At the height 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, France's Conciergerie prison. An impenetrable fortress on the banks of the Seine river. Dank, rat infested, it is known as death's antechamber.
Inside, the voice of a young nation is about to be silenced. As his hair is shorn and his neck laid bare for the blade of the guillotine, Maximilien Robespierre prepares to pay for the cataclysm left in his wake. The explosion of events that became the French Revolution. 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 for the future. It would shake the very foundation of Europe and its impact would be felt across the seas. 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 else. 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, it 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, stood atop his world, presiding over the greatest and bloodiest revolution Europe had ever known. 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 weapon. Now, silenced by a bullet to the jaw, he awaits the same swift and brutal end he has brought down upon so many others.
The revolution is about to eat its own. No one could have foreseen the turbulent times ahead on one spring day in 1770. The Chateau of Versailles fills to its gilded rafters with the glittering crowds of the Royal Court. Completed in 1682, Versailles was the crowning masterpiece of King Louis XIV.
you To put some distance between himself and his subjects, Louis XIV transplanted the capital of France to this small town 12 miles west of Paris, where he had built the most magnificent palace in all of Europe. For nearly 100 years, it has been the seat of the nation's unwavering monarchy. And today, it is host to a very important wedding.
King Louis XV's grandson, Prince Louis Capet, next in line for 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, much less a husband. 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 beginning of new regional ties.
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 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 arrived... When Marie Antoinette comes to Versailles, she is just a teenager.
She is blonde with blue eyes. She is pretty and 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 an age-old ceremony to encourage the conception of an heir, the king's courtiers are present as the awkward young couple is revealed 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 ruling.
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 There is a lot of dark gossip all across the kingdom that will continue to plague the couple for years to come.
The grand wedding gala continues for days, but outside the gates of Versailles, there is hardly cause for celebration. Years of mismanagement by the monarchy have left the French people deprived and hungry. Nearly a decade earlier, King Louis XV lost the Seven Years'War, battling Great Britain over territory in North America.
The ill-fated conflict all but bankrupted France of money and prestige, leaving the country's coffers drained, even as its population is growing bigger every day. With diseases like the plague a distant memory, fewer people are dying, but more and more of them are hungry. France grew from 20 million to 26 million in the 18th century after having grown. only one 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 loses his final battle with smallpox. Louis XV dies a defeated and unpopular king. and leaves behind a country on the brink of chaos. In a lavish ceremony, young Prince Louis inherits the throne and is crowned King Louis XVI.
Despite his insistence on a grandiose coronation, Louis is all too 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 the worst man to have on the watch. A 20-year-old king prays, Protect us, Lord, for we reign too young. Ensconced in their royal apartments in Versailles, Louis and Marie begin their promising new lives as young monarchs. While only 12 miles away, in the city of Paris, another new era is dawning. 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 esteemed Louis-Lagrand College, crowds gather for a glimpse of grandeur. It is a day to welcome the newly crowned king, Louis XVI, and his lovely Austrian wife.
to the city of Paris. And 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. As Robespierre respectfully delivers his Latin soliloquy, the king hardly notices the boy. But years later, their fates will again intertwine under very different, much darker 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 sincere. The visit from the royals may have won the hearts of the people, but their minds are leaning increasingly in an entirely different direction.
Since the Middle Ages, European society had been broken into three distinct classes, dictated by birth. There was a great divide between the wealth of the nobility and the clergy, and the poverty of the peasants. Then, at the blossoming of the 18th century, reason and science began to challenge this age-old tradition. Swept up on a current of innovation and new literature, Paris now radiates as the philosophical center of the world.
The city pulses with a great flourishing of knowledge, a shining beacon of possibility. 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 elite salons across Paris, aristocrats gather to discuss enlightenment authors in the burgeoning age of reason. Voltaire, Rousseau, fresh voices who champion liberty, control of one's own destiny, and above all, equality. The passion for this new literature is highest among the upper class, but as enlightenment ideas take root at 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 need only look across the Atlantic, where the Americans are fighting for freedom from France's old nemesis, Great Britain. Young King Louis wants revenge for his grandfather's defeats, and he sees an opportunity in the American War of Independence. Louis commits to the cause a total of 2,000 million livres, enough to feed and house 7 million French citizens for a year. His investment would mark the beginning of financial collapse for France.
