordinarily successful, L'Ami du Peuple.
Marat was a man possessed of extraordinary anger. You just have to read the pages of his newspaper, The Friend of the People, to see this. In every issue, he displays a complete paranoid mentality.
He sees plots everywhere. Everybody is plotting against the revolution, and the answer is very simple for him. The answer is blood. The answer is heads.
Marat loathes the monarchy's extravagance amidst the poverty gripping France, and needs only the slightest rumour to lambast the king and queen in his newspaper. On 2 October 1789, his anger boils over. Word reaches Paris that the king has thrown a party at Versailles, that the king's soldiers threw the new tricolour flag, symbol of the revolution, to the ground. and trampled it underfoot. Marat is enraged.
He reports the insult in his paper, just as a new threat breaks. The king has again ordered troops to move into position around Paris. With victory at the Bastille still fresh in their minds, Marat frantically urges the people of Paris to take action again.
It's time to open your eyes, he tells them. Shake yourselves out of your torpor. Wake up. Once more, wake up.
The 5th of October. Dawn breaks to the furious ringing of bells. Women gather to protest against the shortage of bread. And now fear of the approaching troops mixes with fury at the news of the King's offensive party. Soon thousands are marching to Versailles, pikes in hand.
The women are taking their grievances to the King. The core of the crowd was made up. Of the famous poissard, the fearsome fish ladies of the central markets who were known for their brawny build and their fearlessness. They were equipped with large knives for scaling fish. They were hugely muscular because they carted boxes.
You didn't want to tangle with these ladies. These are women of the poor quarters. These are poor women which are affected by the increased price of bread, by the scarcity of products, who suddenly begin to realize that they must act.
It is quite extraordinary how these ordinary women, probably most of them couldn't even write their name, suddenly act as the protagonists of the historical process. At the palace, word of the approaching crowd of angry women reaches the Queen's chambers. Legend has it that it is at this moment that Marie Antoinette utters the most famous line she never said. Marie Antoinette did not say, let them eat cake. That is a myth.
Marie Antoinette, unfortunately, probably never even noticed the poor people of her country long enough to make such a statement. As the mob of women gather outside the gates, Louis understands the revolution can no longer be ignored. It is being brought to his front door.
He agrees to sign the Declaration of the Rights of Man. But the crowd continues to grow throughout the night. By morning, 20,000 people are camped outside the palace.
To close the centuries of distance between the king and his subjects, the angry mass demands that the king and queen move to Paris. Typically, Louis prevaricates. His hesitation would provoke a fury in the crowd and put the lives of the royal family in grave danger.
When they don't get instant compliance with what they want, it really looks as if they're going to massacre the Queen. The mob break into the palace, screaming for the blood of the Queen. They massacre guards, decapitate them, and stick their heads on pikes. They were like banshees screaming throughout the palace. Give me her entrails, give me her head.
I want a leg, I want an arm. I think that they had grown so frenzied that if they had encountered her, they probably would have torn her to pieces. Terrified for her life, Marie Antoinette escapes to Louis'apartments, only moments before the women break into her chambers and tear her bed to shreds. The king and queen are now trapped by the mob and at its mercy. The only way the women can be pacified is for the royal family to agree to go to Paris because once they're there in Paris, then they can ultimately be made to do what the people of Paris want.
They march, 60,000 strong, leaving Versailles with carts and wagons filled with flour from the royal storehouses. The King and the Queen were forced to go to Paris with the heads of their guards who had been massacred in the chateau. Their heads had been cut off with knives.
This was a moment of completely unbridled violence. These heads were made up with make-up and paraded in front of the carriage. with the king and queen following. The king and queen are installed in the Tuileries Palace.
They will never see Versailles again. Once the royal family moves to Paris, they are the prisoners of Paris. They know it, everybody else knows it.
There are great limits to what they can do or even dream of doing. They are the prisoners of the capital city, there's no doubt. Versailles is abandoned and the assembly moves to Paris. Ultimate power now seems to rest with the Paris mob. France will have a new democracy, new laws, and a new terrifying symbol of the revolution will make its first appearance.
