Maximilien Robespierre’s final major speech to the National Convention on 26 July 1794 is a dramatic yet flawed attempt to reassert his authority as the defender of revolutionary virtue. The speech, filled with self-pity and vague accusations of conspiracy, reflects his isolation and growing paranoia. Despite its theatrical intensity, it fails to unite the Convention. Instead, it sparks outrage and self-defense, as deputies—including the finance committee’s Combon—challenge the allegations, exposing Robespierre’s lack of concrete evidence and credibility. His absence from public duties for six weeks has eroded his legitimacy, and his enemies, including radicals Collot and Bio and secret police leaders Vadié and Amar, exploit the situation to discredit him. The speech backfires, triggering a public backlash in which deputies accuse Robespierre of inciting fear and corruption, while also turning on each other. This moment reveals the fragility of revolutionary unity: the revolution is not driven by pure ideology but by factionalism, personal ambition, and political survival. The episode underscores that Robespierre’s downfall was not due to a single decision, but a culmination of internal divisions, exhaustion, and the failure of leadership to address public discontent. The story highlights how the French Revolution’s trajectory was shaped not by grand narratives, but by individual choices, paranoia, and the collapse of trust in revolutionary figures.
They call me a tyrant. If I were, they would crawl at my feet. I would stuff them with gold. I would give them the right to commit all the crimes they liked and they would thank me for it. What is the faction I belong to? It is you yourselves. What is the faction that since the beginning of the revolution has struck down so many traitors? It is you. It is the people. This is the only faction to which I am devoted. Who am I? I who have been accused. Why a slave of liberty. A living martyr of the Republic. Both the victim and the enemy of crime. Men who know me are slandered. Other men's felonies are forgiven. But my zeal is treated as a crime. If you take away my conscience, I am the unhappiest of all men. I do not even enjoy the rights of a citizen. I am not even allowed to fulfill the duties of a representative of the people. I was made to combat crime, not to govern it. The time has not yet come when good men can freely serve the fatherland. For as long as this horde of rogues is in control, the defenders of liberty will be outcasts. So that's a brilliant speech. Maximilian Roespierre addressing the national convention on 26th July 1794. He's combating crime. He's defending the revolution. He is sneering at the very suggestion that he's a tyrant. Of course, he's not a tyrant. And yet, Dominic, you have written here a characteristically rambling self-pitying speech. Yeah, it is a rambling and self-pitying speech. I've actually read the whole thing. You can find the whole thing online. And to try to find a bit for you to read was a herchialian undertaking. It probably took longer than preparing the notes for the episode because it's so wordy, so rambling, so self-indulgent, his speech. Historians, I have to say, have given it an absolutely pasting burn large. It is worse than a bad speech as we will discover. It is a terrible political mistake by Roespierre. Yes, worse than a crime than a mistake. It is exactly. And what is more, this is his envoy to the French Revolution. And to this podcast, this is the last speech he ever made. Well, as we will see, there is the latest speech that he makes, but actually no one could hear what he was saying. Yeah, I didn't know he's repulsed. Exactly. So, ladies and gentlemen, we are at the climax of this series. This is the 24th episode of the French Revolution. Now, initially, we did it in one. We did it in one 45 minute episode. And I think the average length of these episodes is about what, four hours now. Twice as long as that episode. Yeah, exactly. But then it was kind of 40 minutes, wasn't it? So, let's hope this isn't the client, like the climax of Game of Thrones or something, that people say it was poor. They threw it away and the wrong person won. So, happily, the French Revolution, as it's commonly told, ends with a narrative banger, like the fall of the Bastille, like the flight to Varenne, like the murder of Mara, like the executions of Louis XVIth and Mary Antoinette or the fall of Donton. It is a fantastic story. And there are lots of narrative drama loads of twists. What is interesting about this story is that we know more about what happened on the 26th and 27th of July 1794. There are almost any other points in the Revolution because the people who ended up winning commissioned detailed reports from across Paris and all the different sections, which were the kind of neighborhoods of Paris, as well as hundreds of different individual police reports. A great story in Colin Jones wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Fall of Horba Spear, based on all these reports reconstructing almost minute by minute the events of those two days. And yet, as he points out, the paradox is we know what people did, but we don't know what they said or what they thought. And so much of this is a mystery because it happened behind closed doors. It happened there were whispers in the shadows. And basically as soon as it was all over, people started making up stuff about why they behaved as they did. They started inventing things. And the truth became obscured behind this kind of great fog of propaganda. But two things right at the beginning. Number one, what happens in today's episode is not inevitable. I don't think any historian thinks it's inevitable. This is your classic case in history of a very dramatic event in which things could have turned out very differently. So often the way of political crises. And that's the genius of Colin Jones's book, isn't it? That he makes what is a very familiar story, seem exciting, unexpected, you don't know, as you turn the pages, you don't know what's going to happen. He has a nice, it's a very simple trick, but by telling it in the present tense, he gives it a sense of immediacy, like Carl Isle. Exactly. The grand old man of British writers on the French Revolution. There was a sense in his book that the end is not yet written, the end is not predetermined, which is what it should be. The other thing I think which is book reinforces, this really is a story about individuals and individual decision making. It's actually so often in sort of textbooks about the French Revolution that you'll see the lines, you know, this couldn't last forever. There was inevitably going to be a backlash. And when it came Robespierre felt. But actually, in this case, it becomes very clear, this is not about a backlash against the terror, at least if there is a backlash against the terror, it's not the sole cause. There was a nice line I thought from a Montenegro deputy called Marc Antoine Boudreau, which probably sums the whole thing up. Boudreau said, "The struggle of the 9th of Théâme d'Or," which is the date attributed to this, "was not a matter of principles, it was a matter of killing." And we will see how true that is. I mean, I suppose an obvious point would be that accusing someone of having the wrong principles is an excellent way of killing them. Exactly so. So let's get straight into it. Let's set the scene. We're in Paris. It is the 15th of June 1794. It's a week after the festival of the supreme being and the reign of terror is at its height. So if you listen to the last episode, you will recall Tom describing the law of Prériel, which was passed five days ago on the 10th of June. And Prériel created this new category of enemies of the people. So these are, if you mislead the people, if you spread false news, you'd pray public morals, you speak ill of the republic, all of this. And these political criminals will be tried by the revolutionary tribunal with no legal representation, no witnesses, no, and there's no need for evidence. The jurists can rely on their consciences and their love of the Fatherland. And if the verdict is guilty, then the only possible sentence is death. Now at the time, there was a tiny bit of resistance in the Convention, but Chobespier made the argument successfully that only people with something to hide could possibly be against this law. So yeah, well, in that case. And what happens in the next few weeks is that the terror reaches unprecedented levels. Now under the centralization agenda, which has always been a huge part of the terror, all suspects in the provinces are now being brought to Paris to be tried and guillotineed. Probably as a result of that, the conviction rate rises from 50% to 80% and the rate of killing rises tenfold. This is very deliberate. One prosecutor says at the time, with this new law, we will purge the prisons in a single blow and rid the soil of liberty of this garbage, these drags of humanity. And so in the seven weeks after the 10th of June, so that's between the 10th of June, 27th of July, and that's based in the period of today's episode, about 1,400 people are guillotineed. So that's more than in the whole of the previous 14 months. So the law of prairieal, if you're a Robespierre, is really working. And some of the victims, I mean, the victims include some people we've talked about in the podcast. So for example, the lawyer who defended Louis XVI, Malzerb, I remember you, you were quite a fan of his, weren't you, Tom? Well, he's very widely admired. I mean, he's seen almost as a kind of conscience of the early stages of the revolution. So to lose him, he's really quite something. People who like science, Francis Grace's chemist, Antoine Lavazier, he's for the shop as well. If you're like poetry, Francis Grace's poet, André Chignier, is also guillotineed, as are, of course, hundreds of ordinary men and women, as one historian puts it, who had muttered too loudly about the price of bread, apparently revolutionary behaviour. So that's some of so many people are killed that there is a problem with the guillotine. The guillotine, as we described last time, for the festival of the supreme being, it had been moved away. It had been moved to, from plaster to evolution, to plaster labasteel. But at the plaster labasteel, the shopkeepers complain that this is bad for business. They don't like the tombrils rattling past, and they definitely don't like the guillotine. They don't like the pools of blood in the square, and they don't like the rotting bodies, especially in the summer heat. So on the 14th of June, the government moved the guillotine out of the city, well, they moved it basically into the suburbs, to a square on the edge of the city to the east beyond the walls. But Dominic just to say that it will be brought back to the plaster de la revolution about six weeks for reasons that we will be coming to. Exactly right. Now, even at this point, there are people who say this is definitely gone too far now. There's a Republican book, Selec, or Nicolai Ruul. I think we've quoted him a few times in earlier series. He's often quoted in histories of the revolution, because he's such a great source. He wrote letters to his brother, he wrote loads of letters to his brother about what was going on in Paris, and he said, "Our leaders are now making themselves hated because of the horror. No citizen can be sure that he will be alive in two days' time." So talking of the leaders, let's focus in on them. And let's say, if you imagine, if the rest of the history were an HBO series or a film, there's one day surely it will be. The camera is swooping over Paris and it zeroes in on one building, in particular, in one room in that building. And the building is the royal palace of the Toulierie, and the room is in what we want to marry Antoinette.