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. While Louis sends money and troops across the Atlantic, Marie is busy incurring debts of her own. Life at Versailles is a never-ending routine 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 ritual drudgery, Marie Antoinette presides over a parade of increasingly outrageous fashions.
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 the nickname, Madame Deficit. Marie is given the name Madame 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. Of all the debts Marie incurs, the greatest is what she owes her country, an heir to the throne. In the seven years since their marriage, Louis and Marie have yet to produce a child.
Marie finds herself in an increasingly humiliating 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 criticize, 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. There is a whole correspondence between the ambassador of Austria and the ambassador of France. Marie Therese, the mother of Marie Antoinette, questioned, if a girl as gorgeous as my daughter cannot get him going, then what is 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'disinterest in sex is seen as a lack of bravado as a king. Finally, after years of frustration and pressure from the court, 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, 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's image. Since the early 1780s, libelles 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 view of the monarchy sours as conditions in the countryside worsen. After a succession of bad harvests, deregulation has raised the cost of flour, leading to a shortage of the very heart of the French diet.
Bread. But the hardships naturally stop at the gates of Versailles. As the royals continue to live in extravagance, complaints are committed to paper.
One charge is leveled directly at the royal court. Do you know why there are so many needy people? It is because your luxurious existence devours in one day the substance of a thousand men. The man behind this charge? The same young man who just a few years earlier regaled the king and queen after their coronation.
Maximilian Robespierre. In Robespierre, the people will soon gain a voice calling for liberty, equality, 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. In an attempt to demonstrate leadership, Louis dabbles in financial reforms. His misguided interfering burdens the poor with heavy taxes, while the nobility pay hardly at all.
With the economy in ruins and the people restless, it seems as if even the heavens are angry, smiting France with the most bitterly cold winter in 90 years. 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 a background of very serious food shortage. For the people of France in the 18th century, flour is the essence of life itself.
Bread. Measure of existence. 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 Louis'financial mismanagement, the cost of flour skyrockets.
Sparse food supplies are hoarded. The cost of a loaf of bread soon equals a month's earnings. Hunger turns to rage.
Riots break out across France. Homes are robbed. The government is in a state of panic.
Bakeries are raided. Shopkeepers suspected of stockpiling bread are lynched on the spot. With the economy in shambles, the banks force Louis to hire a finance minister, Jacques Necker.
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. The nation in fiscal crisis. Necker urges Louis to call a meeting of the traditional representative body of the kingdom, the Estates General.
It is the first time the representatives have been called together 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. May 4th, 1789. A skilled young lawyer and politician arrives at Versailles. Maximilien 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. Back home in the small town of Arras, the Enlightenment ideas he had absorbed in the salons of Paris found a powerful voice as he became a hometown lawyer 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.
At the Estates General, Robespierre and his colleagues are demanding that the nobility and clergy pay taxes. But Louis feels increasingly threatened by the growing radicalism of the Third Estate. Then, on June 20th, after a six-week deadlock... the deputies arrive to find that they are being silenced.
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 is really a handball court, and gather together and swear they will not stop meeting until they have a new constitution. The deputies declare themselves a new 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 communion of voices from around the country, a parliamentary body enacting the people's will. But wresting 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 mid-July is that the king is gathering his forces to disperse them, to overthrow them. By early July, 30,000 of the king's troops are taking positions around Paris. To defend themselves, the people form a new National Guard.
Rioters raid Paris'armories and make a way with over 28,000 muskets. The only thing missing is gunpowder. People know just where to get it.
In the center of Paris, there looms a massive stone dungeon, notorious as a symbol of feudal rule. The Bastille. Prison houses the city's stores of gunpowder and is legendary as a den of torture and unspeakable deaths.
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, there is a stunning outrage. Louis fires his finance minister, the people's beloved Jacques Necker, seen as too sympathetic to the masses.
Hours after Necker is fired, word reaches Paris that their man on the inside has been ousted. There is nothing left but revolt. On July 14th, crowds band together identifying themselves with a small cockade, red and blue for the colors of Paris, separated by white, the color of the House of Bourbon. The tricolore 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.
At the sight of the approaching mob, the governor of the Bastille, Bernard Delaunay, attempts to lock down the prison. He mounts a hopeless defense, and the marauders storm the fortress and tear into the guards with knives and pikes. Finally, Delaunay surrenders, but the enraged mob engulfs him, dragging him through the streets.