The guillotine. May 1791. It is nearly two years since the royal family and the National Assembly have moved to Paris. Robespierre speaks often at the Assembly and at the Jacobin Club, a debating society named after the former Jacobin Monastery where they gather. Words take on a new power in the revolution and Robespierre speaks with an unfailing moral compass. He is an impassioned advocate for the people of France.
He soon earns the nickname, the incorruptible. France is now a constitutional monarchy....to share power with the revolutionaries in the assembly. But it seems Louis'share is growing smaller by the day, as he is forced to sign law after law, diminishing his own power, and that of the other emblem of feudal France, the Catholic Church.
Louis decides the time has come to leave France, and mount a campaign to reclaim his kingdom. Louis had decided by 1791 that he needed to regain control of his country and he knew he could only do that with the help of a foreign army. So the idea was to make a break from the Tuileries Palace and to head for the nearest border. The 21st of June 1791. The King and Queen disguise themselves as servants and, under cover of darkness, slip out from under the watchful eye of Paris. It is past midnight when they arrive in the small town of Varennes, 100 miles east of Paris.
They are close to the border of Austria, safety just a few miles away, but they are about to run out of luck. Rumors of the entourage's movements have preceded them to Varennes. A town official stops the carriage and asks for their passports. The official's suspicions are confirmed.
It is the signature of the king himself. The townsman is overcome at the sight of his king. But revolutionary guards nearby show no reverence for the fleeing royals. He keeps hoping that people will recognize him and there will be a kind of rebellion in his favor.
And much to his horror and surprise, they are not ecstatic to recognize him. They see him as escaping and basically he's arrested and taken back to Paris. The idea that the monarch had tried to abandon his people was psychologically catastrophic. That event really broke the bond between Louis and his subjects.
Now they had not only a king who was superfluous, they had a king who was obviously a traitor as well. With the royal family proving themselves enemies of the revolution, the little control over events that Louis still held is gone. At the heart of the revolutionary government is Robespierre. He shines at the podium, calling for changes of every kind. He demands universal suffrage and an end to slavery in the French West Indies.
Most passionately, he rails against the death penalty. In the new age of enlightenment, Robespierre wants to discard all remnants of the medieval past. France had inherited a macabre repertoire of execution methods from its medieval past. Cruel, torturous deaths by drawing and quartering, hanging, drowning and burning.
Under the old regime there was a whole panoply of very gruesome punishments and decapitation was punishment reserved for the nobility and one of the things that the revolution wanted from the start was to have everybody equal in death. They wanted symbolically to have the same punishment available for anyone. Despite Robespierre's opposition a new killing machine takes center stage in Paris.
Dr. Joseph Guetta, a physician, proposes a new decapitation machine. Beheading, he argues, is a humane method of execution. A swift slice of steel delivers a...
Quick, painless death. Dr. Guillotin describes his new device to the assembly. The mechanism falls like thunder.
The head flies off. Blood spurts. The man is no more.
Always a supporter of bloodshed, the journalist Mara prints an enthusiastic rant in his paper, announcing the device's new name, Guillotine. It will soon earn another nickname The National Razor The French revolutionaries believe in humane values. They believe that unnecessary suffering should not be caused.
And what they like about the guillotine is that it is quick, it's efficient, and as far as we can tell, although no one has returned to tell the tale, it's painless. The guillotine will silence the revolution's internal enemies. Anyone suspected of plotting to return the king to the throne.
But it's the enemies surrounding France that most preoccupy the Assembly. There is a growing fear that aristocrats and royal princes who fled to Austria are preparing to launch an armed counter-revolution. The Assembly calls for a pre-emptive attack, a declaration of war on Austria. Robespierre argues against it. Robespierre is one of the lonely voices who is opposing war because he thinks the enemy will win.
Robespierre is afraid that the country isn't ready, hasn't got an army that would be able to defeat the enemy, the enemy might therefore come in and destroy the revolution. Robespierre loses the debate. In April 1792, the Assembly declares war on Austria against a country ruled by the family of Marie Antoinette. A nationalist fervor grips the country.