apartments. So if you imagine the camera swooping in, we're in a room with rich carpets, tapestries on the walls, this big chandelier, and in the middle is a huge oval table, which is covered with green bays, like a kind of snooker table, and the table is piled with papers, and there are 10 men around the table, and these are the members of the Committee of Public Safety. Now by law, there are meant to be 12. One of them, a guy called Eru de Ceciel, was gillotined for corruption when Donald fell. Another one, the youngest member, man we've talked about a little fair bit, Louis Antoine de Saint-Juste, he is away in what's now Belgium visiting the army. He's having a lovely time, very jolly. Here's something a good time, when it's going well as we will discover. And now of the others, these are the men who are running France in the summer of 1794, and very roughly, you can divide them into three groups. On one side, you have Hobbesby and his friends, Stas Robbesbyer, Saint-Juste, the Archangel of Terror, Archangel of Death, and their friend Georges Couton, who is the bloke who's been too much sex. Yeah, he's in a wheelchair, he says he's been having too much fun. I think historians generally think there are other reasons. To the public, these three men, Robbesbyer, Saint-Juste and Couton, are the faces of the Committee of Public Safety. They are the spokesmen for the terror, the champions of the terror. And that's actually how lots of sort of popular histories treat them to this day. Then you have the men who actually make things work. The technocrats, the bureaucrats who know how the machine works and are basically in charge of it. So three of them in particular, there is a guy called Lazar Carno, who was a mathematician and military engineer. He's effectively the Minister of War. He's the guy who's in charge of the army. There is a guy called Claude Antoine-Prier, another military engineer. He's the Minister of Munitions. And a guy called Robert Linde, who's the oldest member of the Committee. He's a lawyer, and he is, you might call him the Minister of Supply. He's in charge of food supplies, the economy, infrastructure, all that. So you've got Robbesby and Cout, you've got the technocrats. And then there's a more radical group who, if you're doing it left and right, would be on Robbesbyer's left. And in particular, two friends, very important players in this story. There's a guy called Jean-Marie Collaud. Collaud, the Abouah, he was called. So Collaud used to be an actor and a theatre director. And he still has very dramatic kind of mannerisms, and it's got a sort of slightly lovely style to him. And then there's a lawyer, who's a great friend of his, Kozhak Nikola Bio Verhen. Bio was a lawyer. These two guys, Collaud and Bio, were economic radicals. They were appointed initially to please the Sonkulot, the masses on the streets. They were big fans of the terror. Collaud had in fact been involved with the massacres in Lyon. So he's got a lot of blood on his record. Both of them are atheists. Now, last time we talked about the tension between Robbesbyer and the atheists. These guys, Collaud and Bio are very keen on the decrystionisation campaign. They are not impressed by Robbesbyer's enthusiasm for the supreme being, which they regard as bonkers. And in the recent months, Collaud and Bio have become increasingly close to one other person we should talk about on the committee, who is called Bernard Barere. He's the guy who proposed demolishing all the royal iconography and sand and knee. Exactly. Absolute trimmer. Barere is the longest serving member of the committee. He's a fixer. He's sort of Peter Mandelson figure, I suppose, isn't he? He's an operator. But unlike Peter Mandelson, he's a survivor. Yes, he doesn't keep having to resign and disgrace. He is the oldest living surviving member of the, he dies in kind of 1883 or something. Yeah, he advised Sharda Gaul in 1994. Yeah. He's the eternal advisor. He's probably there advising Macaron now. So Barere has become close to Collaud and Bio, the two radicals. In terms of what they actually do these guys, their workload is intense, the only thing that I think it possibly compares to is producing a history podcast. Wow, they must be shattered. Yeah, they're exhausted. On average, the committee of public safety send out between 800 and 900 letters and decrees every day and each decree requires multiple signatures. Some of them start work at 7 o'clock in the morning. They work all morning, then they go to the convention in the afternoon for the debates. Some of them will go to the Jacobin Club to listen to the speeches in the evening. Others will just go straight back to work at the committee of public safety's room in the twillery. By 10 o'clock in the evening, most of them are back at the table, doing the paper work. They'll often work until two or three in the morning. And some of them, they're working so hard. They don't even bother going home. They just sleep in kind of makeshift camp beds that are put up in the committee room. So the fact that the guys who are basically running the French Revolution are getting by on three hours sleep is perhaps an understated factor, the lunacy of what's going on. Exactly. I mean, they are fraught there at the, this is why they keep having nervous breakdowns, physical collapses and so on and so forth. But who actually is doing all of this work? I mean, this is a bit by key part of the story. We actually have, I think, 608 surviving committee of public safety orders from May and June from the month of prairie alas it was called. And 90% of these were drafted by the three technocrats by Carno, Linde and Priya. So these are the guys who are basically running the war effort and they are working effectively with a couple of hours sleep here, a couple of hours sleep there and they're just constantly replying to letters writing orders and all this. Also very hard working other radicals, bio and collo. We know this from the records, they are always there, they're very regular, they do loads of signatures on the papers and they're handling a lot of the boring routine correspondents. Now, now, Maximilieu Robespierre, a slightly different story. He only drafted 14 degrees of these 608 and his mate Couton only drafted eight. Sashius is a bit of a no go because he's of course away with the army, so he can't really blame him. So these guys are not really doing the heavy lifting. Now it's true that Robespierre is away a lot because of ill health, but as Colin Jones says, actually even before that, he wasn't really pulling his weight. He has provided the soundtrack, but his actual input has been minimal. There are a few of people listen to this who have not worked with somebody like that who does a lot of, you know, he seems very enthusiastic in meetings or whatever, but actually when it comes to the heavy lifting, they're nowhere to be seen. Given how little sleep they've got and the pressure they're under, it's not surprising that cracks have emerged. So the tentacles are basically drowning in paperwork. They are sick of the factional squabbles, they are exhausted of Robespierre's lectures about virtue and they are baffled and bored by the cult of the supreme being. So when they're forced to troupe along to the cult of the supreme being, they're like, I have so much work to do. How long do I have to stay on this papier-maché mountain? Is it urgent? Exactly. And they have become increasingly restive in recent months. So when the arrest warrant was drawn up for Don Tor, Robert Linde refused to sign it. Carno has had these blazing rouse with Robespierre's sound use to one point he called them "ridiculous dictators". Now anybody else who did this would risk heading to the guillotine, but these guys are so essential to the war effort and to the machine, they are effectively untouchable, you know, within reason they can say what they like. The other people who are sick of Robespierre are collo and bioveran, and for them, I think it's not so much political over there is the issue about atheism and decrystionisation. A lot of this is personal. They find Robespierre haughty and sanctimonious, he clearly doesn't like them and doesn't trust them, and Bio really hates Robespierre. So when Robespierre comes into the room, Bio will fall silent, he will sort of sulk and brood, and he kind of mutters under his breath while Robespierre is talking. Now, I said it was the 15th of June, they've got a meeting today, and it's going to be especially tense. Everyone knows that because they've got a joint meeting in the diary with the Committee of General Security, which is the other big committee, it runs the Police and the Revolutionary Tribunal. And on this Committee, General Security, the two dominant figures are called Mark Guillaume Vadié and Andre Amar, and Vadié and Amar, effectively secret policemen, are very keen on the terror. They are very keen on the decrystionisation campaign, and they were very scornful of the festival of the Supreme being. They have no time for it at all. And just generally, the Committee of General Security has become very resentful in recent months. They feel that the Committee of Public Safety are taking over a lot of their powers and responsibilities, that they're treating them as underlings, not as equals, and Robespierre stands used to have even set up their own independent police bureau, reporting directly to them, which the general security people are not happy. It's your classic kind of FBI CIA-04. But today, when they come in, Vadié and Amar seem very pleased with themselves, and Vadié says, "Well, I've got a long report to present," and he starts reading his house, and he says, "There is a new conspiracy threatening the Republic. My agents have uncovered an eccentric old woman called Catherine Teo, who lives in the Latin Quarter. This woman, Teo, for years, claimed that she was the mother of God. It was unclear whether she was a separate mother of God or whether she was the Virgin Mary in some form." Just to be clear, she is 80. Yes, exactly. So it would be a miracle. It would be a miracle. So for years, before the revolution she was held in the Salt Petrier hospital, she was let out. She's now been hanging around the Latin Quarter, and she's been saying that she is about to give birth to a new Messiah, and that Robespierre is his prophet. And this woman Teo has a small following. A few kind of semi-airist, gratic women, but mostly poor local women from the neighborhood. Some of these women are informants for the Committee of General Security. I think what is pretty clear is that Vadiye is hoping to use this against Robespierre. He is probably planning to forge correspondence or to coerce witnesses to state that Robespierre put this Catherine Teo up to it, that he is using this in order to get himself named as the Son of God. This is such a kind of ludicrous Expedia.
