707. The Terror: How The French Revolution Collapsed Into Chaos (Part 1)

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Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabytes of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. How long, Frenchman, will you put up with disorder and divisions? Oh, Frenchman, a little longer, and all that will remain of you is the memory of your existence. Already, the problem is that you're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. Already, the provinces are marching on Paris. Already, half of our empire burns with the fire of discord and civil war. There is still a way to extinguish it, but that way must be swift. Already, the vilest of villains, Marat, whose name alone is the image of all crimes, is falling under the avenging blade, shaking the mountain and making Danton and Robespierre pale, those other brigands seated on this black rock. You're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. You're not alone. Your peace depends on the execution of the law. I am not undermining it by killing Marat. Condemned by the universe, he is outside the law. What court will judge me? Let my last breath be useful to my fellow citizens. Let my head, held aloft in Paris, be a rallying point for all the friends of the law. Let the universe declare that I, that I deserved well of humanity. Frenchmen, I have shown you the way. You know your enemies. Rise up. Strike. So a very punchy manifesto there, and it had a very catchy title, 'Address to the French Friends of Law and Peace', and it was found on a young woman who was arrested in Paris on the 13th of July, 1793. And the name of this young woman, Charlotte Corday, 24 years old, strikingly good-looking. Everyone commented on this all the time. And of course, her looks and her youth made her arrest all the more of a sensation, because she was charged with the assassination of perhaps the single most controversial man in France. A radical journalist, a revolutionary firebrand, the supreme champion of terror, Jean-Paul Marat. And it is one of the most famous episodes in French history, 'The Murder of Marat'. The pretty young woman who comes from the provinces, talks her way into Marat's apartment, finds him soaking his pustule-ridden body in a bath, pulls out a knife, plunges it deep into his chest. A scene famously painted, by Jacques-Louis David, one of the most famous illustrations of the French Revolution ever painted. But Dominic, it's not just an incredibly exciting story in and of itself, is it? It is also the trigger for perhaps the most celebrated, the most notorious passage of the entire revolution, the passage that is known as 'The Terror'. Dominic Yeah, exactly right. I'd say it's one of the most thrilling moments in all world history. And it's also one of the most interesting ones. I remember doing it at school, just absolutely loving it. The moment in 1793, 1794, when as you say, France descends into the reign of terror. So loads of people will be familiar with the images of this. The triumph of Madame Guillotine, you've seen it in films, you've seen it in video games and books, whatever. The carts rattling through the streets loaded with prisoners. The old women, the tricoteurs knitting at the foot of the guillotine. They're gonna mob howling for blood as the blade begins to fall. It's something that English writers in particular have always adored. They're turning the melodrama right up to the maximum. So Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities or Hilary Mantel in A Place of Greater Safety. But in this series, we will be looking behind those images to explore exactly what happened and why. And we have an amazing cast of characters. So we'll be talking about the revolutionaries, people like Danton and Robespierre. We've got an amazing episode to come on the execution of Marie Antoinette. And then we have today's protagonist, the man who kicks off the whole story. And he really is an extraordinarily grotesque and fascinating character with his lovely blisters and his squint and his vehement rhetoric. And that is Jean-Paul Marat. So Marat is actually born in what's now Switzerland in 1743 in a small town. His father was a Sardinian friar who converted to Calvinism. So as a, as a little boy, Marat is something he has in common with a lot of revolutionary figures. He's very ambitious. He said later of five, I wanted to be a schoolmaster, at 15, a professor, at 18, an author, and at 20, a creative genius. Actually, he's none of those things. He moves to France initially, and then he goes off to London, lives in London. And he arrives in London when London is gripped by the great controversy about the radical journalist and MP, John Wilkes. And Wilkes is a great sort of newspaper man who's always slacking off the British government and the establishment and corruption. And this is a great influence on Marat. He's really taken with Wilkes' radical style and his, you know, his sort of invocation of the ordinary people against the corrupt metropolitan elite. And Marat will obviously take that and then turn that up to 11. But in the short term, his real enthusiasm is medicine. So he writes a thesis on gonorrhea. He manages to wangle a degree in absentia from St. Andrews, I don't think he ever went to St. Andrews. And then he went into the wellness industry. He's based in Newcastle for five years, isn't he? So presumably, he speaks English with a Geordie accent. Yeah, he goes around peddling these mad cures for venereal disease. If you have bad eyesight, you, of course, like me, Tom, wear glasses. He would prescribe you electrotherapy for your eyes. It would definitely change your eyesight. I don't think whether it would make it better. The sizzling of your eyeballs. This doesn't really work out. He comes back to Paris. He establishes himself as an experimental scientist. He basically puts his money from the wellness industry, what money he's made into making his own laboratory. He claims to have proved that fire is an igneous fluid. And what would that have meant? It meant that previous views about fire were wrong and that actually people needed to appreciate the fluidity of fire. I mean, how would he monetize that? He wouldn't. That's the problem. He also said that Newton was a fool. Newton's theories of light and color were totally wrong. He claimed to have written papers proving that Newton was an idiot. I mean, isn't that what Einstein does, basically? Is Einstein and Marat parallel lives? The genius ahead of his time? Yeah, maybe. Anyway, Marat submitted these findings to the French Royal Academy of Sciences, and they said, "This is idiocy from you." They rejected him, and he felt humiliated. Actually, what Robert Danton, the great historian of 18th century France, points out that this feeling of humiliation on the part of a provincial young man is very, very common among the leaders of the revolution. You know, you can go through a lot of these characters and they are from the provinces, they're from small towns, they've come to the big city, they feel rejected and ostracised by this sort of establishment figures. And this fuels a lot of their rage once the revolution starts. I mean, isn't that the stereotype of revolutionaries, that it's people who've got just enough academic background to feel that they deserve better of society and then don't get it? Exactly. It's people who've spent a lot of time doing kind of YouTube rabbit holes. And they're not idiots, but they feel rejected by the sort of, you know, big science or big history or whatever it might be. So this is Marat. By the late 1780s, he's a very lonely, bitter, disappointed man. Everyone thinks he's a crank and a charlatan. He's struggling to make ends meet. And then, bang, summer of 1789, France convulsed by political and economic crisis. Louis XVI runs out of money, gets into a mess politically, recalling the Estates General, mob storms the Bastille, and this disorder escalates into what we would call the French Revolution. And Marat seizes his chance. He basically thinks back to John Wilkes in London, when he was there all those years ago, 1770s or something. And he says, bang, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to reinvent myself as a radical polemicist, set up my own newspaper, the People's Friend, L'Ami du Peu. So basically, the cause of the French Revolution is the British press. Yeah. I mean, that's, you heard it here first. The model of British journalism is what triggers it all. But we know where to stop, Tom, and that's the difference. So, well, Marat goes well beyond, the tone of the British press, the 18th century British press. He has this incredibly violent and messianic tone in his writings from the very beginning. There's a brilliant new biography, came out, I think, this year or maybe late last year, by the historian Keith Michael Baker, the kind of new definitive life of Marat. And Baker sees Marat as the first modern populist. And to pick out a couple of his elements of his appeal, I mean, these are obviously old things. They go back a long way. But Marat reinvents them for a new age. One of them is the invocation of the people, with a capital P. So the people are constantly in danger of being betrayed by appeasers and traitors. That's a huge part of modern populism, and it's part of Marat's