William Tyler
Revolution: Change for France, Europe, and the World

William Tyler - Revolution: Change for France, Europe, and the World

- Thank you very much indeed, and welcome to everyone, wherever you are. I understand on the east coast of the States you’ve had snow. We’ve just had a lot of rain down here in the south of England and it’s mucky, and I’m only too pleased not to be out there with the lights on here to be able to talk about something which I think is absolutely fascinating. So let me begin then and let me begin by saying it’s a cloudy and rather rainy day in Paris on a Tuesday, on a Tuesday in July. To be precise, the 14th of July, 1789. On this day, a riot in Paris led to the fall of the Bastille prison, which historians take as launching one of the great pivotal moments in world history, the French Revolution, 14th of July, 1789. This event in ‘89 happened a quarter of a century or so into the reign of King Louis XVI. He didn’t even mark it, we noted last week, in his personal diary. He simply recorded under the date of Tuesday, the 14th of July, 1789, one word, rien, nothing, nothing. Well, it certainly wasn’t nothing. It was the beginning of a revolution that was to reverberate through France, through Europe, and indeed through the world. Mao Zedong was once asked, when did the French Revolution end? And his answer was, “It’s rather too early to say.” And, in a sense, that might be true. In a big sweep of history, we’re still living in the era of nation states, a post-French Revolutionary world. This great tsunami of revolution had not just happened overnight, it had been building in France for decades, and we saw that last week when we looked at the long-term causes and issues which were to lead to the French Revolution.

In that way, really Louis XVI and his government should not have been as unprepared and even one might say blind to the tsunami that was building and which from the 14th of July swept across the whole of France. If Louis XVI wasn’t aware of what was happening in his own country, the British ambassador in Paris at the time, Lord Dorset, was absolutely clear because he wrote in his memorandum, which he sent back to his masters in the Foreign Office in London, the following comment about the 14th of July. He wrote, “The governor of the Bastille agreed to let in a certain number of the mob,” this is as they were attacking the Bastille, “on condition that they should not commit any violence. These terms being agreed, a detachment of about 40 in number advanced and were admitted to the Bastille prison, but the drawbridge was immediately drawn up again and the whole party massacred.” Very much can you see the French Revolution as more of a class revolution than, of course, the American Revolution and, indeed, the British Revolution of the 1640s. Lord Dorset went on to say to London, “This breach of honour, aggravated by so glaring an act of inhumanity, excited a spirit of revenge and turmoil such as might naturally be expected. The two pieces of canon were immediately placed against the gate and very soon made a breach,” those are the canons seized earlier in the day by the mob. He ends his dispatch to London in this way, “Upon searching the Bastille, not more than four or five prisoners were found of whom none had been there any length of time except an Englishman who calls himself Major White and who’d been confined in a dungeon upwards of 30 years. The unhappy man seemed to have nearly lost the use of his intellect and could express himself, but very ill. His beard was at least a yard long.

My Lord,” writes Dorset to London, “My Lord, the greatest Revolution that we know anything of has been effected. Comparatively speaking, if the magnitude of the event is considered, the loss of very few lives from this moment we may consider France as a free country, the king a very limited monarch, and the nobility has reduced to a level with the rest of the nation.” Dorset saw it for what it was, not a small event where only four or five people were released from the Bastille prison the only ones there. Instead, he saw it as the greatest revolution that we know anything of has been effected, has been effected. He rather thought that that one event he’s telling London is the Revolution. Now there will be further changes, but the Revolution is over. Well, as Mao Zedong said, as I mentioned just now, he wondered whether the Revolution was over in the 20th century, let alone on the 14th of July, 1789. This revolution is going to run and run in all sorts of waves across France, across Europe, and indeed across the world. The overriding problem that had not been solved in the France of the late 18th century was financial. We talked about finances being a big issue last week, and I think really financial is the major problem, for two reasons. It led to poverty and hunger amongst the lower classes whom represented, as we know, the vast majority of French people. It also financial, because those at the top of society lived a life that well, I’m not sure could even be dreamed of by those at the bottom. And certainly we know that when they sacked the Palace at Versailles, they really were staggered by what they saw. Finance is the base, money is the base.

There was President Clinton who said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Well, in terms of the French Revolution, “It’s the finances, stupid,” which lie at the bottom of it. Simon Sebag Montefiore, in his new book “The World,” says this, if I may read it to you, he says this, “In Paris, bad harvest threatened famine. A crowd shouting, 'Bread, bread,’ was the one that stormed the Bastille on the 14th of July, and the Bastille itself was a symbol of royal injustice. But now,” after the 14th of July says Montefiore, “and now of a symbol of royal impotence, seized weapons, decapitated royal officials and terrorised the countryside. Louis’s only hope was to assume leadership of a liberal revolution himself. As troops guarded Versailles where the King lived, the King’s brothers and many aristocrats fled into exile.” Most of them came here to England. It’s always interesting how many revolutionaries or defeated monarchs, et cetera, always land up here in England. I should write a book about that, and no one’s ever written one. It’s a very interesting thought. “The troops who guarded Versailles, the King’s brothers, and many aristocrats fled into exile. But Louis dithered. He said, ‘Do I stay or do I go? I’m ready for neither.’” Well, this isn’t a man who’s old, he’s in his early thirties. And he’s acting as though he’s in his early eighties or nineties. And apologies to those listening, we’re talking about the 18th century here, not the 21st where I know you’ve all got your marbles and we’re going to have an 80-year-old standing, or maybe standing, as president of the United States. But in the 18th century really to say that in your early thirties he was a ditherer, and that’s the last sort of person you want when you’re facing a crisis of revolution.