Robespierre and his supporters suspect that the king hopes France will be defeated, which will end the revolution. There is also word that Marie is corresponding with her relatives in Austria, with the enemy. They suspect she is giving away French troop movements in a plot to undermine the war effort. All the while the king and queen feign adherence to the revolution. Louis and Marie Antoinette are playing a double game.
They are seeming to go along with the revolution many times, at the same time as they are conspiring against it. They are trying to survive. If you want to be generous, they're survivors, but if you want to be, um, look at it from the revolutionary point of view, is they're liars.
With the French army already suffering setbacks on the border, word reaches Paris that Austria's ally Prussia has joined the invasion. Their troops are mobilized under the command of the Duke of Brunswick. The atmosphere in the city is tense.
Paris is a tinderbox. And then, the Paris papers print a letter from the Duke of Brunswick. In it, he threatens to destroy Paris, if any harm comes to their royal majesties, the king and queen.
The threat backfires massively. The 10th of August 1792. Thousands of armed citizens, fueled by indignant rage at Brunswick's threats, head to the Tuileries Palace and descend upon the King's elite Swiss guards in a savage attack. More than 800 from both sides are killed. The King finds sanctuary within the National Assembly debating chamber, where a vote will later suspend the monarchy.
The French Republic is born. The blade of the guillotine is christened with the blood of Louis'remaining guards, and Robespierre, once a staunch opponent of the death penalty, has had a change of heart. The birth of the new republic can only begin with the death of a king.
August 1792 With the King deposed and imprisoned, Robespierre and his Jacobins are locked in a battle with the moderates of the Assembly, the Gendarme, for control of the national government. But on the streets of Paris there is a new radicalism. It is led by the Archeval. Partisans and working men of Paris, recognizable by their long trousers, in contrast to the knee-breeches or culottes worn by the aristocracy.
They call themselves the sans-culottes, those without knee-breeches. The sans-culottes considered themselves the true people of France. They were not the poorest of the poor. They tended to be fairly well-off artisans, shopkeepers, people like that. But they were people who at least claimed to work with their hands.
Not wearing the breeches, not wearing the culotte for the sans-culottes was simply a symbolism of being not an aristocrat, being an ordinary man of people. The sans-culottes seize control of Paris'city government, while the Jacobins and Girondins steer the country from the assembly, now reformed as the National Convention. They are struggling with the command of the beleaguered French army, which is swiftly losing ground to Austria and Prussia. While fighting back enemies at the border, the revolutionary government cracks down on enemies within.
Royalist traitors who might deliver Paris into the hands of the invaders. More than a thousand people are arrested and herded into prison. Priests, journalists, ordinary men and women.
Robespierre concentrates on the internal crisis. But his ally, the Minister of Justice, Georges Danton, motivates men, young and old, To join the war on the frontier. He is gregarious and flamboyant. Everything that Robespierre is not.
Soon, Danton's name is heard throughout Paris. Danton is a bigger than life character. A man full of life, full of bombast, a tremendous drinker and debaucherer, who though he's from the educated classes himself, is a guy who, unlike Robespierre, can physically identify with the working people.
in a way that Rochefier simply cannot. As the Prussians close in, Danton's fiery rhetoric mobilizes the people, inspiring many to enlist. At one of the moments of greatest peril for the revolution, the Austrian and Prussian armies are invading.
He gets up in front of the people of Paris and shouts, De l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace, et la patrie est sauvée. Boldness, more boldness, forever boldness, and the fatherland is saved. He's really one of the people who manages to rally the country against the invader. It's an extraordinary moment. With so many able-bodied men leaving for the front, Paris is left defenseless.
Its jails bursting with political prisoners. A fear takes hold that the prisoners will be impossible to contain. Marat's paper will later be blamed for inciting the horrific events that follow. The foreign armies were advancing on Paris. Had they linked up in Paris with these bitter enemies of the revolution in the prisons, of course, then the results would have been fairly horrific from the standpoint of the people.
In the first week of September, disastrous news arrives from the front. Prussia has taken Verdun, the ancient fortress on the road to Paris. The enemy is getting closer.
The fear gripping Paris explodes. The sans-culottes break into the prisons and unleash a furious assault on those found within. No traitors are to be spared. The sans-culottes went to the prisons, particularly the prisons where refractory priests were being held, where nobles were being held, where political prisoners were being held, and they started carrying out their own impromptu trials. That were very short and that very often simply ended with slaughter.
