707. The Terror: An Assassination in Paris (Part 1)

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Charlotte Corday manifesto and murder of Marat

2:41How long, Frenchman, will you put up with disorder and divisions? Oh, Frenchman, a little longer, and all that will remain of you is the memory of your existence. Already the provinces are marching on Paris. Already half of our empire burns with the fire of discord and civil war. There is still a way to extinguish it, but that way must be swift. Already the vilest of villains, Mara, whose name alone is the image of all crimes,

3:15is falling under the avenging blade, shaking the mountain and making Danton and Roespierre pale, those other brigands seated on this bloody throne. Your peace depends on the execution of the law. I am not undermining it by killing Mara. Condemned by the universe, he is outside the law. What court will judge me? Let my last breath be useful to my fellow citizens. Let my head, held aloft in Paris, be a rallying point for all the friends of the law.

3:50Let the universe declare that I deserved well of humanity. Frenchman, I have shown you the way. You know your enemies. Rise up. Strike. So a very punchy manifesto there and had a very catchy title, Address to the French Friends of Law and Peace. And it was found on a young woman who was arrested in Paris on the 13th of July, 1793. And the name of this young woman, Charlotte Corday, 24 years old, strikingly good looking.

4:25Everyone commented on this all the time. And of course, her looks and her youth made her arrest all the more of a sensation because she was charged with the assassination of perhaps the single most controversial man in France. A radical journalist, a revolutionary firebrand, the supreme champion of terror, Jean-Paul Marat. And it is one of the most famous episodes in French history, the murder of Marat, the pretty

5:02young woman who comes from the provinces, talks her way into Marat's apartment, finds him soaking his pustule-ridden body in a bath, pulls out a knife, plunges it deep into his chest. A scene famously painted by Jacques-Louis David, one of the most famous illustrations of the French Revolution ever painted. But Dominic, it's not just an incredibly exciting story in and of

5:33itself, is it? It is also the trigger for perhaps the most celebrated, the most notorious passage of the entire revolution, the passage that is known as the terror. Yeah, exactly right. I'd say it's one of the most thrilling moments in all world history. I remember doing it at school, just absolutely loving it. The moment in 1793, 1794, when, as you say, France descends into the reign of terror. So loads of people will be familiar with the images of this. The triumph of Madame Guillotine. You've seen it in films. You've seen it in video games and

6:08books, whatever. The carts rattling through the streets loaded with prisoners. The old women, the tricoteurs knitting at the foot of the guillotine. They're going to mob howling for blood as their blade begins to fall. It's something that English writers in particular have always adored. They're turning the melodrama right up to the maximum. So Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities or Hilary Mantel in A Place of Greater Safety. But in this series, we will be looking behind those images

Jean-Paul Marat and his early life

6:37to explore exactly what happened and why. And we have an amazing cast of characters. So we'll be talking about the revolutionaries, people like Danton and Robespierre. We've got an amazing episode to come on the execution of Marie Antoinette. And then we have today's protagonist, the man who kicks off the whole story. And he really is an extraordinarily grotesque and fascinating character with his lovely blisters and his squint and his vehement rhetoric. And that is Jean-Paul Marat. So Marat

7:10is actually born in what's now Switzerland in 1743 in a small town. His father was a Sardinian friar who converted to Calvinism. So as a as a little boy, Marat is something he has in common with a lot of revolutionary figures. He's very ambitious. He said later, of five, I wanted to be a schoolmaster, at 15, a professor, at 18, an author, and at 20, a creative genius. Actually, he's none of those things. He moves to France initially, and then he goes off to London, lives in London. And he arrives

7:40in London when London is gripped by the great controversy about the radical journalist and MP, John Wilkes. And Wilkes is a great sort of newspaper man who's always slacking off the British government and the establishment and corruption. And this is a great influence on Marat. He's really taken with Wilkes's radical style and his, you know, his sort of invocation of the ordinary people against the corrupt metropolitan elite. And Marat will obviously take that and then turn that up to 11. But in the short term, his real enthusiasm is medicine. So he writes a thesis on gonorrhea.

8:15He manages to wangle a degree in absentia from St. Andrews. I don't think he ever went to St. Andrews. And then he went into the wellness industry. He's based in Newcastle for five years, isn't he? So presumably, he speaks English with a Geordie accent. Yeah, he goes around peddling these mad cures for venereal disease. If you have bad eyesight, you, of course, like me, don't wear glasses. He would prescribe you electrotherapy for your eyes. It would definitely change your eyesight. I don't think whether it would make it better. The sizzling of your eyeballs.

8:47This doesn't really work out. He comes back to Paris. He establishes himself as an experimental scientist. He basically puts his money from the wellness industry, what money he's made, into making his own laboratory. He claims to have proved that fire is an igneous fluid. And what would that have meant? It meant that previous views about fire were wrong, and that actually people needed to appreciate the fluidity of fire. I mean, how would he monetize that? He wouldn't. That's the problem. He also said that Newton was a fool. Newton's theories of light and color were totally wrong.

9:20And he claimed to have written papers proving that Newton was an idiot. I mean, isn't that what Einstein does, basically? Those Einstein and Marat parallel lives? Genius ahead of his time. Yeah, maybe. Anyway, Marat submitted these findings to the French Royal Academy of Sciences, and they said, this is idiocy from you. You know, they rejected him. And he felt humiliated. Now, actually, Robert Danton, the great historian of 18th century France, points out that this feeling of humiliation on the part of a provincial young man is very, very common among the leaders of the

9:51revolution. You know, you can go through a lot of these characters, and they are from the provinces, they're from small towns, they've come to the big city, they feel rejected and ostracized by this sort of establishment figures. And this fuels a lot of their rage once the revolution starts. I mean, isn't that the stereotype of revolutionaries, that it's people who've got just enough academic background to feel that they deserve better of society and then don't get it? Exactly. It's people who've spent a lot of time down kind of YouTube rabbit holes. And they're not

10:24idiots, but they feel rejected by the sort of, you know, big science or big history or whatever it might be. So this is Marat. By the late 1780s, he's a very lonely, bitter, disappointed man. Everyone thinks he's a crank and a charlatan, he's struggling to make ends meet, and then bang.