journalism. Marat is obsessed with conspiracies. He says, quite explicitly, my aim is to keep my readers constantly alert. If I don't keep them alert, they will fall back into the abyss and they'll be dragged there by royalists and priests and other ne'er-do-wells who are all plotting against the people. I mean, you see, it's the idea of, you know, wake up, sheeple. If the truth that is motivating all these awful things that are happening is revealed, then you, as someone who has been illuminated, stand actually above the mass of the people. So Marat's calling himself a friend of the people, but he's also offering a kind of privileged status to those who read him. Completely. And actually, you are quite right. The language of waking and sleeping, Marat uses that a lot. We're so familiar with that now, both on the radio, right, and of course, on the left. Hence, are you woke? Marat would have been very, very familiar with that. And his argument was always, to wake people up, you need to be provocative, confrontational, indeed, violent. That could be rhetorical violence or it could be physical violence, but only extreme language and extreme behavior can rouse the masses from their slumber so their eyes are opened to the horrors of the conspiracy that are going on. And I suppose at this point, to slightly extenuating circumstance for him, is that he doesn't know quite what the matches are that he's playing with. No, I suppose he doesn't, but Marat's instinct is always to to keep lighting those matches. Yeah, and chucking them onto sticks of jellignite. He doesn't have an off button. I don't think he'd ever have had an off button, frankly. Anyway, the revolution spirals out of control in the early 1790s and Marat becomes one of its most controversial outspoken figures. This is very deliberate, very deliberate from him. So rather as in the last few years, you'd see people on social media saying, you know, civility is a political choice. We don't have a, you know, we don't want to be civil. We want to be confrontational because the crisis facing our civilization is so great. Marat sees charm, politeness, courtesy as fake and a sign of treason, actually. It's because it's fake, you are treasonous if you are polite and polished. And I suppose also that, I mean, as with social media today, so then attracting hate can become a measure of status. Yeah, completely, completely. Marat has a, I mean, he actually has this sort of martyr complex. He's constantly talking about how his life is in danger, how plotters and traitors are out to get him. Now, actually, the argument that civility and charm are treacherous is very convenient for Marat because he's an extremely uncivil and charmless man. Everybody agrees he's hideously ugly. He's thin. He's shabby. He's kind of twitchy. He has this shock of unkempt black hair. He's a bit cross-eyed. And above all, he has this absolutely dreadful skin condition. And people have spent a lot of ink discussing whether it's syphilis, which it probably wasn't. The diagnosis now is chronic dermatitis herpetiformis. I don't really know what that means, but it's bad. And it's getting worse, isn't it? It is, yeah. And it will flare up when he's under stress. And the cure for that is a bath, right? Well, that's the only thing that will soothe it. He comes out in these terrible blisters and sores, so he takes a bath. So he has to have a soak. He has a soak. And he's very small, isn't he? He's only about five foot, I think. He's a sort of wizened man. He's like Yoda. And although he doesn't sound like a great catch, he does actually, in 1792, he goes through a sort of atheistical marriage ceremony with a woman called Simone Evra, who was 21 years his junior and was a sort of maragrupee. Right. So he's not exactly a catch. He's a terrible husband, I would imagine. But anyway, he's got this wife, so that's nice. Most of the other revolutionaries can't stand Marat. They find him very, very objectionable company. So Corday, in the speech you read, his assassin, she bracketed him with Danton and Robespierre. But neither Danton nor Robespierre actually liked Marat or really enjoyed hanging around with him. They thought he's extreme, he's histrionic, he's much too bloodthirsty. He's always shouting and ranting and he's just extremely unpleasant company. Other sort of apostles of the terror would say he doesn't pay for it. He just drinks, he catches off you, he borrows money, doesn't pay it back. He's just basically an incredibly unpleasant man. I suppose also what he does, though, is to push to extremes arguments that people like Danton and Robespierre are making that we need to react firmly to counter-revolution or whatever. Marat is saying we basically need to bathe France in blood. Completely. So from the beginning, he's talking about killing people. 600 heads in 1790. In 1791, he's talking about 200,000 or 300,000 people. And this is not just empty rhetoric. So in 1792, France is at war. The Prussians are advancing on Paris. And it's Marat who urges the street kind of militants, the sans-culottes, the trouserless sort of masses, to break into the prisons and to slaughter 1,500 inmates of the prisons. And Marat said this is justice. This will deter these legions of traitors. So this is a very important point. This has real-world consequences. You know, he is encouraging the massacre of hundreds and hundreds of people. And moderates, even people who supported the revolution but were moderate, came to hate Marat. So in his book on the French Revolution, Peter McPhee cites a club in Grandville in Normandy. And this club issued a resolution. It called Marat the provoker of murder who's leading a disgusting faction of blood. But in Paris, which is his kind of heartland, Marat is very popular. He's seen as the tribune. He's seen as the tribune of the common man. And a week after these prison massacres, he's elected to represent Paris in the new National Convention. So the National Convention is going to be playing a huge part in our story in this series. And this is the new sort of legislature of France. And it meets at first in the old riding school, the Manège, in the Tuileries Gardens, in the gardens of the Royal Palace. And the mood of this new convention is very well suited to Marat's style. Because this winter, 1792 to 1793, under the pressure of the economic and military crises that the revolution is facing, it's beginning to tear itself apart. So to paint a picture of the scene, in this convention building, you have about 750 largely young men, inexperienced, a lot of them from the provinces originally, very passionate, very idealistic. They're all dressed, I mean, and we'll talk about this in a future episode, I know. They wear this sort of revolutionary uniform. These long black overcoats and these big kind of leather boots. They will be debating for 12 hours at a time, arguing about the new society they're trying to build. And then all night, they will be staying up to read letters and study paperwork. And all the time, they're getting drunk. By and large, they're a very particular kind of people. I already said they're idealistic young men. So they're young, they're all Republicans, although lots of lawyers and writers. They're from middle-class backgrounds, and they're steeped in the values of the Enlightenment. So they've all read, there, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Yeah, Rousseau is the dominating in isn't he he is exactly but within the convention there are now two factions we've talked about them in previous series who are competing for people's allegiance so on the one hand you have a faction called the gironda and they really have had their upper hand for the last year or so and they are led i mean let's just reduce them very simplistically to two people a former anti-slavery journalist called jacques pierre priso and there's a woman called madame roulon presiding at a literary salon and by and large massive generalization but by and large their power base are the kind of high-minded bien pensant upper middle classes of the big provincial cities like bordeaux marseille and particularly bordeaux right because the name gironde girondin comes from the gironde and bordeaux is just down river from the gironde estuary exactly so they're kind of mercantile uh self-improving yeah and the mercantile aspect is important isn't it because they are there's a set i mean maybe slightly anachronistic but they are kind of free market um in their attitude towards economics whereas we will see their opponents are much more dirigiste so there's a slight roy jenkins against tony ben do you know i was just about to say there are people who would have been in the sdp in the 1980s i think the gironda oh good i'm glad i got that right that would mean nothing to anyone who's not british in fact i mean nothing to anybody who's not british or who's under 50 but you know for people who've read your book i'm going to say that they're not british for people who've read your books it would mean a great deal precisely to both of those people it's a self-selecting elite dominic um an important thing about the gironda they're not a parisian party so they're not they don't have a lot of strength in the streets of paris now on the other hand the other people the other big faction are what's called the montagnard