Episode 59 – The Fall of the House of Bourbon

Hello, and welcome to Relevant History. I’m Dan Toler. This is the third episode in a planned six-episode arc covering the French Revolution. If you want to get the full story, I recommend starting with Episode 57 – Bastille Day. Also, a quick reminder that the Patreon channel is now only $1 a month for a limited time only. You get access to all 24 existing episodes of my video series, Dan’s War College, as well as access to the Relevant History Discord server. This is for a limited time only, though, and eventually I’m going to start charging $5 a month for new episodes, so get in while the offer is still good. Anyway, let’s get going!

Last episode, we left off with the Flight to Varennes, where King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette tried and failed to escape Revolutionary Paris and establish a base of power with loyal troops near the border with the Dutch Netherlands. Unfortunately for the royal family, they were spotted by a sharp-eyed postmaster and hauled back to Paris. If the radicals had their way, this would have been the end of Louis, but the Constituent Assembly still needed a King for their constitutional monarchy and didn’t want to risk a succession war, so they cooked up a half-baked story that Louis and the royal family were kidnapped by the royalist General Bouillé. This fiction was enough to satisfy most French people, if only because it was a face-saving fig leaf.

But not everybody is pleased with the Assembly’s lie. Many radicals see right through it, and begin calling for the complete overthrow of the monarchy. Up until this point, most of the French political debate has been about how much power the King should have in the new constitutional monarchy, with the left arguing for a largely ceremonial role. But following the Flight to Varennes, the Overton window shifts further to the left, and calls for small-“r” republican government enter the political mainstream. These calls intensify on July 15th 1791, when the Constituent Assembly officially announces the fictional story of Louis’ “kidnapping.”

        -To understand what happens next, I’ll need to introduce a couple of new characters to our drama. These men are active in Paris’ Cordeliers district, a working-class district home to thousands of sans culottes, the proletarian Parisians who don’t wear fancy silk knee breeches. The Cordeliers district has supplied many of the most radical revolutionaries, including a large number of those who stormed the Bastille. These working-class radicals get their marching orders from the bourgeoise members of the appropriately-named Cordeliers Club, the most radical of all Paris’ political clubs, which advocates for ideas like universal male suffrage and even direct democracy – meaning rule by popular referendum, rather than by representative government. We’ve already met one member of this club: Camille Desmoulins, the young lawyer who stood on a café table and helped instigate the mob that stormed the Bastille. Now I want to talk about two more members of the Cordeliers Club who will be even more important going forward.

        -The first of these is Jean-Paul Marat. You may remember him from last episode as the one-man writer and editor of the radical newspaper L'Ami du peuple, which had called for many protests including the Women’s March on Versailles. Marat is 48 years old in 1791, and had spent most of his life as a physician and scientist. He’d served in the royal court and published groundbreaking studies on electricity and slightly less groundbreaking studies on optics. He’d also proven that fire was not, in fact, an element but instead a different phase of matter that we now call plasma. In fact, he didn’t publish his first political writings until he was 37 years old, so he’s not the kind of guy you’d peg as a radical Revolutionary, and yet he is. In 1790, he’s one of the first to call for political violence against opponents of the Revolution, writing: “five or six hundred heads cut off would have assured your repose, freedom and happiness.” For the early part of the Revolution, 1789-1792, Marat is often forced into hiding in the Paris sewers, which aggravates an already-existing skin condition and causes his entire body to break out in rashes. When not in the sewer or in exile in London, he spends much of his time in his bathtub soothing these rashes. This is where he does most of his work, and he’s rarely seen in public.

        -The other major figure I want to introduce is Georges Danton, a 30-year-old attorney who is quite literally one of the giants of the Revolution. His height has been described as “colossal,” which is tough to put a number to since people were shorter back then, but it wouldn’t be surprising if he stands 6’2” tall, the same height as George Washington, who was said to dominate a room by his mere presence. Besides being tall, Danton is also known for his athletic build and deep, booming voice, which lends him a commanding presence whenever he speaks in public. This is fortunate for him, since by all accounts he’s incredibly ugly. As a young man, he’d not only been scarred by smallpox, but kicked in the face by a bull and trampled by pigs in separate incidents, leaving him badly disfigured. He was also known as a less-than-stellar student; he could recall lectures almost by memory, but couldn’t seem to retain anything he’d read, and many modern historians seem to think he was dyslexic. None of this stopped him from becoming a successful lawyer, in part by partnering up with Camille Desmoulins. If you’ll recall from Episode 57, I’d said that Desmoulins is known for his writing and Danton is known for his oratory, and the combination of the two makes them a formidable pair. In his book The French Revolution, French historian Hilaire Belloc writes of Danton:

        “His lucidity of thought permitted him to foresee the consequences of many a revolutionary decision, and at the same time inclined him to a strong sympathy with the democratic creed, with the doctrine of equality, and especially with the remoulding of the national institutions—particularly his own profession of the law—upon simple lines. He was undoubtedly a sincere and a convinced revolutionary, and one whose doctrine more permeated him than did that of many of his contemporaries their less solid minds. He was not on that account necessarily republican. Had some accident called his genius into play earlier in the development of the struggle, he might well, like Mirabeau, with whom he presents so curious a parallel, have thought it better for the country to save the Monarchy.”
        -There are other important members of the Cordeliers Club, like Pierre Gaspard Chaumette and Jacques Hebert, but I’m going to gloss over them for the time being because we’re already dealing with enough personalities and the stage of this drama is starting to get crowded.

        -That said, there’s one more person I want to introduce who is not a member of the Cordeliers Club, and that’s Jacques Pierre Brissot. Brissot is a former law clerk who had spent much of his life in England and become famous as a writer and a friend of Voltaire. He had also gained notoriety for publishing a pornographic pamphlet about Marie Antoinette, which had earned him a stint in the Bastille. After that, he had returned to England, and then to the United States, spending time with abolitionists in both countries. Once again returning to France, Brissot had co-founded the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, an abolitionist organization that will become influential during the French Revolution. He’s also a member of the Jacobin Club.

        -Anyway, in the aftermath of the Flight to Varennes and the Assembly’s transparent lie about a royal kidnapping, the Cordeliers Club calls for a public demonstration in the streets of Paris. Their aim? To depose King Louis and establish a so-called “national directory” – a new legislative body elected by all male citizens and superior to the Constituent Assembly.

Jacques Pierre Brissot agrees, and on July 16th, he and his friends distribute a petition in the Jacobin Club. The final version is a bit different from the original, but the substance is close enough, so I’ll read it here:

        “The undersigned Frenchmen, members of the sovereign people, considering that, in questions concerning the safety of the people, it is their right to express their will in order to enlighten and guide their deputies,

“That no question has ever arisen more important than the King's desertion,

“That the decree of 15 July contains no decision concerning Louis XVI,

“That, in obeying this decree, it is necessary to decide promptly the future of this individual,

“That his conduct must form the basis of this decision,

“That Louis XVI, having accepted Royal functions, and sworn to defend the Constitution, has deserted the post entrusted to him; has protested against that very Constitution in a declaration written and signed in his own hand; has attempted, by his flight and his orders, to paralyze the executive power, and to upset the Constitution in complicity with men who are today awaiting trial for such an attempt,

“That his perjury, his desertion, his protest, not to speak of all the other criminal acts which have proceeded, accompanied, and followed them, involve a formal abdication of the constitutional Crown entrusted to him,

“That the National Assembly has so judged in assuming the executive power, suspending the Royal authority and holding him in a state of arrest,

“That fresh promises from Louis XVI to observe the Constitution cannot offer the Nation a sufficient guarantee against a fresh perjury and a new conspiracy.

“Considering finally that it would be as contrary to the majesty of the outraged Nation as it would be contrary to its interest to confide the reins of empire to a perjurer, a traitor, and a fugitive, we formally and specifically demand that the Assembly receive the abdication made on 21 June by Louis XVI of the crown which had been delegated to him, and provide for his successor in the constitutional manner, and we declare that the undersigned will never recognize Louis XVI as their King unless the majority of the Nation express a desire contrary to the present petition.”

-It’s hard to overstate just how radical this petition is. It’s a direct attack on the constitutional monarchy that the Constituent Assembly has been working so hard to build. Not only does it call for the King’s ouster, but it calls for a referendum to decide the succession – and not just a referendum of property-owning active citizens, but of the entire nation. This is too much even for many members of the Jacobin Club, and hundreds of members, including most Jacobin members of the Constituent Assembly, walk out. Led by Antoine Barnave, another Revolutionary who we’ll get to in a minute, they go on to form the explicitly constitutional monarchist Feuillants Club.

-The remaining Jacobins and the members of the Cordeliers Club organize a demonstration the next day, July 17th. The 17th is a Sunday, so all the working people have the day off, and they’re supposed to meet at the ruins of the Bastille, then march across Paris to the Champ de Mars, that large parade ground where the Fete de la Federation had been celebrated just a year before. However, Lafayette is nervous that the protest will result in another mob action like the Storming of the Bastille or the Women’s March on Versailles, so he occupies the area around the Bastille with National Guard troops so the people can’t congregate.

-Instead of calling off the protest, everyone simply gathers on the Champ de Mars, which is where they were supposed to end up anyway. By early afternoon, between 20,000 and 50,000 people have gathered, and around 6,000 have signed the petition to depose King Louis.

-Up until now, it’s been a peaceful protest, but the Champ de Mars is a military parade ground, and while the demonstration is going on, some of Lafayette’s aides are crossing the parade ground to go to the military academy. Seeing the National Guard uniforms, some people in the crowd decide to throw rocks at them. This is not a wise move.

-Now that the protest has turned violent, Paris Mayor Jean-Sylvain Bailly declares martial law, announces that the petition to depose King Louis is unconstitutional, and orders the crowd to disperse. Lafayette then rides up at the head of his National Guardsmen to restore order. An uneasy standoff ensues, and at six o’clock, with the crowd still refusing to disperse, the City Council, along with more infantry and cavalry, arrive at the Champ de Mars with a red flag that indicates that the city is under martial law. By now, Lafayette has also set up a pair of cannons, and he stands beside the sergeant carrying the red flag, which makes the message clear – disperse, or be dispersed.

-The organizers of the demonstration try to get everybody to go home, but are drowned out by the noise of the crowd. Once again, some more belligerent protesters decide that now is a good time to throw rocks at the National Guard, and the soldiers open fire on the crowd. Whether they do so spontaneously or whether they obey the signal of an officer’s pistol is unclear. The crowd flees in chaos.

-In the aftermath, a number of Parisians lie dead. Jean-Sylvain Bailly says that only 12 are killed. Jean-Paul Marat puts the number at 400. Most historians have settled on the number of 50 dead, with possibly 400 wounded. Regardless, it’s a bloody day for the French capital, and it’s a stain on both Lafayette’s and Bailly’s reputations. Lafayette, as we’ll see, is able to continue as a general. But after the event that comes to be known as the Champ de Mars Massacre, Bailly’s political career is over. He resigns as Mayor in November of 1791, and retires to the city of Nantes to write his memoirs.

-At the same time, the fear of the mob is very real, and the events of July 17th 1791 lead to a crackdown on radical organizations. The Constituent Assembly meets the very next day, July 18th, to consider the problem. In his book A People’s History of the French Revolution, French Marxist historian Eric Hazan writes:

“A decree on sedition – with retroactive effect – was voted that very morning: its second article provided that ‘Any person who, in a gathering or riot, is heard to issue a cry of provocation to murder, will be punished with three years in chains if the murder was not committed, and as an accomplice to murder if it was.’ Over the following days, the investigation committee and the Paris departmental council collaborated on raids and arrests, particularly among the editors and printers of Le Père Duchesne, L’Orateur du peuple and L’Ami du peuple. On 9 August, the public prosecutor demanded a series of arrests, particularly those of Desmoulins, Santerre, Robert, Momoro, Danton, Fabre d’Églantine and others … What Mathiez called the ‘tricolour terror’ would last until the general amnesty of 14 September.”

-It’s worth noting that most of these men are never imprisoned. Instead, people like Marat and Danton go into hiding, and come out when the amnesty is announced.

On September 3rd 1791, at long last, the Constituent Assembly approves the new French Constitution. We’ve already covered most of the provisions because they’ve been figuring things out in real time. The old feudal estates are being abolished, and the nobility and the clergy will have the same rights as ordinary citizens. The King no longer has the power to pass laws, but can issue a suspensive veto that the Assembly cannot override until two elections have passed. The King will have command over the armed forces and the power to declare and end war, but only with the approval of the Assembly. There’s going to be a separation of powers, with independent legislative, executive, and judiciary branches. So, it’s officially going to be a constitutional monarchy.

        -That said, there’s one thing we’ve touched on that I want to discuss in a little more detail, and that’s the distinction between active and passive citizens. Remember, you have so-called “active” citizens, who can vote in elections, and so-called “passive” citizens, who can’t. Why is that, and what does it mean?

        -To begin with, the French system isn’t unique in only allowing property-owning males to vote. We need look no further than the original American system to find another example. This is based on the Enlightenment principle that only people who have skin in the game ought to be able to make the rules. For example, someone who’s too poor to pay taxes shouldn’t have any say in how other people’s taxes are spent. Now, if this sounds elitist, there’s actually another argument, and that’s the idea that people who are very poor are easy to pay off. Remember, these Enlightenment thinkers are strongly influenced by the classical world – they’ve read all their Greek and Roman histories. And in the Roman world, it was common practice for wealthy men to go out and buy votes. You literally had a patronage system where rich men would pay poorer men to do whatever they wanted. Sometimes it was physical labor, and sometimes it was voting a certain way in the popular assembly. I’m a big Roman history nut and one of my favorite characters is Crassus. Not to go on a tangent, but Crassus was a landlord who ran a fire company and would literally show up outside of burning buildings and offer to buy out the owners for a fraction of the building’s value. If the owners agreed, he’d have his firefighters put out the fire and own the building for cheap. If the owners didn’t agree, Crassus would let the building burn down. Needless to say, he was one of the most hated men in Rome, but he was also the richest man in Rome. So when he teamed up with Pompey and Julius Caesar to form the first triumvirate, he was able to buy one election after another. Well, the early Americans and the French Revolutionaries don’t want any Crassuses in their system, so their solution is only to limit the vote to people with a certain amount of property.

        -This ties into another new concept I wanted to touch on, and that’s the distinction between political and civil rights. We don’t talk about this distinction as much as we used to because in modern western countries we’ve all adopted the idea of universal suffrage, meaning that everybody gets to vote. But not all that long ago, it was a common distinction, so it’s worth talking about. Civil rights are the rights that extend to all citizens of a country. In the United States, for example, people have the right not to be subjected to a police search unless a judge has issued a warrant. This is a civil right, and it’s not tied to the right to vote. So, for example, if you were a woman in the 1800s before women had the right to vote, you still had the right not to be subjected to a warrantless search. Why? Because that was your civil right as an American. Civil rights include things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and so on. Political rights, on the other hand, are the rights involved in participating in government. The most obvious of these is the right to vote, which now belongs to all adults in most modern democracies, but there are other political rights we don’t think of as often. For example, in the United States, you have to be at least 25 years old to be a member of Congress, 30 years old to sit in the Senate, and 35 years old to become President. Why is it okay to limit those rights? Because they’re political rights and not civil rights. Well, the French Revolutionaries are drawing a similar distinction. All citizens are going to have certain unalienable civil rights, but only active citizens are going to have political rights.