The French Revolution and Marat's newspaper

10:42Summer of 1789, France convulsed by political and economic crisis. Louis XVI runs out of money, gets into a mess politically, recalling the estates general. Mob storms the Bastille, and this disorder escalates into what we would call the French Revolution. And Marat seizes his chance. He basically thinks back to John Wilkes in London, when he was there all those years ago, 1770s or something. And he says, bang, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to reinvent myself

11:14as a radical polemicist, set up my own newspaper, the people's friend, Lamy Dupup. So basically, the cause of the French Revolution is the British press. Yeah. I mean, you heard it here first. The model of British journalism is what triggers it all. But we know where to stop, Tom, and that's the difference. So, well, Marat goes well beyond the tone of the British press, the 18th century British press. He has this incredibly violent and messianic tone in his writings from the very beginning. There's a brilliant new biography,

11:48came out, I think this year, or maybe late last year, by the historian Keith Michael Baker, the kind of new definitive life of Marat. And Baker sees Marat as the first modern populist. And to pick out a couple of his elements of his appeal. I mean, these are obviously old things, they go back a long way, but Marat reinvents them for a new age. One of them is the invocation of the people, with a capital P. So the people are constantly in danger of being betrayed by appeasers and traitors. That's a huge part of modern populism, and it's part of Marat's journalism.

12:20Marat is obsessed with conspiracies. He says, quite explicitly, my aim is to keep my readers constantly alert. If I don't keep them alert, they will fall back into the abyss and they'll be dragged there by royalists and priests and other ne'er-do-wells who are all plotting against the people. I mean, it's the idea of, you know, wake up sheeple. If the truth that is motivating all these awful things that are happening is revealed, then you, as someone who has been illuminated, stand actually above the mass of the people. So Marat's calling himself a friend of the people,

12:52but he's also offering a kind of privileged status to those who read him. Completely. And actually, you are quite right. The language of waking and sleeping, Marat uses that a lot. We're so familiar with that now, both on the right and, of course, on the left. Hence, are you woke? Marat would have been very, very familiar with that. And his argument was always, to wake people up, you need to be provocative, confrontational, indeed violent. That could be rhetorical violence or it could be physical violence, but only extreme language and extreme

13:27behaviour can rouse the masses from their slumber so their eyes are opened to the horrors of the conspiracy that threatens them. And I suppose, at this point, to cite the extenuating circumstance for him, is that he doesn't know quite what the matches are that he's playing with. No, I suppose he doesn't. But Marat's instinct is always to keep lighting those matches. Yeah, and chucking them onto sticks of gel ignite. He doesn't have an off button. I don't think he'd ever have had an off button, frankly. Anyway, the revolution spirals out of control

14:00in the early 1790s, and Marat becomes one of its most controversial outspoken figures. This is very deliberate from him. So rather as in the last few years, you'd see people on social media saying, you know, civility is a political choice. We don't have a, you know, we don't want to be civil. We want to be confrontational because the crisis facing our civilization is so great. Marat sees charm, politeness, courtesy as fake and a sign of treason, actually. It's because it's fake. You are treasonous if you are polite and polished.

14:34And I suppose also that, I mean, as with social media today, so then, attracting hate can become a measure of status. Yeah, completely, completely. Marat has a, I mean, he actually has this sort of martyr complex. He's constantly talking about how his life is in danger, how plotters and traitors are out to get him. Now, actually, the argument that civility and charm are treacherous is very convenient for Marat because he's an extremely uncivil and charmless man. Everybody agrees. He's hideously ugly. He's

15:05thin. He's shabby. He's kind of twitchy. He has this shock of unkempt black hair. He's a bit cross-eyed. And above all, he has this absolutely dreadful skin condition. And people have spent a lot of ink discussing whether it's syphilis, which it probably wasn't. The diagnosis now is chronic dermatitis herpetiformis. I don't really know what that means, but it's bad. And it's getting worse, isn't it? It is. Yeah. And it will flare up when he's under stress. And the cure for that is a bath, right? Well, that's the only thing that will soothe it. He comes out in these terrible blisters and sores.

15:36So he takes a bath. So he has to have a soak. He has a soak. And he's very small, isn't he? He's only about five foot, I think. He's a sort of wizened man. He's like Yoda. And although he doesn't sound like a great catch, he does actually, in 1792, he goes through a sort of atheistical marriage ceremony with a woman called Simone Evra, who was 21 years his junior and was a sort of Mara groupie. Right. So he's not exactly a catch. He's a terrible husband, I would imagine. But anyway, he's got this wife, so that's nice. Most of the other revolutionaries can't stand Marat. They find him very, very objectionable

16:12company. So Corday, in the speech you read, his assassin, she bracketed him with Danton and Robespierre. But neither Danton nor Robespierre actually liked Marat or really enjoyed hanging around with him. They thought he's, you know, he's extreme, he's histrionic, he's much too bloodthirsty. He's always shouting and ranting, and he's just extremely unpleasant company. Other sort of apostles of the terror would say, he doesn't pay for his drinks, he catches off you, he borrows money, he doesn't pay it back. He's just basically an incredibly unpleasant

16:43man. I suppose also what he does, though, is to push to extremes arguments that people like Danton and Robespierre are making that we need to react firmly to counter-revolution or whatever. Marat is saying, we basically need to bathe France in blood. Completely. So from the beginning, he's talking about killing people. 600 heads in 1790. 1791, he's talking about 200 or 300,000 people. And this is not just empty rhetoric. So in 1792, France is at war, the Prussians are advancing on Paris, and it's

17:16Marat who urges the street kind of militants, the sans-culottes, the trouserless sort of masses, to break into the prisons and to slaughter one and a half thousand inmates of the prisons. And Marat said, this is justice. This will deter these legions of traitors. So this has real-world consequences. You know, he is encouraging the massacre of hundreds and hundreds of people. And moderates, even people who supported the revolution but were moderate, came to hate

17:46Marat. So in his book on the French Revolution, Peter McPhee cites a club in Grandville in Normandy. And this club issued a resolution. It called Marat the provoker of murder who's leading a disgusting faction of blood. But in Paris, which is his kind of heartland, Marat is very popular. He's seen as the tribune of the common man. And a week after these prison massacres, he's elected to represent Paris in the new national convention. So the national convention is going to be playing a huge part in

18:17our story in this series. And this is the new sort of legislature of France. And it meets at first in the old riding school, the manège in the Tuileries gardens, in the gardens of the royal palace.