Now the problem with revolutions are that once started, they’re difficult to stop. And the problem is if you want to stop it as a liberal revolution, that’s very difficult indeed. If you think of the Russian revolutions in 1917, the first was a democratic revolution, Kerensky’s government, and they couldn’t hold it. They couldn’t hold it together, and it was the Bolshevik extremist government of Lenin that comes to power by the end of 1917. And so it was in France, the French Revolution is really a study in the way that revolutions play out. If we’re ever involved in a revolution, wherever you live, don’t expect to appear on television representing a liberal point of view and saying, “No, no, no, this is fine, it’s absolutely fine, but we’re not going any further.” You’re not likely maybe survive in terms of your own life, let alone your political stance. And Louis isn’t the sort of person who wanted to compromise. He’s forced into compromise. Now if you’re forced into compromise, you don’t really believe it, everyone can see you’ve been forced into it and the revolution carries on. And that was the position in France. Well, maybe the only course of action was to attempt to halt the Revolution at the fall of the Bastille and introduce a liberal reforms under a constitutional monarchy. Now they had a model for that over the channel here in England. Now there was an attempt, one has to say, in May, two months before the Bastille, an attempt in May, 1789, to do precisely that. Louis called, on the advice of those advising him, Louis called a meeting of the Estates General. It hadn’t met since 1614. And in May, 1789, he calls it showing how desperate he was.

Now the Estates General is the nearest that France had to the British Parliament, or the American Congress, or the Australian or Canadian Parliaments. It’s the nearest, but it isn’t identical, and it’s not identical because of the way it was constructed. That is to say unlike the British Parliament with two houses or the American Congress with two houses, it had three houses as we saw last week. The First Estate of the Clergy, the Second Estate of the Nobility, and the Third Estate of Citizens, basically middle class because there was a property qualification to vote and a property qualification to sit. And the problem was it was a decision come to by all three estates. They met separately, but it was done on how many estates voted for a policy. So although the Third Estate was the largest in terms of members, and the First and Second Estates were lower in numbers, even when combined, it wasn’t a vote like that. It was two estates against one. Well, we know or we knew in the past what that meant when the House of Lords disagreed with the House of Commons. Today that can’t happen. It can disagree, but in the end it’s overrun. So the better example is America with the Senate and with the House of Representatives. And we know what a tizz you can get into politically with those two houses, imagine three, and imagine that the third had the highest membership, but also represented the vast bulk of the people, but could be outvoted by the other two. Well, it wasn’t going to happen. But Louis called it, and in his letter calling it together, he said this, “We have need of a concourse of our faithful subjects to assist us to surmount all the difficulties we find relative to the state of our finances.

These great motives have resolved us to convoke the Estates General of all the provinces under our authority,” and they met. And on the issue of how anything would be voted on, the Third Estate said, “No, we’re not having that. We’re going to change the procedure.” On the 17th of June, 1789, the King’s representatives had failed to get the three estates to agree on a method of going forward. So the Third Estate declared, “We’re not the Third Estate anymore, we are the National Assembly of the people and we shall meet separately. But the other two estates, the clergy and nobility, may join us in this new institution, the National Assembly.” “But if they don’t join,” the Third Estate said, “Well, the National Assembly will meet anyway,” so this is throwing the gauntlet down with a vengeance in June of ‘89, a month before the Bastille. The King attempted to resist this unilateral reorganisation of the procedures of the Estates General. On the 20th of June, the King with armed men with him, soldiers, ordered the hall where the National Assembly was meeting at Versailles to disperse. Instead, they went to a nearby tennis court and held the meeting there. And in that meeting they took the so-called Tennis Court Oath, which meant, “We agree not to disband until we have settled the Constitution of France.” Now that’s revolutionary also with a vengeance. Two days later, they were thrown out of the tennis courts and they moved to a church of Saint-Louis.