The jeering horde kicks and stabs at him until he shouts, Let me die. The crowd eagerly obliges. He is stabbed and shot, and a revolutionary tradition is born.
His severed head is paraded on a pike. 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 July 14th, 1789, he writes, Nothing.
A reference to his unsuccessful hunt. An aide interrupts and breaks the news of the riots and the fall of the Bastille. Louis XVI asks, Is it a revolt?
No, sire, he replies. It is a revolution. Victory at the Bastille unleashes the irrepressible torrent of revolution.
The people had defied their king and won. There would be no turning back. As a symbol of the defeat of tyranny, the people, men, women, and children, dig in with bare hands and tear the Bastille apart, brick by feudal 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 charter is panned within days called the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Under this daring new document, archaic class distinctions are to be abolished, and all men... considered truly equal.
The Declaration of the Rights of Men 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 citizens 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.
To provide a greater voice for the call of revolution, Robespierre demands increased freedom for the press, long muzzled under the old regime. The resulting free press is spearheaded by L'Ami de 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. After a string of unsuccessful careers, Marat found himself living in poverty, for a time finding shelter in the sewers of Paris. It was there he contracted a painful skin disease that now leaves him confined for long periods to a medicinal bath.
A bitter and failed 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.
Magad 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 relentless extravagance, even as poverty grips France, and needs only the slightest rumor to lambast the king and queen in his newspaper.
On October 2nd, 1789, his anger boils over. Word reaches Paris that the king has thrown a party at Versailles, that the decadent royals threw the new tricolore 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 positions around Paris. With the coup at the Bastille still smoldering in the minds of the people, Marat frantically urges them to take action. People of Paris, it's time to open your eyes!
Shake yourselves out of your torpor! Wake up! Once more, wake up!
October 5th, dawn breaks to the furious ringing of bells. Women gather near City Hall to protest the shortage of bread. And now fear of the approaching royal troops mixes with anger as news of the king's offensive party circulates through the crowd.
Soon, thousands are marching to Versailles, pikes and guns in hand. The women are taking their complaints 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.
Inside 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 gathers outside the gates, Louis understands that 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. The crowd continues to grow throughout the night. By morning.
20,000 people are camped outside the royal 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. Indecisive as ever, Louis is weak to respond.
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. A wave of women break into the royal palace screaming for the blood of the queen.
They massacred the guards, decapitated, and impaled 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 friends. that if they had encountered her, they probably would have torn her to pieces. Terrified for her life, Marie escapes to Louis'apartments only moments before the women break in.
break into her chambers, and tear her bed to shreds. The king and queen are now at the mercy of the mob. What the mob wants is a little attention from their king.
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 miles. leaving Versailles with carts and wagons overflowing with flour from the king's storehouses. flanking the royal carriage all the way to Paris. The king and queen were forced to go back to Paris with the heads of their guards, who had been massacred in the chateau.
Their heads had been cut off. This is really a completely unbridled violence. The heads were then made up with make-up and paraded at the head of the cortege, with the king and queen following. The King and Queen must make their new home 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. Power is now with the people. France will have democracy, new laws, and a remarkable and unforgiving form of justice will make its debut on the revolutionary stage... The guillotine.
May 1791. Nearly two years have passed since the royal family and the National Assembly have moved to Paris. Robespierre appears frequently at the Assembly and at the Jacobin Club, a debating society named for the former Jacobin Monastery where they gather. Now, words are the very core of the revolution, and Robespierre speaks with an unfailing moral compass.
His true north is always the people. He soon earns the nickname, the Incorruptible. France is now a constitutional monarchy.
The king forced 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 authority. And that of the other great feudal regime, the Catholic Church.
Louis decides the time has come to escape the confines of the new republic. 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. June 21, 1791. The king and queen disguise themselves as servants, and by covering the palace with a veil, cover of darkness slip out from under the watchful eye of Paris. They make an ill-planned run for freedom. It is long past midnight when the royal family arrives in the small town of Varennes, some 100 miles east of Paris.
They are close to the border of Austria, safety just a few miles away. But their dash to freedom will go no further. Rumors of the Royals journey have preceded them to Varennes. A town official stops the carriage demanding their passports. The official 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.
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 official turncoats to the revolution, power shifts from Louis, now a prisoner king, to the revolutionaries at the assembly. At the very heart of the young revolutionary government is Robespierre. He shines at the podium, calling for liberty, equality, and fraternity.