It illustrates just how incorruptible Robespierre is that they're reduced to peddling it. If you think that don't always in that situation, there'd be no problem in finding some murky example of corruption, but they just haven't got anything on Robespierre. Having to make mad stuff up, exactly. And when Robespierre hears this, of course Robespierre has no sense of humour. I think an important element action, the story of what we're going to be telling. Robespierre has no sense of humour. Somebody else could have laughed it off or made a joke about it. Robespierre is very offended and he's furious, in fact. And it's clear to him that since this comes just a week after the festival of the Supreme Being, which you described as the happiest moment of his life, he's really offended by the he's outraged. They have a massive argument. Vadiay says, "I would like to open a case against Katakintéo, the revolutionary tribunal. Let's have this out and open court." And Robespierre goes mad and he says to all the other people on the committees, "This is insane. You have to block this." Robespierre wins. They do block it. But the mood is very bitter and from that day, relations between the two committees are pretty close to breaking down completely. And what is particularly offensive to Robespierre is that the two radical atheists on his own committee, Kolo and Bio, sided with Vadiay, so this is something he will not forget in the hurry. To two weeks go by, we'll be fast forward to the 29th of June. On the 29th of June, Sashius returns to Paris and he is coming in the wake of incredible news, I mean literally bombshell news. Three days earlier, at a village called Flachouc, near Shalwa in Belgium, the French army and a General Jordan has fought this big battle against the Austrians under the Prince of Coburg and the French won a big victory. This is a great victory for their new citizen army, for their new guns that the manufacturers have been working so hard to make. And actually for their new technology, this is the first battle in history that used aerial observation in the form of a hot air balloon. Brilliant fact. So they sent people up on a hot air balloon, they could see where the Austrians were, massive result for the French. In fact, such a massive result, the Austrians decide the low countries are lost and they're going to pull out of the low countries. So with this win, basically two things. The road to Amsterdam is open so the French are going to take over the Netherlands as well as Belgium. But also, it is clear now that France is not going to lose this war. The war of the first coalition is called. Yeah, the war is not over, but it will end on terms favorable to the French. At some point, that is clear, they're not going to be invaded. So whether you need the terror is an interesting question. Anyway, as you just come back, he goes straight to the Committee of Public Safety. When he walks in, he's horrified by what he finds, because they're in the middle of another ferocious argument, Rob Speer and some of the others. We don't know what the argument was about. It was probably still about this Catering Teo business. At one point, Colo and Bio shout at Rob Speer and they call him a dictator. And the 10 aircraft Linde also shouts at Rob Speer and he shouts, the nation is not just one man. So, effectively, they're sick of him and they're sick of his talk of virtue and they're sick of him. Talking as though, his own personal fortunes and those are the Republic of identical, I suppose. I mean, that is a trend in his thinking, isn't it? He's kind of done that all his life. Exactly. Rob Speer's shaking with anger and he storms out and he's followed by a horrified statue. And after this, Rob Speer is so outraged that he stays away from both the Committee and the Convention for the next six weeks. And so he is not hunting after his enemies. He's not kind of going after Fushe or whatever. He is at home the house of the Duplai family, licking his wounds and thinking. And what he's thinking, we don't know. Colin Jones in his book, I think most historians think this. Rob Speer's probably thinking is that the Committee of Public Safety have unfortunately let him let him and France down, that they are probably infected by the same corruption, possibly the same taint of treachery, that Dontor and Ebert and so many people before were infected by. And there's only one way to deal with infection like that. Yeah, cut it out, exactly. It was a national razor. Shaved by the national razor. And the author we've talked about a lot, R.R. Palmer in his book, Twelve Who Rules. He's very good on the optics of this. That Rob Speer cannot see that quote by sitting virtuously at home while making self-righteous speeches at the Jacobin Club, he reduced himself in the eyes of men who continue to bear the burden of office. I mean, here's a way to think about it. Imagine you're part of a committee, a group of people who had so much work to do under so much pressure. And one of your number decides he's going to go off home for six weeks, and he will serve as occasionally to make speeches accusing you in a sort of failed way of letting everybody down, but he's not actually going to do any of the work himself. This is what a lot of the people on the committee of public safety start to think. And of course, what to the public, it looks as though Rob Speer is setting himself against the government of which he is a part, that basically he's an individual separate from the convention and the committees, which is a very, very dangerous role, I think, to try to play. Anyway, do you know who this reminds me of actually Tony Ben in the 1970s? This is certainly what Tony Ben did. I'd ask actually not the first person to say that comparison. Don't give me any credit. I was going to give you credit, and now I feel that I've been tricked. You have been tricked. I worked hard. I connived at that, and I've got the results I wanted. You didn't have to tell me that. I would have just sat here thinking how brilliant you are. And now it's all crumpled to dust. Yeah, but it would have been hollow. It would have been an authentic. It would have been meaningless. I wouldn't have taken any pleasure in it. Now Rob Speer going away for six weeks. What makes this so dangerous is that he does have enemies in the convention. So just on the convention, convention theory has 749 members, but it's been purged. A lot of them have gone away as deputies on mission. So it's often half empty. Of the members, 200 of them are Montagnar. They're the kind of governing faction. Most of them, however, just to in the centre, they're sort of woolly. They're hanging around. As a classic case, familiar to anybody who knows anything about student politics or something, of a very fanatical, organized minority imposing their will on a majority. You don't really care as much as they do. But the mood in the convention is very anxious at this point. So late June, July 1794. There are rumors that Rob Speer is planning another purge of deputies. There are a lot of deputies who have taken the odd bribe here or there. They got involved with the decrystionisation campaign. They went out to the provinces and they might have overstepped the mark a little bit by killing some priests, mowing people down with greepshot. Exactly. Talking of which, we met one of these last time. So the world's most ruthless physics teacher, Joseph Fusche. Fusche, as we heard last time, has offended Rob Speer on multiple levels, slaughtering thousands of people with cannons, attacking churches. He's very corrupt. He has been rude about the festival of the Supreme being and he stood for the Presidency of the Jacobin Club and actually won it to Rob Speer's horror. Rob Speer then had him kicked out, didn't he? But Fusche is determined that he's going to, if he's going to go down, he's going to go down fighting. And so Fusche has been going around in the early summer of 1794, saying to people, other deputies, "Dear Rob Speer's got this list of people he's going to purge." A little list. Yeah, I think you're on it actually. How do you feel about that? So Fusche is very good at politics. Whether Rob Speer's good at politics has been an interesting grey area, Fusche is exceedingly good at politics. Now there's another man, probably on Rob Speer's list, who's also very good at politics. Here's a deputy who'd been at the recapture of Toulong, recaptured it, of course, from the British, which is unfortunate. This guy's called Paul Barass. He has been also accused of going too far of having, rather, let himself down with some mass executions. And Barass is going to be a massive figure in the politics of the late 1790s, in part because he has made friends with a certain young Corsican and artillery officer. And artillery officer. Who catches A-B's, doesn't he? In the course of the siege. And Barass and this Corsican artillery officer will induce course Shera and Mistress, or at least Barass will give this bloke his mistress. Would this mistress be called Josephine? Josephine Porteath. Yes. There's Barass, there's Fusche, and there's even more significant for our story, a third person, who's probably on Rob Speer's list. This is a young man, and he's called Jean-Lombeur Thélion. Thélion is 27. He used to be a printer. He was very big in the Paris commune. He was a mate of Dongtong. He was a radical deputy. And in late 1793, he was sent to Bordeaux to establish the terror in Bordeaux. And he got stuck in. He loved it. He was very zealous in feeding the guillotine. But then. Ah! Cupid's arrow struck. He fell in love with this Spanish-born woman who'd married a local aristocrat. She's rich. She's very sexy. Her name is Teresa de Cabarrus, and she was said to bathe in strawberry juice. She's a hot dog. Yeah, I think that would be sticky, personally. You have to have someone to lick it off. This is surely, and that man is Dallion. Yeah. So they started an affair. He lost interest in the guillotine once he met Teresa, and has become lax in his duties. So he's gone from one extreme to the other. He was guillotine in people left-right and centre. He met Teresa, and then he said, "Oh, well, actually, forget that. I've found something much more fun." He was summoned back to Paris. She followed him. Rob Speer had her arrested, and she is now in the prison of La Force. She is facing trial as an arresto and probable execution, and she has been sending Dallion her lover increasingly desperate letters. To quote one, she says, "I had a dream in which Rob Speer no longer existed, and the prisons were open. But thanks to your obvious cowardice, there will soon be no one left in France capable of making my dream come true. Are you a man or not?" She's a spitfire. She is. She's tremendous, and she's She's obviously playing a lot of Italians mind. Oh, yeah, that's it.
And Talion is very frightened for his life. He knows that Robespierre thinks it's corrupt. Of course, he did used to be a friend of the Autos. Robespierre has kicked him out of the Jackaband club as well. And Talion has been tailed by the secret police, which he knows. So these men, Fusche, Barra, Talion, form a little kind of anti-Robespierre alliance. Are they an organized conspiracy with a blueprint to bring him down? Not really. Probably they're all trying to save themselves. They are whispering to other deputies, but I don't think they had a very clear plan of what they were going to do. There is a market for anti-Robespierre sentiment. There are a lot of deputies who think, Robespierre does like purging people. And I'm not perfect. You know, I haven't been squeaky clean. I've probably dabbled in a through the free brown envelopes. I've probably executed a few people just for the fun of it. I don't want to be the next don't on. So that's the convention. And we should just say a word about the public as well. What do the people of Paris think? Well, actually, the committees are not terribly popular in June 1794. And the first reason actually paradoxically is back to that military victory at Fliruse. So when the news of the battle broke, people in Paris were understandably delighted. You know, brilliant. We're actually winning some battles. And they organized these big street parties, evening street parties. Everyone would bring their own food and drink, and they would toast their army and their republic, and all this kind of thing. And you would think the committee of public safety would love this. Perhaps the committee of public safety, down like this at all. Why are people organizing themselves without our approval? Without our say, say, without following the rules, what's going on? Without having followed the rules, they're having fun. And what is worse, they're different classes are mixing freely. The working classes, better off people, and they're talking about peace and looking forward to peace. This is very not on-brand. The committee of public safety actually sent Bernard Barraire, the fixer, to denounce the street parties in the convention. He said fraternity does not consist of meals in the streets. There can be nothing in common between the opulent egoists who size for inequality in kings and the sonkelot who loves only the republican equality. These people should not be sitting together at trestle tables, eating coronation chicken sandwiches, an outrage. They're like all those councils that have banned Jubilee celebrations. Exactly, that's what it is. So the street parties have been banned as counter-revolutionary, which is absolutely bonkers. But even more significant is the thing that kicked off the revolution in the first place. And if people remember, what really kicked off the French Revolution was the price of bread. Now they've got this paper money, the assigneur. And that's been tanking again. The shops are running out of food. The bread prices have gone up. There's been a wave of strikes and protests in Paris by the artisans who have always been the driving force of the revolution. Pushed by the committee of public safety, the government of Paris, the municipal government, which is called the commune, has been cracking down on public discontent. So they've been suppressing strikes. They've been enforcing wage controls. They've been banning meetings of the local section assemblies. In fact, they've got a load of pottery workers who wanted higher pay. And these pottery workers are going to be hauled before the revolutionary tribunal as an