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, realized that they must boldly strike out to save the revolution.
They convinced 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.
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 the 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. 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 idle. As one of the most radical revolutionaries, Jacques-René Hébert proposes a new agenda, de-Christianization. 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 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 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 sunk. Up to a hundred thousand people are killed in the Vendée alone. In Paris, the blade falls at an ever more frantic pace. But the 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 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 5, 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 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, I only regret it.
Is that 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 papier-mâché mountain that was built in the center of Paris. And then at the Christmas party, 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? 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. And the last blood of the terror is shed.