Women are raped or mutilated, priests disemboweled, aristocrats hacked to pieces. More than 1600 people are slaughtered in just a few days. When word of the September massacres spreads throughout Europe, there is a widespread revulsion. Across the channel, the London Times gives voice to the general horror. The newspaper asks, are these the rights of man?
Is this the liberty of human nature? The most savage four-footed tyrants that range unexplored Africa rise superior to these two-legged Parisian animals. The revolution has turned a corner. Even Robespierre understands that things have gone too far. that the people cannot manage the revolution on their own.
They need The incorruptible rises to the forefront as the man who can lead the revolution. There was a time when Robespierre had pushed for a constitutional monarchy. He now believes the king is too potent a symbol to the enemies of the revolution. A momentous decision is made.
France will put its own monarch on trial. With the verdict a foregone conclusion, the only debate left is punishment. The moderates, led by the Girondins, call for sparing his life, which isolates them in the convention.
The Gironde really crystallized as a faction in the convention over the debate over the king because they, while they certainly wanted a republic, they were less sure that the king should actually have to die. But the debate is dominated by the Jacobins, who call for blood. Why did the Jacobins want to kill the king? I think they wanted to kill the king because, as Robespierre brilliantly said, you have to kill the king so the revolution can live.
If the king is right, then the revolution is wrong. In any system there had ever been, there's only one penalty for treason, and that is death. So in this sense, if the king is guilty of betraying the country in a time of war, then the argument is that he must suffer the death of a traitor. On the 20th of January 1793, Louis XVI is declared guilty.
The sentence is death. That evening, Louis is briefly reunited with his family. Calm in the face of their tears, he promises to return the next morning to say a final goodbye. He will not. He cannot bear his family's anguish, and must not weaken on the way to the guillotine.
In the morning, a closed carriage brings Louis to the scaffold, and he calmly makes his way to the blade. He attempts to give a speech. I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge.
I pardon those who have occasioned my death. And I pray to God that the blood you are shedding may never be visited on France. But the guards drown him out with a drum roll.
At 1022 a.m. the king is no more. In the temple prison Marie Antoinette hears the cannons fire announcing the death of her husband. She collapses in despair. The king is dead.
The Jacobins victorious. But soon the enemies of the revolution would claim a victory of their own. Their target is the most extreme of the Jacobin spokesman, Jean-Paul Marat.
The death of King Louis the 16th marks a turning point, a pivotal moment when the radical revolutionaries claim victory and the French Republic is born in blood. By the end of 1792 the radical Jacobin faction believing the young revolution to be threatened by traitors and foreign intervention are resorting to more and more violent means. But the Girondins, representing a more moderate brand of republicanism, want to curb the violence for fear it will lead to civil war. Their most vocal opponent, Jean-Paul Marat, strikes back at the Girondins with furious tirades in his newspaper, naming those he believes are plotting against the revolution. He had once called for the execution of 200 people.
Now, he wants 200,000 heads to roll. When you look at Marat's journalism, it's got one basic principle, which is be more extreme than anybody else and call for people to be killed. If you look at Marat's journalism all the time, he's saying, if only we chopped off a few heads, then things will be alright. And when things aren't alright, if only you chop off a few more heads, things will be alright.
Suddenly, people in Paris begin to massacre people, and Marat is the first to claim credit for that. But this extremism hasn't taken hold everywhere. In the provinces, many are outraged at the brutality of the Jacopin, and call for an end to the bloodletting.
Charlotte Corday, a passionate and determined young woman, is one such opponent. Charlotte Corday is an average person in the city of Caen. She's appalled by the killing that's going on there.
And she, perhaps rightly, considers Marat one of the chief authors of that. He's been instrumental on the radical side of the revolution. His Ami de Popola is still calling for heads.
The 13th of July 1793. Charlotte Corday arrives in Paris. She knows that the friend of the people has an open-door policy at his home, where he can be found at nearly any hour, soaking in his medicinal bath. Corday arrives, claiming she has a list of traitors, people who are collaborating with foreign armies to end the revolution. Marat asks Corday for the list. Promising that the traitors will be guillotined the next day.