As soon as the Constitution is approved, the next step is to hold elections for the new Legislative Assembly, which is going to replace the Constituent Assembly as France’s legislative body. Before these elections are held, the Constituent Assembly passes one final motion, which is now known as the “self-denying ordinance.” It’s proposed by the liberal lawyer Maximilien Robespierre, who I said I’d introduce later. For now, suffice it to say that he’s often called “the incorruptible,” and the self-denying ordinance is a good example of why. The self-denying ordinance says that anyone who serves in the Constituent Assembly is to be ineligible for the first election to the Legislative Assembly. Basically, the point is to show the French people that the Constituent Assembly has written the Constitution for the sake of the public good and not for their own self-aggrandizement. Robespierre argues:

        “Can you imagine what imposing authority could accrue to your Constitution by the sacrifice, pronounced by you, of the greatest honors to which your fellow citizens could call you? … We have neither the right nor the presumption to think that a nation of 25 million people, free and enlightened, is reduced to the inability to find 720 defenders as worthy as ourselves.”

        -The self-denying ordinance may be well-intentioned, but as we’ll see, the members of the new Legislative Assembly are indeed nowhere near as capable as the members of the Constituent Assembly. It’s not hard to understand why. After all, the Constituent Assembly consists of everybody’s “first choice” to represent their particular district. The new elections, held in France’s 83 new departéments, is going to select everybody’s second choice; in other words, a bunch of back-benchers. But don’t worry. The back-benchers will only be in power for less than a year before events force them to hold yet another round of elections and rectify the situation.

        -The other problem with the self-denying ordinance is that the original members of the Constituent Assembly don’t just go away. These aren’t just France’s best and brightest political minds, they’re also the most ambitious, so most of the existing politicians remain in and around Paris as members of the Jacobins or other political clubs, fiercely debating the issues of the day. Since policy is, as often as not, crafted over a cup of coffee in one of the political clubs, the crop of existing politicians maintains its own aura of influence, and this keeps the newly-elected members of the Legislative Assembly from spreading their wings and fulfilling their roles as leaders.

        -Anyway, the new Assembly, like the old one, is split into three camps. On the left are the 136 members of the Jacobin and Cordeliers clubs. Because the seats on the left side of the Assembly are elevated, this group comes to be known as the Montagnards, or “the Mountain.” In the center are the unaffiliated delegates, 355 members who call themselves the Plain to contrast themselves with the Mountain. Their detractors sometimes call them the “Swamp,” another mirror-image of today’s political discourse. On the right are the 264 members of the Feuillants Club, officially known as the Society of the Friends of the Constitution.

        -The Feuillants are exactly what their name implies – friends of the Constitution. They’re not reactionary monarchists trying to establish the kind of absolutism that Cardinal Richelieu had dreamed of. They’re conservatives in the fullest sense of the word, meaning they want to conserve the current order, which is the constitutional monarchy. This means pushing back both against the left-wing Jacobins and the radical right.

-To understand the Feuillants, one need look no further than their leader, Antoine Barnave. Barnave is a Protestant and political moderate who had served briefly as the President of the Constituent Assembly, and he’s not eligible to serve in the Legislative Assembly. But he’s still the most influential thinker in the Feuillant Club, so now it’s Barnave who will try to lead the largest faction of the Revolutionary government. In his book Citizens: a Chronicle of the French Revolution, British Historian Simon Schama writes:

“Barnave assumed leadership of those who had an interest in making the constitutional monarchy operational. He was supported by those who had been his closest associates in the old Jacobins – Duport, Le Chapelier, and the Lameths – and who now dominated the Feuillants. They all shared the general view that the ‘new’ France would not survive repeated physical intimidation from the Paris sections, unrestrained polemics from the clubs and the press and most important of all, the democratization of discipline in the army and navy. At the same time, they believed it necessary to protect the state from any kind of counter-revolutionary plots or armed incursions. The wave of strikes and labor riots in the spring had also convinced them that the… modernization project of the Revolution – a liberal economic order – would also require protection against the social collectivism of revolutionary artisans and their advocates in the Cordeliers…

“Barnave’s strategy in dealing with these challenges was carefully worked out. Having brushed off the threat of republicanism after Varennes, he negotiated secretly with the Queen, whom he expected to be sufficiently grateful to listen attentively to his advice. He counseled her to forswear, forever and in good faith, any kind of flirtation with armed counter-revolution; to make sure her brother the Emperor withdrew support from the emigrees; and to have the King persuade his brothers to return to France. In return for this he was prepared to work for the revision of the constitution so that it would strengthen the role of the royal executive. And throughout August and September, a lively and regular correspondence flew back and forth between Barnave and Marie Antoinette. ‘The constitution,’ the Queen had written, ‘is a tissue of impracticable absurdities.’ ‘No no,’ he had protested, ‘it is tres monarchique,’ and if only the King and Queen would try to establish ‘confidence and make themselves loved,’ all France’s troubles would be over; ‘no prince of Europe would be more solidly seated on his throne than the King of France.”

Barnave is wrong, though. Much like in the Constituent Assembly, the outnumbered but well-organized left is going to run circles around the less organized right in the Legislative Assembly. This invigorated left is led by a group known as the Girondins, named after the département of Gironde in southwestern France, and it includes a number of eloquent speakers. Perhaps the most eloquent is Jacques Pierre Brissot, the member of the Cordeliers Club we talked about who wrote the petition to depose Louis XVI. Brissot and other Girondins manage to push through two controversial measures in the fall of 1791.

        -The first of these measures is targeted against the emigrees, and it passes on October 31st. The Legislative Assembly gives emigrees until the first day of the New Year to return to France, or they will have their property seized and be sentenced to death in absentia. This isn’t some money-grabbing scheme or a temper tantrum. It’s a response to what the Assembly considers a real national security threat. Many, although not all, emigrees are lobbying foreign powers to attack France in the name of restoring absolute monarchy, and there’s even a 20,000-man emigree army stationed at the German city of Coblenz on the Western frontier. There’s a real fear that war is about to break out. We’ll get back to this in a second. But understand that the emigrees aren’t simply being targeted because they’re rich and absent. Many in the government, even on the center-right, see them if not as outright traitors, then at least as getting perilously close to treason.

        -The second of these measures is targeted against non-juring priests. If you’ll remember, French Catholic priests are now supposed to become civil servants, and many of them have, and have sworn an oath to the Constitution, and are now called juring priests. You may also remember that the Pope has condemned juring priests and forbidden Catholic priests from taking the oath. Well, at this time, the Pope still owns a fairly sizeable region called Avignon in southeastern France, and there’s a lot of civil unrest in that general area with people refusing to accept juring priests and even taking up arms to protect non-juring priests. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this part of France is on the brink of civil war. Well, on November 29th, the Legislative Assembly gives non-juring priests eight days to swear the oath to the Constitution, or they’ll have their salaries cut off. They can also be kicked out of regions where there is existing religious unrest – so, almost everywhere in France. As a bit of incentive, the Assembly also votes to allow French Catholic priests to marry, although this only serves to further upset orthodox Catholics and the Pope.

        -Both of these measures are unacceptable to King Louis. In September 1791, he’d reluctantly accepted the forced reunification of Avignon with the rest of France – some might call this an act of war against the Pope. But seizing emigree lands runs contrary to the right to private property, and banning non-juring priests is an affront to conservative Catholics, who make up the bulk of the rural French population. So, Louis exercises his suspensive veto, putting both of these laws in limbo and setting off another string of riots in major cities.

With the King’s veto of the laws against emigrees and non-juring priests, the tension between the French Left and the French Right has never been more intense. It seems as if the country is about to tear itself in two, but there’s one thing everybody seems to agree on – war. So far we’ve talked about war as a threat to France from the outside, something the other European monarchies have toyed with to put down the Revolution, although so far nothing has come of it. But why would anybody inside France want war, and why in the world would just about everybody inside France want war?

        -Louis and Marie Antoinette want war because they hope to be restored to power. The best thing for Louis right now would be for the Revolutionary government to go to war, lose, and have to negotiate a return to the pre-war monarchy. The center-right wants war because it will legitimize the Revolutionary government and unite them all as French patriots. Lafayette in particular has his eye set on leading troops into battle once more, like he did during the American Revolution. He even dreams of following in the footsteps of his adoptive father, George Washington, and serving his country as Commander-in-Chief. The Girondins on the left want war because they sense a foreign threat to the Revolutionary government. If there is indeed a threat, better to fight now on their terms than to wait for the Austrians or Prussians to fully prepare and attack in their own good time. As for the great bulk of people in the center, they want war because war will lead to a return to normalcy. The emigrees have taken with them much of the nation’s wealth and employment opportunities. The sooner France can get this war over with, the sooner the emigrees will either return home or disappear for good and allow a new upper class to develop – and an upper class means customers and employers for the people. Besides which, this is still the age of professional armies, and fighting is for professional soldiers. Few are envisioning the mass conscription and death that’s right around the corner.

        -One of the few anti-war voices in France is that of Robespierre the Incorruptible. In a December 18th speech to the Jacobin club, he says:

        “[War] is always the first wish of a powerful government which wants to become still more powerful ... It is in war that the executive power deploys the most fearful energy and exercises a sort of dictatorship which can only frighten our emerging liberties; it is in war that the people forget those principles which are most directly concerned with civil and political rights and think only of events abroad, that they turn their attention from their political representatives and their magistrates and instead pin all their interest and all their hopes on their generals and their ministers ...

“It is during war that a habit of passive obedience, and an all too natural enthusiasm for successful military leaders, transforms the soldiers of the nation into the soldiers of the King or of his generals. [Thus] the leaders of the armies become the arbiters of the fate of their country, and swing the balance of power in favor of the faction that they have decided to support. If they are Caesars or Cromwells, they seize power themselves.”

-As some of you may know, Robespierre is in some sense foreshadowing his own role in the Revolution. But for now, he stands far from the seat of power, and Jacques Pierre Brissot speaks for the Jacobins in the Assembly, and Brissot says there is to be war. So does King Louis, who gives a speech to the Legislative Assembly in December, calls for war against any countries who harbor French emigrees, and receives rapturous applause. Little do the members of the Assembly know that in private, Louis is writing letters to those emigrees and the crowned heads of Europe asking them to attack the Revolutionary government and restore him to power.

        -To understand why the French people are accepting all this war talk, we need to jump back in time a little bit to August 27th 1791, in the final days of the Constituent Assembly. That day, Marie Antoinette’s brother, Austrian Emperor Leopold II, along with King Frederick William II of Prussia, release a document called the Declaration of Pillnitz. It’s not very strongly-worded, and since it’s pretty short, I’ll just read it:

        “Their Majesties, the Emperor and the King of Prussia, having heard the wishes and representations of Monsieur, the Count of Artois, jointly declare that they view the situation in which the King of France currently finds himself as a subject of common interest for all of Europe's sovereigns. They hope that this interest can not fail to be recognized by the powers from whom assistance is being requested. Consequently, jointly with their respective Majesties, they will use the most efficient means in relation to their strengths to place the King of France in a position to be totally free to consolidate the bases of a monarchical government that shall be as amenable to the rights of sovereigns as it is to the well-being of the French nation. In this case then, their said Majesties, the Emperor and the King of Prussia are resolved to act quickly, in mutual agreement, and with the forces necessary to achieve the proposed and common goal. Meanwhile, they shall issue their troops the necessary orders to prepare them for action.”

        -So, nobody is declaring war on France. They’re just maneuvering their troops defensively and stating that they’re willing to take offensive action if all the other crowned heads of Europe join in – an event that seems incredibly unlikely. But this mild-mannered threat is enough to encourage everyone in France to talk about war, and then for the government to seize Avignon from the Pope, so in February Frederick William II of Prussia and Leopold II of Austria sign a defensive alliance, which only seems to further provoke the French, who for all the reasons I just outlined are now hell-bent on war and are only looking for an excuse.

So, on April 20th 1792, France finally declares war on Austria. Now, people who are scholars of the French Revolution will notice that I skipped over a whole lot of drama with the French royal ministry in the run-up to the war. This is an editorial decision on my part. Basically, all the characters involved are going to be out of office within a few months and I don’t want to add more characters to an already-crowded stage. Suffice it to say that the ministers are all members of the Feuillants Club, there’s a lot of backbiting, and everybody is incompetent, and nobody comes out of it looking good, especially not the Feuillants Club. It’s also worth noting that the Feuillants Club are opposed to war because they’re aware that the French Army is in dire straits, but they never control the crucial position of Minister of War, so they’re not able to put the brakes on. Neither is anyone in Austria, since Leopold II dies on March 1st 1792 and is replaced by his son Francis II. Leopold had been pursuing a policy of saber-rattling in hopes of deterring the French from war, and may have had the wisdom to back down. Instead, Francis decides that Austria can win a quick victory against the unprepared French, so he continues with the saber-rattling and even moves 50,000 Austrian troops to the French border. Meanwhile, the Feuillants-dominated French Royal ministry has collapsed and been replaced by rabidly pro-war Girondins, who are now able to totally dominate the French government despite being the minority party in the Legislative Assembly.

        -Okay, so France declares war on Austria on April 20th 1792, although the war is technically against the “King of Bohemia and Hungary,” because Francis II hasn’t even been officially crowned as Holy Roman Emperor yet. In addition, the Legislative Assembly is playing a little propaganda game. They’re not making war on the Austrian people, you see. They’re just making a defensive war against the tyrannical Austrian Emperor, who threatens the freedom of the French people.

        -This ties in with French military strategy in the opening phase of the war. The French plan is to attack the Austrian Netherlands, or modern-day Belgium and some surrounding territories. You may remember the Spanish Netherlands from some of our earlier episodes. Well, in the early 1700s, Spain had lost the Spanish Netherlands, along with its Spanish Habsburg royalty, during the War of the Spanish Succession. At the end of the war, as a compromise between France and Austria, a different branch of the French Bourbon Dynasty had taken over Spain and become the Spanish Bourbons, while the Austrian Habsburgs had gotten control of the Spanish – now Austrian – Netherlands. This arrangement had pleased nobody. The French still had to deal with Habsburg territories directly on their northern border, and the Austrian Habsburgs – rulers of a land-based Central European power – had gotten control over this maritime territory on the English Channel. Since 1715, the Austrians have been trying to use the Austrian Netherlands as a bargaining chip in every peace treaty, and have been trying instead to get control of Bavaria in southern Germany. But nobody seems to want the Austrian Netherlands, so the Habsburgs have kept it so far. Meanwhile, the residents of the Austrian Netherlands have constantly revolted against the Habsburgs. So the French think that the Austrian Netherlands just need a dose of liberté, and that the populace will rise up to greet an invading army and overthrow their Austrian overlords. The idea is to win a quick war, then use the Austrian Netherlands as leverage to get Francis II to back down and stop supporting the emigrees.

        -This is a miscalculation. See, the residents of the Austrian Netherlands do not, in fact, want liberté. The unrest in that area has been caused by conservative Catholic nobles who are displeased at the liberal Enlightenment reforms that the Habsburgs have been making. So instead of the quick victory they’re hoping for, the French Revolutionary government is about to spark off a long war. Thanks to the Austrian defensive treaty with Prussia, the Prussians will get dragged in almost immediately, and various other European countries will join over time in what becomes known as the War of the First Coalition. This war will last for most of the rest of the Revolutionary period, although it will be followed during the Napoleonic Era by the War of the Second Coalition, the War of the Third Coalition, and so on and so forth up through the War of the Seventh Coalition and the Battle of Waterloo. But all of that comes later.

        -For now, the French prepare a three-pronged invasion. The northernmost army will be commanded by General Rochambeau, who had commanded French forces in the decisive Yorktown campaign of the American Revolution. The center army will be commanded by none other than our friend the Marquis de Lafayette. And the southernmost army will be commanded, somewhat ironically, by a German general, Count Nicolas Luckner. The beginning of this invasion goes about as poorly as possible.