Girondins and Montagnards factions

18:29And the mood of this new convention is very well suited to Marat's style. Because this winter, 1792 to 1793, under the pressure of the economic and military crises that the revolution is facing, it's beginning to tear itself apart. So to paint a picture of the scene, in this convention building, you have about 750 largely young men, inexperienced, a lot of them from the provinces originally, very passionate, very idealistic. They're all dressed, I mean, we'll talk about this in a future

19:02episode, I know. They wear this sort of revolutionary uniform, this long black overcoats and these big kind of leather boots. They will be debating for 12 hours at a time, arguing about the new society they're trying to build. And then all night, they will be staying up to read letters and study paperwork. And all the time, they're getting drunk. By and large, they're a very particular kind of people. I've already said they're idealistic young men. So they're young, they're all Republicans, there are lots of lawyers and writers, they're from middle class backgrounds, and they're steeped in

19:34the values of the Enlightenment. So they've all read their Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Yeah, Rousseau is the dominating influence, isn't he? He is, exactly. But within the convention, there are now two factions, we've talked about them in previous series, who are competing for people's allegiance. So on the one hand, you have a faction called the Girondins, and they really have had their upper hand for the last year or so. And they are led, I mean, let's just reduce them very simplistically to two people. A former anti-slavery journalist called Jacques-Pierre Brisseau. And there's a woman called

20:07Madame Roulon, presiding at a literary salon. And by and large, massive generalisation, but by and large, their power base are the kind of high-minded, bien-pensant, upper middle classes of the big provincial cities like Bordeaux, Marseille. And particularly Bordeaux, right, because the name Girondins comes from the Girondes, and Bordeaux is just downriver from the Girondes estuary. Exactly. So they're kind of mercantile, self-improving. Yeah. And the mercantile aspect is important, isn't it? Because they are, there's a set, I mean,

20:42maybe slightly anachronistic, but they are kind of free market in their attitude towards economics, whereas we will see their opponents are much more dirigiste. So there's a slight Roy Jenkins against Tony Benn. Do you know, I was just about to say, there are people who would have been in the SDP in the 1980s, I think, the Girondins. Oh, good. I'm glad I got that right. That would mean nothing to anyone who's not British. In fact, that would mean nothing to anybody who's not British, or who's under 50. But, you know. For people who've read your books, it would mean a great deal. Precisely, to both of those people. It's a self-selecting elite, Dominic.

21:13An important thing about the Girondins, they're not a Parisian party. So they're not, they don't have a lot of strength in the streets of Paris. Now, on the other hand, the other people, the other big faction are what's called the Montagnards, the Mountain. And they're called the Mountain because they sit high up in the left-hand side of the convention. There's about 200 of them. They're more radical, more militant. And the Montagnards are big in Paris. They are dominated by some of the best-known figures of the revolution, more radical figures. So you've got Robespierre, who we'll be talking about next time, Maximilian Robespierre, cold, chilly,

21:46very self-consciously virtuous, you know, the incarnation of kind of Republican purity. And then you've got Georges Danton, who is a big man, big appetites, earthy, corrupt, the sort of slightly more Churchillian, I suppose. It's you and me, basically. Let's be upfront. I didn't want to say it. So what's the difference between the Girondins and the Montagnards? It really boils down to two things. I think the Montagnards, like Marat, they idealize the people. They are ultra-populists.

22:19The Girondins, the sort of more high-minded types, are a little bit more suspicious of the people. They're more paternalistic. They want to be the people directing the revolution. They're anxious about giving too much power to the streets. The Girondins also, and this is allied to that, they think the revolution is in danger of tipping into kind of, you know, an orgy of bloodshed. They want to rein back on the violence a bit. Whereas the Montagnards, I mean, this is putting it very simplistically, they see the violence as necessary, even healthy, to build the better

22:51world they want. So, for example, when they scrapped the monarchy, which they did in the autumn of 1972, the Montagnards said, we've got to get rid of Louis XVI. The Girondins were much more squeamish about it. You know, this one man, do we really need to get rid of him, all of this? And so their enemies, the Girondins critics said, hold on, are these guys committed to the revolution or not? Because, you know, you can't make an omelette and are they prepared to break the eggs? Well, people start to say that they are actively royalist, don't they? In the mountain. Exactly. So if we fast forward to the spring of 1793, this feud between these two factions

23:27is so bitter, it's probably only going to end one way. I mean, somebody is going to lose their heads. And on the 13th of March, 1793, a great Girondins speaker, who was regarded as actually the best speaker in the convention, a guy called Pierre Vernieu, he issued this famous prophecy. He said, we are in danger of destroying ourselves in all these squabbles. We will be like Saturn devouring his children, and this will all end in a dictatorship. And of course, how prescient he was, he was quite right. The irony, though, is actually when you

24:00look at Vernieu's speech, he says this in the course of this massive partisan factional tirade against the Montagnard. So, you know, he's only kind of got himself to blame to some degree. And that tells you how toxic the situation has become. And it's so toxic, precisely because

Economic crisis and war across borders

24:18France in 1793 is gripped by two massive existential crises. So the first one is economic meltdown. So France has had a succession of absolutely terrible harvests. The nationwide grain market has broken down. The government is running out of money to pay for the war against the Austrians and the Prussians. They've been printing paper money, the Assignat, as it's called. They've got four billion of these Assignat on the market in early 1793. And that has triggered this colossal inflation, bread prices, sugar and whatnot going through the roof. There are shortages. There are

24:53protests almost every day at markets. There are women marching in the streets of Paris. It's not great. I mean, women are really a vital part of this story because they kind of emerge as a huge force on the streets of Paris over the spring of 1793. But also, Dom, just to say that these are exactly the circumstances that led to the revolution in the first place and the storming of the Bastille. And I suppose part of what makes the situation so toxic is that people, particularly those who are very poor, those who are on the verge of starvation, are thinking, well, we've had the revolution.