And there the majority of the clergy joined them. They had broken, the Third Estate had broken a mediaeval system which was unfit for purpose in the France of the late 18th century, and the King hadn’t foreseen that it wouldn’t work and now had a major problem on his hands. The following month in July with the fall of the Bastille and he still says, “Rien,” nothing. Well, it’s more than nothing. It’s interesting, isn’t it? That the French, and indeed, Europe as whole, and the Western world, regard the events of the 14th of July, 1789, at the Bastille as the key event at the start of the French Revolution. Whereas, for me, the key event at the start of the Revolution is the decision by the Third Estate to establish a National Assembly, what we would call a parliament or a congress of one house, so that’s a New Zealand model, which only has one house, and to look at the constitution. In other words, in the 18th century, in the Age of Enlightenment, many countries talked about a constitution, even Russia. Now they wanted a constitution and that would require, although Britain doesn’t have a constitution, it has a constitutional parliamentary monarchy, so they want a parliamentary constitutional monarchy. They used the term constitutional parliamentary. They were not thinking in terms of the American Revolution at this stage of a republic. It’s the same as Cromwell originally wanted with Charles I in England, a constitutional monarchy with the king answerable to Parliament, and in France they wanted Louis XVI answerable to the National Assembly.

But because of the nature of the War of Independence in America, the idea of a monarchy was dead in the water and so they go immediately to a republic. But it is important, very, very important to say that the American middle class never lost control of their revolution, and it really wasn’t threatened by extremism as the French was. It may relate to the fact that the vast majority of people in France were still treated like feudal serfs, whereas in America, the idea that every man and woman was free meant that they didn’t resist the organisation established for the new country of the United States by the educated middle class. May I say as a lawyer, slightly in jest, but in parenthesis, if you’re going to have a revolution, don’t allow hotheads, don’t allow the army to interfere. Let the lawyers sort it out, because then you can get an answer. Now they did, of course, have lots of lawyers represented in the National Assembly in the old Third Estate, but things were difficult. Well, we’ll see how it plays out. You make your own minds up. Stephen Clarke says this, from this moment on, that is to say the establishment of the National Assembly and the fall of the Bastille, Clarke writes this, “Instead of trying to placate the commoners and bring them back into the fold, Louis XVI simply locked them out of the proceedings. With one turn of the key he’d sealed his own fate, almost 150 members of the clergy and two aristocrats joined the National Assembly,” that’s when he locks the door of the tennis courts, “and suddenly the absolute monarchy was finished, an alternative government was in place, and a precedent had been set.

You could say merde to the King and get away with it.” The King’s power was broken when the National Assembly was called. Louis XVI is never, when all things are an equal playing field, to agree to a constitutional monarchy. He’d lost the opportunity, I believe, not after the Bastille, but after the Estates General had been nullified by the Third Estate and turned into a National Assembly. The National Assembly began to seek a definition of the “Rights of Man,” Thomas Paine’s book heading, as a basis for a new constitution. And those of you who are listening from the States will recognise the wording of some of this. It reads like this, this is the opening, I’m certainly not going to read the whole thing… One of the differences between Britain and America, and France and Europe is if we have constitutional documents, and remember Britain does have some, but the American’s it’s pithy and short, because the American’s was written by English lawyers who happened then to be American lawyers. But the French go on and on and on. But I’ll just read the beginning, “All men have an invincible inclination for the pursuit of happiness. It is in order to attain it by unity of effort that they form societies and establish governments. Every government must therefore have public happiness as its goal.” No common lawyer, American or British, would ever write such a flowery introduction. “In consequence of this indisputable truth, the government exists for the benefit of those who are governed and not of those who govern. No public functions may be regarded as the property of those who exercise it. Nature has made all men free and equal,” men notice. “Social distinctions must therefore be founded on common necessity. To be happy, man must be entirely free to exercise all his physical and moral faculties. The duty of each individual consists in respecting the right of others.” Written as the “Rights of Man.”

But in September, 1791, the “Rights of Women” is published not by the government, but by a single woman. She lands up guillotined. French women don’t get to vote finally, until 1944, when De Gaulle goes back to a France still fighting Nazi Germany. There’s violence in this revolution. There’s violence in October, 1789, the 5th and 6th of October when the so-called March of Women goes to Versailles, they even entered the Queen’s bedroom and she had to fly to her husband’s which was better guarded. They broke into the Palace at Versailles. Many of you have been to Versailles. Can you imagine if you were there in the 18th century, all your posh clothes, whether male or female, gripping your jewellery, whether male or female. And these women from the streets of Paris arrive dirty, probably quite alive with things. The King was forced to back down. He agreed to the declaration of the “Rights of Man,” the beginning of which I’ve just read. He agreed to the final abolition of feudalism. And he agreed to move back to Paris, the very thing that Louis XIV and XV had ever refused to do. Paris was dirty, smelly, and the mob was there. And, interestingly, that is a issue which remains in France in the 21st century. When there’s trouble in Paris, the suburbs where the working class live, come into the centre where the well-to-do live. Whereas in Britain, the well-to-do live in suburbs and the poor live in the middle of cities.