He demands universal suffrage and an end to slavery in the French West Indies. And most passionately, he rails against the death penalty, because in the new age of enlightenment, Robespierre wants to discard all remnants of the medieval past. Europe had inherited a macabre...
repertoire of execution techniques from the dark ages on remittingly cruel deaths by drawing and quartering hanging drowning and burning at the stake wonder 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. Physician-inventor Joseph Ignace Guillotin devises a ruthless beheading machine, turning old-fashioned decapitation into a humanitarian weapon. ...experience. Dr. Niu Tan 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 Marat prints an enthusiastic rant in his paper, announcing the device's new name, Guillotine. It will soon earn a 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... It's 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 Louis to the throne. But it's the enemies surrounding France that most preoccupy the Assembly.
There is a fear that members of the extended royal family who fled to Austria will launch an armed counter-revolution. The Assembly calls for a preemptive attack, a declaration of war on Austria. But 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 Marie Antoinette's own family. A nationalist fervor grows. If Austria defeats the revolutionary army, Louis will undoubtedly reclaim his throne. And Marie is suspected of aiding the enemy by corresponding with her relatives in Austria, giving away French troop movements with the stroke of her pen. 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. French army already suffering huge losses on the border. Word reaches Paris that Austria's ally, Prussia, has joined the invasion.
The enemy troops are mobilized under the command of the Duke of Brunswick, a Prussian general. Tension pervades the streets of Paris. And then the newspapers print a letter from the Duke of Brunswick, a manifesto, threatening the destruction of Paris if any harm comes to their royal majesties, the King and Queen. The misguided threat wildly backfires. August 10th, 1792, 27,000 armed citizens fueled by indignant rage head to the Tuileries palace and fall upon the king's guards in a savage attack.
By the end of the day, over 800 from both sides are dead. The king flees to safety in the assembly, but the monarchy is no more. Louis is officially stripped of his title. 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.
Dr. Guillotin's chilling new device hangs over Paris like a warning. The penalty for defying revolutionary law and order. Freshly christened with the blood of the King's guards, it will soon put an end to the King himself.
By August 1792, with the king deposed and the royal family secluded in the temple prison, Robespierre and his Jacobins are locked in a battle with the moderates of the assembly, the Girondins, for control of the national government. And on the streets of Paris, a new political movement takes hold. As a symbol of their rejection of aristocratic tradition, Ordinary citizens refused to wear the knee-breeches, or culottes, of the aristocrats.
They called themselves the Saint-Culottes, those without knee-pants. The Saint-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 Saint-Culotte was simply a symbolism of being not an aristocrat, being an ordinary man of people.
The Saint-Culotte seized control of Paris'city government, while the Jacobins and Girondins steer the rest of the country from the National Assembly, now called the Convention. The convention struggles with the command of the beleaguered French army, which is swiftly losing ground to Austria and Prussia. While fighting back incursions 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 friend, the Minister of Justice, Georges Danton, motivates men young and old to join the war on the frontier. He is gregarious and loud, 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 Robespierre simply cannot.
As the enemy closes in, Danton's fiery rhetoric mobilizes the people, inspiring many to take to the battlefront. 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. An unsettling fear floods the city.
The growing mass of prisoners may be impossible to contain. Marat puts out a bloodthirsty call for revolutionary citizens to descend upon the prisons and slaughter all inside. 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, a town on the road to Paris. The enemy is now just miles away. The fear gripping Paris explodes.
The sans-culottes break into the prisons and unleash a furious assault on the city's inmates. They will leave no traitor alive. 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 and brutalized.
Priests disemboweled. Aristocrats hacked to pieces. In a primeval slaughter, more than 1600 are left dead in a matter of days.
When word of the September Massacre spreads throughout Europe... Enemies of the revolution are sickening. Across the English Channel, the London Times gives voice to the revulsion. 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 taken an inalterable turn.
Even Robespierre understands that things have gone too far. that the people cannot manage the revolution on their own. They need guidance, an iron hand. And with the power of his words, the incorruptible rises to the forefront as the man who will guide the revolution. Robespierre had once pushed for a constitutional monarchy.
Now he believes there is no longer room for the king. A momentous decision is made. France will put its own king on trial. With the verdict a foregone conclusion, the only debate left is punishment.
The moderates, the Girondins, called for sparing Louis'life, which isolates them in the convention. The Girondins 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 Girondins are outnumbered by the Jacobin 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. The End On January 20th, 1793, Louis XVI is declared guilty.