25:27Things should have improved. They haven't improved. Therefore, someone must be to blame for the fact that they haven't improved. You know, there must be traitors. And so it's generating, you know, it's fueling that mood of conspiracy that Marat is harnessing so effectively. It totally is. And there's the emergence of a group in 1793 who are exploiting precisely this sentiment. They're called the enraged, so the enraged or the madmen. So basically, people on social media. Yeah. They basically go around saying the working class poor are being betrayed. We need state

26:02intervention. We need massive price controls, massive redistribution of wealth. You know, the revolution needs to go much further. And the really disturbing thing about these enraged is they have moustaches. And this is seen as a sign of kind of virile, working class militancy. And a lot of the sort of more middle class revolutionaries are very shocked by these people's moustaches. Now, the other big existential threat is the war. So the war, I mean, the mad thing is the French started the war. And also, particularly the Girondins were massively keen on it, weren't they? And people like

26:34Ross-Pierre were massively against it. So if the war goes badly, then the Girondins are in real trouble. Completely. The Girondins started it. They thought they wanted to export the ideals of the revolution. They thought it would bring France together under their leadership. They declared war on Austria in April 1792. Then the Prussians joined in. And this has basically went badly for France, and it turned into a struggle for national survival. Now, so far, France's deadliest enemy, Britain, has stayed out. But British public opinion, more certainly high political opinion,

27:10was shocked by the execution of the King Louis XVI. William Pitt, the Prime Minister, called it the foulest and most atrocious act the world has ever seen. And there was a sort of sentiment, I think, among the British political classes at the beginning of 1793. The French Revolution is now totally out of control. It's going to spread across its borders. It's a threat to world peace. And at some point, we're going to have to stop it. The extraordinary thing is that even though Britain is a very dangerous opponent, you know, with its finances, its industry, and above

27:43all, its navy, the revolutionaries in Paris are absolutely gagging for a chance to have a crack at the British. So even before the execution of the King, Montagnon and Deputy told the National Convention, he said, the British Empire is basically just waiting for us to come and conquer it. We'll take India. We'll take the Caribbean. It is on the ruins of the Tower of London that we will sign the treaty which will establish the freedom of the world. Once again, it's the Convention, it's France that declares war first. They declared war on Britain and the Dutch Republic on the 1st of May,

28:161793. The Montagnon deputy, Georges Couton, we can liberate Europe in six months and purge the earth of all tyrants. I mean, this is the way they talk, you know, this incredibly idealistic, impatient, kind of restless rhetoric. But also that weird thing about the French Revolution, that it's simultaneously nationalistic and universal in its ambitions and never quite decide between the two. No. Well, I think they see the two as the same, don't they? Basically, everyone will turn into France and that'll be great for them. So in practical terms, what this means is that France is now at war on almost every frontier. It's fighting Britain, Holland, Prussia, Austria,

28:51and soon it'll be fighting Spain as well. It's fighting Britain and later Spain in the Caribbean. It's also facing a massive slave rebellion, slave revolution on the crucial sugar island of Saint-Domingue, future Haiti. And because it's taken on Britain, it now risks the classic British technique in a war, which is to use the Navy to impose an economic blockade. So that's not going to help with the French economy. And also the British fleet can move to areas on the coast in France that are

29:27counter-revolutionary. Exactly. Particularly in the south, in the south and the west. So there are advances in danger of being completely embattled, surrounded, encircled, and so on and so forth. And to fight all these threats, the military desperately needs more manpower. So on the 24th of February, 1793, the convention votes to draft 300,000 more men and issues quotas to officials across the countryside. This is the number of people you need to get. And in rural areas, this is colossally unpopular. And this goes back to a point you made about the economy.

30:00So the historian Timothy Tackett says, puts it this way. He says, In the eyes of many rural citizens, the revolution had taken away their priests, killed their king, and raised their taxes. Now, the convention wanted to send them off to die in a war hundreds of kilometers from their homes, while many of those who had started and supported the war remained in their towns to count the taxes. So if you're a peasant, this is very, very alarming.

Uprising in the Vendee

30:25And nowhere is this more contentious than in a region. So it's just south of Nantes, when you look on the maps, that sort of rural west-central France on the Atlantic. And this is called the Vendée. And the Vendée is a very distinctive part of the country. It's got an unusual landscape, kind of woods and fields separated by this very, very high hedgerows. And people live in these tiny villages scattered across this landscape, or in isolated farms. The local aristocracy in the Vendée lived on the land. They were quite close to the peasants, by and large.

31:00They had good relations with them. The church, as well, played a massive part in the social life of this region. It was basically the only institution that brought people together, the only collective institution that gave their lives a sort of sense of community. And when the revolution attacked the clergy in 1790, 1791, getting them to sign loyalty oaths, or swear loyalty oaths, to the revolution, people in the Vendée were very upset about it. They said, well, who are these people in Paris to tell us and our priests what to do to come and disrupt our way

31:30of life? And this conscription order in 1793 is basically the final straw. And in the first weeks of March 1793, the Vendée explodes. And attacks on officials and the National Guard escalate into this mass uprising. And you've got all, it basically unites all sectors of society. So you've got peasants, you've got priests, you've got landowners. They arm themselves with scythes and pikes. They hide in all these woods and hedgerows. And they will kind of leap out in this kind of guerrilla insurgency

32:01to attack troops sent from Paris to put down the rising. But there's also an element of a kind of religious crusade about it. It reminds me a bit of, I don't know, the Pilgrimage of Grace and Under Henry VIII or something. You know, the Vendéeans call themselves the Catholic and Royal Army. They wear religious images like the Sacred Heart on their coats. And their rhetoric is quite moving, I think, quite stirring. We are free men. We want our priests back. If we must die, let them kill us in our own fields. And all this kind of thing. So the Vendéeans have written up.