And that is an important observation to make when you hear about riots in French cities, and that’s why it’s such a threat to law and order, because they are capable of barricading the well-to-do in the centre of cities and killing them. The King duly did return to Paris. He couldn’t do anything other than that. And let me read you an account of his return to Paris. This is Jones’s book, which is on my blog, “The French Revolution: Voices from an Epoch.” This is in lots of firsthand accounts, and this is a firsthand account here by a French noble. “They,” the mob, “sang vulgar songs.” Oh yes, they sang vulgar. The vulgar, the people. “They sang vulgar songs, which apparently showed little respect for the Queen. Then with one hand pointing to the flour.” They were bringing flour in waggons into Paris for bread to feed the Parisians, and the King had unlocked warehouses from outside, so the waggons full of flour is coming in, as well as the Royal Family. They thought that might save them. “They sang vulgar songs, which apparently showed little respect for the Queen. Then with one hand pointing to the flour and the other to the Royal Family, they shouted, 'Friends, we will not lack for bread in the future. We are bringing you the baker and his wife, and the baker’s boy!’” Their son, Louis, later to be called Louis XVII. I mean, the Bourbons have lost it, haven’t they by this point? One of my favourite quotations from Dickens comes from the start of “The Scarlet Pimpernel.”

And I think it’s probably one of the best paragraphs he ever wrote. Talking of the French Revolution, Charles Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity. It was the season of light, it was the season of darkness. It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” No one has encapsulated the French Revolutionary years, I don’t think more brilliantly than Dickens. It was a violent revolution. Horrible amounts of people killed, massacred, blood everywhere. But the ideas were the ideas of the enlightenment, so the ideas were enlightened. Robespierre had granted freedom of worship to Protestants and to Jews. They did all sorts of positive things as they waded through the blood. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” In Britain, Edmund Burke is horrified now by the reality of the French Revolution. And he writes this, “Treasons, robberies, rapes, assassinations, slaughters, and burnings throughout the harassed land of France.” And, of course, in Britain, the establishment looked in horror. And then, looked at their own servants and their own working class and inevitably asked themselves the question, “Could it happen here?” Well, as we know, it did not happen here, and there are many reasons for that, but they were horrified by what they saw in France. Moreover, in the National Assembly, there were various parties of revolutionaries, some on the right, some on the left, some on the center-left, center-right, middle, you name it, they had everything. And as Clarke says in this short piece, “The name of the National Assembly kept changing itself. The Constituent Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, the Convention, the Directois, were some of its new identities over the next five years of the Revolution. And each change brought not just sackings, but wholesale executions as different factions the Girondins, the Montagnards, and the Jacobins took power. It was Voltaire who said, ‘In a government, you need both shepherds and butchers.

The problem in France was that the butchers kept killing the shepherds while the sheep turned cannibal.’” If you were doing a postgraduate degree, that’s your essay for the next week I think. “The problem in France was that the butchers kept killing the shepherds while the sheep turned cannibal.” Discuss. Now that’s not an Englishman. That’s Voltaire, a Frenchman. This was a terrible time to live through in France, a truly dreadful time. It’s not as though there were just two sides as in the English Civil War, nor is the American War of Independence, it’s clear you are A or B. But here you’re A, B, C, D, and you’re not sure which one at the moment is in power that you need to support if you wanted to keep your head linked to your body. The end result of all of this was societal and political meltdown in the so-called Reign of Terror, which lasted in France from 1793 to 1794. The English became more and more horrified. At the beginning, many English middle-class intellectuals supported the French Revolution. This is the idea of the Age of Enlightenment. Some had even supported the American Revolution some 20 years before, but that was slightly different because they were the same people, they were English, they were British. But this is another country. And they thought, “And this is Europe, and you can see it on a clear day from the cliffs of Dover.” And some of them thought, “This is absolutely right. We want some of this here.” They weren’t asking here for an overthrow of the monarchy or Parliament, they just wanted a more enlightened form of rule.

And then, they saw what that meant in France and they were horrified. This is one example from “The Times” newspaper, and it was a report based upon an attack on a member of the French aristocracy called the Princesse de Lamballe. “And the Princesse de Lamballe, the most famous,” says Clarke, “of the victims was Marie Antoinette’s First Lady of the Bed Chamber, Marie Louise, Princesse de Lamballe, who was suspected of having a lesbian affair with the Queen.” Oh, that’s the gossip of the court. That’s what Versailles was like. You only had to be seen to be talking to another woman and you were guilty of adultery. You only had to be a woman talking to a woman and you were lesbian. A man talking to a younger man, and you were gay. The court existed on rumour. “The Princess was taken out of La Force prison in the district of Paris and told to swear an oath of disobedience to the Royal Family. When she refused, she was hacked to death and her head was paraded under Marie Antoinette’s window, at the nearby temple prison where Marie Antoinette had been held, by a crowd calling to the Queen to come out and kiss her lover,” “The Times” reported. So I’m a elderly English gentleman and I’ve got my copy of “The Times” ironed for me, of course, by my butler, and I’m reading it over the breakfast table and I turn to my wife and I say, “Dear, I don’t know if you know what’s going on in Paris.” And she would say, “Oh no, dear, do read it to me.” And I read, and this is a direct quotation from “The Times,” “Her thighs were cut across and her bowels and heart torn from her, and for two days her mangled body was dragged through the streets.” Oh dear, that has quite put me off my boiled egg. The English couldn’t believe what the French were doing, but I don’t think the French could really believe what they were doing. The barbarousness continued to horrify the French, and the barbarousness continued to horrify the British and give them a sense of superiority.

