hey there students and welcome back to my French Revolution lecture series this being the second part of my lecture on the reign of terror so if you didn't see the other part go back and look at it and a quick shout out to Jackie my favorite internet troll and just all-around terrible person haha bad pun see what I did there some people like that sort of thing I intentionally left you out of the first shout at Jackie because well i trolled you and this is appropriate because really one could think about the guillotine as one of the earliest forms of clothing except not only internet actually pretty fatal so where were we we were talking about the left wing and the right wing and we've already gotten rid of those right wing monarchist and EEMA grace and all of these people who are overtly trying to bring back the monarchy well now it's time for the Jacobins to fight amongst themselves and they take out their rivals the Girondins so jacobins this is why that word is a lot of times used just to refer to the most radical faction the mountain but of course you know for a student in a survey level course using both of these interchangeably isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world but taking out the Girondins leaves the way open for Robespierre to go about with his republic of virtue [Music] Robespierre said that it is this virtuous people that spills all of its blood to found the Republic that is imposing two internal enemies and shakes the thrones of tyrants good lord that's sickening but Robespierre really believed that what he's doing was a good thing the creation of this Republic of virtue of long the lines of the social contract that Rousseau put out there now remember that Rousseau wasn't the first philosopher to write about the social contract but he put forward another idea of a social contract remember that Locke's idea of a social contract was very individualistic that the purpose of government is to protect every individuals life liberty and property now meanwhile Rousseau believed that government should be an instrument of the general will this is kind of a radical democracy approach maybe even a proto socialist approach because it is not built on individualism it is built on this idea of the general will which I addressed a bit in my lecture on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the citizen which I cast as a dialogue between Jefferson who was an heir of Locke really and Rousseau and what Robespierre setting up here is a dictatorship of the people that will bring about this general will by by liberalism and all of these ideas about economic freedom and civil liberties and all of that kind of stuff that the point now is for the nation to come together and submit to the general will so individualism liberalism out the window for this time period and a good example of this is the bread of equality this was something this is a piece of legislation that the French government during this time outlawed white bread because to make white bread you've got to take the husk off of the grain and it's wasteful now white bread you what it tasted better still does taste now a lot of people eat wheat bread because they think it's better for you today but of course then again white rice and stuff like that's kind of making a comeback in some health circles but anyway the thing is that since white bread is wasteful and there are people not eating what they did was mandate that every Baker had to bake brown bread that white bread was something that the aristocrats ate so therefore we're getting rid of that and the idea here is that the government is not there to protect the rights of individuals and the civil liberties and the economic freedom of individuals but to look out for the whole and specifically for those people who are not eating so we see a different view of government than that put forward by locked social contract another attack on the old regime was D Christianization where this government under the Committee of Public Safety and the National Convention sought to get rid of the religion of the old regime not just regulate it like they had a few years before with the civil constitution of the clergy but to completely D Christianize France in order to do this Robespierre introduced the festival of the Supreme Being which was something that was kind of a deist sort of way of looking at things they would have festivals at the end of the year to celebrate particular virtues and these were supposed to replace the old Christian religion now it's interesting when you look at France today there's a bit of a legacy of de-christianization now remember Europe is a very diverse continent as far as you know cultures languages religious beliefs when we look at the percentage of Europeans who believe in God it is very high in countries like Poland and Greece and Italy and Portugal you know pretty high also in Spain and Germany and of course Ireland but at the same time when we look at France France has one of the lower percentages today of people who believe in God and in fact the highest percentage of people who do not believe in any spirit God or lifeforce very interesting of course a lot of people in France today also who remain you know very Catholic and conservative as well but interesting to look at the first country that experimented with D Christianisation even for a short time you know seems to have reaped a legacy of that to an extent and let's take a look at John Palmer ah the revolutionary saint now of course I mentioned jock Louie de'vide in the previous installment and Jacques Louie devide portrays jean-paul Marat here as a revolutionary saint and this is something to replace the old system of the saints that were in the Christian calendar so the idea is that we take the saints that people used to value and we replace these saints with well Mad Men like jean-paul Marat I've got a video about that and my women in the French Revolution series featuring Charlotte Corday where I go into Marat in his list of enemies of the people and all the other things basically why he deserved to die and Charlotte Corday did the world a favor of course Jacques lui de vide didn't see it this way at the time what's that okay that's not just an ordinary period that is ladies and gentlemen a decimal all right so decimal time all right all kinds of new innovations here while we're getting rid of the features of the old regime let's go ahead and redo the way that we calculate time and here is a French decimal clock very revolutionary way to keep time ten hours in a day a hundred minutes in an hour a hundred seconds in a minute now what really strikes me here is pretty amazing is when you think about this we all have this idea in our head of what a second is and in order to create this decimal clock they had to redefine what a second is and you see kind of why this stuff didn't stick I mean you're really dealing with you know a cultural revolution very much at once but they're gonna try it and I guess it's easy to tell time like this but it's very difficult to get rid of the idea of what