32:37In Paris, however, among the radicals who are in charge, they are seen as barbaric and backward. So one newspaper says, they're an unholy alliance of vindictive lordlings, wild priests, gamekeepers without pity, and fanatical peasants. So this is basically everything the revolution is trying to eradicate, that they cast the Vendéeans as a caricature. You see that? The vindictive peasants is interesting, though, isn't it? Because aristocrats,

33:07priests, gamekeepers, you can understand them being enemy of the people. But if the peasantry aren't the people, then I don't really know what is. And there is, I guess, the kind of the emergence of metropolitan radicals feeling impatient with people in the country who are too conservative for their tastes. And that's a theme that will run through revolutions beyond the French Revolution, right? Yeah, completely. I mean, Russia, 1920s, 1930s, exactly the same story. And it becomes a war,

33:40rather like, actually, the comparison with the Soviet Union. This becomes a campaign of horrific savagery, as we will see. We'll talk about this a little bit in future episodes. Massacres, reprisals, scorched earth campaign. I mean, to jump ahead, this campaign probably kills about a quarter of the population of the Vendée, maybe 200,000 people. And there's a long-running historiographical argument among French historians. Is it genocidal? Is it a kind of proto-genocide? Does it anticipate some of the horrors of the 20th century? You know, it's a very,

34:14very impassioned debate. Anyway, so it's March 1793. You've got the economy, you've got the war, you've got the Vendée, the news from the Vendée's come in. Could things be any worse for the convention and the people running it? Guess what? They could, and they're about to get much worse. Because as they're getting the first reports of the uprising in the Vendée, they're also getting news from the Flanders battlefront. So in the low countries, the French have done quite well.

34:46They've been pushing. Their commander is Charles-Francois Dumouriez. And Dumouriez used to be the Girondin's foreign minister. He was one of the great architects of the war. He saw it as a chance to kind of cement his own personal popularity. But he has been in bad odour recently with the convention because he has, when he's been conquering bits of what becomes Belgium, he's kind of seen as being soft on the local elites because he wants to kind of get them to cooperate. He doesn't want to drive

35:16them away from his army. And then a total disaster. So on the 8th of March 1793, the Austrians, having been on the back foot, launched a counter-offensive and they absolutely smashed Dumouriez' army at the Battle of Nervinden. And Dumouriez is pushed all the way back. He has to withdraw all his troops from Belgium and Holland. And at this point, Dumouriez thinks, God, this is a disaster. And actually, he thinks, part of the reason we're losing this is because there's such chaos in Paris and that these flipping oddballs are running the revolution.

35:47So he wants to do a sulla? Yeah. Or try to do what one of his old army colleagues, Marquis de Lafayette, General Lafayette, had thought of doing. March on Paris, set myself up basically as a military dictator, restore a bit of order, sort all this chaos out. Knock heads together. Correct. He says it's the army's time now. You know, it's such a classic thing in history. And he goes to his men and says, will we march on Paris? And his men say, no, actually, we won't. I don't want to. You're the problem, not the people in Paris.

36:22And so what Dumouriez does next confirms all the darkest suspicions of people like Marat and Robespierre. He rides to the Austrian lines on the 5th of April and he hands himself in, along with a load of other senior officers, including the future French king, Louis-Philippe. So Dumouriez, the guy who was in charge of France's army, has just gone over to the opposition. And as one volunteer in the army writes to his mother, who can we trust now? This Dumouriez, whom the French Republic regarded as its saviour, has thrown off the mask.

36:56So he's revealed himself to be a traitor. So you might say, well, who could have seen this coming? Who indeed? Who indeed? Well, we know who saw this coming. The man who sees a traitor behind every mask. And that is Jean-Paul Marat. Marat had said two weeks ago, I think Dumouriez is probably a traitor. And Dumouriez has proved him right. And so for Dumouriez's allies in the Girondin faction, this is a catastrophe. In Paris, there are riots by the militants, by the sans-culottes, attacking Girondin newspapers,

37:27Girondin printers and so on. Georges Danton, the earthy kind of Churchill figure. Dominic Sandbrook of the French Revolution. Thank you. He'd been quite close to Dumouriez. He says, come on, enough of this now. The gloves have got to come off. There can be no further truce between the patriots and the cowards. And now there's a very telling moment. So up until now, the deputies in the convention had immunity from prosecution. But the convention votes in the aftermath of Dumouriez's defection that their immunity can be lifted

37:57if they are suspected of plotting with the enemies of liberty, equality and republican government. And Danton plays a leading role in proposing and pushing that through, doesn't he? And a time will come when he may regret that. There's a lot of irony in this series. There's an awful lot of dramatic irony. So Dumouriez has defected. It's kicking off in the Vendée. It's looking all bad with the economy and on the frontiers and everything. There is this widespread sense of apocalyptic national emergency at this point.

38:31March, April 1793. An overriding obsession with enemies within. People like Dumouriez who are about to betray us. When you say apocalyptic, I mean, this is still an unbelievably Catholic Christian country, even if atheists are starting to seize the commanding heights of the revolution. And the sense of an apocalypse of sheep and goats being divided up, good and evil, I think is hugely a part of the climate of the age.

39:03They don't think of it in overtly theological terms, but it is fundamentally theological, I think. When you read the rhetoric, I mean, it's all good and evil, purity and impurity, all of that kind of thing.

Institutional machinery of the Terror

39:13Absolutely. So anyway, this moment, March, April 1793, the historian Timothy Tackett says, this is the major turning point in the coming of the terror. So if you think of the reign of terror, the tumbrils, the guillotines, this is really the moment that sets this in motion. So what's behind this is that for four years, people like Marat have been saying there is a giant conspiracy of aristocrats and priests. And they say now, well, look, we've been proved right. We know the king and queen were in on it.

39:45We know some of our generals were in on it, some of our top politicians. It is time now to take extreme measures against this conspiracy. And Tackett quotes the Montagnard deputy, Lazard Carnot, who goes on to be the great organizer of the army. Carnot says, at this point, we can never hope for a genuine peace with our enemies, neither with those inside nor those outside the nation. Either we pulverize them or we will be crushed by them. Any weakness will be fatal. And so it's in the next few weeks that they set up what become all the key institutions of the reign of terror.