the mountain and they're called the mountain because they sit high up in the left-hand side of the convention there's about 200 of them they're more radical more militant and the montagnard are big in paris they are dominated by some of the best known figures of the revolution more radical figures so you've got robsbier who we'll be talking about next time maximilian robsbier cold chilly self-consciously virtuous you know the incarnation of kind of republican purity and then you've got uh george danton who is a big man big appetites earthy corrupt the sort of slightly more churchillian i suppose it's some it's you and me basically basically let's be up front i didn't want to say it so what's the difference between the gironda and the montagnard it really boils down to two things i think the montagnard like mara they idealize the people they are ultra populists the gironda the sort of more high-minded types are a little bit more suspicious of the people they're more paternalistic they want to be the people directing the revolution they're anxious about giving too much power to the streets the gironda also and this is allied to that they think the revolution is going to be a revolution they're going to be a revolution they're going to be a is in danger of tipping into kind of you know an orgy of bloodshed they want to reign back on the violence a bit whereas the montagnard i mean this is putting it very simplistically they see the violence as necessary even healthy to build the better world they want so for example when they scrapped the monarchy which they did in the autumn of 1972 the montagnard said we've got to get rid of louis xvi the gironda were much more squeamish about it you know this one man do we really need to get rid of him all of this and then the montagnard said we've got to get rid of him and so their enemies the girondas critics said hold on are these guys committed to the revolution or not because you know you can't make an omelette and are they prepared to break the eggs well they people start to say that they are actively royalist didn't they and the mountain exactly same so if we fast forward to the the spring of 1793 this feud between these two factions is so bitter it's probably only going to end one way i mean somebody is going to lose their heads and on the 13th of march 1793 the montagnard said we've got to get rid of them all we've got to get rid of them a great gironda speaker who was regarded as actually the best speaker in the convention again a guy called pierre vergniaud he issued this famous prophecy he said we are in danger of destroying ourselves in all these squabbles we will be like saturn devouring his children and this will all end in a dictatorship and of course how prescient he was he was quite right the irony though is actually when you look at vergniaud's speech he says this in the course of this massive partisan factional tirade against the montagnard so you know he's only kind of got himself to blame to some degree and that tells you how toxic the situation has become and it's so toxic precisely because france in 1793 is gripped by two massive existential crises so the first one is economic meltdown so france has had a succession of absolutely terrible harvests the national nationwide grain market is broken down the government is running out of money to pay for the war against the paper money, the assignats as it's called. They've got 4 billion of these assignats on the market in early 1793. And that has triggered this colossal inflation, bread prices, sugar and whatnot going through the roof. There are shortages. There are protests almost every day at markets. There are women marching in the streets of Paris. It's not great. I mean, women are really a vital part of this story because they kind of emerge as a huge force on the streets of Paris over the spring of 1793. But also, Dom, just to say that these are exactly the circumstances that led to the revolution in the first place and the storming of the Bastille. And I suppose part of what makes the situation so toxic is that people, particularly those who are very poor, those who are on the verge of starvation, are thinking, well, we've had the revolution. Things should have improved. They haven't improved. Therefore, someone must be to blame for the fact that they haven't improved. You know, they must be traitors. And so it's generating, you know, it's fueling that mood of conspiracy that Marat is harnessing so effectively. It totally is. And there's the emergence of a group in 1793 who are exploiting precisely this sentiment. They call the enragés, so the enraged or the madmen. So basically people on social media. Yeah. They basically go around saying, the working class poor are being betrayed. We need state intervention. We need massive price controls, massive redistribution of wealth. You know, the revolution needs to go much further. And the really disturbing thing about these enragés is they have moustaches. And this is seen as a sign of kind of virile working class militancy. And a lot of the sort of more middle class revolutionaries are very shocked by these people's moustaches. Now, the other big existential threat is the war. So the war, I mean, the mad thing is the French started the war. And also, particularly the Girondins, were massively keen on it, weren't they? And people like Rosepierre were massively against it. So if the war goes badly, then the Girondins are in real trouble. Completely. The Girondins started it. They thought they wanted to export the ideals of the revolution. They thought it would bring France together under their leadership. They declared war on Austria in April 1792. Then the Prussians joined in. And this has basically went badly for France, and it turned into a struggle for national survival. Now, so far, France's deadliest enemy, Britain, has stayed out. But British public opinion, more certainly high political opinion, was shocked by the execution of the King Louis XVI. William Pitt, the Prime Minister, called it the foulest and most atrocious act the world has ever seen. And there was a sort of sentiment, I think, among the British political classes at the beginning of 1793. The French Revolution is now totally out of control. It's going to spread across its borders. It's a threat to world peace. And it's going to spread across its borders. And it's going to spread to world peace. And at some point, we're going to have to stop it. The extraordinary thing is that even though Britain is a very dangerous opponent, you know, with its finances, its industry, and above all, its navy, the revolutionaries in Paris are absolutely gagging for a chance to have a crack at the British. So even before the execution of the King, one Girondin deputy told the National Convention, he said, the British Empire is basically just waiting for us to come and conquer it. We'll take India. We'll take the Caribbean. We'll take the United States. We'll take the Kingdom. It is on the ruins of the Tower of London that we will sign the treaty which will establish the freedom of the world. And once again, it's the convention, it's France that declares war first. They declared war on Britain and the Dutch Republic on the 1st of May, 1793. The Montagnard deputy, Georges Couton, we can liberate Europe in six months and purge the earth of all tyrants. I mean, this is the way they talk, you know, this incredibly idealistic, impatient, kind of restless rhetoric. But also that weird thing about the French Revolution that is actually nationalistic and universal in its ambitions and never quite decide between the two. No. Well, I think they see the two as the same, don't they? Basically, everyone will turn into France and that'll be great for them. So in practical terms, what this means is that France is now at war on almost every frontier. It's fighting Britain, Holland, Prussia, Austria, and soon it'll be fighting Spain as well. It's fighting Britain and later Spain in the Caribbean. It's also facing a massive slave rebellion, slave revolution on the crucial, sugar island of Saint-Domingue, future Haiti. And because it's taken on Britain, it now risks the classic British technique in a war, which is to use the navy to impose an economic blockade. So that's not going to help with the French economy. And also the British fleet can move to areas on the coast in France that are counter-revolutionary. Exactly. Particularly in the South and the West. So they're at, France is in danger of being completely embattled, surrounded, encircled, and so on and so forth. And to fight all these threats, the military. desperately needs more manpower. So on the 24th of February 1793, the convention votes to draft 300,000 more men and issues quotas to officials across the countryside. This is the number of people you need to get. And in rural areas, this is colossally unpopular. And this goes back to a point you made about the economy. So the historian Timothy Tackett says, puts it this way, he says, in the eyes of many rural citizens, the revolution had taken away their priests, killed their king and raised their taxes. Now, the convention wanted to send them off to die in a war hundreds of kilometers from their homes, while many of those who had started and supported the war remained in their towns to count the taxes. So if you're a