Having given him that, she then produces a poignard, a little stiletto, and stabs him in the chest. Marat is dead. The self-proclaimed wrath of the people has been silenced. The revolution has its first martyr.
When the revolution turns bloodthirsty, it's very easy to say it's his fault. And that, of course, is what those who hated him or feared him did say. And that's one of the reasons why Charlotte Corday actually murders him in 1793, because she regards him as responsible for many of the bloody atrocities that have actually occurred. Corday makes no attempt to escape. At her trial, she is unrepentant and proud.
When the prosecutor demands to know what she had hoped to achieve, she answers, Peace. Now that he is dead, peace will return to my country. Corday is guillotined four days after Mara's death. Her dream of peace dies with her.
She has killed the man, but created a legend. Marat's death is most famously depicted by the painter David. He became a martyr.
He became a kind of almost religious figure. You had people offering a prayer that went, Heart of Jesus, Heart of Marat. You had these scenes at his funeral where the bathtub in which he was murdered was sort of put up on the altar, almost as if it was a kind of crucifix. If you look at David's painting of Marat's death, Marat's body is draped in precisely the same way as the body of Christ is depicted in classic representations of the pie. The descent from the cross.
So clearly there's an identification of Marat with Christ, with Marat representing the new kind of God of the radical republic. Robespierre is envious of the adoration lavished upon Marat, but ever the pragmatist, he turns his attention to pressing matters at hand. Although Marat is dead, there are still others calling for blood, royal blood. The Conciergerie, death's antechamber.
Eight months after the execution of her husband, and just days after the killing of Charlotte Corday, Marie Antoinette is jailed here, in a small, dark cell, alone. One of the worst things that happens to Marie after the execution of Louis is her children are ripped away from her. Her children were the most important thing to her and she knew that that her son was going to be subjected to terrible abuse to make him forget that he was ever royal by these revolutionaries.
And it turns out she was right. It only took a couple years after her son died of terrible neglect and abuse. The once vain Marie Antoinette is only 38 years old, but events have aged her beyond her years.
Marie Antoinette had been a very pretty woman, elegant, until the revolution. And from 1788-89, she got thinner, her hair went white. She abandoned all her pretty coquetry and her pretty things. She got very, very thin. When she arrived for her trial, She was unrecognizable.
On the 15th of October, Marie Antoinette is put on trial, accused of high treason. Most of the evidence offered is salacious and vengeful rumor. A final charge is added to the list.
She is accused of incest with her son. At this, Marie stands to defend herself. I appeal to the conscience and feelings of every mother present to declare if there be one amongst you who does not shudder at the idea of such horrors. And at that moment there was a change in the mood, because all the women felt that they were implicated, and they realized they had gone too far with these accusations.
In a moment of public sympathy, Marie hopes she will be deported to Austria. But her hopes are dashed when the sentence is handed down. She is to meet the same fate as her husband.
Marie Antoinette was, in a sense, doomed from the start. She was the symbol of this Austrian alliance that had proved disastrous for France. She was, along with her husband, a laughingstock because of the apparent sexual failure of their marriage.
And she was a symbol of court culture. At a time when people were coming to see the court culture itself as something completely corrupt and terrible for the country. So for all these reasons, she was hated like no Queen of France had ever been hated before. She was loathed, she was reviled.
From her cell, she writes a final letter, bidding farewell to her children and family, promising to be brave. Her long grey hair is cut in preparation for the blade. Her arms are tightly bound. As she is escorted out of the prison, she is expecting a carriage.
Instead, there is just a tumbrel, an open wagon. She hopes when she's taken off to execution that she's going to get the same treatment that the king got, meaning she would be in an enclosed carriage so that the crowd couldn't get her, but they just put her in an open wagon where people would shout all sorts of things, horrible things, horrible threats at her. A shadow of the sovereign she once was, Marie Antoinette maintains a queenly dignity as she sits in the open tumbrel, paraded through the streets of Paris. Her name and the charges against her are read out. The last queen of France is dead.