        -Remember the Nancy Affair, where underpaid French troops had mutinied against their commanders? Remember how something like half of the entire French officer corps has emigrated to surrounding countries? Yeah. Underpaid troops with officers who are either absent or new, inexperienced replacements are not going to perform well under fire. Not only that, but the French army is currently being restructured and many of the soldiers are raw recruits, so you have a recipe for disaster. And on April 29th 1792, when an advance force of 5,000 French soldiers cross the frontier near the city of Marquain, the leading cavalry element comes under Austrian artillery fire. Now, the Austrian fire is inaccurate and none of the men are killed, but the cavalry turns around and runs anyway. They run into the infantry, who have been following behind, and the infantry also turn and run. The commanding officer, Brigadier General Théobald Dillon, takes shelter in a peasant’s house, but takes off his officer’s coat. So the peasant, who has been warned about Austrian spies, reports Dillon to some nearby soldiers, who take him to the city of Lille and lynch him. Following this and other embarrassing failures, Lafayette holds his own troops back. So does Rochambeau, so the entire French attack stalls.

The only thing that saves the Revolutionary Government is the fact that the Austrians and Prussians are woefully unprepared. While Austria has troops in position, the government is still transitioning to the new rule of Francis II, and both Austria and Prussia are distracted by the Russians, who are once again gobbling up Polish territory in what will become known as the Second Partition of Poland. So the war stalls out for a couple of months, which gives the French some much-needed breathing room to get their house in order and put together some disciplined forces. Had the Austrians and Prussians been prepared to press the offensive, the French Revolution might have ended in the spring of 1792.

        -In the midst of all this, the French are at each-other’s throats more than anybody else’s. The right blames the left for its Revolutionary excesses that have driven out much of the officer corps and encouraged soldiers to mutiny. The left blames the right for defeatism and for having one shoe in the enemy’s camp. Both sides have their points. The idea that revolutionary policies have created the emigree problem isn’t even controversial; it’s an undisputed fact. As for the left’s complaints, we need look no further than Lafayette, who not long after the disaster at Marquain writes to his Austrian counterparts offering to march his army to Paris and expel the Jacobins from power. If Lafayette, the pro-revolutionary center-right politician, is ready to partake in civil war, it goes without saying that there are French monarchist elements chomping at the bit to side with the Austrians and restore King Louis to full power.

        -The Legislative Assembly throws more fuel on the fire by making three new demands. First, on May 27th 1792, it passes a law calling for the deportation of non-juring priests, whom it accuses of preaching against the Revolution. Then, on May 29th, it calls for the abolition of the King’s 1,800-man Constitutional Guard, which protects the royal palace, but is made up mostly of aristocrats who have openly celebrated the army’s failures. Finally, on June 8th, the Assembly orders the creation of a 20,000-man volunteer force of provincial soldiers known as fédérés to protect Paris in the event of an Austrian breakthrough. Louis agrees to the abolition of his Constitutional Guard, but once again uses his veto pen to strike down the measures deporting non-juring priests and creating an army of fédérés.

        -At the same time, Louis decides to fire his Girondin ministers and replace them with Feuillants. Keep in mind that even if the ministers were supposed to represent the will of the electorate – which they’re not, because the executive and legislative branches are separate – but even if they were, this would still be closer to the makeup of the Assembly than a bunch of Girondin ministers. But the Girondins and other Jacobins are able to spin this as an attempt by Louis to side with the Austrians and against the Revolution, and the centrist delegates once again side with the left. So when the new War Minister, a guy named Dumouriez, goes to the Assembly and gives a speech that accurately describes the poor state of the army, instead of listening to him, the Assembly boos him down. Dumouriez then goes to Louis and advises that Louis withdraw his vetoes of the law against non-juring priests and the creation of fédérés, but Louis refuses, fires him, and sends him to the northern front to serve as a general.

        -When he hears of this on June 18th, Lafayette writes an angry letter to the King, criticizing pretty much everybody in the government. He calls Dumouriez: “a worthy product of his club …, all of whose calculations are false, his promises vain, his information deceptive or frivolous, his counsels perfidious or contradictory.” But he saves his largest broadside for the Jacobins in the Assembly, only he calls them “Jacobites.”:

        “Can you conceal from yourself that one faction, and, not to beat about the bush, the Jacobite faction, is the cause of all this disorder? Their very actions accuse them: organized as a realm of their own in their metropolis and its affiliations, blindly directed by certain ambitious leaders, this sect forms a distinct corporation within the French people, whose powers it usurps, subjugating their representatives and their mandataries.”

        -Lafayette ends by offering to come to Paris with his army and restore the monarchy. But Louis, still unwilling to risk outright civil war, refuses. When the Legislative Assembly hears about Lafayette’s letter, some of them publish angry letters in left-leaning newspapers. But such is Lafayette’s public stature – even after the Champ de Mars Massacre – that nobody is quite ready to denounce him in public. Add to this a sugar shortage due to slave rebellions in the French Caribbean colonies, and once again the Paris mob is ready for action. The Paris radicals, always itching for a good riot, are now going to march on the Legislative Assembly to demand that the common people be allowed to vote. In fact, they go further, demanding not just a vote for the poor sans culottes, but that the active citizen/passive citizen dichotomy be reversed – in other words, they want only the poor citizens to be able to vote.

In his book The French Revolution: From Enlightenment to Tyranny, British historian Ian Davidson writes:

        “…the common people, restless and angry because of their poverty, were now arming themselves, usually with pikes (for lack of rifles). Because of its prevalence, the pike became the symbol of popular protest; as Robespierre said: ‘This weapon is in a sense sacred.’

“All of this meant that the situation was now ripe for a violent dénouement, a day of crowd action, or what the French call une journée, the first of which was set for June 20, 1792. As so often with the big crowd events of the Revolution, the question of who planned or led it remains something of a mystery. Albert Mathiez, the noted Marxist historian of the Revolution, says the Girondins started it; but François Furet says it was obscure local figures, who were then led in action by Antoine Santerre, a rich and popular brewer of the Saint-Antoine quarter.

“In any event, it seems clear that there had been preparations in the Jacobin Club for a big demonstration at least a week before, and probably well before that; and that Robespierre was part of this planning talk. By June 16, everyone was discussing June 20 as the now expected date for the demonstration. The Directoire of the département of Paris, which had overall responsibility for the region and whose members included Talleyrand, wanted to prevent it; but Pétion [the new Mayor of Paris], knowing that it could not be averted, simply wanted to contain it, by calling up the whole of the Garde nationale and getting them to march alongside the demonstrators.

“The popular momentum towards the demonstration was unstoppable, but now most of the Jacobins were firmly opposed to it. ‘Robespierre’, says Michelet, ‘far from taking part, was entirely hostile; he did not like these big events. Carefully turned out, bewigged, and powdered, he would not have risked in these roughhouses, nor even in the crude society of a riot, the safety of his person.’

“The demonstration duly happened on June 20. It was meant to be in commemoration of the Tennis Court Oath of 1789, but it seems to have been pretty disorganised. Perhaps 10,000 men assembled outside Le Manège, the meeting chamber of the National Assembly; they were organised by Section and led by Santerre, Legendre, Fournier, Saint-Huruge and Jean-François Varlet. They demanded to be received by the National Assembly, to present a petition. The National Assembly agreed to receive only a small number of them, a delegation. The demonstrators then demanded the right to hold a parade through Le Manège. Reluctantly, the parliamentarians submitted, and it lasted three hours; many of the demonstrators were drunk.”

-Following this, the increasingly rowdy crowd turns their attention to the nearby Tuileries Palace, which now only has a handful of guards due to the Assembly’s dismissal of the Constitutional Guard. In their book The Age of Napoleon: The Story of Civilization Volume XI, American historians Will and Ariel Durant write:

“…an excited crowd of men and women—patriots, ruffians, adventurers, fervent followers of Robespierre, Brissot, or Marat—forced their way into the courtyard of the Tuileries, shouting demands and taunts, and insisting on seeing ‘Monsieur et Madame Véto.’ The King ordered his guards to let a number of them in. Half a hundred came, brandishing their varied weapons. Louis took his stand behind a table, and heard their petition—to withdraw his vetoes. He answered that these were hardly the fit place and circumstances for considering such complex matters. For three hours he listened to arguments, pleas, and threats. One rebel shouted, ‘I demand the sanction of the decree against the priests; … either the sanction or you shall die!’ Another pointed his sword at Louis, who remained apparently unmoved. Someone offered him a red cap; he put it gaily on his head; the invaders shouted, ‘Vive la nation! Vive la liberté!’ and finally ‘Vive le Roi!’ The petitioners left, and reported that they had given the King a good scare; the crowd, dissatisfied but tired, melted back into the city. The decree against the nonjuring clergy was enforced despite the veto; but the Assembly, anxious to dissociate itself from the populace, gave the King an enthusiastic reception when, at its invitation, he came to accept its pledge of continued loyalty.

“The radicals did not relish this ceremonious reconciliation of the bourgeoisie with the monarchy; they suspected the sincerity of the King, and resented the readiness of the Assembly to stop the Revolution now that the middle class had consolidated its economic and political gains. Robespierre and Marat were gradually turning the Jacobin Club from its bourgeois sentiments to wider popular sympathies. The proletariat in the industrial cities was moving toward cooperation with the workers of Paris. When the Assembly asked each of the departments to send a detachment of the Federation of National Guards to join in celebrating the third anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, these ‘Fédérés’ were mostly chosen by the city communes, and favored radical policies. One particularly rebel regiment, 516 strong, set out from Marseilles on July 5, vowing to depose the King. On their march through France they sang the new song that Rouget de Lisle had composed, and from them it took the name that he had not intended—'The Marseillaise.’”

-This song, La Marseillaise, remains the French national anthem to this day. And if you listen to the lyrics, it’s actually quite violent:

“Rise up, children of the Fatherland, the day of glory has arrived!

Against us stands tyranny, her bloody standard has been raised.

Do you hear, in the countryside, the roar of those ferocious soldiers?

They come right into your arms to tear the throats of your sons, your wives!

To arms, citizens! Form your battalions!

Let's March, let's march!

Let an impure blood waters our furrows.”

-This fits the tone of the rest of the French Revolution quite nicely. Despite the odd riot or lynching and the fact that the country is now at war, it’s been a mostly peaceful affair so far. Not anymore. Both Paris and the French countryside have turned into a pressure cooker. Now, with the threat that foreign troops may soon be marching into French territory, the pressure has been cranked up. The pike-wielding mobs, the musket-wielding National Guard, the royal ministry, the Legislative Assembly, the people, and the press are all prepared to start killing. From here on out, things are going to get a lot dirtier and nastier. And make no mistake, that threat of foreign invasion is very real.

So far, the Austrians and the Prussians have been content to sit back and watch the French army implode. But all this time, they’ve slowly been preparing for war, and on July 25th 1792, Charles William Ferdinand, the Duke of Brunswick and commander of the allied Austro-Prussian army, sends an ultimatum to the French people, to be delivered to every town, city, and village. In it, he explains the reason for the pending Austro-Prussian invasion; namely, that the French revolutionary army has attacked first, and that this joint German alliance is only defending itself. He then goes on to explain that the Austrian and Prussian troops are planning only to restore Louis to full kingship. As long as the French people stand aside and let them do their jobs, there will be no looting or killing. But anyone who resists will be treated not just as an enemy, but as a rebel. Their houses will be burned, their property looted, and they themselves may be subject to summary execution.

        -The reason for the Brunswick Manifesto is twofold. First, it’s to defang French resistance by letting royalist subjects know that the invasion isn’t directed against the French nation; it’s directed against the enemies of King Louis. Anyone who’s tempted to oppose the invasion out of a sense of patriotism can rest easy. Second, the Manifesto is supposed to damage the morale of the already-shaken French army. It’s one thing to fight for your survival. It’s another thing to surrender knowing that you’re going to be treated well.

        -The Austro-Prussian invasion might be intended to restore the monarchy, but it has the opposite effect. Even before the Brunswick Manifesto, several individual Paris sections have declared that Louis is an illegitimate King and that they no longer owe him their allegiance. The Assembly has condemned these statements, but they haven’t taken any action to quell the mobs that are forming throughout the city. Meanwhile, more and more of those fédéré militias are arriving from the countryside, and while the countryside tends to be conservative, the fédérés themselves are made up of pro-revolutionary citizens. This exacerbates the already-existing situation of Paris being more radical than the rest of France, and ensures that a lot of the radicals are armed.

        -Lafayette makes one last attempt to salvage the situation. In late July, he leaves his troops on the German frontier and returns to Paris, where he gives a speech to the Legislative Assembly warning that the fédérés pose a grave danger to the constitutional monarchy. He’s greeted with a chorus of boos, and of angry delegates demanding why he has abandoned his frontier post. He goes to the Tuileries to see the King, only to be refused entry. Confident in their Feuillant ministers and angry that Lafayette has thus far sided with the revolutionaries, Louis and Marie Antoinette will not meet with him. Lafayette then arranges a review of the Paris National Guard, hoping to give a speech and call on them to expel the fédérés from Paris. The new mayor, Pétion, gets wind of these plans, and cancels the review. All of his efforts stymied, Lafayette returns to the front. After the overthrow of the monarchy, he will leave France rather than risk the anger of the Revolutionary Government. He will not return until Napoleon comes to power. And although he will serve in both Napoleon’s government and the later government of the Bourbon Restoration, and will be recognized as a hero of France, he will never again achieve his old levels of influence.

        -The overthrow of the monarchy will not be long in coming. On the night of August 9th 1792, representatives from 28 of Paris’ 48 sections gather at the Hotel de Ville. These men, including Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins, overthrow the existing city council, or Commune, and establish their own openly anti-monarchist Commune. They also summarily execute the commander of the Paris National Guard and replace him with a radical named Antoine Joseph Santerre, the influential brewer who Ian Davidson had mentioned as one of the possible planners behind the coup. All of this is a prelude to an attack on the monarchy itself, which is set to take place on the morning of August 10th.

At around 7 AM, the fédérés, Sans Culottes mob, and sympathetic National Guard members launch an organized attack against the Tuileries Palace. Again, I can’t stress enough that this is a planned assault, not some spontaneous mob action. It’s just way too organized, with the people organized into proper brigades and each brigade given its own assigned route to sweep through Paris, covering both banks of the River Seine to ensure there are no loyalist soldiers left in place to attack them in the rear. Although as Ian Davidson says, it’s impossible to say for sure who has done the planning.

        -The crowd – or, more accurately, the impromptu Revolutionary Army – closes in on the Tuileries, which is defended by National Guardsmen and around 900 Swiss Guard mercenaries. By 9 o’clock, the National Guardsmen have abandoned their posts and are mingling with the crowd. Louis and the rest of the royal family leave through a back door, surrounded by a handful of Swiss Guards, to join the National Assembly in the apparent safety of their chambers.

        -The crowd and the Swiss Guard are at a standoff when Louis sends orders for the Swiss to stand down in order to avoid more bloodshed. Some of the Swiss, who are standing on a palace balcony, throw paper musket cartridges down to the people as a sign of peace. But then a French nobleman who is amongst the palace’s defenders fires his pistol, and both sides start shooting at each other. The Swiss try to withdraw, but the crowd overwhelms them, and by the end of the day something like 800 people lie dead. The enraged people then ransack the palace, and a number of unarmed royal servants are killed. Some members of the crowd light fire to buildings in the surrounding courtyard, and when Paris firefighters arrive to put out the flames, they are shot at. Other rioters seize the red uniforms of the dead Swiss Guardsmen and attach them to their pikes, waving them around like flags. From then on, a red flag will be one of the enduring symbols of the French Revolution.