example to the others. And what is worse, the committee of public safety to deal with this inflation have drawn up what they call a wage maximum, basically wage controls. And this is going to come into effect in Paris towards the end of July. How many people is that going to affect? Oh, everybody. It's going to affect, you know, it's a cap on wages. It's going to affect the lot. If you're a carpenter, your daily pay is about to be cut by half. If you're a blacksmith working in these big arms factories they've set up, your pay is going to be cut effectively by two thirds, your living standards. On the streets, there is not much love for the commune or indeed for the committees. Now, that said, if you're a smart politician, you can capitalize on this. It's not as though these people are desperate to jump into bed with Robespierre's opponents. By a lot, they don't really know who Robespierre's opponents are. At any given point in history, most people have never heard of half of the politicians who think they're terribly important. Clearly, there is a sense of discontent here, but if Robespierre plays his cards right, he can exploit that and turn that against some of his enemies. So this wage maximum is due to come into effect on the 23rd of July. And that same day, Robespierre returns to the committee of public safety for the first time in six weeks. And his colleague, Behre, the great trimmer, has been saying to people, come on. There's been too much squabbling. Let's all come together and let's advertise our unity to the world. So Robespierre comes back, sort of all of everyone's a bit sheepish. Sunshine's used. Greet Sims has brilliant to have the martyr of liberty back with us. And Robespierre, as his want, gives this incredibly self-pitting speech. He says, well, I've been thinking about the revolution. You've always been bitching about me behind my back. Don't think I don't know what you've been doing. Some of them are clearly not really that pleased to see him like Kano and the bureaucrats, but the radicals, Kolo and Bio, try to reassure him. They say to him, we're your friend, we've come so far together. Come on, we'll put that by guns, be by guns. And they agree that in four days time, so on the 27th, Sunshine's used will make give a big speech in the convention and unveil a big report on the situation facing France. He will reassure the convention. Your two committees are united. They're working together. We're gonna win the war and build a better world. But the very next evening, which is July the 24th, there is a very bad sign for the people who want unity. Crop spear and Couton, in his wheelchair, go to the Jacques Manclub. Couton has sort of wheeled himself up to the front and he gives a blazing speech attacking the committee of general security. He says they're out of control, these policemen, they're making corrupt and arbitrary decisions, something has to change. He says there are people among us, so-called comrades whose hands are full of riches and who wreak with the blood of their innocent victims. Impure individuals who seek to corrupt public morality and to build a throne of crime on the tomb of virtue. Now what Couton doesn't actually say, these people who clearly have not been obeying the rules, he doesn't say who they are. It could be Fusche and Talion. It could be Vagdien, Emma and the committee of general security. It could be the bureaucrats, Carno and Linde, it could be Colo and Bioverein. It could be all of them. It could be all of them, right? It could be anybody. So no one knows. Meanwhile, Hubspier, unbeknown to a lot of these people, has actually been working on the big speech of his own. It's the speech tom that you regard as an absolute banger and everybody else regards us rambling in self-biting. He is going to come back to the convention where he hasn't been for weeks. He's going to come back with a bang and that moment is scheduled for the 26th of July two days later. It's a key turning point in this story and it proves to be one of the most dramatic twists in French history. Well, I don't know about you ladies and gentlemen, but I am massively looking forward to hearing more about this sensational speech and to finding out how it secures Robespierre and command of the French Revolution for the next decade. So don't miss it. (upbeat music) This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps. Many of them started as hard questions that people didn't want asked. - Yeah, there's a classic example of that tom at the end of the 15th century and the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the West? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus great pioneering voyage of discovery. And it is, of course, the Americas. So, you know, Anthropic knows the importance of questions and it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people? 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the rest is history, where it is the 26th of July 1794, or it's some mad revolutionary date, which I can't work out. We are in Paris, of course, and we're in the old court theatre, the Sal Demachine of the Twillary Palace, which is now the venue for the National Convention. And it is obviously a very theatrical setup. You've got a wooden stage structure with chairs for the president and for clerks, and it's adorned with captured enemy flags, speakers' rostrum. You've got that arc of the covenant, haven't you, with the Constitution, inside? And looking down at it, you've got bank seating for 749 deputies, and you've got public galleries for almost 1,500 spectators. And in the chair is the Radical Atheist Collot from the Committee for Public Safety, and Dominic, he is not a Robespierre fan, is he? We've established this. And will this have any significance in the proceedings that are to follow? It may well do. Because Robespierre has come here, hasn't he, to give a speech, this banger of a speech. Yeah. So, as you say, a very theatrical setting. Collot, former actor, is perhaps a little trace of makeup on his features, a little flourished as he sits down in the president's chair, and he is not a Robespierre fan because Collot is a very keen Atheist, not a fan of the supreme being, among other things. I call Robespierre. Exactly. In the Donton film, the Gerard Dupatier film, there was a guy who I'm assuming is meant to be Collot, who is absolutely chewing the scenery, he's made up like a clown or something. Brilliant. Anyway, so Robespierre stands to deliver this tremendous banger of a speech. It's two hours long, and there is absolute textbook, Robespierre Bingo. So loads of virtue and loads of terror, which he describes as the thunderbolt of retribution launched by the hand of liberty. Who was that to like? I mean, the thing about the French Revolution, the French Revolutionary rhetoric is terrible metaphors. What do we have a second to go? The throne of virtue on the blood of traitors or something. Anyway, so Robespierre, I mean, people have heard this now a thousand times, but there are a couple of things worth noting about this speech, which I know you love. Even by Robespierre's own standards, this speech is crazily self-pitying. So he says, you know, I'm the martyr of liberty. If it weren't for my conscience, I should be the unhappiest man alive. As he goes on, you know, as he enters the sort of 27th hour of the speech, his, it's obvious how suspicious and paranoid he really is. He has not a good word to say about anybody, only these veiled and sometimes not so veiled criticisms. Again and again, he talks about the criminal conspiracy facing the Republic. He says there are monsters in our midst. He points, I think, at the convention's finance committee, which, you know, has been not part of this story at all in all the episodes we've done, because they've just been doing stuff with debt, public debt. He says, the finance committee is a sink of corruption. He's probably not wrong, though, is he? There's a little bit of corruption, I think, but to be fair, I think the finance committee have done quite a good job, as I'll explain in a second. The committee of general security, the secret police, he says they've been infiltrated by aristocrats and criminals, even the committee of public safety, and no longer doing their job properly. So my colleagues on the committee of public safety, they spend more time criticizing me than they do fighting the enemy within. And at the end of his speech, this very sort of, this very almost tear-stained rhetoric that people love in the 1790s. He says, "People have accused me of wanting to be a dictator. But how can they criticize me? How can they object to a man like me who wants to tell the truth and is willing to die for it? How can they object to a reasonable man who knows how to die for his country?" How, indeed. Well, what's Rob Sphere thinking with this speech? So Colin Jones has a great analysis of this. He basically says, "Well, Sphere has been in the duplays house in his shut up in his bedroom for six weeks, and he's been brooding about all the slights and the criticisms, and he has come to the conclusion, struck him like a revelation that all along he's been even more right than he thought." What a brilliant conclusion to come to. Yeah. It's the conclusion that self-instructs me actually. Yeah. God, I'm at it even better and wiser than I imagine. So Rob Sphere thinks, "The Republic of Virtue, it's not too far away now. You know, with one that battle, the revolt in the Vonday has been defeated, you know, Leon's been brought back into the fold. But of course, that means that our enemies, you know, they will stop a nothing now. Their conspiracy must be reaching its absolute peak. So this is not the time to relax. It's time to intensify the terror. Let's double down to get to the Promised Land because compromise is corruption, compromise is corruption completely." So what he's looking to do with this speech, I think, is to establish the ground for, in a few weeks, a purge of the convention. He would probably have thought to use the Sonskullot, the commune, the municipal government, to do that much as he had done against the Giralda a year before. And this is what I think what most of his listeners thought. So the very first professional historian in France to write about the revolution was called Alfonso Ula, and he had this wonderful line that for all the talk of martyrdom, Robespierre to his listeners sounded less like a man determined to die for the cause than a man who wanted to kill for it. But his great mistake, same as Kuton, are the club before the break. He's made some very vague threats and allegations about monsters and conspirators and stuff, but he hasn't really named many names. He hasn't said who he's talking about. What if he had? I think he could have worked. I think if he had picked on a few couple of people and prepared the ground, as a politician does, Fouche, Thalion, you're picking off the stragglers. Yeah, if he could bring down a bear on Donald. I mean, it's a question about how often you can pull off the same trick. But if you've gotten organised support, if it appears that you have bayonets behind you and the streets behind you, you know, are there that many people who are going to go to the guillotine to defend Fouche or Thalion or whoever? Well, not if the risk of standing up for them is that you then become an object of suspicion yourself. Yeah, I mean, as we'll see in this in the next half hour or so, you know, there are moments in parliaments or in assemblies or whatever where the outcome is uncertain and people could jump one way or another and they make individual decisions on the spare of the moment, based on who they think is going to win. And that's going to happen this time. But actually, the way that Robtspia has done this by not naming names, everybody in the convention thinks, well, could it be me? And instead of intimidating them into silence, he's actually scaring them into answering back. So the classic example is the guy who is the head of the conventions finance committee. And he was somebody who actually Robtspia did name. I mean, this was mad from Robtspia, such a mistake. He names this guy Pierre-Joseph Combon, his name is. Combon, who's just been sitting on the sidelines throughout. It's like, what, me? He can't believe he's been dragged into this. Combon was a businessman from Montpellier, a Protestant businessman actually, rich businessman. He'd come in, he'd said, I'll sort out Francis National debt. He's been doing it. Everyone thinks he's printed at this job. He's got no enemies. He's not even that corrupt. He's respected on every side of the sort of political spectrum. And now when he's his Robtspia slacking him off, he's like, what? And he goes and he demands the rostrum. And he says, this is absolutely outrageous that my committee are being dragged into this by Robtspia. It is time to tell the truth. One man is paralyzing the will of the convention. And that man has just been speaking. It is Robtspia. Ah, blind me. For somebody who is not, you know, in the sort of, in the thick of the factional struggle to be doing this is quite a big moment. So he's like the little boy saying he ever has no clothes to a degree. A little bit, yeah, I think he is. There is unexpectedly enthusiastic applause at this. And some of Robtspia's enemies in the committees think, oh, so BO gets up from the committee of public safety. And he says to Robtspia, he says, well, if Robtspia had bothered to turn up for the last six weeks and actually do some work, he would know better than to make so many wild allegations. And then Vadiya and Amar from the Committee of General Security, they pile in as well. It's disgraceful for Robtspia to make these allegations against people on the committee without naming them and without giving them the right of reply. So there's a big argument and eventually they agree that very unusually the convention will not immediately print Robtspia's speech and have copies sent out to all the different communes across the country because it's too contentious. So they will be denied this banger of a speech. Yes, exactly. Imagine that was a, what a fun evening that would be for somebody else to be reading Robtspia's speech to your local Juckabank club. Come children, gather around, I have to read this. So Robtspia is very shaken and shocked by this. One deputy said afterwards he saw him slumped in his chair muttering darkly to himself in a rage.