As Mrs. Thatcher said to President Mitterrand on the bicentennial of the French Revolution, she said to him, “Liberty, equality, and egalite, we had that before you.” And in some ways she was right, we had had some of that before. But at the time, the English middle class, educated middle class, many of whom wanted to believe in the Revolution, lost complete trust in the Revolution. This was not what they wanted to see. Louis had lost control of the Revolution. The guillotine was to play a major role in the horror of these years. Cecil Jenkins writes this, “The Terror,” as it’s called, “in fact, came out of terror, the fear of defeat and the fear of hunger. It led to the effective transfer of power in April, 1793, to a so-called Committee of Public Safety.” Well, you know in extreme regimes, if something’s called public safety, it will mean the exact opposite, and it did in France. “Increasingly dominated by Robespierre, who brought in harsh emergency measures against food profiteers in particular. As the situation worsened dramatically that autumn, the Committee of Public Safety’s attitude hardened correspondingly into a ruthless do or die approach. In October, not only did it send the opposition leaders to the guillotine, but it began to look at prosecuting the Royal Family.” The Royal Family’s final mistake on the 4th of September, 1791, was to plan an escape by coach at night to the Austrian border.

Marie Antoinette, the Queen, of course, was Austrian, so they were heading for the Austrian border, but they were caught at a place called Varennes, and it’s known as the Flight to Varennes. And they were caught because Louis wanted to stop to have something to eat, really. This is what “The Rough Guide to French History” says of this event. “The King who had been under close watch in the Tuileries in Paris,” his Parisian palace, he’s not allowed back to Versailles, “tried to escape with the Royal Family into Austrian territory, but was arrested at Varennes and ignominiously brought back to Paris on the 24th of June, 1791. The order goes out, ‘Whoever cheers the King will be beaten. Whoever insults him will be hanged.’” So the government is still wavering. This is very much like the situation in the 1640s in England. “What do we do with this king”? France had always had a king, you can’t imagine France without a king. So they’re debating. You can’t shout an insult to the King, you will be punished. You can’t shout, “Vive le roi,” you’ll be punished. They don’t know where to go. They are like Cromwell seeking the monarch to move to them, rather than them to move to the monarch. By this date in 1791, a constitution has finally been agreed for France, the first Constitution, and that constitution briefly is a constitutional monarchy. So there’s a constitutional monarchy in place by the beginning of 1792. But things began to turn worse for the Bourbons. On the 20th of June, 1792, so-called Day of Revolution, the sans-culottes, the working class of Paris, so-called because they wore short culottes, sorry, without culottes.

The culottes were the britches worn by the nobility and they weren’t allowed to wear britches, so they’re without britches, the sans-culottes. They invaded the King’s palace in Paris, the Tuileries, and forced Louis to wear the Red Cap of Liberty. Those of you who have been following the advent of the next Olympic games will see that the Red Cap of Liberty has been chosen by the French as the mascot for, very strange, it’s a very strange thing, you’ve got a walking hat as a mascot for the next Olympics. Believe that, I’m not going there. So Louis is a prisoner in Paris. People can almost do what they like. But before anything happens, France is invaded by Prussia, the largest Germanic state. And it leads in August, 1792, to complete collapse of law and order in Paris between the second and the sixth of September ‘92, the so-called September Massacres take place. The authorities have lost complete control and the populous murder, it’s estimated 1,200 royals brutally murdered. We’re not talking about trial and execution, we’re talking about being butchered in the streets, being butchered in their own homes. And that sense of massacre, if you like, spreads right across France. This is a moment at which France could fall, and this also marks a very important moment in wider European history. This is the moment when the German Prussia becomes Germany, and in the unification of 1870, this is the moment at which Franco-German rivalry on battlefields begins in the modern world and doesn’t end until 1945, and it begins with this invasion.

But finally on the 20th of September, 1792, the French, arming citizens from Paris, go out to meet the Prussians and remarkably beat them at the Battle of Valmy, V-A-L-M-Y. That is a most important event. The Prussians are not happy to have been beaten by the French, and that is going to be a repetition of events, French victories, German victories, until the final defeat of Germany, of Hitler’s Germany in 1945. We will come across this time and again in the future. But please remember, this Battle of Valmy was such an important victory. It saved Paris. It saved France from Prussian occupation, maybe Prussian annexation. It saved France. And it was the people that saved France, not the King. This is what “The Rough Guide” writes on this point, he writes, “A little more than an artillery skirmish, the Valmy battle is of great psychological importance for the French. Goethe witnessed the battle and wrote, 'At this place, on this day, there has begun a new era in the history of the world and you can all claim to have been present at its birth.’” Sometimes it’s small events that take on a greater significance. The fall of the Bastille in ‘89 and the victory at Valmy in '92. The day after news comes back to Paris, “You’re saved, we’ve won, the Prussians are in full retreat,” the National Assembly meet and decide to abolish the monarchy. That’s the moment that the monarchy is abolished. On the 20th of November, the Revolutionaries find a strong box in the palace at the Tuileries, and in it there’s correspondence which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Louis has contempt for the Constitution of France and for the Revolution. That gives them their opportunity. And on the 11th of December, 1792, Louis is put on trial. Louis is found guilty.