        -Meanwhile, other members of the crowd, including members of the Revolutionary Paris Commune, break into the hall of the Legislative Assembly. A handful of elected representatives are killed in the scuffle. One of the Commune’s leaders gives the following speech:

        “It is the new magistrates of the people who present themselves at your bar… The people have charged us with declaring to you that they invest you anew with their trust, but it has charged us at the same time with declaring to you that they can only recognize, as sole judge of the extraordinary measures to which necessity and resistance to oppression have brought them, the French people, your sovereign and ours, gathered together in their primary assemblies.”

        -In other words, the people of Paris are declaring that they’ve lost confidence in the Legislative Assembly, and they demand a new election – one in which all citizens, both active and passive, will be allowed to vote.

        -The rest of the day is spent in negotiations. The Assembly offers to provisionally suspend King Louis and appoint a new provisional royal ministry to hold executive power until after the elections. The Paris radicals demand Louis’ complete removal. In the end, they compromise. Louis is provisionally suspended, but an earlier measure to appoint a tutor for his son is shelved. In the words of one radical, “…you have pulled down the statues of kings and now here is a decree for the education of a Prince Royal! But what use have we for this Prince Royal?” Along the same lines, the Feuillant royal ministers are fired by legislative vote and replaced with the old Girondin ministers whom Louis had just recently fired. There will be one exception – Georges Danton, the giant of the Revolution, will be the new Minister of Justice. Finally, the Assembly agrees to new elections, with universal suffrage for all male citizens – no more distinction between active and passive citizens.

-The next day, August 11th 1792, Robespierre is appointed to the Paris Commune. That same day, the Assembly announces that the royal family will be placed under house arrest in the Luxembourg Palace – yet another luxurious royal residence in the city of Paris. But the Commune overrules them. Instead, Louis, Marie Antoinette, and their children are moved to the Temple, an old monastery belonging to the Knights Templar, which has long since been converted into a prison. It goes without saying that none of these acts are legal under the recently-approved French Constitution. Ian Davidson writes:

“The sans-culottes were now in charge. This would not last; but it was a clear sign that the world was changing. And the central fact in this changing world was that the French Revolutionaries had crossed the fatal frontier into illegality.

“For more than three years the Revolution had been managed peacefully, and above all legally, by the bourgeois Revolutionaries in the National Assembly. Now the Paris sans-culottes had thrust them violently aside. From this point on, the central theme of the Revolution was an uncompromising power struggle between these two groups.”

For the rest of the summer of 1792, the Revolution advances quickly. In Paris, the new Revolutionary Commune suspends the freedom of the press and orders the closure of all pro-royalist newspapers. In the rest of France, messengers are sent to every municipality to announce the holding of new elections. A new Civic Oath is also published, to be taken by all clergy to reaffirm their loyalty to the revolution. Those who refuse are to be deported to France’s South American colony of Guyana. On August 16th, the Assembly authorizes the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal. This tribunal will consist of six members, with the authority to execute anyone they find guilty of crimes against the Revolution. Only a handful of people protest this, including the incorruptible Robespierre, who is opposed to the death penalty on general principle.

        -To this end, a device called as “the machine” is erected in the courtyard in front of the Tuileries Palace. Today, this device is better known as the guillotine, and it’s seen as an instrument of terror. I’ll talk more about that terror in a little addendum at the end of this episode. But to the people at the time, it’s seen as a mechanism of mercy and egalitarianism. It’s merciful because beheading is seen as less horrible than other forms of capital punishment. The condemned isn’t tortured as they are with medieval punishments like breaking on the wheel, drawing and quartering, or burning at the stake. It’s egalitarian because it erases the old two-tiered execution system of the Ancien Regime – beheading for nobles, hanging for everyone else. Under the new revolutionary regime, everyone will have the privilege of getting beheaded.

        -The machine gets his name from a revolutionary doctor named Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who had proposed it as an execution method way back in 1789. In the good doctor’s description: “The mechanism falls like thunder; the head flies off, blood spurts, the man is no more.” Later on, after thousands of people have been dispatched by the machine, Guillotin will protest the use of his name to describe a machine that he did not invent, only advocated for.

        -Simon Schama describes a contemporary engraving that depicts the use of the guillotine and its humanitarian nature:

        “A rather beautiful engraving made to illustrate the humanity of Guillotin’s device suggests dignified serenity rather than macabre retribution. The setting is bucolic since the good doctor wanted the site of execution to be moved beyond town, away from what he thought was the primitive spectacle of the gutter mob. The action is stoical, perhaps even sentimental, since the executioner too has been transformed, from a brawny professional into a sensitive soul required to avert his eyes as he slashes the cord with his saber. The benevolent confessor is straight out of Rousseau’s Confessions de Foi d’un Vicaire Savoyard and the few spectators are expressly kept from the machine by a barrier guarded by an impassive soldier.”

        -But why use a machine rather than a human executioner? The answer is provided by Charles-Henri Sanson, Paris’ public executioner at the time of the Revolution. When presented with the idea of beheading all criminals, Sanson is shaken. He’s used to conducting one or two beheadings at a time, with most executions being carried out by hanging. With multiple beheadings, he’s afraid that his sword could get dull, or that his arms could get tired, or that common prisoners could squirm instead of maintaining the stately dignity expected of noble prisoners. Any of these things could lead to a botched execution and require multiple blows, which is excruciating for the condemned, embarrassing to the executioner, and horrifying to any spectators. All of which explains why the Revolutionary Government chooses to adopt a quick, efficient machine to perform the deed.

        -In fact, the Feuillants had adopted the use of the guillotine in the spring of 1792, but it’s the Girondins and other radicals who will give it its fearsome reputation. On August 21st, the machine will claim its first victim under the Revolutionary Tribunal. Louis Collot d’Angremont, a lowly secretary with the Paris National Guard, is found guilty of siding with the royalists during the August 10th coup. Over the next few months, the Tribunal will sentence 27 more people to death, almost all of them ordinary criminals, not counter-revolutionaries. It’s only in 1793 that the Tribunal will start killing people willy-nilly.

        -Meanwhile, Danton’s Justice Ministry sets to work uprooting enemies of the Revolution. Voted 550,000 livres of emergency funding, he quickly hires a network of spies, and convinces the Paris Commune to order a curfew from August 29th-31st. On these days, Danton’s secret police conduct a house to house search of the city. Ostensibly, they’re looking for weapons to arm the National Guard. At this point, Austro-Prussian forces are on the move towards Paris, and it looks like it will be necessary to defend the city. But the real aim of Danton’s police is to arrest anyone suspected of harboring anti-revolutionary views. Over the course of 48 hours, around 3,000 Parisians are arrested and locked in prison. It’s worth noting that Danton appoints Camille Desmoulins as one of his chief secretaries, and fails to keep receipts of all his expenditures. This is no doubt due to the haste with which he’s tightening the Revolutionary Government’s grip on society, but the lack of receipts will come back to haunt him later on. More on that in the next episode.

-Another important development in August of 1792 is the establishment of a revolutionary Committee of Surveillance. This committee is established not by the National Assembly, but by the Paris Commune, and Jean-Paul Marat is one of its members. The committee operates its own secret police force, provides a list of suspects for Danton’s men to arrest, and conducts a political purge of the various Section representatives. Any remaining non-radicals in the Paris government are removed from office, and most are arrested. Cities and towns throughout France follow suit, with as many as 20,000 local committees of surveillance being established by the end of September. Even the most conservative towns now find their local governments being run under the watchful eye of radical revolutionaries.

-The crackdown on the Catholic Church intensifies. Religious processions are banned. Gold and silver sacred vessels are taken from the churches and melted down to fund the government. The Church is stripped of its right to record births, marriages, and deaths. Along with the establishment of local committees, this only serves to enflame the tensions between Paris and the rest of France. Ian Davidson writes:

“Just one of the anti-Church measures – the removal of the bells – illustrates the depth of the chasm of incomprehension between the Paris sans-culottes and the mass of the population in the rest of the country. Rural France had lived to the rhythm of bells since time immemorial. Church bells announced the morning Mass and signalled the midday break with the Angelus, celebrated marriages and tolled for deaths, rang out for victories and warned of dangers. The first Revolutionaries had conceded the rights of religion, in their Declaration of the Rights of Man; but the sans-culottes of the Paris Commune – who always recognised the sound of the great bell of the Cordeliers, the tocsin, as the signal of alarm – now seemed determined that the Revolution would be wholly secular and thought they could simply sweep away the sound of bells from the lives of the peasants. This inevitably put them on a collision course with much of the rest of the French population.”

In Paris itself, there are now tens of thousands of armed revolutionary soldiers. But with so many prisoners being held in Paris’ jails, rumors begin swirling of a royalist counter-coup. According to these rumors, as soon as the troops leave for the front, the prisoners will be broken out and overthrow the Commune and the Legislative Assembly. Some leading members of the Revolution have called for the government to abandon Paris to the Austro-Prussian army and move to the south, but Danton, now the most powerful man in the government, will not have it. He says: “I have brought my seventy-year-old mother to Paris. I have brought my two children, who arrived yesterday. Before the Prussians enter Paris I would wish my family to perish with me, and that 20,000 torches should turn Paris into a heap of cinders in an instant. …be careful in talking of flight, be afraid, lest the people are listening!”

        -On September 2nd, Danton addresses the Legislative Assembly:

        “Everywhere there is stirring and commotion, a burning wish to fight, an uprising in France from one end of the realm to the other. One part of the people will head for the frontiers; another will dig trenches; and a third will defend our town centers with pikes … We demand that within forty leagues of the point where battle is waged, those citizens who have weapons shall march against the enemy; those who remain are to arm themselves with pikes. We demand that anyone who refuses to serve in person or to hand over his weapons shall be punished with death … We demand that couriers be sent to all departments to advise them of the decrees that you have issued. The ringing of tocsins will resound throughout France. This is not a signal of alarm, but a signal to charge against the enemies of the Fatherland. In order to conquer, gentlemen, we need boldness, more boldness, and boldness again, and France will be saved.”

        -This marks the beginning of the first levee en masse, or mass conscription. It’s a new kind of war, the war not of an army against an army, but of the entire French people against their enemies. This war of the Nation against all will reach its zenith under Napoleon, but under the banner of the Revolution, Napoleon’s massive armies are already taking shape. The same day as Danton’s speech, representatives of the Paris Commune call for an army of 60,000 volunteers: “Citizens, march out forthwith under your flags; let us gather on the Champ-de-Mars; let an army of 60,000 men be formed this instant. Let us expire under the blows of the enemy, or exterminate him under our own.”

        -But the problem of the Paris prisoners remains. What to do with the 3,000 men languishing in jail cells? Leaving them behind would seem to be national suicide. The Paris Mob has a solution. On the afternoon of September 2nd, roughly concurrent with the announcement of mass armament, a caravan of six hackney cabs is on its way to the Abbaye prison, carrying twenty-four non-juring priests. A mob forms around them, and one of the priests lashes out at a rioter with his cane. The people go ballistic, and hack the prisoners to death. The impromptu weapons include pikes, clubs, swords, axes, and, in one case, even a carpenter’s saw. The mob then makes its way to the Abbaye itself, where they break inside and kill between 50 and 60 Swiss Guards who have been held prisoner since the August 10th coup. Another group of citizens goes to the nearby Carmelite Convent where they kill 188 more non-juring priests, as well as other prisoners.

        -The Committee of Surveillance tries to get a handle on things by ordering an impromptu court to be set up at the Abbaye, but the court is overseen by a prison guard and general thug named Stanislas Maillard, whose nickname is Tap Dure, or “Hit Hard.” Prisoners are brought before the kangaroo court, judged, and executed on the spot by men with pikes and bayonets. There are further killings at the Conciergerie prison on September 3rd, and at the Châtelet, Saint-Firmin, and La Salpêtrière prisons on September 4th. Sporadic killings continue through September 7th. Georges Danton, as minister of justice, is approached by a number of other Revolutionaries who are disgusted by the lawless killing. He famously says: “I don’t give a damn about the prisoners; let them do the best they can.” For his part, Jean-Paul Marat seems to care nothing for most of the slain, except for those who he views as victims of the bourgeoisie. In response to the first killings, he only says: “Save the poor debtors, those imprisoned for brawling, and the petty criminals.”

        -One member of the Legislative Assembly, Claude Basire, writes a letter to a female friend describing the events. He’s a Jacobin and a friend of Robespierre, and even he seems horrified. In the letter, he says he is glad that:

        “…your beautiful eyes have not been soiled by the hideous sights that we have had before us these last days… Mirabeau said that there is nothing more lamentable or revolting in its details than a revolution but nothing finer in its consequences for the regeneration of empires. That may well be, but courage is needed to be a statesman and keep a cool head in such upheavals and such terrible crises. You know my heart; judge the situation of my soul and the horror of my position. A feeling man must simply cover his head in his cloak and hurry past the cadavers to shut himself up in the temple of the law. [Meaning the Assembly hall.]”

        -At the end of the event that comes to be known as the September Massacres, between 1,090 and 1,395 people lie dead. This is far short of the 8,000 claimed by some royalist historians of the time, but it still accounts for as much as 45% of Paris’ prison population. The bulk of these prisoners aren’t even anti-revolutionaries – most are common criminals, but as Eric Hazan writes:

        “It has often been claimed that these were ‘common law’ prisoners, but can the thirty or so minors killed in a Bicêtre reformatory – a bad lot, no doubt, aged between twelve and seventeen – or the thirty-five young and not so young women, perhaps of ‘ill repute’, massacred in the Salpêtrière, be classified in this way?”

As I said, this is a busy time in the French Revolution. Even before mass military recruitment and the September Massacres, elections for a new legislative body are underway. Because the Paris Sections have successfully pushed for a new constitution and the new legislature is going to design that constitution, the legislative body is to be called the National Convention. If yet another change of name sounds too confusing, I have good news: the National Convention will be the last major legislative body of the Revolution, and will last all the way up until November of 1795. Voting begins on August 26th 1792, with different provinces holding their first round of elections over the next few days. This first round of elections chooses a set of electors for each province, and the provincial electors will then begin voting on September 2nd. There will be no self-denying ordinance, which means all male citizens aged 25 and older will be eligible for office, including current members of the Legislative Assembly. As a result, the National Convention will include current officeholders and men who had previously held office in the Constituent Assembly, as well as some brand new faces.

        -As promised the vote is held on the principle of universal manhood suffrage. All male citizens aged 21 or older are eligible to vote, except for servants and the unemployed. So, not really universal, but close. But despite the expanded franchise, actual voter participation is dismal. Provincial rates range from 5% to 20% of eligible voters, and the consensus “average” seems to be just under 12%. The problem is that there’s extreme pressure to conform to a certain type of radical politics. Think about it. In Paris, Danton’s Justice Ministry thugs are breaking into people’s homes and arresting those they deem to be insufficiently on board with the Revolution. Things in most provinces aren’t much better. So for the most part, people who don’t favor radical politics tend to just stay home.

        -The Paris elections show a particularly extreme example of voter intimidation. The Commune decides that instead of a secret ballot, votes are to be held by verbal acclamation. So if you want to oppose radical politics, you actually have to stand up and say it. As a result, in a city of 600,000 people, only 525 voters turn out to select Paris’ 24 delegates to the National Convention. Then, at the last minute, the polling place is moved from the Archbishop’s Palace – theoretically neutral ground – and the vote is taken in the Jacobin Club instead. Again, this is an extreme example, but voter intimidation can and does take place in most of France’s provinces.