a second is once that's in somebody's head so these reforms are going to be very temporary but at the same time they're very ambitious and very interesting and then there's the French Republican calendar now this was the official French calendar between 1793 and 1805 and the goals of the Republican calendar were to eliminate the influence of the old regime the monarchy in the church and also to create increased productivity with a 10-day workweek they even changed the Year 1792 the first year of this French Republican calendar was to be year one and in fact they went back a year because they started with the abolition of the monarchy so they said let's go back about a year and instead of starting with the birth of Christ of course France is no longer a Christian nation here and they said 1792 is year one and then we are going to change the names of the months the names of the days of the week so every month has 30 days there was a festival at the end of the year to celebrate the Supreme Being and the virtues and all of that kind of stuff but you notice there being you know incredibly original here with ok we're gonna have 10 days first day second day third day fourth day fifth day six day and so on and the tenth day would be a day of rest it would replace this Christian Sunday this day of rest that was there traditionally and the months themselves were named after natural occurrences you notice here germinal which that's when the plants germinate and it was mid-march to mid-april you're seeing in fact that they're really aligning this with the zodiac you can see here that there is a ram here this is on the time of Aries so these you know these natural months that are mimicking more the zodiac rather and the Christian calendar so kind of a an attempt to introduce kind of a civic paganism and then the metric system which a lot of countries use today was introduced during this time it was introduced in France in 1795 to go along with the decimal time which is really no longer used by anybody but the metric system is used in lots of places around the world the United States of course being a notable exception with a handful of other countries now of course at the same time a lot of people say that the British don't even use their system but colloquially the British do the British still talk in terms of miles and pints you know and that sort of thing so they use their own system but officially Britain has adopted the metric system the United States has not done so officially or unofficially even though we use it in science classes quite a bit let's go now to the end of the reign of terror and the fall of Robespierre now there are lots of political purges after getting rid of its enemies the mountain then turns on itself and this happens in the history of political factions and especially during revolutionary upheavals you know you can think about Stalin and Trotsky you know in other revolutionary factions over the years that you know there's there's a faction that's taken out and then this revolutionary faction then turns on itself and so what happens here is that Robespierre believe it or not was not the most radical person in this faction of the mountain there were on one hand the a bare 'test and then the Danton nice I'm sorry if I've slaughtered this I don't speak very good French as people who watch my videos a lot know so the Danton East they are not radical enough these are followers of Dan tone and then there are the aber 'test who were too radical so you know too hot here if we're thinking about revolutionary porridge Jacques a bear and the members of his radical faction were guillotined in march 1794 too radical for Robespierre if anybody can believe that and then we get to to cold Jorge Dan tone and his followers were guillotined in April because they had the nerve to advocate the end of the terror you know they they were asking when is this going to end you know I thought this terror was gonna be a temporary thing and of course Robespierre's thinking hey if you think the terror needs to end then you must be an enemy of the people yourself one of Robespierre's partisans said the monsters they want to break down the scaffolds but citizens never forget those who want no guillotines are those who should feel that they are worthy of the guillotine some foolproof logic right there anybody who doesn't think that we need to have mass executions needs to get in line for the next mass execution but that's really this frenzy that was overtaking this political faction leading it to cannibalize itself so who will be next at a certain point people start to think alright even if I'm a member of Robespierre's faction I'm still not safe so eventually you start to think maybe this has gone on long enough because you're thinking kind of like at the DMV you take a number you imagine that numbers gonna come up and you're going to get executed so even members of Robespierre's faction begin to express some concern and so enough is enough and people have had enough at a certain point you could only cut so many heads off before people get tired of it I think that's a fundamental truth of human existence and so the next person is going to be Robespierre and we mentioned the French Republican calendar the month of Thermidor which is actually my birth month also Jackie's birth month Jackie check out this lion in the fountain here this is the month of Leo okay this is when the best people were born right because Leo's are naturally egotistical as well so of course a little point of view analysis there but the month of Thermidor because you know thermos it keeps your drink hot or whatever this is the hot month so when we think of a natural occurrence the hot month noticed that the lady being depicted here is topless because I guess it's hot and you've gotten rid of Christianity so you know there's the Swan you know it's kind of like you know Billy Madison stop looking at me Swan I so anyway the month of Thermidor you think about it getting too hot and I think about the old cartoons where it would get so hot that the thermometer would burst that on the 9th of Thermidor of year 2 you have the thermidorian reaction so people think you know what this reign of terror has gone on long enough that it has gotten way too hot and so this is when the metaphorical cartoon thermometer just burst and what goes around cuts your head off I don't know if that's how the original quote goes in fact I'm pretty sure that it doesn't but at the same time I'm pretty proud of that little animation let's look at it again real quick just because I'm so proud of it what goes around cut your head off and so Robespierre in the thermidorian reaction he's done and that is the end of the reign of terror and so we've really gotten past the climax of this whole thing and we will move next to the directory phase and I'm hoping to use that to explore particularly the war in the vendée which I find fascinating and then I'll finally move on to Napoleon thank you for watching so far and supporting this French Revolution series it's always a pleasure [Music]