Two weeks later, after countless more executions, a member of the National Convention notes the pointless waste of life, as one colleague after another falls victim to the guillotine. The revolution is like Saturn, devouring its own children, he says. Danton sniffs.
Revolutions, my friend, cannot be made with rose water. The bloodshed has only just begun. September 1793, four years into the revolution. France is being torn apart. There is violent insurrection in the provinces and huge losses in the faltering war against Europe.
In a humiliating defeat, the British take the port city of Toulon. Europe is eating away at France's borders. France is the single largest country in Western Europe. It's the most populous country in Western Europe.
It has been the great military power. And of course, when it entered into the revolution, a lot of its traditional enemies and also a lot of its traditional allies thought, aha, this is our chance to, not to carve a piece off of the actual territory of France, but certainly to enrich ourselves at its expense and to weaken it. Permanently.
France is isolated in the whole of Europe. It's being blockaded by Britain. It's being attacked and invaded by Austria and by Prussia.
The people of Paris are seized by a fear that the victory of the counter-revolution will lead to a bloodbath. Danton and Robespierre, the star orators of the National Convention, realize that only drastic new measures can save the revolution. They convince their colleagues to institute a new form of martial law.
It is time for all Frenchmen to enjoy sacred equality, announces Danton to the convention. It is time to impose this equality, by signal acts of justice, upon traitors and conspirators. Make terror the order of the day.
It is the founding moment of the revolution's most infamous episode. The terror will come to symbolize Jacobin extremism and the corruption of revolutionary ideals. To meet the emergency, the new constitution and the rights it guarantees are suspended. Police spies scatter throughout the country. Anyone suspected of counter-revolutionary activity is rounded up, quickly tried and executed.
The reign of terror was conceived as an emergency government. What they understood by terror was striking terror into the hearts of the enemies of the Republic, so that they would be either scared straight, as it were, or arrested and disposed of. The slightest suspicion can send anyone to the scaffold. Politicians who say a kind word of the extinguished monarchy, anyone who uses the formal monsieur or madame, Instead of the new form of address, citoyen, citizen. Informers are everywhere.
Neighbors denounce neighbors. The incessant rolling of the tumbrels en route to the guillotine rattles through the streets of Paris. Execution is absolutely hanging over people's heads in the sense that we know in Paris there are police spies.
And there are quite a few police spies everywhere, standing in bread lines, listening to what the women are saying, and turning them in if they don't like what they hear. You could be turned in not just for complaining about the high price of bread, but you could be turned in supposedly even for not being enthusiastic enough about where things were going and the successes of the revolution. So just about anything that would stand out for commentary could get you into trouble. The Convention sets up the Revolutionary Tribunal, streamlining the process by which traitors can be identified and sentenced.
Power is centralized in a new 12-man council, called the Committee of Public Safety. Ultimately, power had to be delegated to a smaller group, and that group became the Committee of Public Safety. Ultimately, it became 12 people who really ruled France as a kind of collective dictatorship.
With his masterful words and revolutionary vision, Robespierre soon emerges as the committee's guiding voice. And that voice is calling for more blood. One of the paradoxes in Robespierre's political life is that he very early on is a passionate opponent of the death penalty. And of course this is thrown back in his face later when he becomes an equally passionate proponent of terror and the guillotine.
He is, he never particularly responds to that except to say, well times have changed. The revolution has hardened Robespierre. Once a fierce supporter of a free press, he now reinstates censorship.
The Catholic Church, already mauled by the revolution, faces a new threat. Robespierre endorses one of the most radical revolutionaries, Jacques-René Hébert, as he proposes a program of dechristianization. When the crisis...
Of the war and internal rebellion as at its height, people begin to say the root of all the problem is priests, is religion. And what we've got to do if we're ever going to be safe against the enemies of revolution is destroy the power of the Catholic Church. Superstition, fanaticism, that's what religion is all about and therefore what we have to do is stamp out this whole thing entirely.
Streets carrying the word saint are renamed. Religious icons are destroyed. and replaced with tributes to the new saint, Marat. The church came to seem simply the enemy to the radical revolutionaries. Churches and cathedrals are simply stripped of their altars.