I'm lost, I'm lost, all this sort of thing. Now that evening, of course, the Jack and my club are meeting as they always do, and they meet in a ruse centre on Array, which is just down the road, in the right in the centre of Paris, it's just down from Robespierre's house. Robespierre turns up, and he says, you know, fellow club members, I'm among friends, I'd actually like to read my speech to you if that's okay, and collo, the actor, he's already heard it once, and he's like, what, are you joking? And collo says, no, it's too divisive, you're not reading the speech, and Robespierre says very coldly, we can all see who's afraid of being unmasked in the presence of the people, and the crowd say, yes, yes, we want to hear the speech. So Robespierre gives the speech, and at the end, there are huge cheers. And at that point, Robespierre's great friend, Couton, says, I want to speak too, and he is carried to the rostrum, of course, because he's barrel-ized. Couton says, citizens, I'm convinced of the facts that Robespierre has enunciated, we're witnessing the deepest of all conspiracies yet, yes, there are pure men in the committers of government, but it's certain there are villains as well. And he points very dramatically, a collo and bio, he says, we shall see the conspirators at this rostrum, we shall examine them, we shall catch them out, they will grow pale in their presence of the people, they shall be convicted, and they shall perish. And everyone's shouting and whooping with, and they're pointing and screaming at collo and bio, ala giludin, ala giludin, basically it's a lynch mob, and collo and bio have to run for the exit. They leave the check-in-man club, and they go back to the office of the committee at the twillary palace. Both the committees, as usual, are working late. Sargeust is in the committee room at the table, and he's working on this big report that he's going to unveil to the convention tomorrow, the report that to show everybody how united they all are. And Sargeust, I actually don't really like Sargeust, but I feel a tiny bit sorry for him with this conversation, because he of course doesn't know what's going on. And he says to them, they come in, and he says, ah, what's new at the check-in-man club? Funny evening, yeah, how's it going, how's it going? And collo went mad at him. He said, you really don't know. Aren't you great friends with the man who's behind all this, the man leading us to civil war? You, you're a coward and a traitor. You're scoundrels, the three of you, determined to lead the fatherland to ruin. And when people hear collo, this is your classic sort of, I don't know, boys boarding school, or girls boarding school even worse. He finds that they discover there's a new scapegoat, and they're like, yeah, let's pile in. So everybody else piles in. A guy called Ellie Legost from the Committee of General Security says, yes, there are tremor of the rugs, Rob Spear, Kuton, Sargeust, plotting against the country. And Barraea, who's the trimmer, who can see where the wind is blowing, says to Sargeust, yeah, you insolent pigmies, a cripple, a child, and a scoundrel. You couldn't even run a farm yard. I mean, that's an ominous moment, isn't it? God, if Barraea is swinging round. Exactly. The wind really is changing. Sargeust has been working on this report, just kind of looks up, and he's pale, and he doesn't know what to say, stammering, because it's come from nowhere. It's come out so you know, he just asked them how they had a fun evening. Yeah. And collo says, I expect your plan to have us killed, are you tonight or tomorrow? Well, we're going to stay at our post and we'll own mask you. I expect you're making plans against us, right? I expect that's what you're doing with all these papers. You're the enemy. You're the conspirator. And Sargeust is so stunned. He can't get his words out. He tries to show collo what he's been writing, because as I don't want to look, you can take our lives, you can have us killed, but you will never dilute the virtue of the people. It's the former actor, of course. He's having a brilliant-- Oh. Oh. You know, what wrongs are this? Exactly. Infernal villain. I can't take someone called collo seriously, though. Why not? We've got a guy in our cricket team. He's called collo. That's his nickname. OK. He's very much not a kind of revolutionary figure. OK. Well, that explains it. Similarly, collo, like a actor, like a sort of volcano returning to its slumbers, he eventually subsides. Oh. Enough. Yeah. Exactly. I've haunt. We'll all meet in Chester, something like kind of Henry IV's scene. Anyway, he calms down. Sanjus finally gets a word in. He says, listen, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll finish this. I'll bring it to the committee tomorrow. You can all read it, approve it, and if only if you approve it, I will present it to the convention. Yeah, come on. Let's be friends. Sanjus, I mean, he is better at compromising than Rosvia by this point. Yeah. You know, he can see the problem brewing. I think he is, actually. I think he is. But he will make a terrible mistake, as we will see. He goes back to his report on which he's been working very hard, the poor fellow. He finishes his report at five o'clock in the morning. Probably he went to see Rob Spear after that, which is why he changed his mind. We don't know. Now, while all this has been going on, it's clearly some of the people on Rob Spear's potential enemies list have also been going around the city. The most obvious candidate to be on that list is probably Jean-Lenbert Talion, the guy whose girlfriend is in prison. Yeah. Who's bathing in Storby Jam, who's been sneering at sending him mocking letters saying, "You're not, you know, man at all, you know, all this." Talion has been going around visiting moderate deputies. Now, most of the deputies live near the Twillary Palace or on the Rousse-Anne Donnery, so you can go and visit a lot of them. And he's said, look, Rob Spear has totally out of control. He's clearly planning a coup against us. We've got to stand up to him. That's what Talion has been doing overnight. And dawn on Sunday, the 27th of July, which is the ninth day of De Amidore. The Committee of Public Safety meet as normal at 10 o'clock at the Twillary, and they're waiting for Sanjuice to come and show them this famous report. Sanjuice does not show up. He's very hurt by what happened last night, and he's decided he's not going to show them the report after all. He's going to go to the convention, and he will open his heart to them. He will explain, you know, just how much Rob Spear means to him. He will. And Rob Spear means to the revolution, "Oh, folly of folly's." Exactly. What a falling off was there. Yeah. The pigm is that have been sniping at Rob Spear. He's going to, you know, say, "This isn't very unfair." So the Committee wait for him. He doesn't turn up. Maybe they go across to the Twillary Theatre just before midday, and the deputies have been gathering for a couple of hours at the Theatre for the convention meeting. The convention meeting would all start at 11 with a very boring reading of correspondence, so people would arrive during that. Kolo, the actor, is going to be in the chair again, the president. And as they go in, Talion is there. He's outside. He's whispering to potential allies in the corners, I'm sure Fusche is doing much of the same. And Talion is saying to them, "Yeah, I'm going to speak up. I'm going to seize the moment." It has claimed that he said, "By this evening, Rob Spear will be no more." So the bell strikes noon midday. And Sans just, "This is his moment." He comes in with his speech, big pile of papers, he goes up to the rostrum, and he starts very Rob Spear-like. He says, "I belong to no faction. I am against all factions." And just a couple of words later, he embarks on this very convoluted metaphor about the Tarpean rock. Now you will know this, Tom. Traitors are flung off it in Agent Rome. Yeah, so you're a traitor, you're throwing off this rock, that's the end of you. And he's just embarked on his Tarpean rock metaphor, which is so beautifully crafted. And at that point, Talion jumps to his feet, and he says, "I have a point of order. This has got to end." I'm going to have to really strain myself from doing it all, is this sort of ludicrous act as for us. But they are all playing parts, aren't they? So it's appropriate. And Talion says, "Rob Spear and Sans just say they don't belong to any faction. But they're the most divisive people in the convention. They have come here to assail the Fatherland, to aggravate its troubles, to hurt it into the abyss." Talion says, "Do you know what, until today I was frightened of the tyrant Rob Spear. And he compares him actually to Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell, who he regards bizarrely as a bad man." And Talion pulls out a dagger, and he says, "But this morning I armed myself with a dagger to pierce Rob Spear's breast, if the convention does not have the courage to vote for his arrest." And people start clapping, and these are clearly Talion's mates, clapping and cheering. And Sans used, I mean, I was about to say the first time in his career, I mean, this happened last night, but the first time in public. He's always normally a very good debater, but he doesn't have an answer. He's so shocked to have been interrupted, I mean, also, he was working till 5am, so he's absolutely exhausted. He seems to lose his nerve, and he just sort of slumps into his seat in shock while Talion is speaking. Now, at this point, Rob Spear jumps to his feet, says, "I want a right to reply," and this is where it really matters that the person in the president's chair is Colo, who hates Rob Spear. Yeah. And Colo says, "No, not you," to all of you, he says, "No!" Yes. He would. No. I say, "No." that's. - Time has not yet come. - That will shout not darken the podium with eyepresence. So he calls for BIO, BIO gets up and BIO says, "Sans Houston, Rob spare the worst people in the world." Sans Houston promised us he would come and show us in the committee his speech, he was a liar, he's a cheat, he didn't turn up, they spent all their time in the committee threatening us, they've been plotting actually to use the National Guard against us all, they're terrible people. Rob spare is horrified, he jumps to his feet, he's trying to get to the rostrum, but actually there are now people shouting, "Down with the tyrant, get rid of the tyrant." And Kolo says, "I now call Mr. Sitoyan Vadiye "from the committee of general security." Now Vadiye, you hate it, Rob spare. This is his best thing that's ever happened to him. He goes out to the rostrum and he says, "Well, I remind everybody about this woman that I found, "this prophetess." Oh yeah, the 80 year old woman. Yes, they can't leave that alone. This woman, have I not been telling you that this woman claims to be the mother of God and that Rob spare is the Messiah? This mad woman had a letter under her mattress telling Rob spare that his divine mission had been predicted by Ezekiel. And at this everybody starts laughing 'cause they know this is obviously ridiculous. And this is the one time that anyone actually really, you know, in a speech in the French Revolution, I think used humor very effectively 'cause they're not great laugh and minute people in the French Revolutionists. And Vadiye really twists the knife now. He says, "Oh yes, well, to hear Rob spare speak, "you would think he was the only defender of freedom. "Oh, he's so modest, isn't he? "I'm so oppressed, I'm not allowed to speak. "So and so is conspiring against me "and I am the best friend of the republic." And that's not a bad parody. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's a good stand up, revolutionary stand up. And I suppose the fact that it's all happening on a stage - Of course. - Means that people are judging it as a kind of theatrical performance. Absolutely they are. And I mean, you're right, so and so is conspiring against me. I'm so oppressed, I'm so miserable. And everybody starts laughing at this. Rob spare cannot deal with this at all. So at this point, he is shouting at them and he's really losing it. He's losing his voice. I think because of stress, the shock of it and whatnot, well, he's given his two-hour speech twice in a row. That's true, that's. Oh God, a full speech. So he's shouting whorcely and he's drowned out. His voice at this point breaks. And one of the deputies shouts at him, the blood of Dongtong is choking you. Amazing. What a moment. What a moment. And everyone's howling and all of this. At last, another deputy and absolutely nobody called Lu She, shouts, "I demand an arrest warrant against Rob Spier." And a few people start clapping. And then the clapping spreads. People have sensed where the wind is blowing and the clapping becomes universal. They vote to arrest Rob Spier. To arrest the head of the Paris National Guard, who's a guy called Francois Orio, who is a Rob Spier loyalist. At this point, Rob Spier's younger brother, Augusta, who's a bit of a nobody, really. He'd been at too long, hadn't he? Yeah, he had, exactly, with Napoleon when he does his stuff. Yes, and he was sort of Napoleon's patron, wasn't he, a little bit? Yeah. So Augusta and Rob Spier, he gets up and he says, "If you are going to arrest my brother, you should arrest me as well." All right. And they say, "Bring it." Well, yeah, we will. And another person jumps on this mad bandwagon, who's called Philippe Le Ba, who was a young friend of Rob Spier, who had married, was Rob Spier's landlord, DuPlay. He'd married her on a DuPlay's daughters. And he says, "Yes, arrest me, too." So they're like, "Bring it, well, we'll find, we didn't like you anyway." They arrest this guy, and then they add sands used, and they add Couton. And rather, crudely, they say of Couton as they arrest him. Yes, he wanted to use our corpses as a staircase to ascend to the throne. But of course, Couton could not have done that, because he can't walk. It's harsh from them. So ushers surround these five deputies, and they take them out of the convention. They take them to a building nearby, which is called the Hotel de Brian. And the Hotel de Brian is the office of the Committee of General Security. And they'll be held here, and then they'll be taken to prison. So by now, it's actually late afternoon. And all the rest of the convention deputies, they're exhausted with the emotional drama of it. But also, they're thrilled, they're excited, and they're hungry, they're French, and they feel like now seems like the obvious time to break for dinner. So they all go off to the kind of local restaurants to have dinner. Now, what they have forgotten, the convention people, is that Robespierre still has a lot of support, and in particular, in the municipal government of Paris, which is based at the Hotel de Ville, the commune. And as soon as the news about what's happened to Robespierre reaches the commune. The officials there immediately proclaim a state of insurrection, and they send messages to all the neighbourhoods, to the sections. Mobilise your local militia battalions, the battalions of the National Guard. And they're doing this, aren't they, by ringing the toxin? Yes, so bells ringing, which is never a good sign. No, it's always an exciting moment in the toxin rings across Paris. So meanwhile, it's about 4.45 in the afternoon. The National Guard commander, Orio, of course there's a warrant for his arrest. He grabs the load of men, and he says, we're going straight over to the Hotel de Brion, we're going to rescue our friends. And they've got their sabers drawn. They charge into the Hotel de Brion. They break down the doors, and they say, give us the five prisoners. But in one of many twists, at this point, another group of guardsmen turn up, and these guardsmen are loyal to the convention. And they surround these guys. They grab their swords. Orio is overpowered, and he is tied up, and he is pushed into another room in the Hotel de Brion. So he's under arrest, too, now. About an hour later, six o'clock, the Committee of General Security agents take out the five deputies. They go out to take them to prison. They put each one into a different carriage, because they're going to split them up and send them to five prisons around the city. So Robespierre, for example, is destined for the Luxembourg prison, which is a mile to the south across the rivercent. Now, the carriage rattles off, but in the meantime, the commune has sent orders to all the prisons, because the commune is in charge of the prisons, technically in Paris. Don't admit any new inmates without our written approval. So when this carriage arrives at the Luxembourg prison, and they try to, you know, the agents say, "We've got Robespierre for you." The governor says, "No, I can't accept him. We've been told not to accept him." And at this point, the carriage is surrounded by policemen who are loyal to the commune, and they say, "We're heading back. We're taking him off." And they take Robespierre and his carriage off back to the center of town, to the police headquarters, which is at the Mechy, on the Ildalacite, in this very center of Paris. The sun has just set, at eight o'clock, and the carriage rattles into the courtyard of the Mechy, the police headquarters, and Robespierre, who is now exhausted and pale and bewildered, is helped out of the carriage by police agents who are wearing tricolor sashes, and he's escorted into the building of police HQ. A messenger has sent off from the police headquarters, and at 815, he bursts into the Odele de Ville, where the commune are meeting in emergency session, and he says, "I've got brilliant news. Robespierre is free, we have him." And there's great cheers, and they say, "Let's get an armed escort to go over to police headquarters, bring him here to the city hall, the Odele de Ville, and we are the legitimate government now." So, while that's been happening, two other important things have been going on. First of all, the commune have sent out from city hall and appeal a call to warms to the hold of the city. Sitoyar, the farther land is more in danger than it ever has been. Villains are dictating and oppressing the convention. They are persecuting Robespierre, the man who established the principle of the supreme being, and the consoling doctrine of the immortality of the soul. I mean, I think people have mentioned the Odele de Ville before, haven't they? - Yeah, maybe. - They're oppressing Sajust, the apostle of virtue, who led the armies of the Republic of Victory. - Again, slight exaggeration. - Exactly, my favorite. Along with Kuton, this virtuous citizen who's only living parts, his head and body, burn with patriotism. So, Paul Kuton, who's forever defined by the fact that he's disabled, he's sort of very much an afterthought there, I think. Now, the appeal has gone out, but so far, the Sankulots have been very hesitant to rise. And one reason for that, of course, is they're very bitter about their street parties, of course. Yeah, 'cause these are the guys who banned them. - Yes, exactly. - Fun sponges. - They have her feelings about the street parties, you know, those sausage rolls or whatever, but they get eaten. - Yeah. - But, of course, they're very bitter about their wage maximum, about the fact their pays just facing a colossal cut, and that the communists basically just been bossing them around and telling them what to do and all of this. There are a couple of other things. The machinery of street politics is not what it was a couple of years ago. And the reason for that is because, as we've described in this whole series, the terror was all about centralising things, [BLANK_AUDIO]
putting power back in the government's hands and actually stopping the sort of anarchic politics of the street. And so the habit of that has faded. The habit of that and the sectional assemblies have been suppressed. So it's just harder to get people out on the streets. But also I think to a lot of ordinary people this now really does seem like a very confusing, factional struggle between two sets of Montenegro deputies who hate each other. And they're not really clear what's a stake here, who are the goodies, who are the baddies? Yeah, who should side are we really on? Yeah. So that's one thing. The appeal has gone out but it hasn't really been answered. The other thing is better news for obviously in the commune. So the National Guard Commander Henrié, remember I said, how he'd been tied up and held at the hotel to Brionne. But about 830 that night, the building is surrounded by 3,000 guardsmen who are loyal to him and to the commune. And they overpower the Jean-Darmes who are guarding him. They find Henrié, they cut his buns and now he is free as well. And what happens in the next few minutes is actually the turning point of this whole story. So there's 845 in the evening. Henrié has 3,000 armed men who've just rescued him and they've brought 30 cannons with them. And they are in plastucaracel. So on one side you've got hotel to Brionne but on the other side you have the Twilliery Palace and they have trained these cannons on the convention. The convention has no defenders at this point. The deputies have returned from their Cocova and they're sort of hanging around having a great chat about how well they've done. But they are Henrié's mercy. If Henrié gives the order now, his troops will bombard or storm the convention, they could conceivably kill everybody if they wanted to or arrest them. He would win. He can win the day in the next half hour. That would be Robespierre wins, Robespierre lives and the story of the French Revolution in the 1790s is very different. And had it been Napoleon, we know what he would do. He'd have done it. Surely he'd have done it. Of course, we know he does. Henrié has been locked up for three hours. He doesn't know where Robespierre is. He doesn't know what's going on in the commune. He doesn't really understand what's going on all day, to be honest with you. And he decides, I think we should regroup, go back to the commune, take stock, find out what's going on. And so he says to his troops, "Vive la République. My friends follow me to the commune." And so instead of attacking, they march off to the east towards the city hall, the Odelle de Ville, and the moment is lost. So by nine o'clock, this is the picture. There are toxins running across Paris. There are drums beating across the city, but it is not clear to most people what's going on or who's got the upper hand. The conventioners now, they've now finally got their act together. They've rallied their own forces. And what are these forces? There's these are National Guards loyal to them by and much. And they place them under the command of the deputy Paul Bachas. So he's the guy who'd been it too long. And a guy who was actually going to dominate the politics of France for the next five years. He's basically the link between this moment, the revolution and Napoleon. And Napoleon. Yeah. On the face of it, you would say the commune is still the favorite. The commune still has the upper hand. So they've tracked down Saint-Jose to Couton and the other people who'd been arrested. They brought them to the city hall. Ongrio has now turned up with his troops and his cannons. And he's also joined there by hundreds more. Those people who have actually answered the call from their sections. The thing is outside the city hall, Ongrio and Couton, they don't really know what to do. There's no clear lead. There's no one in charge. The minutes go by, but no one's giving any orders. There's no sense of direction. And actually some of Ongrio's men are like, do you know, it's quite late. I might actually just, I don't think anything's going to happen. I need a bit of a nightcap. I think I'm just going to go home. I'm a snifter. At 1030 that night, Rob Speier is finally, he's been escorted from police headquarters and he's finally brought into the council chamber at the Odeleville. And there are great cheers. All his fans are there. Huge cheers. Finally, the man of the hour. Finally, the man who will give us a lead. And this is a fantastic irony. If Rob Speier had been the tyrant of his enemies' claims, if he had been the dictator, if he'd been the power craze despoit that people said he was, this was his moment and he would have seized it. But Rob Speier is exhausted, pale, shaken. He can't believe how he's been treated by the convention. He definitely does try to say something to make a speech. He's lost his voice, isn't he? His lost his voice and nobody could really hear what he was saying. Hey, I've hurt you. It's not my fault. Yeah, poor me, basically. But I