And on the 21st of January, 1793, he is guillotined. There’s a description of his guillotining here if I may. This isn’t a book which isn’t on my list. I’m going to do more lists next week, I hope, on books on French history going forward in time, as well as some that I’ve missed out. “Leaning on his servant’s arm, Louis walked to the scaffold. On the top step, he let go of the arm and walked alone firmly across the platform. Silencing by his look alone, the 15 drummers placed opposite him, he addressed the crowd in a very loud voice,” quote, this is Louis on the scaffold, “'I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge. I pardon those who’ve occasioned my death. And I pray to God that the blood you are now going to shed may never be visited on France and you unfortunate people.’ He was going on further, but his words were drowned as an officer on horseback ordered the drums to beat. The time was 20 minutes past 10 in the morning. The executioner and his aide seized Louis and tied him to the upright plank. The plank was tipped over.” I mean that’s appalling, just imagine being on a plank, and then tipped over backwards towards the blade. “The plank was tipped over and he felt a heavy wooden collar go round his neck. The executioner pulled the cord and the blade fell. Because Louis’ neck was so fat,” overeating, overindulgency, he’s only 35, “because Louis’ neck was so fat, instead of slicing through, the blade penetrated comparatively slowly and the crowd heard the King scream.”

This is more barbaric than the execution of England’s king 150 years or so previously. Louis is finally followed nine months later by his wife on the 16th of October, 1793. She is 34 years of age, and her death is also recorded. “Marie Antoinette had to be helped out of the cart, the tumbrel, and in her pretty plumb shoes slowly climbed the ladder to the scaffold. Saints had been abolished and the word was reserved now for the thing that towered over the thin figure in white, St. Guillotine, and the Widow Capet,” the name of the previous Royal Family, they called them Madame and Monsieur Capet, or Capet. “And exposed there on the platform, Marie Antoinette was overcome by exhaustion and began to tremble in all her limbs. The executioner seized her and tied her to the plank. Four minutes later, she was dead.” Four whole minutes later, she was dead. What shall I say? You can have little support for the King and Queen. They were silly people in many ways. They could have done more and didn’t do more. As for Marie Antoinette’s story, it’s told by Sebag Montefiore in this way, which I think is a rather interesting way of putting it, “Early in the reign of her father-in-law, Louis XV, Marie Antoinette boasted that she had a minister’s act. She told a close friend, ‘I asked the King to send him away,’ but she mocked Louis as, ‘The poor man.’” This outraged her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna. Who wrote to her, “Where is the good and generous heart of Arch Duchess Antoinette? I see only intrigue, vulgar spite, delight in mockery, and persecution.

All the winter long, I’ve trembled at the thought of your too-easy success and the flatterers surrounding you while you have thrown yourself into a life of pleasure and preposterous display!” Well, that’s Versailles, preposterous display. Maria Theresa went on, “Your luck can all too easily change. One day you will recognise the truth of this, and then it will be too late. I hope I shall not live until misfortune overtakes you.” Well, that’s Maria Theresa in Vienna, who realised, who realised long before she even became Queen, when she was still the dope man’s wife in Louis XV’s reign, that if she went on behaving like that, then disaster would come. As disaster came, as she quite literally lost her head. Maximilien Robespierre who led the Terror, was born in 1758, and he was a provincial lawyer in the town of Arras in northern France. In 1789, at the beginning of the Revolution, he’d been elected to the Third Estate of the Estates General by Arras. And because he was elected to the Third Estate, he became a member of the National Assembly. And in April, 1790, he became president of the National Assembly. He was, I think you could describe, as a radical Democrat. For example, he proposed that priests should be allowed to marry. He supported the freedom of slaves in the French West Indies. He wanted to do things properly. After Louis had fled to Varennes and was brought back to Paris, Robespierre wanted to put him on trial for treason, exactly what happened to Charles I in England. Robespierre eventually emerges as the leader and the architect of the Terror and effectively the leader of France. But the higher you fall, the higher you climb rather, the quicker you fall. And he was accused of being authoritarian, dictatorial, like an absolutist monarch, and it doesn’t last.