Stained glass is smashed, statues are smashed, the wealth of the church is simply carted off. Of course for European opinion, this was something even more shocking than the death of the king. Not even the Christian calendar is spared. Years are no longer numbered from the birth of Christ, but from September 1792, the proclamation of the Republic.
It is now year one. Months are renamed according to the seasons. July becomes Thermidor, April, Floreal.
Months are broken into three weeks of ten days each. The revolutionary calendar was certainly designed as a kind of weapon against Christianity, against Christian belief. Of course, by having a ten day week you'd no longer have Sundays. So people wouldn't even know what day Sunday was anymore.
That's what they hoped. The terror spreads across France. Insurrections are put down with swift, unrelenting brutality. In the city of Lyon, where counterrevolutionaries are gaining ground, the National Convention's representative sets a brutal example. Hundreds of rebels are tied up, marched into fields, and mowed down en masse.
The Vendée region in the west of France has also become a counter-revolutionary stronghold. Rebels and priests are tied up and drowned in the Loire, a national bath to accompany the national razor. Up to a hundred thousand people are killed in the Vendée alone.
In Paris, the guillotine falls at an ever more frenetic pace. Now the French armies are beginning to win victories. With the help of a brilliant young commander named Napoleon Bonaparte, rebellious Toulon is recaptured and the Royal Navy forced to evacuate. The revolution is fighting back. Robespierre is at the height of his power.
He had taken on the enemies of the revolution and ensured its success through terror. For a time the terror was very effective as a means of getting the country together, getting the government together. together and fighting what was after all a war on several fronts. On the Eastern Front and on the Northern Front against external enemies, also a civil war in the Vendee, which was the bloodiest of all, also a civil war against the supporters of the Gironde and other revolutionaries who had turned against the government in Paris. The terror has achieved its goals, but it does not stop, and it will not stop until it devours the very man who unleashed it, Maximilien Robespierre.
With the bloodletting of the terror, Robespierre has saved the revolution. An invigorated army repels attacks at the border and internal dissent has been all but quashed. But Robespierre has now set his sights on a loftier goal. To use more terror to create a new kind of society.
A republic of virtue. By virtue he means civic virtue. It's an active principle for Robespierre. For example, you cannot be a virtuous citizen by simply obeying the laws and keeping your head down. You must actively be involved in the work of the state, and that includes for Robespierre destroying the enemies of the state.
On the 5th of February 1794, Robespierre gives a speech outlining his philosophy. Terror without virtue is disastrous, he declares. But virtue without terror is powerless. He associates terror with virtue.
Terror at that moment becomes in his thinking an instrument by which you create virtue. But others disagree. For Danton, the revolution is heading down the wrong path. He and his followers, the Dantonists, believe it is time to bring terror to an end.
It has served its purpose, and is in danger of feeding the revolution. into their own fire. By the spring of 1794, things are beginning to go better. The food situation is no longer so bad, and the war effort is going better, and Danton is basically saying, we need to get a new footing for the government. We need to move to a kind of normalization.
Robespierre believes it's too soon. Danton will start organizing a group to argue that we should end the terror. Robespierre will see this as a direct threat to the government.
He will not see it as just a difference of opinion about the direction of policy. He will see it as potential treason. And in Robespierre's Republic of Virtue, there is only one response to treason. The Dantonists are rounded up and quickly sentenced to death. Robespierre has sent thousands to their deaths, but is uneasy with the actual process.
He will not attend the beheadings of his former friends and allies. As he steps up to the blade, with typical bravado, Danton tells the executioner, You will show my head to the people. It is worth seeing.
With the Dantonists out of the way, Robespierre launches France into an even bloodier, more horrifying new phase. The Great Terror. The Great Terror is the name given to the last phase of the terror in the spring of 1794 into the summer of 1794. It's the period at which the tempo of executions really starts to increase, at which the atmosphere of paranoia, particularly in Paris, but really across the country, starts to increase exponentially. You can track the number of executions until it's up to almost 800 per month in Paris, towards the end even more. The scale of bloodletting is unprecedented, but on the 6th of June 1794, the roll of the tumbrils comes to a halt.