The sentence is read, the king must die. 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 pain. family's anguish and must not weaken the way to the guillotine. The next morning, a closed carriage brings Louis to the scaffold.
And he stoically makes his way to the blade. He attempts to give a speech. I trust that my death will be for the happiness of my people.
But I grieve for France, and I fear that she may suffer the anger of the Lord. But the guards drown him out with a drum roll. 1022 AM.
The man who once was king is no more. In the temple prison, Marie hears the cannons fire, heralding the death of her husband. She collapses in despair. The king's blood is spilled.
The revolutionaries victorious. But the enemies of the revolution will soon claim a victory of their own. Their target?
The man who is calling for so many heads to roll. Jean-Paul Marat. The execution of Louis the 16th marks ultimate victory for the revolutionaries.
A pivotal moment when a young nation, the French Republic, is literally at war. Born in blood. By the end of 1792, the radical Jacksons, believing the young revolution is in danger of being sabotaged by traitors, are steering the revolution with more and more violent means.
But the Girondins, representing the people of the French countryside, want to slow the ascending 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. Marat, who once called for the execution of 200, now demands 200,000 heads fall. 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 all right. And when things aren't all right, if only you chop off a few more heads, things will be all right.
Suddenly, people in Paris begin to massacre people. And Marat is the first to claim credit for that. But the radical movement hasn't taken hold everywhere.
People outside of Paris are furious at the spiraling brutality of the Jacobins and call for an end to the bloodletting. And the message reaches the lovely Charlotte Corday, an unassuming yet determined young woman from the provinces. 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 Amida Pupula is still calling for heads. July 13th, 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 comes on the pretense that she carries a list of traitors, those colluding with the people. with foreign armies to put an end to the revolution. Marat asks for the list, promising Corday that the traitors will be guillotined the next day.
Having given him that, she then produces at Poignard a little stiletto and stabs him in the chest. The so-called friend of the people dies instantly. The angry voice of his newspaper silenced. When the revolution turns bloodthirsty, it's very easy to say it was 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. What did you expect to achieve in assassinating Marat?
Peace. Now that he's dead, peace will return to my country. Charlotte Corday is swiftly executed, and her dream of peace dies along with her.
She has killed Marat the man, but she has created Marat the legend. His death most famously depicted by the revolutionary painter Jacques-Louis David. He became a martyr.
He became a kind of almost religious figure. You had people offering up prayers 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 Pieta.
sent 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.
Because though Marat is dead, there are still others calling for blood. Royal blood. The conciergerie, death's dark 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 hideous cell, utterly alone. The End 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 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 38 years old, but the revolution has aged her beyond her years.
Marie Antoinette had been a very pretty woman, elegant, until the revolution. From 1788-89, she got thinner, her hair went white. She abandoned all her coquetry and her pretty things.
She became emaciated. When she arrived for her trial, she was unrecognizable. On October 15th, Marie is put on trial, accused of high treason and depleting the national treasury.
The little 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 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. 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 laughing stock 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, Marie writes a final letter, bidding farewell to her children and family, promising to be brave. Her long gray hair is cut in preparation for the blade. Hands are tightly bound.
As she is escorted from the prison gates, she expects a carriage. Instead, there awaits a common criminal's cart. He 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 is paraded through the streets of Paris. Charges against her are read out. The last queen of France is dead. Several days later, following countless more executions, a member of the National Convention notes the pointless waste of life, as one after another of his colleagues are lost 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 and France is being torn apart.
There is violent insurrection in the provinces and huge losses in the faltering war against Europe. In one blistering defeat, the British Navy takes 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 peace 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 convention, realize that they must boldly strike out to save the revolution. They convince the people of Paris to fight. their colleagues to institute a menacing new form of martial law.
It is time for all Frenchmen to enjoy sacred equality. It is time to impose this equality by signal acts of justice upon traitors and conspirators. Make terror the order of the day.
Thus begins a new chapter in the revolution. A period of violent repression called the Terror. In a remarkable reversal, the revolutionaries suspend the new constitution and all the rights it was to guarantee.
Police spies scatter throughout the country. Anyone suspected of counter-revolutionary activity is rounded up, quickly tried, and sent to the National Razor. 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 defunct monarchy. Anyone who uses the formal monsieur or madame instead of the new form of address, citizen. The air is fraught with paranoia.