And I’ll just read you a short bit here from “The Rough Guide,” because it does it nice and quickly for me. “Robespierre pursued a path that seemed to many to be leading towards tyranny rather than liberty. Inexorably the Revolution’s tendency to devour the children caught up with it.” And he, himself, was executed in the Terror, which he had established. Blood everywhere in France of the French Revolution. When he was guillotined, the day before, he tried to shoot himself and only managed to shoot his jaw. He, himself, was terrified of the guillotine. So I come to an end today and we’ll finish next time, but there’s one more thing I want to say. Out of all this chaos and bloodshed was to emerge a great figure to restore stability in France and what the French call La Gloire, translated not very meaningfully as glory in English. It’s much more deeply felt by the French than that. This man was born 20 years before the Revolution began. He was born on the island of Corsica, which had only just changed from being Italian to being French, and his family were really more Italian than they were French. His military career was furthered by the Revolution, for one of the key parts of this revolution was the destruction of class. And when he led the French army on a campaign in Italy, he became the youngest general in the French army. He later rose to become First Consul under the Consulate in France, one of the many systems of government they established.

And, finally, to crown himself emperor. And Clarke writes this, he writes, “Democracy had come to certain aspects of French life, notably the military,” he says. “If it hadn’t been for the Revolution, a Corsican with an incomprehensible regional accent and bad grammar would never have risen through the ranks of the French army by merit alone. An aristocratic general would’ve made sure that the young, upstart Bonaparte was kept in his place ordering horse feed perhaps or going on a suicidal charge against the enemy.” Napoleon Bonaparte, he brings stability, modernity, and order to France. But, in the end, the search for La Gloire brings him to his knees. First at the Battle of Nations, the Battle of Leipzig in 1813 when he’s exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba. And then, secondly, in 1815 when he left Elba, escaped, and for 100 days became again the bogeyman of Europe until finally defeated by an Anglo-Prussian force at the Battle of Waterloo. And if you thought the Revolution was over then, think again. We get two Bourbon, pretty well absolutist kings, then a Bourbon, a member of a related part of the Bourbon family who becomes a constitutional king. Then we get a Second Republic, and the president of the Republic declares himself the second emperor, Napoleon’s nephew, Napoleon III. And then, we get the Third Republic, and the story goes on and on. As Mao Zedong said, “It’s too early to say if the French Revolution is over.” But we’ll continue the story, everyone, same time next week. Thanks for listening tonight. I’m sure lots of questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Oh, thank you, Ava, that’s nice.

No, Dennis, it was Mao Zedong.

Q: “Did the American Revolution have any impact on the French Revolution? Its cause is 13 years later.”

A: Yes, I think I mentioned that last time, not less because of Lafayette, who might well have become, if events had turned out differently, a liberal democratic leader of France, but it didn’t. Certainly, as you could see when I read out the passage from the “Rights of Man” that they leaned heavily on the American model. But it’s not a direct parallel, because Anglo-American history, and Anglo-American law, and Anglo-American views are distinctly different from those of continental Europe and of France.

Q: Anthony, “The French Revolution was a high jump, not a long jump. The French people ended up not far from where they started. Do you agree?”

A: Not entirely, it depends on the timescale. That’s the problem. When did it end? It depends on the timescale.

“The Catholic Church must have loved the idea that all people have a right to be happy. That was the purpose of life.” Well, I don’t think the Catholic Church was particularly happy, because it lost its property.

“And we shall come to the agreement between Napoleon and the Pope.” No, the Catholic Church is now going to be disestablished. The Catholic Church has lost its power, post-Revolution.

“Tale of Two Cities,” I said “Scarlet Pimpernel.” Now why the heck did I say that? I’m so sorry. “Tale of Two Cities,” of course, it is. What do we say now? I misspoke. I’m sorry, how stupid. No, everyone, yes, everyone but me didn’t get it wrong. I don’t know why I said that. I haven’t read any of Hilary Mantel. I’m afraid I can’t get on with her. I’m sorry, if that’s heresy to some of you, then we all have different views.

Betty says, “I’m not sure,” I’ll read what you typed, “I’m not sure you meant another word, like me meaning another book.”

“The out of education in North America is that Dickens has been dropped from the reading requirements in English. When I read ‘The Tale of Two Cities’ I would hit on Dickens for life. I think you learn more from Dickens.” No, I’m sorry, I can’t agree. Lucy, Dickens is a big turnoff for children today. It’s not relevant to their world. Hopefully, like all of us, we will come to great literature when we’re older and we can understand it. But teaching Victorian literature in Britain or in the States is, I would say as an educator, no longer appropriate. That doesn’t mean I would agree with everything Britain says should be taught in literature or that I would agree with everything that’s being taught in American literature. All I’m saying is that I don’t think Dickens, or Victorian literature in general, is appropriate. I’m glad you’re all disagreeing as well. It’s not only me that comes in for criticism.

Well, I’m so sorry, that was a stupid thing to say. Yes, “Citizens” by Simon Schama, Jonathan, is on my book list that I put up. Earlier this week, I put up a book list around the French Revolution.

Q: “Please explain what a monarch is, and are all monarchies alike?”