        -Unsurprisingly, the new National Convention is far more radical than any of the bodies that preceded it. The Paris delegation reads like a Who’s Who of the revolutionary left. Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Jean-Paul Marat all earn seats. Jacques Pierre Brissot and most of the other Girondins are re-elected in the provinces, and the Abbe Sieyes returns to take a seat at the table. Barnave and the Feuillants are rendered irrelevant, and the Feuillant party ceases to exist. Of the handful of nobles elected, the most notable is that First Prince of the Blood we talked about, the Duc d’Orleans, who has taken a new name, Philippe Égalité, as a sign of his dedication to the Revolution. Some of the provinces even elect foreigners. The most notable of these is Thomas Paine, who you may remember as the Anglo-American author of a pamphlet called Common Sense that helped kick off the American Revolution. Paine has recently been exiled from Britain for his radical political views, and gladly takes his seat in the National Convention. Amusingly, American founding fathers George Washington and Alexander Hamilton are also elected, although both decline the invitation.

        -The new Convention is divided primarily between two political camps: the Girondins, led by Jacques Pierre Brissot, and the Mountain, led by Maximilien Robespierre. The Mountain is so named because its delegates have chosen to sit on a set of risers way up above the left side of the assembly hall. The Girondins sit on the right, with the unaffiliated delegates once again seated in the middle and referred to alternately as either the Plain or the Swamp.

        -The National Convention is more confusing than earlier Revolutionary governments because the political division isn’t between left and right. Yes, Robespierre’s Mountain sits on the left and Brissot’s Girondins sit on the right, but both groups embrace left-leaning politics. The main policy differences are threefold.

        -First, Brissot and the Girondins are in favor of keeping King Louis around, while Robespierre and the Mountain are out-and-out small-“r” republicans. Now, I need to be 100% clear that the Girondins have not morphed into a more moderate party. They simply argue that because France has been a monarchy for all of its existence, the time may come when reinstating King Louis is politically necessary. They still want a more limited role for the king than he had under the 1791 constitution, and would prefer a republic to a monarchy. They just see him as a unifying symbol at a time when France needs unity, and believe that if nothing else he could prove valuable as a hostage.

        -The second difference between the Girondins and the Mountain is that the Girondins are pro-war while the Mountain has a mix of anti-war delegates like Robespierre and pro-war delegates like Danton.

-The third difference is their geographic distribution. By and large, the delegates for the Mountain are either Parisians themselves or are elected to represent Paris. The Girondin delegates hail largely from the south of France, as well as from major port cities. They generally have a fear of the Paris mob, which as we’ve seen has had an outsized influence on the course of the Revolution. The Mountain’s delegates are generally pro-mob, and see in the sans-culottes of Paris a dynamic force that pushes the Revolution forward.

-That’s pretty much it. Other than that, the factions agree on policy, and are elected almost exclusively from the upper middle class. Their disagreements are mostly about personalities and power politics. For example, the National Convention elects a new President every two weeks, and there can only be one President at a time. If a Girondin is holding that seat, then by definition the Mountain is not, and vice-versa.

        -From the beginning, the Girondins hold a majority of seats in the new National Convention, but the situation is far from stable. Because the political parties are not official bodies – and both the Girondins and the Mountain are creations of the Jacobin Club – there’s a lot of movement back and forth. And as before, neither side can get anything done without the support of a majority of the uncommitted delegates.

Before I talk about the National Convention’s first few months in power, I want to back up one more time and talk a little bit about the war. Because remember, while all of this politicking is going on, France is being invaded by Austria and Prussia, and as you might imagine, that war is going to have a big impact on events inside the country.

        -Back on August 19th, William Ferdinand, the Duke of Brunswick, the Prussian general who had issued the Brunswick Manifesto, made good on his promise to invade France. The Prussian army crossed the frontier, and a day later besieged the fortress of Longwy along the French border with modern-day Luxembourg. The fortress was in poor condition before the attack, and surrendered on August 23rd after a 3-day bombardment.

        -Six days later, on August 29th, Brunswick’s 40,000-man army surrounded the fortress of Verdun, the last major French stronghold between the Prussian army and the city of Paris. The defenses at Verdun were in much better physical condition than those at Longwy, but the 4,000 defenders hardly had any food stored up. The garrison commander, Colonel Nicholas Beaurepaire, wanted to hold out for as long as possible, but his officers outvoted him. Baurepaire then either shot himself or was murdered by his officers – it’s unclear which – and Verdun surrendered on September 2nd. This is the same day that Danton called for a massive army of the French people and the September Massacres began, but it’s important to note that word of Verdun’s fall would not reach Paris until a few days later. Even so, it’s easy to understand why the Parisians would already have been panicking.

        -The fall of Verdun leaves the Prussian army just 150 miles from Paris, and if you look at an ordinary map it’s tough to understand why the Duke of Brunswick’s Prussians don’t just charge forward and overwhelm the city. But if you look at a topographical map, you’ll see that their path runs through the Argonne forest, with its wild and hilly terrain that forces the Prussians to choose from a few narrow passes through which to march their army. Brunswick’s troops are also suffering from dysentery – probably a result of foraging on French grapes – so he’s forced to slow down to allow them to recover.

        -This gives the French time to prepare a response. Generals François Kellermann and Charles Dumouriez, who have taken over for the recently-resigned Lafayette and Rochambeau, pull their armies back from the border with the Austrian Netherlands and march back south to defend the capital. Actually, their line of march puts them to the west of the Prussian army, and the Prussians still have a clear route to Paris. But Kellerman and Dumouriez are now sitting right across Brunswick’s supply lines, which puts him in a precarious position. If he continues to advance to Paris, he could take the French capital, only to find himself completely surrounded by French armies and under siege in hostile territory. So he turns his army around and attacks the French to try and re-open those supply lines.

        -Brunswick launches his attack on September 20th, which just so happens to be the last day the French Legislative Assembly will sit in session before turning over power to the newly-elected National Convention. The French line up on a ridge marked out by the Valmy windmill, which Kellerman orders demolished in order to prevent it from being used as a targeting landmark by the Austrian artillerymen. Brunswick lines his men up on another ridge about a mile and a half away, and a long-range artillery duel commences. Both sides are about equal in number, and both have around sixty artillery pieces. Both sides’ gunners are also as accurate as can be expected given the long range. Despite the large number of volunteers in the French army, Kellerman and Dumouriez also have a large number of experienced regular troops, and their artillerymen are among the best in the world. Still, casualties are light, with only a few hundred dead and wounded on both sides – again, this is largely thanks to the long range.

        -Even so, the Prussians are known for their discipline under fire and their effectiveness in close-quarters combat. With that in mind, Brunswick orders a frontal assault by bayonet-armed troops at around 11 in the morning. But the ground is wet from several days of rain, and the mud makes for slow going, all while the Prussians get closer and closer to the French artillery.

        -Rather than cave in as expected, Kellerman orders his men to sing, and tens of thousands of Frenchman begin singing La Marseilles, as well as another French war anthem called Ça Ira, some of whose lyrics go:

        “Ah! It'll be fine, It'll be fine, It'll be fine

By the torches of the August assembly,

Ah! It'll be fine, It'll be fine, It'll be fine

An armed people will always take care of themselves.

We'll know right from wrong,

The citizen will support the Good.”

        -The Prussians had been expecting the French to run away as they had in previous battles. But at the sight of all these men standing their ground and singing, Brunswick orders a tactical withdrawal. He tries another charge at around 4 in the afternoon, and this time the Prussian grenadiers get within about 600 yards of the French line. But once again, the French show no signs of breaking, and Brunswick orders a withdrawal. At nightfall, he pulls his entire army back, after which he makes an end run around the French and heads back for Prussia.

        - In terms of casualties, the Battle of Valmy was little more than a skirmish, but it demonstrated that this French army is tougher than it had looked at the beginning of the war. German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who is with the Prussian army at the battle, sums things up after the battle by telling a group of officers: “From this place and this time forth commences a new era in world history, and you can all say that you were present at its birth.” Hardly comforting words for the men on the losing side of a pivotal battle.

        -After Valmy, the French emigrees are livid. Around 15,000 of them had marched alongside the Prussian army, and conspiracy theories run wild. Some say that Louis XVI, always hesitant to shed blood, asked the Duke of Brunswick to retreat rather than fight a pitched battle against the French army. Others suggest – with no evidence – that Revolutionary secret agents had offered Brunswick the Bourbon family jewels in exchange for a withdrawal. In reality, the reason for the Prussian withdrawal is probably more prosaic. Brunswick had envisioned a quick lightning march on Paris to end the Revolutionary regime, but is instead facing what looks to be a tough fight. See, while all of this is going on, Catherine the Great’s Russians have invaded Poland and her armies are now milling around near Prussia’s western frontier. King Frederick William II fears the Russians more than the Revolutionary French, and he’s marching with Brunswick’s army, so it’s likely that he orders the withdrawal himself in order to fight the more dangerous threat. We’ll probably never know for certain.

        -Regardless, the withdrawal of the Prussian army leaves the Austrians fighting the French all by themselves, and the Austrian army is weaker than expected. In the fall of 1792, they suffer a string of defeats in the Netherlands, as well as along the Mediterranean coast. During this time, the French take the city of Nice from Savoy, and Nice will remain a part of France to the present day. French armies also advance in the area of Alsace-Lorraine, where they take over a handful of small statelets from the Holy Roman Empire.

        -On November 26th, Brissot sums up French foreign policy when he says: “We cannot be calm until all of Europe is in flames.” What he’s advocating is the creation of a buffer zone around France, consisting either of smaller, weaker allies or outright satellite states. But the Revolutionary government sometimes fears its own generals as much as it fears its enemies. In particular, General Dumouriez comes under fire for refusing to seize Church property in Belgium, instead promising to protect it in exchange for an interest-free loan from the Pope. To ensure that French generals don’t get to run their own little fiefdoms with independent foreign policies, the National Convention passes a new law on December 15th 1792. This law requires French generals to implement Revolutionary policy in conquered territories, including the destruction of any and all feudal regimes and the seizure of Church property. As we’ll see, this policy of spreading Revolutionary principles will have a long-lasting effect on all of Europe.

        -Simon Schama writes:

        “Just as the ‘rights of man’ were now deemed to be a universal possession grounded in nature, so a similar axiom of nature was to determine the territorial limits of the Revolution. Dumouriez and Danton both agreed that those limits were self-evidently provided by geographical barriers: the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine, the Channel, and the Mediterranean. This already meant that a policy of ‘liberation’ was blurring into one of annexation, euphemistically known as reunion, in regions like Porrentruy on the Swiss border, which became the Department of Mont-Terrible, and Savoyard Nice.

        “The mere declaration of ‘natural frontiers,’ however, did not imply that French arms would be confined within them. On the contrary, as long as they were threatened by coalitions of kings, or (as the propaganda decree now authorized) as long as they were summoned by peoples groaning under the yoke of despotism, the French would feel free to take the fight to the enemy, wherever he was. Nor did the means of this offensive have to remain orthodox. The ci-devant Marquis de Bry offered to found what was, in effect, the first organization of international terrorism, the Tyrannicides – twelve hundred committed freedom fighters dispatched to assassinate kings and the commanders of foreign armies wherever they could be nailed down.

        “It was, indeed, as Goethe warned, a new moment in the history of the world.”

Returning now to Paris, the National Convention officially takes power on the 21st of September. That same day, it passes its first significant piece of legislation: the abolition of the monarchy and the creation of a new French Republic. The next day, it votes to establish a new calendar. Henceforth, all laws will be dated beginning with Year 1 of the Revolution, and Year 1 will not be 1789 but 1792, the year of the overthrow of the monarchy. The National Convention also creates a new set of months with their own names, and we’ll talk more about the Revolutionary Calendar in a later episode.

        -When the Convention abolishes the monarchy, it doesn’t just shuffle Louis XVI off into forced retirement. He remains imprisoned at the Temple, and is stripped of all his honors and titles. Instead of “His Majesty Louis XVI,” he’s now referred to as “Citizen Louis Capet,” the last name “Capet” being taken from Hugh Capet, who had become King of France way back in the late 900s and founded the Capetian Dynasty, of which the Bourbon Dynasty is an offshoot. Louis hates being a simple citizen, and the guards at the Temple rub it in his face at every opportunity.

        -At the same time, when the Convention elects its first President and other officers, all of these positions are taken by Girondins. Brissot and others accuse Danton, Robespierre, and Marat of attempting to seize the legitimate power of government and set up a triumvirate – if not a de jure triumvirate, than a de facto triumvirate backed by the power of the Paris Mob. The Girondins cite – again, not without reason – the coup of August 10th, which they argue was an illegal act. Robespierre denies trying to create a triumvirate or overthrow the new republican government, but does not disavow the coup of August 10th. He says: “All these things were illegal, just as illegal as the Revolution, as the fall of the King and of the Bastille, as illegal as freedom itself. You cannot expect a revolution without a revolution.” Marat openly calls for a dictatorship in the old Roman style, but denies any conspiracy with Robespierre and Danton and defies the Girondins to bring formal charges against him. When they do not, he pulls out a pistol, puts it to his own head, and says: “If my indictment had been decreed, I would have blown my brains out at the foot of the tribune.”

        -Danton is in a more delicate position. Remember how he’d failed to keep receipts of his expenditures as Justice Minister? Well, leading Girondins are now calling for an investigation, so Danton outwits them by resigning his position as Justice Minister and promising to serve only as a member of the National Convention. He says: “I received [these functions] to the sound of the cannon with which the citizens of the capital were demolishing despotism … but now that the union of our armies is accomplished, and the political union of the people’s representatives effected, I am no more than a mandatory of the people and will confine myself to that honorable function, and proceed to speak in that capacity. The empty phantoms of dictatorship, the extravagant idea of a triumvirate, all these absurdities invented to frighten the people, will disappear, since nothing will be constitutional that is not accepted by the people.”

        -Bolstered by French successes on the battlefield, the Girondins are secure in their legislative power, at least for the time being. But on two issues, they overreach. First, leading Girondins call for a protective force of troops to defend the National Convention from the mob. This force is to consist of 4,500 men, drawn equally from all 83 French departéments. The measure passes, but is overruled by the Paris Commune, who object to the presence of so many provincial troops in the capital. When many of those troops come anyway, Marat helps to turn them to the Parisians’ side. The Convention has made no effort to provide adequate accommodations for them in the city, and Marat famously tours the run-down barracks and expresses concern for the soldiers’ well-being. Within months, the provincial troops have “gone native,” and either head to the front to help with the war effort or openly side with the Parisian sections in the days ahead.

        -Second, Brissot publishes an article openly condemning the entire Paris faction in the government. When the Jacobin Club calls him to a meeting to account for this, he refuses to show up. As a result, he is expelled from the Club on October 10th. He then publishes another article calling for provincial Jacobins to set up their own parallel clubs, and many of them do. Ian Davidson writes:

        “The Robespierrists were determined to purge this club not just of Brissot and his Girondin allies but of all members of the Convention who were in any degree tempted to question their authority. They decreed that anyone who belonged to another club would be excluded, and they drove out about 200 members.

“The first result was that when the Girondins wanted to discuss their political plans, they had to do so mainly in private meetings, at little dinners or, more socially, in the salons and soirées of the leading political ladies, like Madame Roland. The second result was that the Robespierrists now had a total grip on the proceedings of the Jacobin Club and on the opinions which could be expressed there. From this point on, it held no more political debates; instead, the Jacobins would simply rubber-stamp, usually with servile applause, policy positions already adopted by Robespierre and his close allies.”