peasant, this is very, very alarming. And nowhere is this more contentious than in a region. So it's just south of Nantes when you look on the maps, that sort of rural west central France on the Atlantic. And this is called the Vendée. And the Vendée is a very distinctive part of the country. It's got an unusual landscape, kind of woods and fields separated by this very, very high hedgerows. And people live in these tiny villages scattered across this landscape or in isolated farms. The local aristocracy in the Vendée lived on the land. They were quite close to the peasants, by and large. They had good relations with them. The church as well played a massive part in the social life of this region. It was basically the only institution. It brought people together, the only collective institution that gave their lives a sort of sense of community. And when the revolution attacked the clergy in 1790, 1791, getting them to sign loyalty oaths or swear loyalty oaths to the revolution, people in the Vendée were very upset about it. They said, well, who are these people in Paris to tell us and our priests what to do to come and disrupt our way of life? And this conscription order in 1793 is basically the final straw. And in the first half of the 1793, it was the final straw. And in the first weeks of March 1793, the Vendée explodes. And attacks on officials and the National Guard escalate into this mass uprising. And it basically unites all sectors of society. So you've got peasants, you've got priests, you've got landowners. They arm themselves with scythes and pikes. They hide in all these woods and hedgerows. And they will kind of leap out in this kind of guerrilla insurgency to attack troops sent from Paris to put down the rising. But there's also an element of a kind of religious crusade about it. It reminds me a bit of, I don't know, the Pilgrimage of Grace and Under Henry VIII or something. You know, the Vendéans call themselves the Catholic and Royal Army. They wear religious images like the Sacred Heart on their coats. And their rhetoric is quite moving, I think, quite stirring. We are free men. We want our priests back. If we must die, let them kill us in our own fields. And all this kind of thing. So the Vendéans have risen up. In Paris, however, among the radicals who are in charge, they are seen as barbaric and backward. So one newspaper says they're an unholy alliance of vindictive lordlings, wild priests, gamekeepers without pity, and fanatical peasants. So this is basically everything the revolution is trying to eradicate. They cast the Vendéans as a caricature. You say that. The vindictive peasants is interesting. Though, isn't it? Because aristocrats, priests, gamekeepers, you can understand them being enemy of the people. But if the peasantry aren't the people, then I don't really know what is. And there is, I guess, the kind of the emergence of metropolitan radicals feeling impatient with people in the country who are too conservative for their tastes. And that's a theme that will run through revolutions beyond the French Revolution, right? Yeah, completely. I mean, Russia, 1920s, 1930s, exactly the same story. And it becomes a war rather like, actually, the comparison with the Soviet Union. This becomes a campaign of horrific savagery. As we will see, we'll talk about this a little bit in future episodes, massacres, reprisals, scorched earth campaign. I mean, to jump ahead, this campaign probably kills about a quarter of the population of the Vendée, maybe 200,000 people. And there's a long running historiographical debate among French historians. Is it genocidal? Is it a kind of proto-genocide? Does that anticipate some of the horrors of the 20th century? You know, it's a very, very impassioned debate. Anyway, so it's March 1793. You've got the economy, you've got the war, you've got the Vendée, the news from the Vendée has come in. Could things be any worse for the convention and the people running it? Guess what? They could, and they're about to get much worse because as they're getting the first reports of the uprising in the Vendée, they're also getting news from the Flanders battlefront. So in the low countries, the French have done quite well. They've been pushing. Their commander is Charles-François Dumouriez, and Dumouriez used to be the Girondins' foreign minister. He was one of the great architects of the war. He saw it as a chance to kind of cement his own personal popularity. But he has been in bad odor recently with the convention because he has, when he's been conquering bits of what becomes Belgium, he's kind of seen as being soft on the local elites because he wants to kind of get them to cooperate. He doesn't want to drive them away from his army. And then a total disaster. So on the 8th of March, 1793, the Austrians, having been on the back foot, launched a counteroffensive, and they absolutely smashed Dumouriez' army at the Battle of Nervinden. And Dumouriez pushed all the way back to the battle of Nervinden, and he was able to get back to his country. He had to withdraw all his troops from Belgium and Holland. And at this point, Dumouriez thinks, God, this is a disaster. And actually, he thinks, part of the reason we're losing this is because there's such chaos in Paris, and these flipping oddballs are running the revolution. So he wants to do a Sulla. Yeah. Or try to do what one of his old army colleagues, Marquis de Lafayette, General Lafayette, had thought of doing. March on Paris, set myself up basically as a military dictator, store a bit of order, sort all this chaos out. Knock heads together. Correct. He says, it's the army's time now. It's such a classic thing in history. And he goes to his men and says, will we march on Paris? And his men say, no, actually, we won't. I don't want to. You're the problem, not the people in Paris. And so what Dumouriez does next confirms all the darkest suspicions of people like Marat and Robespierre. He rides to the Austrian lines on the 5th of April, and he hands himself in along with a load of other senior officers, including the future French king, Louis-Philippe. So Dumouriez, the guy who was in charge of France's army, has just gone over to the opposition. And as one volunteer in the army writes to his mother, who can we trust now? This Dumouriez, whom the French Republic regarded as its saviour, has thrown off the mask. So he's revealed himself to be a traitor. So you might say, well, who could have seen this coming? — Who indeed? — Who indeed? Well, we know who saw this coming. The man who sees a traitor behind every mask, and that is Jean-Paul Marat. Marat had said two weeks ago, I think Dumouriez is probably a traitor. And Dumouriez has proved him right. And so for Dumouriez's allies in the Girondins faction, this is a catastrophe. In Paris, there are riots by the militants, by the sans-culottes, attacking Girondins newspapers, Girondins printers, and so on. Georges Danton, the earthy, Churchill figure. — Dominic Sandbrook of the French Revolution. — Thank you. He'd been quite close to Dumouriez. He says, come on, enough of this now. The gloves have got to come off. There can be no further truce between the patriots and the cowards. And now there's a very telling moment. So up until now, the deputies in the convention had immunity from prosecution. But the convention votes in the aftermath of Dumouriez's defection that their immunity can be lifted if they are suspected of plotting with the enemy of the French Revolution. So, you know, it's a very, enemies of liberty, equality, and republican government. And Danton plays a leading role in proposing and pushing that through, doesn't he? And a time will come when he may regret that. There's a lot of irony in this series. There's an awful lot of dramatic irony. So, Jumeirah is defected. It's kicking off in the Vendée. It's looking all bad with the economy and on the frontiers and everything. There is this widespread sense of apocalyptic national emergency at this point. March, April 1793. An overriding obsession with enemies within. People like Jumeirah who are about to betray us. When you say apocalyptic, I mean, this is still an unbelievably Catholic Christian country, even if atheists are starting to seize the commanding heights of the revolution. And the sense of an apocalypse of. Sheep and goats being divided up, good and evil, I think is hugely a part of the climate of the age. They don't think of it in overtly theological terms, but it is fundamentally theological, I think. When you read the rhetoric, I mean, it's all good and evil, purity and impurity, all of that kind of thing. Absolutely. So, anyway, this moment, March, April 1793, the historian Timothy Tackett says, this is the major turning point in the coming of the terror. So, if you think of the reign of terror, the tumbrils, the guillotines, this is really the moment that sets this in motion. So, what's behind this is that for four years, people like Mara have been saying there is a giant conspiracy of aristocrats and priests. And they say now, well, look, we've been proved right. We know the king and queen were in on it. We know some of our generals were in on it, some of our top politicians. It is time now to take extreme measures against this conspiracy. And Tackett quotes the Montagnard deputy, Lazard Carnot, who goes