A: No, certainly not all monarchies are alike. But a monarch, oh dear, is a hereditary ruler. That’s the easiest way of putting it. Sometimes they’re an elected ruler, as in the past in Poland. But normally it’s an hereditary ruler. And you can have absolute monarchies, like Louis XVI, or parliamentary constitutional monarchies, like that of George III at the time. All the European monarchies today are constitutional monarchies with the exception of the papacy.

Mike says, “You would love the OverSimplified version of the French Revolution. You can find it on YouTube.” Yeah, you’re absolutely right, I love simple things.

Q: “Why did they decide to abolish it the day after they got the news of Valmy”?

A: Because Valmy gave them confidence that they could do the job without a king basically. They didn’t need a king. Yes, the peasantry in the countryside did participate in the events, but largely led by the middle classes. The story of the Revolution in the countryside is inevitably with France, depends upon which region of France you’re talking about, and I’m sorry, I don’t have time to do that. But basically you’re correct.

Nikki says, “As an aside, I was once told that the basis of the National Gallery collection here formed from the French aristocracy who fled here with their art.” Don’t ask me about art, I’m ignorant. And you may well be right, I don’t know.

Who was that? That’s nice of you, Alan, thank you.

Q: “Why was the French Revolution so violent and bloody compared to other revolutions”?

A: There have been other revolutions very bloody. I’m thinking in terms of Europe. The Spanish Civil War was pretty bloody. I’m not sure, but I’d have to think a long time. I’m not sure it was so bloody, plenty of people were killed during the American Revolution. No, probably not so many. But there may be more, less civilians. Russia, and that’s difficult. That’s difficult because it depends where you draw the parameters of the Revolution. Plenty of people died under Stalin.

Thank you, Rita, that is my blog, but I’m not professor. We don’t use those terms in England. I’m Mr., I’m proud to be Mr., thank you. Like Churchill, who held out a long time against getting a knighthood.

Q: “Could I say again,” says Norman, “the difference between where poor and rich lived in towns and country in France and England? I got a bit confused.”

A: I’m sorry you got confused. It’s not your fault, it’s mine, let me try again. If we take today as well as in the past, in France, the rich never moved out of the centre of cities. They stayed there, so the poor were pushed out to the ever-growing suburbs. The banlieue, in Paris. In England, the rich moved out into suburbs and countryside for better air, more gardens, and the poor remained in the centre. In Tudor England, the rich and poor lived together in the middle of London. The rich moved westwards out of the way of the dirt, because the wind blows from west to east. They move westwards, or northwards, or even southwards away from the filth of London, the poor remained. In Paris, it is different. In France, it’s different. It’s a strange thing. If you take a English city like Liverpool, people moved out of Liverpool to the rural in Cheshire where the footballers today live. In Manchester, they moved to the Lake District and travelled by train into Manchester for business. But that is not the same in France.

Q: Oh, Francine, that’s a very interesting question. “Just wondering if the quest of happiness was a wise one”?

A: Woo. Well, Freud talks of a pleasure principle, doesn’t he? Perhaps pleasure and happiness are not the same.

Oh, I can’t answer that, come on. I’m not Homer, I can’t answer that in five minutes. It’s a very, very good question.

Q: “What did the Americans think of the Revolution at the time”?

A: Basically, as the English did. At the beginning, they’re terribly pro the Revolution, think about people like Benjamin Franklin. But then they’re horrified in the same way that the British were horrified when the stories come out.

Q: “Why do I feel Dickens isn’t relevant”?

A: Because it isn’t relevant to children. They have no concept of the language that’s being used, they have no concept of the Victorian age. I just think it’s not appropriate. And I certainly wouldn’t use that in any school in Britain or the States. It’s even odder that it’s used in the States if you think about it. Although, he made his money in the States by all his lecturing. Maybe I should come to the States and make some money, I could lecture.

Q: “What happened to the middle class during the Revolution”?

A: They basically led it. But you’d say merchant class, now that’s slightly different. The merchant class are hoping always for stability, because that’s the way you make money. You can’t make money in the middle of a revolution. It’s the professional middle classes that lead it. And it’s the lawyers and accountants as ever, who I don’t know about, I haven’t got it off the top of my head how many lawyers and accountants, and such like professionals, sit in the House of Representatives. But they’re overrepresented in the House of Commons and always have been.

And well, I’m glad you all enjoyed it. I’m so embarrassed by saying the wrong book. I can’t believe how stupid I am. “My wife always says, ‘It’s very good to be taken down a peg or two.’ Well, she manages it more frequently than you.” I can’t grumble.

I think I’ve come to the end of the questions and I’ve enjoyed it, I hope you have. And next week, I have to say, I’m a fan of Napoleon. I’m a fan of Napoleon. Now for those of you interested in football, Americans, it’s soccer, in 45 minutes time, the USA play Wales and I shall be glued to it. So I’ve got to have my supper before, that’s seven o'clock British time, I’ve got to have my supper before the match begins.

So I’ll say goodnight for now.