40:21There's no blueprint. There's no plan. Yeah, it's ad hoc, isn't it? I mean, important to emphasize that. They are making stuff up as they go along. But all of these things, these they're putting in place, perhaps unwittingly, the pieces of the machine. I mean, I think definitely unwittingly, because as we will see, so many of the people who are involved in setting up these institutions end up being devoured by it. Well, it's sat and devouring his children, isn't it? It is. Completely it is. So to give you some examples, they set up the institution of what are called deputies on mission. So these are people who are sent out from the National Convention,

40:54basically to impose the will of the central government on provinces by force, if necessary. So you're the equivalent of a member of the House of Representatives or a British MP or something, and you are sent out to God knows where, maybe with some of the troops, your job is to impose the national order on this remote part of France. There's that. There is, on the 10th of March, a revolutionary tribunal. This is a court that will try people accused of political crimes when the result is the death sentence.

41:29The death sentence has to be carried out within 24 hours, and there is no right of appeal. Yeah, and that's set up in the Palace of Justice, isn't it? Just down from Notre Dame. And in the basement, there are pre-existing cells, the conciergerie. And so the conciergerie will become the great holding pen for people who are arrested by this revolutionary tribunal. And they know that the revolutionary tribunal, with no right of appeal, is going to be very, very severe. But they lean into that.

42:00Danton says, let us be terrible, so the people will not have to be. In other words, what they're saying is, we cannot afford a return to the anarchy of the prison massacres. We cannot have mobs running through the streets. So basically, we're going to have to do this ourselves, and we are going to have to eliminate all the traitors. They want to export this across the country. So they have surveillance committees in every commune in the country. These surveillance committees will make lists of all the foreigners. They will also compile a register of all adult citizens to mark off when people have done their civic duty.

42:33And they will encourage people to report all counter-revolutionary activity. Although, of course, that's not really very tightly defined. So if you fancy your neighbor's pig or something and you want to denounce him, this is your opportunity. And the most famous of these institutions, the 6th of April, 1793, the Committee of Public Safety. And this has been set up to handle the different military emergencies. It is the key driver of the reign of terror.

43:04It wasn't actually conceived that way. It was actually proposed, ironically, by a Girondin called Isna. You would know this better than anyone. It was modeled on the temporary dictatorships of ancient Rome. So am I right in saying that when Rome was facing an existential threat, you'd appoint Cincinnatus or somebody from his plough, and he would take over as a dictator? Yeah. For six months, it's short. It's a self-confined period of time. That's what's crucial. But the dictator has complete control of the state to end a state of emergency.

43:35So the Committee of Public Safety is modeled on this. Its powers are renewed every month. So every month, the convention can choose whether or not to give it another lease of life. It always does. It has nine members at first, and its meetings are secret. And the person that dominates it initially is Danton. And Danton actually, at this point, is not on the more militant wing of the Montagnar faction. He is much more pragmatic.

44:06So in the first three months of the Committee's existence, Danton is saying, let's have a look and see if we can make a deal with some of our enemies, the Prussians, for example. Or the Austrians, right? I mean, it's often said that he has channels of communication to the Austrians. And not only that, but making a deal with some of the provinces. So this is anathema to some of the revolutionaries. But Danton is like, do we need to drive everybody against us? You know, if people aren't in actual revolt already, we can talk to them, as we would to the Austrians or to the Prussians.

44:37We don't need to fight everybody all at once. So he's trying to find pragmatic solutions. While Danton is doing that, though, so remember, we're still in April or so, 1793. The factional feud between the Girondins and the Montagnards is reaching an absolute peak, a sort of frenzy. And our friend Mahat is in the thick of it. He is laying into the Girondins. He says they are the criminal accomplices of royalty who every day seek to kindle the flames of civil war.

45:10And the Girondins, of course, they're on the back foot now. Now their mate Dumourir has defected. Well, not just mate, one of their shining stars. Their ex-foreign minister. Yeah. We said about how they'd scrapped the rule on deputies having immunity from prosecution. The Girondins think we need to kind of strike back, we need to assert ourselves. And they decide they would use this rule change against the person they hate more than any other, which is Mara. And on the 14th of April, when a lot of these deputies have gone away from Paris to go on

45:42mission to the provinces to impose the new order, the Girondins move an indictment. They charge Mara with inciting an uprising against the convention. And they're able to get it through because so many deputies are away. And so now Mara is effectively facing, it's like an impeachment trial, he's facing a formal trial in front of the revolutionary tribunal. And his first instinct is to go into hiding.

46:07But after three days of hiding, he thinks to himself, it becomes clear to him, the mood on the streets of Paris is very much in his favour. And so he hands himself in to the police. He says, fine, bring it on. I'll face the trial. And his trial is held at the Palais de Justice on the 24th of April. And for the Girondins, it's a total fiasco. So the prosecutor, who's a guy called Fouquet Tainville, we will hear more about him in future episodes, he's a Montagnon supporter. And he lets Mara basically hold court, you know, speak at length, rant and rave.

46:41Mara says, you know, I did say things against the convention, but my remarks have been taken out of context. I'm the people's friend. I want nothing more than the good of the nation, blah, blah, blah. The courtroom is full of his supporters, the jury, 10 people in the jury, and it takes them a few hours and they acquit him. They say, this bloke Mara is brilliant. Why have you accused him? And he is chaired out of the courtroom, you know, on people's shoulders. He is crowned with roses and is carried back into the convention by about 800 people chanting

47:12Vive la République, vive Mara. So for Mara, this is actually, you know, it was a dark hour, but it has turned into a stunning success. His star has never been higher. Mara's on top of the world. But for the Girondins, this has been an absolute humiliation. And they've got a lot of enemies in the radical clubs, on the streets, in the Paris Commune, the kind of city government, who are itching to get at them. They can sense the Girondins' weakness. And then the next few days, they sharpen their knives to strike.

47:44Although, of course, Dominic, they are not the only people who are sharpening a knife. And in the second half, we will meet someone else who's sharpening a knife, and that is Charlotte Corday. But before that, we will be finding out what this clash with the Girondins means for Jean-Paul Marat. See you after the break.

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Insurrection and fall of the Girondins

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50:49Includes up to 20 gigabytes of hotspot. Capable device required. Affailability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Rest is History, where it is the spring of 1793. France is at war. The countryside is in rebellion. And the rivalry between the Girondins and the Montagnards, the rival factions in the National Convention, is reaching fever pitch. So, Dominic, we heard before the break that the Girondins tried to convict Marat at the Revolutionary Tribunal and comprehensively failed.