Neighbors denounce neighbors. The incessant rolling of the death carts 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 a revolutionary tribunal, expediting trials and executions with ruthless efficiency.
To consolidate power, they form a 12-man council and call it 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 fiercest guiding voice. And that voice is calling for more blood. 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 never particularly responds to that except to say, well, times have changed.
The revolution has hardened Robespierre. Once an impassioned supporter of a free press, he now reinstates censorship, a vestige of the old regime. And with the church already under attack, Robespierre stands... Widely by as one of the most radical revolutionaries, Jacques-René Hébert proposes a new agenda, dechristianization. When the crisis of the war and internal rebellion is 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 Annihilation 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 glasses 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 numbered no longer from the birth of Christ, but from September 1792, the overthrow of the monarchy. 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... friends. Insurrections are put down with a vicious, unrelenting cruelty.
In the city of Lyon, where counter-revolutionaries are gaining ground, the Committee of Public Safety sets a brutal example. Hundreds of rebels are tied up, marched into fields, and mowed down en masse. A region called the Vendée in the west of France has also become a counter-revolutionary stronghold.
Rebels and priests are tied together and packed onto boats that are then mercilessly destroyed. is sunk up to a hundred thousand people are killed in the Vendee alone in Paris the blade falls at an ever more frantic pace French armies are finally seeing victories on the frontier. Under a brilliant young commander named Napoleon Bonaparte, the French army sends the British Navy into a demoralizing retreat at Toulon.
The revolution is on the rise. Roderick Fierre is at the height of his power. He has 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 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 Vendée. 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 blood of the terror, Maximilien Robespierre has rescued the revolution. An invigorated army is repelling attacks at the border, and internal dissent has been all but crushed. At the height of his success, Robespierre dreams up a loftier goal yet.
To use... More terror to mold 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 law. 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 February 5th, 1794, Robespierre gives a speech outlining his philosophy.
Terror without virtue is disastrous. 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 is the one who is going to be the first to know. and his followers, the Dantonists, believe it is time to bring the terror to a halt.
It has served its purpose and is in danger of feeding the revolutionaries 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 the scaffold, but is uneasy with the blood of execution. He will not attend the beheadings of his former friends and allies. As he steps up to the blade, Danton shouts, My only regret is that And I'm going before that rat, Robespierre.
With the Dantonists out of the way, Robespierre launches France into an even bloodier, more horrifying period. 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. Paris'executioner is busier than ever. But on June 6th, 1794, the roll of the carts 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 one, the goddess of reason. 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 and i believe it was june of 1794 which had choirs of people dressed in white singing you had this kind of paper mache mountain that was built in the center of paris and then at the critical moment of the ceremony you had robus pierre 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 uh who does he really think he is does he think he's god here does he think he's the king you As the great terror spirals on, Robespierre's colleagues see the festival of the supreme being 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 turn to those closest at hand. On June 27th, now the 9th of Thermidor, he appears before the convention and delivers a speech of threats.
It is the last speech he will ever give. 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 deputies declare him an outlaw and immediately remove him from the convention. Robespierre and several of his associates are taken to City Hall, where they remain under watch for the night.
Shots ring out in the early morning. Guards race to the second floor. They fling the doors open to a grisly scene.
One of Robespierre's allies... has thrown himself from the window. Another has taken a pistol to his head.
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 the table of the Committee of Public Safety, in the very room where he had piloted the terror to its hideously bloody peak. 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.
His cellmate, the revolutionary Saint-Just, points to a painting of the rights of man and declares, At least we did that. Robespierre had spearheaded a revolution and changed the face of France. He had reordered society and engineered a bloody and tyrannical system to ensure its success.
But he was destined to be one of its final victims. 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 July 27th, 1794, the guillotine comes down on the incorruptible. 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 accomplishments of the revolution would far outlive any of the revolutionaries themselves. France would enter a period of uncertainty, frozen between fear of another terror Or worse yet, 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.
Historians disagree over the end of the revolution. Some believe it died with the rise of Napoleon. Others maintain that the revolution lived on into the 19th century and beyond. The revolution was the first...
an 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 Europe and forever changed the course of Western civilization.
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. As Robespierre and his colleagues were driving their country into the future, many of them must have wondered what the final outcome would be.
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 is eternal. For liberty, equality, fraternity.
For revolution.