on to be the great organiser of the army. Carnot says, at this point, we can never hope for a genuine peace with our enemies, neither with those inside nor those outside the nation. Either we pulverise them or we will be crushed by them. Any weakness will be fatal. And so it's in the next few weeks that they set up what become all the key institutions of the reign of terror. There's no blueprint. There's no plan. Yeah, it's ad hoc, isn't it? I mean, important to emphasise that. They are making stuff up as they go along, but all of these things, these they're putting in place, perhaps unwittingly, the pieces of the machine. I mean, I think definitely unwittingly, because as we will see, so many of the people who are involved in setting up these institutions. End up being devoured by it. Well, it's Saturn devouring his children, isn't it? It is, completely it is. So to give you some examples, they set up the institution of what are called deputies on mission. So these are people who are sent out from the national convention, basically to impose the will of the central government on provinces by force, if necessary. So you're the equivalent of a member of the House of Representatives or a British MP or something, and you are sent out to. God knows where, maybe with some of the troops, your job is to impose the national order on this remote part of France. There's that. There is, on the 10th of March, a revolutionary tribunal. This is a court that will try people accused of political crimes when the result is the death sentence. The death sentence has to be carried out within 24 hours and there is no right of appeal. Yeah, and that's set up in the Palace of Justice, isn't it? Just down from Notre Dame. And in the basement, there are pre-existing cells of the conciergerie. And so the conciergerie will become the great holding pen for people who are arrested by this revolutionary tribunal. And they know that the revolutionary tribunal with no right of appeal is going to be very, very severe. But they lean into that. Danton says, let us be terrible so the people will not have to be. In other words, what they're saying is, we cannot afford a return to the anarchy, of the prison massacres. We can't have mobs running through the streets. So basically, we're going to have to do this ourselves and we are going to have to eliminate all the traitors. They want to export this across the country. So they have surveillance committees in every commune in the country. These surveillance committees will make lists of all the foreigners. They will also compile a register of all adult citizens to mark off when people have done their civic duty. And they will encourage people to report all counter-revolutionary activity, although. Of course, that's not really very tightly defined. So if you fancy your neighbor's pig or something and you want to denounce him, this is your opportunity. And the most famous of these institutions, the 6th of April, 1793, the Committee of Public Safety. And this has been set up to handle the different military emergencies. It is the key driver of the reign of terror. It wasn't actually conceived that way. It was actually proposed, ironically, by a Girondin called Isna. You would know this better than anyone. It was modeled on the temporary dictatorships of ancient Rome. So am I right in saying that when Rome was facing an existential threat, you'd appoint Cincinnati or somebody from his plow and he would take over as a dictator? Yeah. For six months, it's short. It's a self-confined period of time. That's what's crucial. But the dictator has complete control of the state to end a state of emergency. So the Committee of Public Safety is modeled on this. Its powers are renewed every month. So every month, the convention can choose whether or not to give it another lease of life. It always does. It has nine members at first, and its meetings are secret. And the person that dominates it initially is Danton. And Danton, actually, at this point, is not on the more militant wing of the Montagnard faction. He is much more pragmatic. So in the first three months of the committee's existence, Danton is saying, let's have a look and see if we can make a deal with some of our enemies, the Prussians, for example. Well, the Austrians, right? I mean, it's often said that he has channels of communication to the Austrians. And not only that, but making a deal with some of the provinces. So this is anathema to some of the revolutionaries. But Danton is like, do we need to drive everybody against us? You know, if people aren't in actual revolt already, we can talk to them as we would to the Austrians or to the Prussians. We don't need to fight. We don't need to fight everybody all at once. So he's trying to find pragmatic solutions. While Danton is doing that, though, so remember, we're still in April or so, 1793, the factional feud between the Girondins and the Montagnards is reaching an absolute peak, a sort of frenzy. And our friend Marat is in the thick of it. He is laying into the Girondins. He says they are the criminal accomplices of royalty who every day seek to kindle a flame to the flames of civil war. And the Girondins, of course, they're on the back foot now. Now their mate Dumouriez has defected. Well, not just mate, one of their shining stars. Their ex-foreign minister. Yeah. We said about how they'd scrapped the rule on deputies having immunity from prosecution. The Girondins think we need to kind of strike back. We need to assert ourselves. And they decide they would use this rule change against the person they hate more than any other, which is Marat. And on the 14th of April, when a lot of these deputies have gone away from Paris to go on mission to the provinces to impose the new order, the Girondins move an indictment. They charge Marat with inciting an uprising against the convention. And they're able to get it through because so many deputies are away. And so now Marat is effectively facing, it's like an impeachment trial. He's facing a formal trial in front of the Revolutionary Tribunal. And his first instinct is to go into hiding. But after a few days, three days of hiding, he thinks to himself, it becomes clear to him, the mood on the streets of Paris is very much in his favor. And so he hands himself in to the police. He says, fine, bring it on. I'll face the trial. And his trial is held at the Palais de Justice on the 24th of April. And for the Girondins, it's a total fiasco. The prosecutor, who's a guy called Fouquier-Tinville, we will hear more about him in future episodes. He's a Montagnard supporter. And he lets Marat basically hold court. You know, speak at length, rant and rave. Marat says, you know, I did say things against the convention, but my remarks have been taken out of context. I'm the people's friend. I want nothing more than the good of the nation. Blah, blah, blah, blah. The courtroom is full of his supporters. The jury, 10 people in the jury, and it takes them a few hours and they acquit him. They say, this bloke Marat's brilliant. Why have you accused him? And he is chaired out of the courtroom, you know, on people's shoulders. He is crowned with roses and he's carried around and he's carried back into the convention by about 800 people chanting, vive la République, vive Marat. So for Marat, this is actually, you know, it was a dark hour, but it has turned into a stunning success. His star has never been higher. Marat's on top of the world. But for the Girondins, this has been an absolute humiliation. And they've got a lot of enemies in the radical clubs, on the streets, in the Paris Commune, the kind of city government, who are itching to get at them. They can sense, the Girondins' weakness. And then the next few days, they sharpen their knives to strike. Although, of course, Dominic, they are not the only people who are sharpening a knife. And in the second half, we will meet someone else who's sharpening a knife, and that is Charlotte Corday. But before that, we will be finding out what this clash with the Girondins means for Jean-Paul Marat. See you after the break. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Goal Hangers, The Rest Is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Think of some things that glow. Okay, fireflies, glow sticks, the northern lights. They're very cool. But what if we could replicate that glow inside our bodies? And what if doing so could help us save lives? Because Cancer Research UK scientists, they're investigating whether a special fluorescent dye that sticks to prostate cancer cells could tackle an ongoing disease. And if so, we have our own challenge in the operating room, removing every single trace of cancer. Because when cancer cells are glowing and easy to spot, surgeons can precisely remove them, leaving healthy cells untouched, meaning there's less chance of the cancer returning and fewer nasty side effects. 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And it meets you where you are in your browser and in your inbox. Innovative revenue streams are already setting the pace with Atio. Now it's your turn. Try Atio for free at A-T-T-I-O dot com slash Goalhanger. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash Goalhanger. Go to mintmobile.com slash history. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for three months. For six months or $180 for 12 months. Plan required, $15 per month equivalent. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Rest Is History, where it is the spring of 1793. For our first episode, we're going to be talking about the history of Mint Mobile. The rest is history. We're going to be talking about the history of Mint Mobile. normally been the bedrock of the revolution. And they think it's gone too far. They've been provoked by local extremists who've tried to set up their own kind of tribunals and things and rig elections and stuff. And this escalates into a full-scale rebellion against what the people in Lyon see as the tyranny of the Paris radicals. So it ends, well, I mean, we'll have a lot more about Lyon. It basically ends horribly with siege, with lots of guillotining, lots of shooting and all of this. So the result of this, right, we're in the summer of 1793. Yet another ingredient. So the war on the frontiers, the economic meltdown, the revolt in the Vendée, and now what historians call a federalist uprising in lots of provincial cities, so Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, and so on, led by the mercantile middle classes who had once been, you know, the motor of the revolution. Oh, I've been riding on a crocodile and now the crocodile's trying to eat me. Whoever would have thought it. Exactly, exactly. Now, one of these places is a place in Normandy called Caen. So Caen, even before the coup, had turned against the convention. And actually, for that reason, this is where some of the Girondins deputies had fled even before they could be arrested. So there's about 20 of them in Caen, Girondins deputies, by the middle of June 1793. And they are saying, Paris has been taken over by nutcases and brigands. We should raise an army, march on the capital, kick out these madmen. And on the 7th of July, the Girondins organized a parade through the center of Caen. 2,500 volunteers marching with a military band. And imagine the scene, handsome town, the parade marching past with a band. And, you know, the camera sort of pans upwards and you see people watching on the balconies. And it focuses in on one person on the balcony in particular. And this is a very pretty young woman. Very short, actually, 5'1". They're like Marat. She's a bit more. Becoming, exactly, than Marat. And her name is Charlotte Corday. So Charlotte Corday, who's watching this parade, she's 24 years old, and she comes from a kind of minor aristocratic family in rural Normandy. She's actually descended from the 17th century playwright, Pierre Cornet, who wrote all these incredibly boring plays that I had to study years ago about duty and honor and all about the Romans. Classical. Classical plays, exactly. And Charlotte Corday, she's not an ultra-reactionary by any means. She's conference-schooled, and she had grown up reading Plutarch, Voltaire, Rousseau, all the same books. All the lads. Yeah. But all the same books that the revolutionaries read. And at first, she liked the revolution. She was a Girondeur. She became horrified by the lurch towards violence. She was shocked when a local priest who had given the last rites to her mother was kind of stripped of his living, and then he was hunted down in the woods and guillotined. And this wasn't a religious thing from Charlotte. She doesn't seem to have been particularly pious. It was actually a personal thing. You know, he was close to the family. She was horrified by what happened to him. Anyway, the Girondeurs have turned up in Caen. They're making all these speeches in the town. They've got their headquarters right in the center. She's very impressed. She loves the Girondeurs, and she thinks, I'd love to strike a blow for their cause. She's an idealistic young woman. And the man she decides will bear the brunt of this blow is the man who has dominated today's story. He is Jean-Paul Marat. Now, we've already talked about how Marat is a massive hate figure for the Girondins. He's a particular hate figure in Caen, because when he heard that Caen had turned against Paris, he said to the convention, we should send in the sans-culottes with pitchforks, scythes, pikes, guns, and sabers, and crush them, meaning the people in Caen, without mercy. So, in the streets of Caen, there have been attacks on Marat circulating, pamphlets saying what a dog he is. So, in Simon Sharma's book, Citizens, he quotes one example. Let Marat's head fall, and the Republic is saved. Purge France of this man of blood. Marat sees the public safety only in a river of blood. Well then, his own must flow, for his head must fall to save 200,000 others. And I suppose the thing that is troubling for the Girondins is that the rhetoric of the Girondins exactly echoes the rhetoric that had been used in the trial of Louis XVI to justify his execution. This idea that there is someone, you kill him, and then you save the revolution. Very, very tempting. But there's a slight quality of the royalist rhetoric about it. There maybe is, but having said all that, I think if you're a Girondin at this point, you think, yeah, let's just kill him. Yeah, for sure. But retrospectively, it's not going to look good. No, I suppose not. I'll tell you who it looks good to. It looks good to Charlotte Corday. Because as we said, she's a descendant of Corneille and all his plays about heroism and sacrifice. And she has read her Plutarch. So she's read all about people assassinating other people, you know, in the name of the Republic and so on. And she thinks, well, why not me? I could be a patriotic heroine. I could give my life for my country. And she decides that she will. And on the 9th of July, it's a very hot day, she writes a note to her father. And she says, Daddy, I'm going to England. Papa, je vais en Angleterre. And then she gets on the coach for Paris and she's got her copy of Plutarch with her. You know, you can imagine her earnestly reading about Plutarch. Yeah. So the coach journey from Caen to Paris takes two days. And she arrives about midday on the 11th of July. And she takes a room at the Hotel de la Providence, which is very popular with visitors from Normandy. And her original plan was, you know, she could go as a spectator to the convention, as so many people did. She could confront Marat before the representatives of the nation and strike her blow there. But she asks around and people say, well, Marat hasn't been to the convention for weeks. He's vanished. No one, you know, he's been in his bath. However, the good news for her, people say, Marat still, you can still go and see him. Basically, if you need his help or you're coming to make a denunciation of an enemy of the revolution, he will see you. I mean, he'll be in the bath, but he'll see you. So Friday, the 12th of July, Charlotte drafts a manifesto. Explaining exactly why she's doing what she's doing. She calls on the people of France to wake up. She says, I'm here to rouse you against this monster. I want to make the mountain, the Montagnard, tremble. I want to send a message that we won't stand for this sort of bloodshed, for this extremism. And I will be judged by posterity. My actions will be seen as legal because such a man is outside the law. And she also says, she also writes a note to Marat saying, I'd like to come and see you. And she says, I'm a massive patriot. I've come from Caen. I've got secret information. I want to do France a service. Can I come and see you? She gets no reply. The day goes by. The next day, the 13th of July, is a Saturday. And Paris, there are always loads of people coming at the weekends into Paris from the suburbs and the villages. But they're expecting more people than usual because tomorrow, of course, is the anniversary. of the fall of the Bastille, the 14th of July. The authorities have just organised a big festival. They're launching yet another new constitution. And they're going to have a big festival for it. The city has been decorated with red, white and blue, you know, the tricolour colours. It's going to be a really hot day. So it's sort of, the temperature is rising. People have started gathering early. There are going to be executions. There are nine people from Orléans who had attacked deputies on mission. And they're going to be guillotined. So the crowds are very excited. It's going to be a brilliant day, basically. It's a great day's entertainment. At about eight o'clock in the morning, Charlotte Corday leaves her hotel and she walks to the arcades of the Palais Royal. Lots of shops, stalls. She buys a newspaper and the newspaper tells her that the convention are likely to ask for death sentences for the imprisoned Girondin deputies. She also buys a new hat. Bonnet, which was a characteristic dress of Normandy. She buys a black Parisian hat with green ribbons. And she goes into a shop called Le Coutelier Badin, a sort of cutlery shop. And she buys a black-handled kitchen knife with a big blade, a blade about 15 centimetres long. Between about 11.30 and 12, sometime at that point, she arrives by a cab at Marat's house in the Rue des Cordeliers. She doesn't, though, have an appointment. And Marat's sister-in-law is there, and Marat's sister-in-law says he's too ill to have any visitors today. He'll have to come back another day. So Charlotte goes back to her hotel and she writes a second letter. And