-This takeover of the Jacobin Club by the Mountain happens at the same time as yet another food crisis. Without the right to organize, laborers’ pay is not keeping up with inflation, and for reasons we’ve already discussed, the French assignat is losing value by the day. As a result, producers are selling food abroad rather than on the domestic market. So in spite of a relatively good harvest, the French people are once again going hungry. And hungry people tend to get angry, both in Paris and in the provinces.

-Representatives from the Paris suburbs come to the National Convention with a novel solution. They demand a law to require grain producers to sell on the domestic market, and they demand price controls to ensure that the average worker can afford to feed his family. The Girondin faction successfully defeats this measure over the objections of Robespierre and the Mountain. Slowly but surely, the Girondins are losing the faith of the broader populace, while the more organized, more egalitarian Mountain is growing in popularity.

In some sense, all of this is historical background noise. The Girondins will do themselves no favors with how they handle the biggest issue of 1792: what to do about King Louis. Throughout the fall, a committee has been studying what can legally be done with the King. The Girondins have argued that Louis’ removal from power is more than enough punishment for his opposition to the Revolution. As I mentioned, they also believe that he could prove a valuable hostage, and that reinstating some kind of constitutional monarchy may even be necessary to preserve the Revolution’s gains. Many Girondins also raise the point that the Constitution of 1791 prescribes one penalty for crimes by the King, and that penalty is removal from office, which has already been done. The Mountain, on the other hand, is arguing for Louis’ execution. Their argument is summed up on November 13th 1792 in a speech by a 25-year-old lawyer named Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, who will come to be known, appropriately, as the Archangel of Terror. Saint-Just says:

        “The sole aim of the committee was to persuade you that the king should be judged as a simple citizen, but I say that the king must be judged as an enemy: that we have not to judge him but to fight him, and that having no place in the contract that binds the French people, the forms of procedure are not to be found in civil law, but in the law of nations…

        “The men who will judge Louis have a Republic to found; those who attach the least importance to the matter of a king’s just punishment will never found a Republic. Among us, fineness of mind and character is a great obstacle to liberty…

        “I do not see a middle ground: this man must reign or die... No one can reign innocently: the truth is too obvious. Every King is a rebel and a usurper...

        “Citizens, the tribunal which must judge Louis is not a judicial tribunal: it is a council, it is the people, it is you; and the laws which we must follow are those of the rights of the people…

        “Louis is a foreigner among us; he was not a citizen before his crime; he could not vote, he could not bear arms; he is even less a citizen since his crime… He is the murderer of the Bastille, of Nancy, of the Champ-de-Mars, of Tournai, of the Tuileries: what enemy or foreigner has done us greater harm?...

        “Everything I have said tends, therefore, to prove to you that Louis XVI must be judged as a foreign enemy. I add that his condemnation to death need not be submitted to the people for their approval ... Louis has waged war against the people: he is defeated. He is a barbarian; he is a foreign prisoner of war.”

-For all of Saint-Just’s rhetoric, the delegates of the Mountain are unable to come up with any appropriate criminal charges, and the committee is deadlocked. For a while, it looks as if Louis and the royal family will remain under house arrest indefinitely. But then, a new scandal changes everything.

        -The scandal, called the Armoire de Fer Incident, is brought to light by the Girondin Interior Minister, a man named Jean-Marie Roland. Roland is a wealthy merchant and a close friend of Jacques Pierre Brissot. I’ve neglected him so far, but he’s one of the central figures in the Girondin party. A leading member of the Jacobin Club, Roland has been Interior Minister since March of 1792, and is one of the few senior government officials to have survived the Coup of August 10th. This is thanks in no small part to the influence of his wife, Marie-Jeanne Roland, who is generally considered the smarter of the two. She’s believed to have written most of Roland’s correspondence, and is one of the few women to have been active in the Jacobin Club. In fact, many meetings of the senior Girondin leadership take place at the Rolands’ house, with Madame Roland doing much of the talking. For these reasons, Jean-Marie Roland is one of the most influential men in government, and a critical link between the new not-so-royal ministry and the National Convention.

        -On November 20th 1792, while the Girondins and the Mountain are arguing about what to do with their former king Louis Capet, a locksmith named François Gamain pays a visit to Roland, and tells him a little story. Upon moving from Versailles to the Tuileries, Louis had commissioned Gamain to construct a secret safe to store his most sensitive personal correspondences. The safe is built into a thick stone wall near the King’s bedroom, and concealed by a layer of paint that’s carefully colored to match the stone. Even the keyhole is hidden, designed to look like a chink in the rock.

        -Roland runs to the Tuileries without notifying anyone else in the Convention, and with Gamain’s help he opens the safe – an iron box or, in French, an armoire de fer, which is where we get the name Armoire de Fer Incident. What Roland finds in the box is unclear. According to Roland himself, he finds a large collection of letters and other documents, all of which he dutifully delivers to the committee investigating Louis XVI. According to Madame Campan, one of Marie Antoinette’s servants, this is false. She says that Marie Antoinette never trusted François Gamain and urged Louis to empty the safe, which he did in her presence. Given the suddenness with which the King was forced to vacate the Tuileries, this seems unlikely, but there’s also a third version of events. In this version, Jean-Marie Roland hurries to the Tuileries and empties the safe himself because he knows that some of the documents may incriminate his fellow Girondins. He then throws out these documents and adds new ones before turning over the whole stack to the committee. We’ll never know for sure.

        -What we do know is what Roland himself presents to the committee. Will and Ariel Durant write:

        “It contained 625 secret documents, which revealed the King’s dealings with Lafayette, Mirabeau, Talleyrand, Barnave, various émigrés and conservative journalists; clearly Louis, despite his affirmation of loyalty to the constitution, had plotted the defeat of the Revolution.”

        -The reaction is exactly what you might expect. The Jacobins destroy a statue of Mirabeau that had graced their clubhouse, and the great man’s remains are exhumed from the Pantheon and buried in an unmarked grave. Antoine Barnave is placed under arrest. Lafayette, to his good fortune, has already fled the country and is safe in an Austrian prison. Talleyrand manages to escape to England, where he will remain in exile before eventually getting kicked out and moving to the United States. But don’t worry; he’ll be back as soon as Napoleon takes the stage.

        -Freshly armed with evidence of Louis’ anti-revolutionary activities, the delegates of the Mountain renew their calls for the deposed king’s execution. They’re bolstered by similar demands from the Paris sections, where mob violence is once again becoming a distinct possibility. The mood in the capital is, as usual, bolstered by conspiracy theories. According to one, the food crisis is the fault of none other than Louis himself, who has supposedly purchased large supplies of grain and stored it in caches near the Prussian frontier to help feed an invading army.

        -There’s still a lot of debate as to whether or not Louis can be tried and, if so, whether or not he can be executed. Robespierre, who not long ago had opposed the death penalty, proposes a motion on December 3rd to have Louis summarily executed. He supports it by saying:

        “This assembly has been led, without realizing it, far from the real question. There is no trial to be held here. Louis is not a defendant. You are not judges. You are not, you cannot be, anything but statesmen and representatives of the nation … Louis has been dethroned by his crimes; Louis denounced the French people as rebellious; to chastise them he called on the arms of his fellow tyrants; victory and the people decided that he was the rebellious one: therefore Louis cannot be judged; either he is already condemned, or the Republic is not acquitted … Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.”

        -Many of the Mountain’s delegates support Robespierre’s motion, but in the end it’s defeated. The bulk of the National Convention’s members are, after all, lawyers. And whatever their feelings about Louis XVI, the idea of condemning a man without trial is a bridge too far for most of them to support. If the former king is to be executed, the state will need to provide evidence, and he’ll need to have the opportunity to present a defense. Still, the Mountain takes measures to ensure a conviction.

        -Ian Davidson writes:

        “On December 6 the Montagnards secured a decree by the Commune that a new committee of twenty-one members would draw up the charge sheet against the King, that the trial would be held in public and that all members of the Convention, called by roll, should vote on the outcome, on the verdict as well as the sentence, in public and out loud.

“The trial was ‘extremely unjust’, according to the account in the Robespierrist Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française: ‘The evidence was withheld from the King. Any pieces of evidence which could have constituted an avenue of defence were withheld, in a deliberate attempt to show that he was guilty. The witnesses who could have spoken for the defence had been massacred in the prisons on September 2 or 3, 1792, or executed in Versailles’. Nevertheless, the Montagnards expected that public opinion, all too present in the public galleries, would be hostile to the King and would tilt the balance towards a guilty verdict and then a death sentence. It turned out that they were right.

“On December 10, 1792, Jean-Baptiste Robert Lindet in the name of the Commission of Twenty-One, presented the charge sheet listing all the duplicities of the King, going back to the beginning of the Revolution. The general charge laid was that ‘Louis Capet was guilty of conspiracy against the general security of the state’.”

On December 11th 1792, the trial begins. Jean-Baptiste Mailhe, the Secretary of the National Convention, reads out the charges – 33 in all. Among other things, Louis is charged with attempting to disband the Estates General, sending troops against the Paris populace in the run-up to the Storming of the Bastille, vetoing the laws on non-juring priests, trying to flee the country during the Flight to Varennes, and plotting with the Swiss Guard to overthrow the Legislative Assembly on August 10th. The most damning charges are supported by papers from the Armoire de Fer Incident. Several state that he was sending money to emigrees who opposed the Revolution, and weakening the country by encouraging military officers to emigrate. The final charge is: “You have caused the blood of Frenchmen to flow.”

        -During cross-examination, Louis responds to each of the charges. He denies trying to flee the country, and says that even when he sent troops after the Paris mob, he never intended to shed blood. As for plotting to overthrow the Legislative Assembly during the August 10th coup, the idea of opposing thousands of armed revolutionaries with 900 Swiss Guards is absurd, especially since Louis himself had ordered the Swiss to stand down. His strongest defense is his response to the charges of vetoing bills; the Constitution of 1791 specifically granted him the right to veto, so how could it have been illegal? His weakest defense is in regard to some of the letters between himself and the emigrees, when more than once he absurdly claims not to recognize his own signature. Throughout all this, Louis shows proper royal composure, until he’s read the last charge, causing the bloodshed of French people. He denies it completely, and witnesses say that a tear rolls down his cheek during the denial.

        -Throughout the trial, various foreign governments will engage in lobbying efforts to buy off members of the National Convention and gain an acquittal. Georges Danton, ever the opportunist, agrees to act as a go-between, but ends up derailing these efforts by demanding huge amounts of money for himself.

        -Louis’ defense team consists of three prominent lawyers: François Denis Tronchet, a former delegate for the Third Estate and co-author of the French Civil Code, Raymond De Sèze, a young lawyer from Bordeaux who is famous for his speaking skills, and Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, Louis’ former Secretary of State and a prominent defender of free speech. Louis is particularly grateful to Malesherbes, and tells him: “Your sacrifice is the greater because you are exposing your own life, though you cannot save mine.” This is not hyperbole; Malesherbes will himself face the guillotine in April of 1794.

        -Louis is given until December 26th to prepare his defense, and insists that it be a properly legal one. He rejects an early draft of De Sèze’s opening statement on the basis that it appeals to emotion rather than to the law. On the day of the trial, the galleries are filled with people wealthy and influential enough to find their way inside. Even in the middle of winter, the packed hall is hot from all of the warm bodies inside, and many of the spectators are munching ice and eating oranges to stay cool. Outside, poorer citizens and sans-culottes are milling about, with many chanting their demands for a guilty verdict. Raymond De Sèze opens the defense by saying:

        “Citizens, if at this very moment you were told that an excited and armed crowd were marching against you with no respect for your character as sacred legislators… what would you do?... You accuse him of shedding blood? He mourns the fatal catastrophe as much as you. It is the deepest wound inflicted on him, his most terrible despair. He knows very well that he has not been the author of bloodshed though he has perhaps been the cause of it. He will never forgive himself because of this.”

        -De Sèze then goes on to paint the picture of a young king, a good an honest man who wanted to reform France along more modern lines. After all, who had called the Estates General in the first place? He closes by saying:

        “Louis ascended the throne at the age of twenty, and at the age of twenty he gave to the throne the example of character. He brought to the throne no wicked weaknesses, no corrupting passions. He was economical, just, severe. He showed himself always the constant friend of the people. The people wanted the abolition of servitude. He began by abolishing it on his own lands. The people asked for reforms in the criminal law... he carried out these reforms. The people wanted liberty: he gave it to them. The people themselves came before him in his sacrifices. Nevertheless, it is in the name of these very people that one today demands... Citizens, I cannot finish... I stop myself before History. Think how it will judge your judgement, and that the judgement of him will be judged by the centuries.”

-De Sèze’s appeal to the judgement of history is right in line with the Revolution’s ostensible Enlightenment values. His only mistake is arguing that Louis has “given” liberty to the French people, a remark that’s sure to upset some of the delegates.

        -Several Girondin delegates try to forestall a guilty verdict with an appeal to the French people. Paris may be howling for blood, but what about the rest of the country? It would be a grave mistake to execute the King without first submitting the action to a vote of the departéments. Failure to do so could risk tearing France apart. As we’ll soon see, this is a valid concern, but the Mountain is able to squish this motion by arguing that the National Convention is the seat of French sovereignty. Isn’t France a republic? Hasn’t the Convention been trusted with the sovereignty that used to belong to the king? If it appeals to the departéments, it will not be a show of national unity, but proof that republican sovereignty has already failed.

        -The defense rests on January 4th 1793, but the Convention takes several days to vote on a verdict. There are now three questions to be decided: is Louis guilty, what is the sentence, and should there be an appeal to the departéments? After several days of legal wrangling, the Convention decides to vote on the issues separately, beginning with the question of guilt on January 15th.

        -With 33 total charges, a verdict of guilty is almost a foregone conclusion. Out of 749 delegates, several are not present and several others abstain, but not a single one votes “not guilty” and 693 vote “guilty.” The Convention then votes on whether or not to submit their verdict to the departéments. 424 vote no, and 283 vote yes, so the guilty verdict stands.

        -The convention adjourns for the night, and returns on January 16th to decide on a sentence. Two Girondins, Jean-Denis Lanjuinais and Antoine François Hardy, try another tactic and argue that a death sentence should be decided by a two-thirds majority, not a simple majority. But Danton successfully kills this idea, arguing forcefully that the abolition of the monarchy and declaration of war had only required simple majorities. If these weighty actions required only a simple majority, why should a two-thirds vote be required for a death sentence?

        -The arguments back and forth are fierce. Thomas Paine speaks in favor of a reprieve, but Marat accuses him of only being opposed to the death penalty because he’s a Quaker. Another Montagnard delegate says: “A king is only made useful by death.” In the galleries as well as outside, Parisians chant slogans in favor of death, and promise vengeance to any delegates who vote any other way.

        -Ian Davidson writes:

        “The vote on the King’s sentence started the day after the other votes and lasted thirty-six hours, from 10 o’clock in the morning on January 16 until 10 o’clock at night on January 17; it was, according to Tulard, ‘probably one of the most dramatic in the history of the Convention’. It took so long because every Deputy had to vote out loud, one after the other, following the roll call; each was expected to give reasons for his vote; and many added riders or additional conditions to their votes.

“The first to vote was the Girondin Jean Mailhe, a lawyer from Toulouse, whose name was the first to be drawn by lot from the list of Deputies. Quite by chance, it was he who had been entrusted with drawing up the charge sheet against the King. He voted for the death penalty, but he added a rider calling for an additional vote on a reprieve or a delay. ‘If there is a majority for a death sentence’, he said, ‘I think it would be worthy of the Convention to consider whether it would not be useful to delay the moment of execution.’