think the fact that he's so uncertain tells its own story. Rob Speier, as we were talking about earlier this week, Rob Speier's in his own mind is a massive goodie-goodie. He's the man who always follows the rules. And a more ruthless man, a would-be dictator would say, sod the rules. Let's kill all the deputies and the convention and I will rule France. Rob Speier doesn't want to do that. He wants to do the right thing and he doubt doesn't know what to do. So no clear lead comes from the council chamber. And outside, more and more of the troops are disappearing. The difference is that back at the convention, Rob Speier's enemies know exactly what they want to do. It's half an hour after Rob Speier returned up. Talion gets up in the convention. I mean, he's now cock a hoop. His girlfriend is going to be so pleased with him after this. And he says, my friends, we must make sure that before the sun rises, the conspirators are flushed out from their lair. We must beat Rob Speier to it. We will only sleep when the traitors have been annihilated. And there are great cheers, everyone shouting to arms, to arms. And Barras and some of the other deputies lead the convention's troops off towards the east. At the Hotel de Ville, more and more onriars men are drifting away now. Some of the local sections have decided, do you know what? I think we should sit this out. I think we should just sit this out and see who wins. This is not going to be our fight. And so more and more of them are drifting away. By one o'clock, the square is now really visibly emptying. And of course, if you see those are people going, you start, you decide that you want to go as well. And at two o'clock in the morning, which is when the convention troops and two columns under Barras and a guy called Léanor Bordon, when they converge on the square, it's virtually deserted. Do you know what this reminds me of? Ironically. It's the failure of Lafayette to defend the raw couple at Versailles. Oh, yeah, the march of the market women. He went for a sleep, didn't he? But it's that kind of vibe that if you've got passion on your side, your instinct will tell you what to do. And if you don't, you will either go to sleep or just sit there croaking horsey. Yeah, it's true actually. Joe, the whole series, the less than it teaches me is the size of action. Decisive always decisive action. Indecision kills you. I mean, that's the case with the raw couple with Lafayette. Business lessons from the French Revolution. It's totally true. If there are any corporate giants out there, who will be interested in business lessons from French Revolution, this excellent proposal. So on the way into the square, they meet a commune artillery unit and this deputy called Bordon Shouts. Do you want to fight for the tyrant? And the commune men say, no, actually, no, we don't want to fight with you. So they join him. They literally just walk through the doors of the city hall. They go through the doors. They go up the main staircase and upstairs, they can hear this sort of panicked shouting from the chamber at the top of the stairs. And a gunshot, right? And gunshots, yeah. Maybe. Possibly. Well, I think, I think two gunshots. Comes in a bit later, perhaps? Probably. Yeah. When they get upstairs, they find a scene of utter chaos. So August Saint Robert Speer has fallen out of a window, either he was trying to kill himself or to escape to jump out. And he's lying at the bottom very badly injured. Ario, the commander of the National Guard, it's also fallen from a window. The general consensus, I think, was that the others threw him out because he just panicked, started drinking. And they were sick of him and they just threw him out the window. But he landed in a dung heap. So he's not too badly injured. But it's not been a good evening for him. I mean, let's not be out of the bush. Couton, who people have been kind of insensitive about all through this episode, someone has thrown him down the stairs in his wheelchair, which seems very harsh. So he's lying at the foot of a staircase with blood streaming from his head. Philippe La Ba, who only entered the story, you know, 20 minutes ago, he's left it already, because he has shot himself, taken his own life. Sanchez is just standing there, very pale, very silent, you know, but quite calm. Archangel Light. Yeah. And Robert Speer is lying on the ground in agony. His face is covered with blood and his jaw has been shattered by a pistol shot. Afterwards, some of the convention deputies said, oh, well, he was the, he was shot actually by one of our heroes, by Trooper, called Charles Andre Mervda. But I think it's generally a
that Rob Spear probably tried to, you know, he wanted to be a Roman, didn't he? - Yeah, he wanted to be Kato. - I mean, he thought the Roman thing to do was to, yeah, to do a Kato take his own life, that he shot himself, made a mess of it, shot himself in the jaw. - I mean, how'd you do that? He's not a natural military man, is he? I mean, you're trying to shoot your brains out and you shoot your jaw off. - So he, who could have given him excellent advice? - Who? - Teodros, the Emperor of Ebersynia. - Yes, well, but he just grazed his ear, didn't he? The first time he tried to shoot himself. So practice made perfect for him. - Yeah. - That's a funny dinner party, doesn't it? I mean, two people with enormous reserves of self pity, actually. - Yeah. - Who's the real victim in that conversation? - Wow. - Always Rob Spear. - So the prisoners are taking back to the committee of public safety, the place, the room in which this episode began. And Kuton is left lying on a stretcher. Sanchius stands in the corner in handcuffs. He's very calm, he's silent. One witness says he looked like a pickpocket court red handed. And Rob Spear, who is unconscious, is laid on a table. His show to search with blood. His stockings around his ankles. His breaches are kind of unbuttoned. Yeah, for somebody who cares so much about looking. - Such a humiliation. - This is a complete humiliation. He wakes up after he's actually only been unconscious for an hour. And then he wakes. And he must have been an excruciating agony, but he doesn't make much noise. So he is playing the Roman. He's doing what Kuton would do. - They call for a surgeon and the surgeon took out some teeth that are basically-- - Oh, come loose. - And then Rob Spear sort of shattered a jaw and sort of bandaged it up so that it was in place. And Rob Spear, of course, couldn't speak at this point. He can only really communicate by grunts. And there are people standing around him and they're mocking him the whole time. Is your majesty in pain? What of this kind of thing? - But you know what? I think this is admirable on his part that he does try to keep his dignity 'cause about nine o'clock he sits bolt up right from where he's lying in agony. And he's wearing his sky blue coat. The one that he wore at the festival of the Supreme Being. So he's got it on. Smooth it down and he pulls up his stockings and he crosses to a vacant armchair and sits there to preserve his dignity despite the unspeakable agony that he must have been. That's the being in. - Yeah, imagine. - But I wouldn't mind that. - And when they carried him out, they carried him out in this armchair. And some people said that he tried feebly to kind of hit the people who were carrying him while they were carrying him. - Well, it's such a-- It's a butcher's shambles, isn't it? - It is. Blood everywhere. - I mean, he's physically broken, Kuton's physically broken, his brother's physically broken. I mean, Sanchez is basically the only person who's, who's all right. What's his name? He's covered in dung. - It's awful. - Yes. - Blood and shit. - Unreal, who's completely let himself down, I think. - He's not had a good evening. It has to be said. - He's had a terrible evening. He threw away a brilliant opportunity and now he's paying the price. So late that afternoon, they're loaded into the tumbrills for the journey to the guillotine. And you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, the guillotine has been moved back, especially to plaster their evolution on the center of Paris, because the winners, the convention, want to make a big show of this. And as the tumbral passes, one on look has said, it was a holiday. All the elegant people were at their windows to see them pass. They cheered and clapped their hands all along the Rue Sant'on ore. The street where Robespierre, of course, had been living. And when they, it says they cheered and clapped, they didn't cheer and clapped because they were, it wasn't friendly applause, put it that way. There's a lot of abuse, as always, with all executions, there's a lot of abuse, there's a lot of jeering and mockery. Sonsan, the executioner, he's had a very busy few years. He got to work at about 7.30, and Couton goes first. Couton's body was so, I mean, he's not only, of course, as he disabled, but he's been thrown down the stairs. His body at this point is so bent that it apparently takes him, takes 15 minutes for the guards to basically straighten them out, forcibly straighten them out. - Who's hairling? - Oh, he's an unimaginable agony, and the crowd were told, are loving every minute of it, delighted. Then Sons Juste, who dies like a Roman? - I would expect nothing less. - Not quite like Donton with his, you know, he's quips on the scaffold, but he's impassive, he's calm, he's brave, I suppose. And then there's some others, the usual thing where they're thrown in a few people for luck. And then after half an hour of waiting, Rob Speer, and he's, you know, he's done his best, but he's still a blood smeared, pretty ragged, you know, wild-looking figure. And then a literally jaw-dropping moment, because Sonsan rips the bandage off, which has been keeping his jaw attached to the upper part of his skull. And as they rip it off, the jaw drops, and he gives this terrible shriek, which people describe as being like, you know, an animal being tortured or something. And then chop, that's it. - Yeah, so that's the end of Maximilian Rob Speer, 36 years old, not even that old. And the funny thing is, every sort of popular account you read, says Rob Speer fell because of a backlash against the terror. But that's just not the case. The people who brought him down, if you go through the people who brought him down, the people we've mentioned most, Kolo, Bio, Barere, Daniel, Paul Berras, Fouche, Fouche, and so on, they love it. These had been enthusiastic and bloodthirsty operatives of the terror. You see, this is where I think it comes back to the question of how good a politics you are. And I said, I think last time, I feel like Rob Speer was very good at politics until he wasn't, until he got found out as a were. And this didn't have to happen. He made too many enemies. He was really poor at making friends. And his speech in particular was a catastrophic misjudgment. I mean, it's easy for me to say unnecessary. I mean, you could say that from Rob Speer's perspective, it was very, it was only too necessary. But a more cany politician would surely have played things differently. I think he has driven mad ultimately by his principles drive him mad, his principles inspire him for so long. And they combine with his native ability for outsmarting his enemies. But in the end, his own sense of virtue leads him to make catastrophic errors, as you say. Yeah, his sort of manically and sense of good and evil corruption and purity, virtue and, you know, treachery. I think once you're in the world where you see any opposition, any dissent, any disagreement as treachery, or as a sort of existential impurity, then it's going to be very difficult to command the allegiance of your. I think there are worldly men, of course. I mean, the thing is that he is incredibly effective while he still has the power of surprise on his side. But once it becomes obvious, he really only has the one strategy that it's driven by his own deeply held moral principles. Everyone knows what his strategy is going to be, and so it becomes actually possible to outsmart him. Yes, so then that's absolutely right. So after his death, nobody had a good word to say about him. People who, just days earlier, would have, you know, encountered themselves as his loyalists, his partisan's, now say they were against him all along. And so at this