51:27So, they've shot their bolt. What now? The mood in the capital is now incredibly, incredibly febrile. So, the Assignat, the paper money, is losing its value all the time. The bread prices are going up. On the 1st of May, so not long after Marat's acquittal, a load of working-class women invade the convention. Is this the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women? Yeah, I think it is. I mean, there's loads of these women's radical clubs now that will end up being stamped out, but they're thriving at this point in 1793.

52:01And a female activism, a big part of the revolutionary story. And these women say, you know, you're wasting a lot of time when you could actually be fixing grain prices, helping the poor. When are you going to take action? The Girondins are dead against this because the Girondins, as you said, they're kind of free marketeers, really. And they say, you know, it's insane to fix prices. That will just make things worse. But they're outvoted in the convention, another sign that they're losing their grip. In the streets of Paris, of course, the Girondins' reputation is at an all-time low.

52:33And people are making lists already of saying, you know, which of the deputies that we want kicked out of the convention. And on the 26th of May, the Saint-Culottes, the militants on the streets, get the green light from the only person who really rivals Marat as their great darling. And this is the man who will, of course, become this personification of the reign of terror. And that is Maximilien Robespierre. And Robespierre goes to one of the radical clubs, the Jacobin Club, and he gives a speech. And he says, when good faith and decency are trampled underfoot, the people must rise in insurrection.

53:10So it's a spectacle of a deputy encouraging an insurrection against his own legislature. A common thing, actually, in the French Revolution. So that is the signal they've been waiting for. And four nights later, in the early hours of the 31st of May, 1793, it's the dead of night. And you hear the toxin, the great bell of Notre Dame, ringing out across Paris. This is the signal. I mean, I think that if there is a lesson in French history, it is that when you hear a toxin ringing out over Paris, you probably better go and hide in a cellar.

53:40Completely. Just get rid of the bells. I mean, that's what I did them. Anyway, the toxin summons out the Saint-Culottes. They install their own man, who's a bloke called François Henriot, the new head of the National Guard in the capital. The issue of proclamation saying Paris is in a state, a formal state of insurrection. They close the city gates. They fire warning cannons across the River Seine. And they surround the convention. The convention has now moved from the riding school to the old court theatre at the Tuileries Palace.

54:10And for the next two days, the Saint-Culottes surround, effectively lay siege to the National Convention. So inside are all the deputies, including lots of the Girondin leaders. And this stalemate lasts for two days. And then on the 2nd of June, it reaches a climax. So you now have thousands of National Guardsmen with a fixed bayonet surrounding the National Convention and a crowd of about 50,000 people. And Henriot, the guy who's taken over as head of the National Guard, sends in an ultimatum.

54:44He says, we want the surrender of 22 Girondin members. And the president of the convention says, no, we're not going to give up our colleagues. And Henriot sends a reply. The messenger is told, tell your effing president that he and his assembly can go f*** themselves. And if within one hour, the 22 are not delivered, we will blow them all up. So the president of the convention decides he's going to try and lead all the deputies out. But they try to walk outside in a big group, and they're blocked by these blokes, armed cavalrymen.

55:19And Henriot actually brings up his cannons at that point, and he shouts very loudly, sort of performatively, to arms, cannoneers, to your guns. The deputies, perhaps not surprisingly, all go back, troop back inside.

55:33Mara, by the way, is there, and he's screaming at them, hand over the traitors, give them what they want, you know, give them the traitors. And showing the backbone and courage, which politicians have always been renowned, they decide they will actually hand over all the traitors. So they vote in favour of a Montagnard motion to place 29 Girondin members under suspension and house arrest. And it was later said that Mara had personally chosen some of the, you know,

56:04he'd added some of the 29 names to the list. Impossible to say how, whether this is true or not, by the way. But it was widely believed by his critics. And actually, one of the names on the list is that bloke, Pierre Verneau, the guy who had made the speech about Saturn devouring his children. And he is the only one of them, you know, he's the only one who really reacts in a memorable way, because once the motion goes through, he stands and he says,

56:34shall I offer you a glass of blood to slake your thirst? That is memorable. So quite a good comeback from him. Also, just to say that there are a lot of the most prominent Girondins are not in the convention, because they're out in the provinces. And one of the key figures is Monsieur Roland, who is the husband of Madame Roland, the Salonista, and who'd been a minister under Louis XVI. So he is at liberty at this point. Yeah, we'll come back to him, won't we, in a future episode. And indeed to Madame Roland.

57:05So just to pause here, this coup, the surrender of the Girondins, this is a seismic moment, really, in the history of the revolution. So not for the last time in this story, you have people who only a year or two before were very close, close colleagues, members of the same clubs, basically giving up their friends, their old friends, now enemies, to the fury of the mob. Of course, for Mara, who didn't have any friends, this is a brilliant moment. So only a few weeks ago, his Girondins enemies were trying to bring him down,

57:38and now they have been purged, and he and his allies are in the Ascendant. And, as we've described, the institutional machinery for the terror is already in place. So he's very close to getting what he wants. But the interesting thing about Mara is that, at this point, he vanishes. He disappears from the convention, and he's not seen in public. Now, why? It's because of his skin. So, not surprisingly, he's been quite stressed in the last few weeks.

58:11His skin has broken out. He's covered in kind of separating sores and blisters. What does his wife make of this? She thinks it's gorgeous. She loves it. You see, I reckon she'd probably have said it's a sign that he is a martyr for the revolution. It's a sign that he's suffering. And he's not one of these polished fops, you know, manicured kind of dandies. He's a real man. A real man has massive bleeding sores all over himself. Correct. Exactly. So, Mara is holed up in his apartment, his house, in the Rue des Caudeliers.

58:43And he's in his lukewarm bath, full of kaolin solution, apparently very good for you. And he's working on his newspaper on a kind of plank across the bathtub. So, he's in his house, in his bath. His influence, though, is very great. The Montagnards are now in charge of the government. Great. However, in the big provincial cities, where, of course, the administrations were much more sympathetic to the Girondins, the news of this, effectively this coup, provokes a horrified reaction.