she says, I've come all this way from Caen. I actually have vital information about the security of the Republic. Furthermore, I am being persecuted in the cause of liberty. I am unhappy. That should be enough to give me the right to your protection. So she's written this letter. The afternoon goes by and that evening, at about half past six, she takes another cab to the Rue des Cordeliers and she's got her letter and she's got the knife. And as she arrives, she sees that the door to Marat's apartment is open. And the reason is that a delivery man is taking in the newspapers and fresh bread, baguettes, surely. And Charlotte starts to go upstairs. And on the stairs, she's intercepted by Marat's wife, Simone. I mean, you can understand why. I mean, if you find, you know, you're married to someone and there's a woman woman creeping up towards the bathroom where you're husband is lying naked i think you'd feel justified and yeah but mara often has visitors i think doesn't he i mean i suppose it depends how beautiful the young charlotte is charlotte very beautiful of course i think we've established that so simone says what are you doing you know who let you in why are you coming upstairs and charlotte doesn't say she shouts she says i've got the names of gerund and traitors because she notes she wants mara to hear and mara can hear the confusion from his bath and he says let her in let her in you know she goes into his bathroom this has always puzzled me i'm assuming he's mostly not visible under the you know the lip of the bath and the surface of the water because superating genitals it can't be a very attractive sight anyway he's in the bath he's tied a wet cloth around his head like a sort of turban and he's working on some paperwork on this plank across the bath and he says you know sit down my dear and charlotte sits down and she starts to tell him what's going on in con she says well they're doing down turned up they're giving speeches all this and simone his wife is a bit suspicious of all this unsurprisingly and she stays there as well listening so they're chatting for about 10 minutes and then about 10 minutes in mara says to simone can you go and get me some more kale in solution for my bath water i don't know why this is such a great thing but apparently it is and simone goes out to get it and at this point mara says okay let's cut to the chase give me the names of all the jurors and their supporters and charlotte begins to recite the names of 18 people and when she's got to the end mara says good in a few days i will have them all guillotined he's such a fun guy he's such a funster well as is charlotte because at this point she gets to her feet from the chair she reaches into her dress she pulls out this kitchen knife and she plunges it deep into mara's chest and mara shrieks out he howls out to me my dear friend meaning to his wife but those are the last words he ever says immediately he sinks back into the water and there's blood pouring out of his chest and simone rushes back in with other people from the household there's a man called lauren ba who works on mara's paper he sees the opportunity to grab charlotte corday by the breasts and pushes her down onto the ground and holds her down while groping her which i think is poor from him and at this point either simone or her sister we don't know which starts basically punching charlotte in the face pummeling her but the neighbors then all rush in because they've heard the screaming and then the police rush in and basically drag them off charlotte the neighbors try to lift mara from the tub to staunch the knife has gone through an artery it's pierced his lung and his heart he probably died within seconds basically just after he shouted out he probably died moments later now we'll come back to mara first of all charlotte corday the police as i said were there almost straight away she's caught red-handed she's interrogated straight away and by an extraordinary coincidence one of the people who interrogated her is a guy called jean baptiste drouet and people who listened to one of our earlier french revolutionaries who were interrogated by an extraordinary coincidence series will remember drouet was the postmaster who had spotted louis the 16th during the royal family's flight to varennes so he's now in paris and he's on hand to interrogate her and charlotte is completely open i mean it's not like she can possibly deny doing it she says yeah i did it i came to paris to heal mara and they're like well who put you up to this and from the beginning she says i acted alone now meanwhile while she's saying all this there's this gathering baying for blood and you know they really would have lynched charlotte on the spot had the police not been there one woman says is shouting i would like to rip her apart and eat her beat by bit by bit and drouet says no no no no no don't touch her because if you touch her we will lose the links in the plot which is an important point so they don't want a jack ruby style intervention they don't and so she's taken to the abbey and she's taken to the abbey and she's taken to the abbey prison the abbey prison is where the september massacres of the prison inmates had begun and she's questioned three times by officials of the revolutionary tribunal they question her again and again and it's always about this issue of the links in the plot and this is because they are absolutely convinced that she must be part of a girondin conspiracy is that because she's a woman a young woman i think that's part of it unquestionably there's no doubt that they think that a mere woman cannot have acted alone it's not possible for a woman to take the initiative in this way and to be so bold i suppose also they're massively into conspiracy theories aren't they so it's like kennedy's assassination you know you can't have a lone actor it's got to be some sinister conspiracy behind it that but even more so absolutely embedded in the political imagination of paris in 1793 is the notion of a foreign conspiracy and a conspiracy involving people enemies within as well as without so when something like this happens it must be part of the conspiracy in which foreigners aristocrats priests and girondin are all implicated there's a really telling exchange with a guy called montaner who is the president of the revolutionary tribunal and he says to her well who told you to do this and she says well nobody i alone conceived the plan and executed it and he says that's just not possible because you are telling us that you think mara is the cause of all the evil in france but mara is the man who has never ceased from unmasking traitors and conspirators so someone must have been lying to you about mara and who was that person and she says to this guy you're mad it is only in paris that people have eyes for mara in the other departments he is regarded as a monster but of course the revolutionary tribunal can't get their heads around that the failure of political imagination is such they cannot conceive that in the other parts of france people would think of mara as a bad man and they thought well it must be a conspiracy that's we'll be talking about him next time he said it has been mathematically demonstrated that this monster to whom nature has given the form of a woman was sent by the conspirators of mathematically brew i want to see that equation so anyway charlotte's trial is on the 17th of july the trial was six hours the verdict to foregone conclusion and it's very some moving moments actually they had gone through all her letters to try to find evidence this conspiracy and one of the letters they read out was a letter to her father forgive me dear papa for having disposed my existence without your permission i have avenged many innocent victims i prevented many other disasters one day the people will lose their illusions and rejoice at being delivered from a tyrant anyway she's condemned to the guillotine the sentence is going to be carried out immediately as is the way with the revolutionary tribunal but she actually has a last request she's seen an officer of the national guard a man called howard sketching her during the trial and she says could he paint my picture before i have my head cut off and permission is given and this guy how i came to her cell and painted her portrait before she was executed so this is the portrait that you see of her when you you google her and when the executioner came to cut her hair before her death she cut off one of the locks herself and she gave it to this guy how and she said take this as a souvenir of a poor dying woman and then she was loaded into the cell and she was taken to the cell and she was taken to the cell and she was the cart the tumbril taken to the guillotine at the place de greve and there's a huge crowd there to watch her die everybody said she died really well you know composed calm she'd she'd known this was coming when the moment she got on the coach to paris she had known this would happen um people said you know her face was so calm that one would have said she was a statue not everybody dies well in the french revolution but she dies really well do you know this this fantastic story that's told about what happens when her head drops into the basket and the executioner goes to pick it up and he supposedly