point, it's only after this point, after the coup of Thelmy Dors, it becomes called, that people start to use the phrase, "Le rejim de la terreur, the reign of terror, to describe his ascendancy." And they say, "All Robespierre was the tyrant, Robespierre was the dictator, and it was all because of him." In Peter McFee's book on the Revolution, there is a lovely quote from. It's great to get a British naval officer on the show, especially one with a tremendous name, "Captain Watkin Tentch." And Captain Tentch was held to take in as a prisoner, and held as a POW, a couple of months later. And Tentch said afterwards, "He listened to people talking," and he said, "Those who prostrated themselves like reptiles before Robespierre, and now blaming him for all the assassinations and misery, to screen themselves from odium, or the subordinate tyrants, fix upon him, and attribute to his orders the innumerable butcheries and acts of oppression, which they have perpetuated." And I think this is a degree of truth in that. Robespierre was the great spokesman for the terror. It's most articulate defender, but he wasn't the sole proponent of it, and it probably would have happened. No. Well, I mean, it's. The people coining this phrase "terrorist" to describe him, are people who themselves were. more enthusiastic practitioners of terror. Exactly, right. Exactly. So where's the sleeve of the revolution? And I think this is the biggest irony of the story. So, as we said, none of the men who brought Robespierre down really were that keen to dismantle the terror or to scrap the whole regime. So, Kolo, Biel, Bahair, on the Committee of Public Safety, they thought, "We're Robespierre gone, brilliant. We're going to run things. We're going to have things our own way." But actually, what's happened is that they have unleashed forces they cannot control. And what this actually reminds me of is the four of the Soviet Union, where you have unanticipated consequences of political decisions and suddenly, without people. quite understanding why the whole thing is tumbling down. And the reason is that when the great mass of people in the convention look at the situation, they say, well, hold on, we've actually have beaten all the rebels and we've beaten the Austrians and France is safe from invasion now. So although the war's still going on, it's no longer a massive emergency, the terror, you know, it's kind of done the trick. So why do we need it? Why do we need to give the committees all this power? So they start to strip the committees of their power in the next couple of weeks. In August, they repeal the law of Prairie El, so that basically brings the terror to an end. The revolutionary tribunal lasts for another year until 1795. But for the last year of its existence, it's really being used against the terrorists themselves. You know, it's no longer being used to sort of punish, you know, housewives complaining about bad wine makers. Yeah, wine makers and stuff. In September, they've been rebranded, not as Robespierre's assassins, but as Robespierre's accomplices and they voted off the Committee of Public Safety. In November, the Jacques Banque Club is closed down. It's a bit like the moment in, I don't know, 1991 when the Communist Party was outlawed in Russia. The Jacques Banque Club has been closed down. In December, the convention scraps all the economic measures, the wage and price controls. So now, the value of the assay now plummets, massive inflation. A few people, well-connected businessmen and politicians start to make a lot of money. Most people don't, and the second half of the 1790s will be very tough economically for the French. By the spring of 1795, they've brought back the Gerardard. So those Gerardardard, who they haven't killed, are released from prison, and they are welcomed back to the convention. Let's bury that hatchet, you know. You might have just stepped the market a little bit. There are now only about 70 months on your left, and actually the convention is now dominated, really, but I suppose what you could call the right by the moderates, I guess. And the survivors start having survivors' parties, don't they? Yes. Where the women wear thin red chokers around their neck to emulate what might have happened to them? Have they not survived it? We talked about this, I think, in our episodes about the young Napoleon. Do we not? Episode 383, don't we? Oh my word, that's good work. So maybe, I mean, the story of what happened in the late 1790s and the rise of Napoleon, we did do young Napoleon, but maybe that's a story from another time. But I think the point to stop is March 1795, because that month, Collo, Bio, and Barrera, as well as Vadié from the Committee of General Security, they were arrested as terrorists, and they were convicted, and they were sentenced to be deported to French Guyana. They did not all end up there. And also put on trial that month, and this is a really ironic moment, was the prosecutor, the revolutionary tribunal, Fouquet-Tainville, the man who had sent to the guillotine as prosecutor, Charlotte Corde, Mary Antoinette, Abeir, and Donald. He lamented, didn't he, that he felt trailed by ghosts? Yes, he did. Yes, he did. I actually feel a tiny bit sorry for him. His trial lasted, unlike theirs, it lasted 41 days, and more than 400 witnesses were called. And Fouquet-Tainville defended himself. This will be very familiar to people. He said, "All I was doing, I was doing my job. I was only following orders." And he was sentenced to death nonetheless, and his last words before he headed to the guillotine were as follows. He said, "I have nothing to approach myself for. I've always complied with the laws. I have never been a creature of Robespierre as such used. I die for my country. I am satisfied. And one day, my innocence will be recognised." And that is the end of the story. So an epic moment, the end, not just of our series on the terror, but our series on the French Revolution. So we hope you have enjoyed it. Next week, we begin a four-part series on something very different, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. A mystery romance that has fascinated people for centuries and centuries and now, for the first time, on our podcast. First time in history, right? We will be revealing the site of Camelot, the location of the Holy Grail. We will identify where Avalon actually is, where King Arthur lies, are waiting to come and rescue Britain. He needs to get a move on. Incredible. And all four episodes will be available on Monday for the rest of history. Club members, so if you'd like to get them, go to therestishistory.com. But for now, Dominic, thank you very much. Thank you very much, everyone for listening and Au revoir. Au revoir. Is history anything more than the story of heroes and villains? Of course it is, but not in our brand new Therestis History Book, a history of the world in 51 heroes and villains. Now, in this book, we have picked out some of our very favorite characters from the last few years of Therestis history. So we've got Genghis Khan, we have Cyrus the Great, we have Mary Antoinette, and obviously we have Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones. Now, some of these people are friends of the show, some of them are unwanted acquaintances, some of them are downright foes of the show. But we had one rule, they had to be interesting, and they had to be interesting stories about them. So now is your chance to pick a side, to polish your armor, to dawn your very best First World War generals, moustache, and to decide whether you are on the side of the heroes or the villains. A history of the world in 51 heroes and villains is available now. It makes a wonderful Christmas present. I cannot recommend it to you more highly. if you don't buy a copy, you will probably regret it till the day you die. Goodbye.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Robespierre delivers a self-pitying, politically charged speech defending himself as a martyr of liberty while accusing the Convention of conspiracy and corruption.
Despite his role as a revolutionary leader, Robespierre’s actual influence is limited, with most key decisions made by technocrats and bureaucrats, not him.
Internal dissent within the Committee of Public Safety grows due to exhaustion, frustration with Robespierre’s moralizing, and ideological clashes with radicals like Collot and Bio.
The Committee of General Security, led by Vadié and Amar, resents the Committee of Public Safety’s overreach and launches a smear campaign by falsely accusing Robespierre of supporting a mystical cult.
Robespierre’s return to public life after six weeks of absence sparks a dramatic confrontation, where his vague accusations trigger outrage and self-defense from opponents.
A key turning point occurs when Robespierre’s speech, instead of uniting the Convention, provokes a backlash, with deputies openly challenging his allegations and demanding accountability.
The speech fails to instill fear or secure loyalty; instead, it exposes the fragility of revolutionary unity and fuels paranoia, leading to accusations of corruption against innocent figures like Combon.
The episode reveals that the French Revolution’s collapse was not inevitable but driven by shifting alliances, personal vendettas, and the failure of leadership to maintain trust and transparency.
Summary:
Maximilien Robespierre’s final major speech to the National Convention on 26 July 1794 is a dramatic yet flawed attempt to reassert his authority as the defender of revolutionary virtue. The speech, filled with self-pity and vague accusations of conspiracy, reflects his isolation and growing paranoia. Despite its theatrical intensity, it fails to unite the Convention.
Instead, it sparks outrage and self-defense, as deputies—including the finance committee’s Combon—challenge the allegations, exposing Robespierre’s lack of concrete evidence and credibility. His absence from public duties for six weeks has eroded his legitimacy, and his enemies, including radicals Collot and Bio and secret police leaders Vadié and Amar, exploit the situation to discredit him. The speech backfires, triggering a public backlash in which deputies accuse Robespierre of inciting fear and corruption, while also turning on each other.
This moment reveals the fragility of revolutionary unity: the revolution is not driven by pure ideology but by factionalism, personal ambition, and political survival. The episode underscores that Robespierre’s downfall was not due to a single decision, but a culmination of internal divisions, exhaustion, and the failure of leadership to address public discontent. The story highlights how the French Revolution’s trajectory was shaped not by grand narratives, but by individual choices, paranoia, and the collapse of trust in revolutionary figures.
FAQs
He claimed that a criminal conspiracy was threatening the Republic, accusing members of both the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security of corruption and betrayal, while defending himself as a martyr of liberty and champion of the revolution.
The speech was too vague and lacked specific names, leading deputies to suspect they might be targeted. This prompted a backlash, with several deputies demanding a reply and the convention ultimately refusing to publish the speech widely.
The Committee of General Security, led by Vadié and Amar, was deeply resentful of the Committee of Public Safety's growing power and openly opposed the cult of the Supreme Being, contributing to factional divisions and mutual distrust.
His absence fueled suspicions that he was detached from the revolutionary government, making him appear self-serving and undermining his image as a dedicated servant of the Republic, which weakened his standing among colleagues and deputies.
The speech marked a turning point in the revolution by intensifying fear of internal conspiracies and setting the stage for a political purge, though its failure to name specific enemies allowed opposition factions to unite against him without direct accusations.
Combon, a respected businessman with no known enemies, was shocked by being named in accusations of corruption, leading him to demand the rostrum and challenge Robespierre's claims, showing the public's skepticism of unverified allegations.
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