The guillotine hangs silent. Robespierre has declared a new religious holiday, the Festival of the Supreme Being. He wants to replace the old Catholic God with a new rational devotion.
One thing about Robespierre is that he never supported these atheist policies. He believed that people needed a divinity to believe in. And he helped sponsor this cult that was called the Cult of the Supreme Being with this extraordinary tableau in Paris in, I believe it was June of 1794, which had choirs of people dressed in white, singing, you had this kind of papier-mâché mountain that was built in the center of Paris. And then at the...
Critical moment of the ceremony, you had Robespierre himself sort of emerging on the top of this mountain, clad in a toga, and marching down. And I think at this moment a lot of people felt, all right, who does he really think he is? Does he think he's God here? Does he think he's the king?
With the great terror spiraling out of control, Robespierre's colleagues see the festival as his departure from the realm of reality. There are those who think that Robespierre really has reached so... Extreme and so unreasonable a position that he can't turn back, that his fanaticism has somehow overtaken him, and there are those who think he's just gone nuts.
Once again, Robespierre's suspicions seem to focus on those closest to him. On the 26th of July... Now the 8th of Thermidor, he appears at the convention and gives a four-hour speech, insinuating that there are traitors in their midst. Rozier makes a tactical error. He comes in and announces that he has a new list of enemies of the Republic, but he won't give the list.
Therefore, everyone is afraid they might be on the list, and when he comes back the next day to give the list, he is arrested before he can speak. An unexpected chorus of voices shouts Robespierre down. He is stunned into silence.
The convention orders the arrest of Robespierre and four of his supporters. He will never have another opportunity to address the convention. The following day, Robespierre is freed by his supporters.
but immediately declared an outlaw and recaptured by the National Guard. In the process, one of Robespierre's allies throws himself out of a window, another shoots himself on the spot, and Robespierre is found semi-conscious, with a bullet wound to the face, his jaw shattered from an apparent suicide attempt. Robespierre spends his last hours on a table in an ante-room of the National Convention.
As he is ridiculed and insulted by his former colleagues, Robespierre is unable to respond. The Grand Master of Oratory has been silenced. In the Conciergerie, where the last Queen of France had preceded him, Robespierre is prepared for the national razor. The French Revolution, with its origins in noble hopes for liberty and equality, has become a monstrous exercise in political murder and civil war. At its head had been Robespierre, convinced that only terror and absolute ruthlessness could save the revolution from its many enemies.
But the atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia that he has created will require him as its final victim. It turns out that there is a great deal of enthusiasm for ending the terror. Nobody can figure out how to do it.
And what turns out to be the case is that the only thing that will end the terror, and apparently the only thing they can all agree upon, is the fall of Robespierre. On the 27th of July 1794, the guillotine comes down on the incorruptible, and the last blood of the terror is shed. The terror dies with Robespierre, but the revolution does not.
The rights of man, democracy, the new republic. The impact of these revolutionary achievements would far outlive any of the revolutionaries themselves. France would enter a period of uncertainty, frozen between fear of another terror or a return to the oppressive monarchy that preceded it. Five stagnant years would pass before power once again consolidated in the hands of a single man, Napoleon Bonaparte.
Whether Napoleon betrayed the revolution or consolidated its achievements is still keenly debated. His meteoric rise was certainly only possible because of the revolution. The Revolution was the first and enduring model of a people taking its destiny in its own hands. The idea that the subjects of the oldest, the most established, the most glorious monarchy in Europe could decide to completely rewrite their history was something that had extraordinary resonance. The revolution tore apart the old feudal fabric of France and changed the course of Western civilization.
The issues it raises still carry a powerful significance today. The question raised by the French Revolution is how much violence is justified in achieving a better society. Do people have the right to overthrow what they see as an unjust system to replace it with what they are convinced in their hearts is a more just system? How much violence is justified in doing that? We still face this question today.
More than 200 years after the birth of the French Republic, the ghost of Robespierre hangs over revolutions from Russia to Vietnam, China to Latin America. The French experiments with democracy have inspired models all over the world. Wherever tyranny takes root, the cry for justice can be heard.
For liberty, equality, fraternity, for revolution.