holds it up to the crowd and gives the cheeks her cheeks a slap because he's a mara enthusiast and it's it's it's said that she blushed oh so still feeling even though her head's been chopped off she's still demure still demure now so that's charlotte corday what about mara so mara in death even more than life becomes this great symbol of revolutionary militancy he becomes a great symbol of revolutionary militancy he becomes a martyr for a sacred cause and i use those words very deliberately within hours of his death someone posted a poem on the door of his house people mara is dead the lover of the fatherland your friend your sucker the hope of the afflicted has fallen beneath the blows of the withered horde weep but remember that he must be avenged i feel it's always a bad sign in a revolution when people start writing poetry completely i couldn't agree with you more i mean there's a lot of artistic representation of course to mara's death so the man they they turn to is the artist jacques louis david who is a montagnard who's you know the most famous the most celebrated and influential painter in france well dominate we will be hearing about him in this week's bonus with laura coming and she'll be looking at david's career more generally because he is a remarkable figure and he's been kind of hovering on in the background of so much of the episodes that we've been doing on the on him the focus on him how can i hear that because i'd love to hear it you could uh Joined this thing called The Restless History Club. And apparently there's a website, therestlesshistory.com, and you just go there and sign up. And I gather there's a whole range of supplementary benefits as well. I do like a supplementary benefit, to be fair, so I'll probably do that. I'll do that straight after doing this, actually. All right, so David organized the funeral. And David wanted to turn it into this great political tableau, a sort of Roman public spectacle. And his plan was, he said, I'm going to embalm Marat and we will exhibit him in the Caudelier Convent, former convent, as a sort of classical martyr. So we'll give him a crown of oak leaves. We'll design a Roman-style bed on which he will recline. His pen will be in hand and we'll pin up his writings around there. Everyone says, oh, this is absolutely brilliant. Can't wait. Actually, doing this is a nightmare. Marat, as soon as they get hold of the body, David says, oh, Jesus. Because basically it's. He's covered in those sores, in blisters and separating puss-ridden sores. So they have to make him up to disguise his skin. Then when they prop him up on the bed, Marat is obviously dead. He's a corpse. And his tongue is lolling out madly from his mouth. So they have to cut his tongue, cut it up and stuff, just hold it in place. They sew up his wound in his chest. That started to gape and to sort of reek. So they have to sew that up. Now, there are also some claims, I don't know how true this is, actually, that his arm had become dislocated in all the sort of to-ings and fro-ings. So they decide to just take his arm off completely. And so on, somebody else's arm, an arm from another body, like Frankenstein's monster. It'd be a twist if it was Charlotte Corday's arm. That is a massive twist, with the knife, with the knife. Yeah. They sewed on this arm. But when they came back the next day, the arm had fallen off. And they kept having to sew it back on. So they do that. Now, that's not even the biggest thing. The biggest thing is that I've mentioned multiple times deliberately, and people may have wondered why, that it was very hot. And Marat's corpse has begun to rot in the heat. So there's a terrible stench. And they're having to spray Marat's body, and indeed the surrounding room, with perfume and vinegar. The whole time. But the stench is so disgusting, that after a day and a half, they give up. And they say, we're just going to have to have the funeral now. We're going to give up on this. So they have the funeral. They have a torch-lit procession. There's loads of maidens in white robes. They've taken out his heart, and they have it in an urn. One of the members of the club gives this massive rant. And he lies down and prostrates himself in front of the urn. And he says, I mean, Tom, this is such Tom Holland bingo. He says, I mean, that is Dominion bingo. And, you know, they suspend that urn with the heart of Marat from the ceiling of the Cordelier Club. And the Cordelier Club was a Franciscan convent. So, I mean, the kind of the Christian undertoes to the French Revolution. When you look for them, you see them everywhere. I mean, they are everywhere. I mean, they have relics, don't they? They have Marat relics. So you can buy all sorts of sort of locks of his hair. You can buy merch. You can buy plates. You can buy little obelisks of Marat. Women go and have the special Marat haircuts, which is insane. Because Marat was such an unattractive person. They renamed towns after him. So Montmartre was renamed Montmarat. Le Havre, the town of Le Havre was renamed Le Havre Marat. I think the French should lean back into this, actually. I think visiting Montmartre. Montmartre is quite an annoying place with all sorts of people, caricature artists and things. I think it was Montmarat and it was for Marat impersonators. Sitting in baths. Yeah. Mime artists performing the death of Marat. I'd definitely go to see that. So Marat is dead and now the descent into the terror becomes unstoppable. Because, of course, if you are on the radical wing of the revolution, if you have this conspiratorial mindset, you say, look, this is it now. This is the final proof. We had the king and queen running away. We had the revelation that the king and queen were kind of plotting against us and the revolution. General Dumouriez defecting to the Austrians. Now, this proves basically no one can be trusted. Any man or woman in the street that you pass could be part of the conspiracy walking around with a kitchen knife, you know, to stab a patriot. So in the next few days, the Girondin deputies who haven't fled the city are taken from house arrest and taken formally into prison. And everybody know this isn't going to end well for them. However, the national emergency. Emergency is far from over. So the Vendée's in flames. Lyon's in revolt. The poor haven't got any bread. The Royal Navy. So finally, Tom, someone in this story that we can really root for. The Royal Navy are blockading France's ports and the Austrians and the Prussians are advancing in the east. So the question now is who on earth is going to save the Republic? Now, a year earlier, France had been in a mess and they had looked at Danton. But Danton is distracted. His wife had just died. He's married again. He's married a 17 year old. He's taken this child bride back to his native Champagne and he's been out of town. Also, Danton's not quite in step with the new mood. He's a little bit too worldly, a bit too pragmatic, a bit too keen on deals and compromises. Well, he's turned into a centrist dad, hasn't he? Relative to the more radical elements of the Jacobin club. Yeah, he has. He doesn't have the icy, pitiless class. There's clarity that the Montagnards are looking for. So actually, while he's away, they vote him off the Committee of Public Safety. Danton's a kind of busted flush. So the question is, who is going to replace him? And the answer comes 17 days later when a new member joins the Committee of Public Safety. And this man will become the embodiment of the reign of terror. And this man is, of course, Maximilien Robespierre. Next time, we will have a deep dive into his life. His character, terror, will become the order of the day. The carts will start rattling towards the guillotine in escalating numbers. And France will become ever more soaked in blood. And after that episode, we have another four epic episodes. One on the execution of Marie Antoinette. One on the fall of Danton. The attack on Christianity. And one on the fall of Robespierre himself. And club members can hear all of them now. And to join them, just to reiterate, therestishistory.com. And you can also hear Léo Cumming talking about the painting, David's painting, The Death of Marat. And if you sign up at therestishistory.com, you will also be able to get our super-sore-away revolutionary newsletter absolutely free. But for now, au revoir. Au revoir. ♪♪♪ Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's Wholesale Club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kids? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents. 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. BJ's, home of the save. I'm going to Washington. This is Snap Judgment from KQED. When everything is falling apart, what do you do? Hurricane Helene shut everything down. No roads, no cars, no way through. But his daughter was getting married. And somehow, someway, he was going to walk her down that aisle. All systems down. A new Snap Judgment miniseries from KQED. Tap to listen now. I'm not giving up. I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the bear. The restaurant is flooded. Everything's either going to be okay. No, stop. Or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned. But we have each other. FX is the bear. The final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+.