“The first count gave 366 votes for the death penalty out of 721 votes cast; 361 were needed for a majority. But the results were challenged, and there had to be a second vote. This time there were 387 votes in favour of death, but it was decided to exclude those with a rider like Mailhe’s; this produced a total of 361 votes in favour of the death penalty without qualification, exactly the minimum majority required…

“There remained the question of a reprieve, and the results of this last vote were declared at around one o’clock in the morning on January 20: of 690 votes, 310 were in favour of a reprieve and 380 against.

“Later that day, one of the Deputies who had voted for the death sentence, Louis Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, a thirty-two-year-old, ultrarich nobleman, was stabbed to death in a restaurant in the courtyard of the Palais Royal by a nineteen year-old nobleman, Philippe de Pâris, until recently a member of the King’s Constitutional Guard.”

When Louis is informed of the verdict, he’s given only 24 hours to prepare, but the writing has been on the wall since the guilty verdict on January 15th. Since then, he’s been reading David Hume’s account of the British King Charles I, determined to die a death worthy of a King. When he receives his death sentence, he responds stoically, except when he hears that Philippe Égalité, the former Duc d’Orleans, had voted for execution. “It really pains me to see that Monsieur d'Orléans, my kinsman, voted for my death.” Philippe himself has less than a year to live, and will be executed in November as an enemy of the Revolution.

        -Louis has only three requests: a three-day reprieve to prepare himself, a priest to hear his confession, and to see his family. The Convention denies him any reprieve, but they do allow him to see a non-juring priest, an Irish Jesuit named Edgeworth de Firmont, as well as to see Marie Antoinette and his children and give them the news himself. Marie Antoinette is inconsolable, but Louis says that they’ll see each other again at eight in the morning. He’s talking about the time he’s going to be taken for execution, but the Queen is so shaken that she seems to think he’s talking about breakfast, reportedly saying: “Why not seven? Of course, why not, seven.”

        -Charles-Henri Sanson, the Paris executioner, has erected a large scaffold in the Place de la Revolution, which is today known as the Place de la Concorde, a 19-acre public square that’s one of Paris’ most famous landmarks. The scaffold and its guillotine will eventually claim the life not just of Louis XVI, but of Marie Antoinette and many victims of the Reign of Terror – including Robespierre and many of the other delegates who voted for Louis’ execution.

        -Sanson is taking no chances. On the morning of January 21st, 80,000 soldiers line the streets in ranks four deep to prevent any attempt at a rescue, and if that’s not enough, 1,200 more troops are escorting Louis to the scaffold. Simon Schama paints a vivid picture of the event, and I couldn’t have done better myself:

        “Louis was woken in the wintry dark by Cléry and received communion from Edgeworth at around six. He dressed simply, but it was already apparent that he would not see his family again, since he asked the valet to give his wedding ring to the Queen along with a packet containing locks of hair from all the family. A royal seal, taken from his watch, was to be passed to his son as a sign of succession. When representatives from the Commune arrived, he asked them if Cléry might not cut his hair to spare him the indignity of being cropped on the scaffold. Needless to say, permission was denied. He was, for the purposes of the executioner, just another head. At around eight [General] Santerre arrived and, after shuffling around somewhat, was put out of his misery by Louis’ own command: “Partons.” [Let’s go.] The ride took two hours through Paris streets shrouded in damp fog. The sense of a blanket of quiet was strengthened by the closed shutters and windows which had been ordered by the Commune and the peculiar suspended animation of the crowds, who, on other occasions, had been vocal with both their cheers and their execration.

        “Not long into the drive a pathetic rescue attempt was made by the Baron de Batz and four followers shouting, ‘To me all those who want to save the King.’ They were immediately set on, as was one of the Queen’s former secretaries, who tried to push his way through to the coach. At ten o’clock the procession arrived at the scaffold. Beneath the platform Sanson and his assistant prepared to undress the King and tie his hands, only to be told by the prisoner that he wanted to keep his coat on and have his hands free. He evidently felt so strongly about the last matter that it appeared for a moment he might even struggle, and it took a remark from Edgeworth comparing his ordeal to that of the Savior for Louis to resign himself to whatever further humiliations were to be heaped on him.

        “The steps to the scaffold were so steep that Louis had to lean on the priest for support as he mounted. His hair was cut with the professional briskness for which the Sanson family had become famous, and Louis attempted finally to address the great sea of twenty thousand faces packed into the square. ‘I die innocent of all the crimes of which I have been charged. I pardon those who have brought about my death and I pray that the blood you are about to shed may never be required of France…’ At that moment Santerre ordered a roll of drums, drowning out whatever else the King might have had to say. Louis was strapped onto a plank which when pushed forward thrust his head into the enclosing brace. Sanson pulled on the cord and the twelve-inch blade fell, hissing through its grooves to its mark. In accordance with custom, the executioner pulled the head from the basket and showed it, dripping, to the people.”

        -After the execution, some members of the crowd come forward and dip their handkerchiefs in the blood. Sanson cuts some strips from Louis’ clothing and begins selling them as souvenirs, as is his right as executioner. Some people raise a cheer, “The King is dead, long live the Republic!” a subversion of the traditional cheer, “The King is dead, long live the King!” which is used to mark the transition from one monarch to the next. One attendee reportedly shouts “Jacques de Molay is avenged!” a reference to the last Grandmaster of the Knights Templar, who had been burned at the stake by Louis’ ancestor Philip the Fair, and who according to legend had used his dying breath to lay a curse on the French royal bloodline.

        -Louis’ last wish, that the shedding of his own blood would not mean more bloodshed for France, will not come true. If de Molay’s curse is real, it will invoke not just a royal execution, but torrents of blood from the French nation. The monarchs of Europe, fearful of the Revolution’s spread, will turn on France and try to tear down the republican government by force of arms. In the provinces, thousands of French people will launch a counter-revolution to avenge their king and rein in the Revolution’s excesses. And in response to all this, the Revolutionary government will institute a Reign of Terror, with the guillotine as their weapon. All that and more in the next episode of Relevant History.

[PAUSE]

What follows is an addendum to the episode, and not an integral part of it. I’d thought about releasing a bonus episode about ultra-violence as executed by state and non-state actors, but it would have been really short, and it seemed to fit well with the theme of Louis XVI’s execution. So, here it is in all its bloody glory. I’m about to discuss some graphic and nasty stuff. If you’re not interested in vivid descriptions of real-world violence, including modern-day violence against real human beings, you may want to skip this part. It’s not for the faint of heart, nor is it in any way appropriate for children. Some might even call it exploitative, although I respectfully disagree. Regardless, if you stop the episode now, you won’t be missing any of the narrative history. That will resume in the next episode. But there’s a reason I put an “explicit” tag on this episode, so again, fair warning: things are about to get pretty nasty.

Now, I’d like to tell you that Relevant History is the best history podcast on the internet, but if I did I’d be lying. It’s actually the second-best, because as everyone knows the best history podcast on the internet is Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History. I mention this because Dan and I share a fascination with what he calls “the extremes of human experience,” and I can’t think of anything more extreme than being executed. When I think of someone like Louis XVI, I wonder what he’s going through at the end of his life. What is it like to know the exact hour of your own death and exactly how it’s going to happen? What’s going through your head a week before your execution? What about a day beforehand? An hour? What is it like to be loaded onto a carriage and paraded through the streets and actually see the guillotine come into view? What’s it like to feel the wooden frame close around your neck, knowing that any second the blade is about to drop? To hear the blade coming towards you? Does it hurt? Do the lights just go out, or are you actually conscious for a few seconds as your head drops into the basket?

        -I don’t have any answer to most of these questions. All of the stuff leading up to the execution – the anticipation – is probably different for everybody. We all have different personalities and process traumatic events differently, and I see no reason why the experience of anticipating your own demise would suddenly become a human universal. But that last question, when the beheaded person loses consciousness, is particularly interesting to me because on the one hand, it’s presumably similar for everybody and on the other hand, it’s tough to find out for sure. It’s not as if you can take a poll of all the people who’ve ever been guillotined and calculate an average. That said, the French government will use the guillotine from 1792 all the way up until 1977, and during that time some people try to come up with an answer. Remember, the whole point of using the guillotine is that it’s supposed to be humane. It’s only natural that people would investigate whether it actually is.

        -There are a few accounts we can look to, starting with the execution of political assassin Charlotte Corday, who I’ll be talking about in the next episode. After her beheading, executioner’s assistant Francois le Gros lifts her head from the basket and slaps her across the face. And according to accounts, she blushes and appears angry. Now, some of this is clearly exaggeration. It’s physically impossible for a severed head with no blood flow to “blush,” but what if she did appear angry? What if, even after being removed from her body, her head retained consciousness and she was able to register the insulting slap? It’s an interesting question.

        -Another account comes from a French doctor named Beaurieux, who attends the 1905 execution of a murderer named Henri Languille. According to Dr. Baurieux’ account:

        “I consider it essential for you to know that Languille displayed an extraordinary sang-froid and even courage from the moment when he was told, that his last hour had come, until the moment when he walked firmly to the scaffold. It may well be, in fact, that the conditions for observation, and consequently the phenomena, differ greatly according to whether the condemned persons retain all their sang-froid and are fully in control of themselves, or whether they are in such state of physical and mental prostration that they have to be carried to the place of execution, and are already half-dead, and as though paralysed by the appalling anguish of the fatal instant.

        “The head fell on the severed surface of the neck and I did not therefor have to take it up in my hands, as all the newspapers have vied with each other in repeating; I was not obliged even to touch it in order to set it upright. Chance served me well for the observation, which I wished to make.

        “Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds. This phenomenon has been remarked by all those finding themselves in the same conditions as myself for observing what happens after the severing of the neck …

        “I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased. The face relaxed, the lids half closed on the eyeballs, leaving only the white of the conjunctiva visible, exactly as in the dying whom we have occasion to see every day in the exercise of our profession, or as in those just dead. It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: ‘Languille!’ I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions – I insist advisedly on this peculiarity – but with an even movement, quite distinct and normal, such as happens in everyday life, with people awakened or torn from their thoughts.

        “Next Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves. I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression, that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks: I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me. After several seconds, the eyelids closed again, slowly and evenly, and the head took on the same appearance as it had had before I called out.

        “It was at that point that I called out again and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement – and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead.

        “I have just recounted to you with rigorous exactness what I was able to observe. The whole thing had lasted twenty-five to thirty seconds.”

        -If Dr. Beaurieux’ account is accurate – and I have no reason to believe that it’s not – then it seems like the severed head retains some type of consciousness for up to 30 seconds post-decapitation.

        -A third opinion comes from two more French doctors, Piedelievre and Fournier, who write in a 1956 report called Justice Without the Executioner: “…death is not instantaneous... Every vital element survives decapitation… [It is] a savage vivisection followed by a premature burial.”

        -There have also been experiments involving brain scans of decapitated rats, which show a burst of brain activity called the “wave of death” about 60 seconds after decapitation, although the scientists involved believe that the brains lose consciousness after a shorter period of time.

        -If all this is true, then beheading needs a new name. Maybe we should call it “de-bodying,” since for a brief period, the victim has the unique and terrifying experience of being a disembodied head.

        -To be fair, there are those who disagree. American University professor Robert Johnson has this to say about the death of Louis XVI: “If this near-death literature is right, he probably had no pain or despair, but experienced enhanced mental activity, then calm, then a sudden review of his life.” As for the cheering Paris mob, Johnson doubts that Louis would have registered it as a cheer, and instead would have heard “a kind of background music.” Let’s hope so, for King Louis’ sake.

But if we’re being honest, Louis XVI is only one of thousands of people who will meet their end at the guillotine. Most historians believe that around 17,000 people will be guillotined during the Reign of Terror, and it’s possible that the real number is even higher. The French Revolution is about to start cutting off heads left and right, and to some extent it’s easy to understand why, because when we think of capital punishment we usually think of deterrence. The state is sending a message: “Don’t do X, Y, Z… or else!” When we think of capital punishment, we also think of some kind of justice system. The condemned may not deserve what’s coming to them, but they’ve had a trial and been found guilty. But we don’t need to look very far to find stories of mass non-judicial killings by state actors.

        -The ancient Assyrians are famous for this. After a battle, they often build a monument with graphic descriptions of what they did to the losers, written in the first-person style. This is a reminder to any future would-be rebels of what happens to those who oppose the emperor. In one account from the 7th century BC, Emperor Ashurnasirpal II says:

        “I flayed as many nobles as had rebelled against me [and] draped their skins over the pile [of corpses]; some I spread out within the pile, some I erected on stakes upon the pile… I flayed many right through my land [and] draped their skins over the walls.”

        -Another account says:

        “I felled 50 of their fighting men with the sword, burnt 200 captives from them, [and] defeated in a battle on the plain 332 troops… With their blood I dyed the mountain red like red wool, [and] the rest of them the ravines [and] torrents of the mountain swallowed… I cut off the heads of their fighters [and] built [therewith] a tower before their city. I burnt their adolescent boys [and] girls.”

        -Yet another account reads:

        “In strife and conflict I besieged [and] conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword… I captured many troops alive; I cut off some of their arms [and] hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears, [and] extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living [and] one of heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city.”

        -If that sounds bad, listen to this account from a later Emperor, Sennacherib:

        “I cut their throats like lambs. I cut off their precious lives [as one cuts] a string. Like the many waters of a storm, I made [the contents of] their gullets and entrails run down upon the wide earth. My prancing steeds harnessed for my riding, plunged into the streams of their blood as [into] a river. The wheels of my war chariot, which brings low the wicked and the evil, were bespattered with blood and filth. With the bodies of their warriors I filled the plain like grass. [Their] testicles I cut off, and tore out their privates like the seeds of cucumbers.”

        -Now, massacring people after a battle isn’t strictly an Assyrian thing. In most places, for most of human history, there’s an unwritten rule of warfare that says that if a besieged city resists until it has to be taken by force, the besiegers are free to kill and loot. But what makes these Assyrian accounts stand out is the systematic nature of the killing and the fact that the Emperors seem almost proud of them.

The Romans are famous for crucifixion, which is a particularly awful death. People often hang on a cross for days before they finally die from exposure and asphyxiation, but for the most part crucifixion is a judicial punishment. In other words, the Senate or the Emperor isn’t typically just ordering a crucifixion. With the exception of mass condemnations after a slave revolt – Spartacus, anyone? – there’s a legal procedure. The Biblical story of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ is a good example. It’s also noteworthy that only rebellious slaves and certain other rebels are subject to crucifixion. Others are typically beheaded, thrown from a tall place, trampled by animals, or burned alive.

        -Now, I can’t possibly get into every culture and country, but I do want to talk a little bit about Medieval Europe because in many ways it forms the bridge between ancient history and the modern, Western world. And what we see in Medieval and later Renaissance Europe is a series of attempts to square these ancient, brutal executions with a new, more merciful religion. And yes, I hate the term “Medieval Europe” because Europe is a whole continent and the medieval era lasts several hundred years – even longer when you say “Medieval and Renaissance Europe.” But for the sake of brevity, I’m going to go ahead with a broad generalization.

        -The way Christian Europe does this is by turning the execution into an act of redemption. So on the one hand, you have all kinds of horrible punishments like burning at the stake or breaking on the wheel, and on the other hand, you have what seems to be genuine concern for the soul of the condemned person. In his book The Faithful Executioner, historian Joel F Harrington tells the story of Frantz Schmidt, a professional executioner from 16th-century Nuremberg, and explains that the execution is a sort of morality play. First, the condemned is read their sentence by a court of law, and is expected to thank the court for its justice – although some prisoners curse the court instead. Second, there’s a procession through town, so everybody can see the condemned on their way to the place of execution. Finally, before the sentence is carried out, the condemned is often allowed to pray or even sing hymns along with the assembled crowd. To the modern eye, it seems bizarre, but it makes perfect sense to the people in this time and place. Harrington writes:

        “Public executions, like corporal punishments, were meant to accomplish two goals: first, to shock spectators and, second, to reaffirm divine and temporal authority. A steady and reliable executioner played the pivotal role in achieving this delicate balance through his ritualized and regulated application of violence on the state’s behalf. The court condemnation, the death procession, and the execution itself constituted three acts in a carefully choreographed morality play, what historian Richard van Dülmen called ‘the theater of horror.’ Each participant— especially the directing executioner—played an integral role in ensuring the production’s ultimate success. The ‘good death’ Frantz and his colleagues sought was essentially a drama of religious redemption, in which the poor sinner acknowledged and atoned for his or her crimes, voluntarily served as an admonitory example, and in return was granted a swift death and the promise of salvation. It was, in that sense, the last transaction a condemned prisoner would make in this world.”

        -You can find a similar practice today in Saudi Arabia, although the steps of the morality play happen in a different order. There, the condemned is led to a town square in a sort of procession, and a judge reads out the criminal charges before the prisoner is executed, most often by beheading. Saudi Arabia also serves as an example of how execution with the sword can get messy, and why the guillotine seems humane by comparison. The following account is taken from a 1989 interview with Sa’id al-Bishi, the former executioner of the Province of Mecca who is said to have beheaded over 600 people in his 35-year career. Al-Bishi says:

        “The strangest and most difficult [experience] was once in Mecca when I had to execute two men who had killed a colleague of theirs and buried him on a farm in Wadi Fatima... [We were] in Sahat al-'Adl (Justice Square) in front of the Holy Mosque in Mecca. After the death sentence was read out, I struck the neck of the first criminal and in one blow his head fell off right in front of him and in the immediate view of the second criminal who was still awaiting the sword. When I went up to him he gave me a strange look, but I felt no pity for him because he was a criminal who deserved punishment. I hit him on the neck and he fell flat on the ground. The doctor examined him and declared him dead, but apparently he had been so shocked by the sight of his colleague's head that his heart had stopped beating for a few moments.”

        -Al-Bishi then says that he delivered a second blow to finish off the prisoner, and that on some occasions a third blow has been required.

These days, it’s popular in the West to pick on Saudi Arabia for their public beheadings, but if you ask me the Saudi system makes more sense than what we do in developed countries. Not many developed countries even have the death penalty these days, and personally I’m not in favor of it, but what really confuses me is the way we carry it out. Instead of a big public affair, executions take place behind closed doors, which seems to take away some of the deterrent effect. If you ask me, if you’re going to execute people, it should be done in public and the videos should be posted online. At least that way there’s a deterrent.

        -Two major developed countries that still execute people are Japan and my own country, the United States. In Japan, executions are carried out by hanging. In the US, most modern executions are carried out via lethal injection, although some states have backup methods such as a firing squad or nitrogen asphyxiation. Personally, if given the choice, I’d opt for a firing squad, but that’s just my opinion.

        -What strikes me about all of these methods is that they’re relatively humane. For example, several US states recently put lethal injections on hold because of difficulty in obtaining one of the drugs involved and the concern that potential replacements had never been tested. In other words, unlike the ancient or medieval worlds, there’s no torture involved. There’s no more breaking on the wheel or burning at the stake. With those methods, death is just the culmination of the punishment, and the condemned person is probably glad when it comes. Today, the punishment is that you forfeit whatever years of life you would have had remaining. They even sterilize the needle when giving a lethal injection. If there’s a last-minute stay of execution, nobody wants the condemned getting an infection.

        -The most fascinating developed country is China – and yes, I’m calling China a developed country because they are. You don’t get to build massive skyscrapers and public transit and have the second-largest economy in the world and still claim to be just “developing.” Anyway, China doesn’t only conduct their executions in private; they’re actually secret, and like everything the Chinese government does it lies through its teeth about the numbers. We’re talking a minimum of 1,100 executions a year according to official numbers, but probably in the neighborhood of 8,000 to 10,000, although it’s impossible to say because the Chinese government lies about literally everything.

        -What’s interesting about the Chinese system is the way they conduct executions. I watched a leaked video online that shows the execution of eight prisoners, some drug dealers and some murderers, and here’s how it goes down. They’re all convicted on the same day, and held briefly in a holding cell before being blindfolded and taken out behind the courthouse. Each one is forced to kneel by two police officers, while eight more officers with rifles take positions behind them. The prisoners are tied into the kneeling position, after which the officers who tied them up step backwards and the officers with the rifles step forward. The warden shouts the order to fire, and all eight rifle-armed officers fire simultaneously. All eight prisoners are shot in the back of the head and drop dead immediately. It’s tough to say because there are cuts in the video, but the whole process seems to take less than five minutes from the moment they’re led out of the courthouse until the moment they’re killed.

        -Just like the US and Japan, I’m baffled why the Chinese government doesn’t do this publicly. I don’t understand the deterrent value of executing criminals in secret, but again, the process seems pretty humane. There’s no visible torture, no rough treatment, and the speed of the whole process means that the prisoners don’t have a lot of time to panic or contemplate what’s about to happen to them. All of this to say that even in one of the world’s most repressive regimes, the government seems to want efficient executions with a minimum of suffering. The goal isn’t to hurt the prisoners. It’s to remove them from society.

If you’re looking for really nasty executions in the modern world, you can’t look at the world’s governments. Instead, you have to look at non-state actors. So before we wrap up, I want to talk about two examples: drug cartels and terrorist organizations, specifically ISIS. You can find this content on so-called “gore” websites, and I’d be very careful about those sites because there’s even worse stuff than what I’m going to be talking about. I have mixed feelings about these sites because they show things like babies drowning in the bathtub, which to me is just exploitative and awful. At the same time, these sites serve a valuable public service because respectable, mainstream websites won’t host content like ISIS beheadings, which are things the public should be aware of. Anyway, don’t search for this stuff unless you’re prepared to see some really sick things that I won’t be talking about.

I want to start with drug cartels because to the casual observer, all of their videos are just sadistic violence. But when you see somebody like a drug cartel post violent videos online, it’s important to ask yourself why. Remember, as violent as they are, cartels are businesses at the end of the day. And while some lower-level sicarios might post this stuff for fun, there’s a real “business” reason for lieutenants and higher-ranking members to post their executions online. The first reason is obvious: deterrence. There’s nothing quite like seeing a guy get his head cut off with a chainsaw to make you think twice about ratting out your boss.

        -The gore community gives these videos memorable names like No Mercy in Mexico or Sponsored by Adidas, and I want to talk about two of them to illustrate what I consider the two types of videos.

        -The first type is what I call an “intimidation” video because it’s all about business. These videos typically begin with a brief interrogation. The unfortunate victim is asked their name, their relationship to the cartel, and what they did to warrant an execution. Generally there are some sicarios standing around with assault rifles, so the condemned person thinks they’re “only” about to be shot, which helps to keep them relatively calm.

-In one of the worst intimidation videos I’ve seen, the victim is bent forward, and a cartel executioner makes a horizontal slice across the base of the skull, then methodically makes a vertical slice from the base of the skull towards the front, then two more slices up the side and around the ears. This allows them to peel the scalp forward in one piece. When the executioner reaches the temples and forehead, the victim is then rolled over, and an assistant helps to hold him in place by putting a boot on his chest. At this point, the victim speaks for the only time during the process, when he says in Spanish: “Don’t step on me, pops.” The skin is then peeled forward and sliced away from his face, with the executioner trimming the front of the skin away from the chin, taking care not to cut too deeply and kill the victim at this point. Only then does he cut the victim’s throat, make a second cut through the gap in the bottom of the jaw, and pull the tongue down through the hole to create a so-called “Brazilian necktie.” The executioner then cuts away the victim’s shirt, makes a single slice down the center of the chest, reaches inside, and cuts out the heart, which he holds up to the camera to show that it’s still beating. The camera then lingers on the beating heart for a full minute before the video abruptly ends.

        -What strikes me about this video is how calm the victim seems to be through the whole experience. He only complains when someone steps on his chest, which indicates to me that he can feel pressure but not pain, so he’s probably been heavily drugged. This begs the question, “Why would a cartel give their victim a painkiller before torturing him to death?” The answer is that they’re probably going to leave the body to be found in this state, with a Brazilian necktie, the scalp and face removed in one piece and the heart laying on top of the chest. If the victim isn’t drugged, they’re going to be struggling, and the whole thing will be a botched mess instead of a display of precision violence. In other words, this murder isn’t personal – it’s strictly business, and the body is meant to send a message.

        -The other type of murder is what I think of as a pure torture video, where the killing isn’t just business – it’s also personal. This type of death is usually inflicted on someone who has betrayed the cartel, so we’re not just talking about a member of a rival cartel. The victim is either a government informant or has switched sides to join another cartel.

        -The most notorious of these videos has been named Funkytown by the gore community, because the song Funkytown by Lipps Inc. is playing in the background. In it, a screaming victim writhes in pain on the floor. His skin has already been flayed away from his face, which is just a mass of blood. Someone is making shallow cuts on his neck with a razor knife, not to kill him, but in order to inflict more pain. At one point, he reaches for his face, and you can see that his wrists are bound. I say “wrists” because his hands have been amputated, so the poor guy is trying to shield himself but can’t. At another point, he begs to be killed, and someone puts what looks like the end of a broomstick in his mouth both to keep him quiet and to hold his head in place. The whole time, people are laughing and joking in the background.

        -What strikes me about this video is that despite the obvious torture and blood loss, the victim is still very much conscious and aware. If you look closely, you can see an IV tube going into one of his arms, which gives a clue as to why. Instead of being drugged with a painkiller, he’s being given something to keep him awake, most likely a mix of saline and adrenaline. The cartel is using medical means to extend the torture for as long as possible and ensure that their victim feels every bit of it. I don’t have a full translation of the audio and I don’t speak Spanish, but one person does taunt the victim by telling him that he chose the wrong side. In other words, he’s a traitor, and this is his comeuppance.

        -Almost all of the Cartel videos I’ve seen are filmed on low-quality cellphone cameras. The makers aren’t interested in production quality. They’re making a quick and dirty video to throw on the internet and intimidate their rivals as well as any would-be traitors. Oscar-worthy cinematographers they are not.

On the other end of the production value scale, we find ISIS. Now, you’ve probably heard of some of these videos, like the numerous beheadings or the one where the Jordanian pilot is burned alive. What most of them have in common is that they’re shot in HD by people who seem to know what they’re doing. Change the content out for something less terrible, and the quality is right up there with anything you’d find on one of the major streaming services. The one I’m going to describe is called The Making of Illusion.

        -The video begins with a CGI logo and animation for the ISIS film production body. I don’t speak Arabic, so I’m not sure what it says, but it’s a bit unsettling to see a logo and animation at the beginning of a terrorist video. Next, there’s a series of shots of American spies, mostly stock footage and film footage, including shots of Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg from the Mission: Impossible films. We also see the US Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA logos, and a CGI map of the Middle East with US bases marked on it. There’s a voiceover in Arabic which again, I don’t understand and couldn’t find a transcript for, but the message is clear: US spies are everywhere, they’re targeting Islamic countries, and they’re trying to stop the spread of ISIS. We then see some ISIS fighters training and praying, intercut with previous ISIS beheading videos. An Arab man is watching a laptop screen and listening on an earpiece, frantically writing in Arabic before we see an American soldier reading the same text and typing into his own laptop. Again, the message is clear: some of our Muslim brothers are betraying the cause and working with the Americans.

        -There are more shots of ISIS fighters, intercut with shots of European landmarks and CCTV footage of a terrorist attack in Belgium. I’m able to make out the words: “Belgium,” “Paris,” and “Orlando” in the voiceover. More ISIS fighters training and more execution clips. Then the title appears in Arabic and English: The Making of Illusion, written in 3D text and dropping onto a flaming background, accompanied by a “whoosh” sound.

        -The next five minutes are unintelligible to anyone who doesn’t speak Arabic, and again, I couldn’t find a translation. There’s an interrogation in a dark room, which appears to be staged. A man in a black balaclava is interviewing a man in an orange prison jumpsuit. From other context, I know the man in the balaclava is an ISIS interrogator, and the man in the jumpsuit is one of sixteen Syrians who have been captured and accused of spying for the US. We also see some brief interview clips of other ISIS members, including one who appears to be sitting in an office in a Western country. His face is blacked out and his voice is digitally altered, similar to the way they alter voices of informants in crime documentaries.

        -At around eight and a half minutes in, the camera cuts to the inside of a slaughterhouse, and we hear a group of men singing in Arabic. The song they’re singing is called a Nasheed, or a jihadist war song. I don’t have the lyrics for this specific song, but here are the words to a similar song. And I should note that some of the Arabic words are religious terms that don’t have an exact English translation:

        “Come, come, keepers of the greatness!

        Come out light and heavy and respond to the persecutions!

        He is cursing and raging with exhaustion.

        So where are the glorious, where are the lions?

        Move towards the fast horses and come.

        And scatter those behind them by fighting them!

        And mourn them by tearing them out with your spear!

        And rip their lungs out with your knife!

        Let’s go to war, lions!

        To strong castles and borders!

        To bring lightning down on blasphemy!

        For us to be exalted with our flag and banner!

        We throw our souls forward with the love of the heavens!

        We shake up the war with an open heart!

        We march on them with spears!

        We will not hold back because of the violence of the war.

        Come, come, keepers of the greatness!

        Come out light and heavy and respond to the persecutions!

        He is cursing and raging with exhaustion.

        So where are the glorious, where are the lions?”

        -As this war song plays, the sixteen Syrian prisoners are dragged one by one through the slaughterhouse. They’re laid over a grate in the floor and their throats are cut so the blood flows into the grates like a slaughtered animal. At some point, the music is replaced by a voiceover which I’m pretty sure is a speech by ISIS leader and would-be Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. As he speaks, the victims’ bodies are hung on chains in a tiled room – again, just like you’d do with a slaughtered animal. The video ends with the executioner standing over the last victim, who is still bleeding out. We hear an exaggerated breathing sound effect as the victim expires, then a closeup of the body being dragged through the door to the room with the chains, and the door slams shut before the camera fades to black. Again, if the content weren’t so terrible, you’d think you were watching a Hollywood movie.

        -The purpose of this content isn’t to inspire fear, although it may have that secondary effect. No, this is a propaganda video, meant to recruit a certain kind of young Muslim man who’s already been radicalized and needs one final push to convince him to join ISIS. The whole message says that the Westerners are spying on us, there are traitors in our midst, but we will root them out. Our interrogators will uncover the truth and the Western spies will be put to death. The jihadi war song is meant to inspire, like a patriotic anthem. And at the end, who is alive? Not the victims, but the executioner, as the Caliph’s voice speaks triumphantly in the background.

        -We’re talking about ultra-violence, yes. But it’s ultra-violence with a specific goal and a specific target audience. This is true for all such violence throughout history, if you take the time to understand it.

In the next couple of episodes, we’ll be talking about the French Reign of Terror and surrounding events. As the heads drop into the baskets and are piled up next to the executioner’s platform, ask yourself why this is happening. It’s not just about killing enemies of the Revolution. That could just as easily be accomplished behind closed doors. It’s about making a public display that says to any would-be counter-revolutionaries: “Watch out. You could be next.” The coming Reign of Terror is terrible indeed.

This transcript is linked from: https://www.DanTolerPodcast.com/