59:13The most famous example is in Lyon, in the second city of France, famous for silk weaving. The Montagnards always said, oh, Lyon rose up against us because of a royalist conspiracy. This is just not true. In Lyon, Lyon turns against the revolution, and the people who lead the uprising in Lyon are the artisans and shopkeepers and sort of middling people who had normally been the bedrock of the revolution. And they think it's gone too far. They've been provoked by local extremists who've tried to set up their own kind of

59:44tribunals and things and rig elections and stuff. And this escalates into a full-scale rebellion against what the people in Lyon see as the tyranny of the Paris radicals. So it ends, well, I mean, we'll have a lot more about Lyon. It basically ends horribly with siege, with lots of guillotining, lots of shooting and all of this. So the result of this, right, we're in the summer of 1793, yet another ingredient. So the war on the frontiers, the economic meltdown, the revolt in the Vendée, and now what historians call a federalist uprising in lots of provincial cities, so Lyon, Marseille,

1:00:19Bordeaux, and so on, led by the mercantile middle classes who had once been, you know, the motor of the revolution. Oh, I've been riding on a crocodile and now the crocodile's trying to eat me. Whoever would have thought it. Exactly, exactly.

Charlotte Corday prepares to strike

1:00:34Now, one of these places is a place in Normandy called Caen. So Caen, even before the coup, had turned against the convention. And actually, for that reason, this is where some of the Girondins deputies had fled, even before they could be arrested. So there's about 20 of them in Caen, Girondins deputies, by the middle of June 1793. And they are saying, Paris has been taken over by nutcases and brigands. We should raise an army, march on the capital, kick out these madmen.

1:01:07And on the 7th of July, the Girondins organized a parade through the center of Caen. 2,500 volunteers marching with a military band. And imagine the scene, Hansom Town, the parade marching past with a band. And, you know, the camera sort of pans upwards and you see people watching on the balconies. And it focuses in on one person on the balcony in particular. And this is a very pretty young woman. Very short, actually, five foot one. They're like Marat. She's a bit more becoming, exactly, than Marat.

1:01:40And her name is Charlotte Corday. So Charlotte Corday, who's watching this parade. She's 24 years old and she comes from a kind of minor aristocratic family in rural Normandy. She's actually descended from the 17th century playwright Pierre Cornet, who wrote all these very incredibly boring plays that I had to study years ago about duty and honor and all about the Romans. Classical. Classical plays, exactly. And Charlotte Corday, she's not an ultra reactionary by any means.

1:02:12She's convent schooled and she had grown up reading Plutarch, Voltaire, Rousseau, all the same books. All the lads. Yeah. But all the same books that the revolutionaries read. And at first she liked the revolution. She was a Girondin. She became horrified by the lurch towards violence. She was shocked when a local priest who had given the last rites to her mother was kind of stripped of his living and then he was hunted down in the woods and guillotined.

1:02:43And this wasn't a religious thing from Charlotte. She doesn't seem to have been particularly pious. It was actually a personal thing. You know, he was close to the family. She was horrified by what happened to him. Anyway, the Girondin have turned up in Caen. They're making all these speeches in the town. They've got their headquarters right in the center. She's very impressed. She loves the Girondin. And she thinks, I'd love to strike a blow for their cause. She's an idealistic young woman. And the man she decides will bear the brunt of this blow is the man who has dominated today's story.

1:03:15He is Jean-Paul Marat. Now, we've already talked about how Marat is a massive hate figure for the Girondin. He's particularly a hate figure in Caen. Because when he heard that Caen had turned against Paris, he said to the convention, we should send in the sans-culottes with pitchforks, scythes, pikes, guns and sabres and crush them, meaning the people in Caen, without mercy. So, in the streets of Caen, there have been attacks on Marat circulating, pamphlets saying what a dog he is.

1:03:45So, in Simon Sharma's book, Citizens, he quotes one example. Let Marat's head fall and the republic is saved. Purge France of this man of blood. Marat sees the public's safety only in a river of blood. Well then, his own must flow. For his head must fall to save 200,000 others. And I suppose the thing that is troubling for the Girondin is that the rhetoric of that exactly echoes the rhetoric that had been used in the trial of Louis XVI to justify his execution. This idea that there is someone, you kill him and then you save the revolution.

1:04:21Very, very tempting. But there's a slight quality of the royalist rhetoric about it. There may be is, but having said all that, I think if you're a Girondin at this point, you think, Yeah, let's just kill him. Yeah, for sure. But retrospectively, it's not going to look good. No, I suppose not. I'll tell you who it looks good to. It looks good to Charlotte Corday. Because, as we said, she's a descendant of Cornet in all his plays about heroism and sacrifice. And she has read her Plutarch. So, she's read all about people assassinating other people, you know, in the name of the republic and so on.

1:04:52And she thinks, well, why not me? I could be a patriotic heroine. I could give my life for my country. And she decides that she will. And on the 9th of July, it's a very hot day, she writes a note to her father. And she says, Daddy, I'm going to England. Papa, je vais en Angleterre. And then she gets on the coach for Paris. And she's got her copy of Plutarch with her. You know, you can imagine her earnestly reading about Plutarch's years. Yeah. So, the coach journey from Cornet to Paris takes two days.

1:05:23And she arrives about midday on the 11th of July. And she takes a room at the Hotel de la Providence, which is very popular with visitors from Normandy. And her original plan was, you know, she could go as a spectator to the convention, as so many people did. She could confront Mara before the representatives of the nation and strike her blow there. But she asks around, and people say, well, Mara hasn't been to the convention for weeks. He's vanished. No one, you know, he's been in his bath. However, the good news for her, people say, Mara still, you can still go and see him.

1:05:54Basically, if you need his help, or you're coming to make a denunciation of an enemy of the revolution, he will see you. I mean, he'll be in the bath, but he'll see you. So, Friday, the 12th of July. Charlotte drafts a manifesto explaining exactly why she's doing what she's doing. She calls on the people of France to wake up. She says, I'm here to rouse you against this monster. I want to make the mountain, the Montagnard, tremble. I want to send a message that we won't stand for this sort of bloodshed, for this extremism.

1:06:29And I will be judged by posterity. My actions will be seen as legal, because such a man is outside the law. And she also writes a note to Mara, saying, I'd like to come and see you. And she says, I'm a massive patriot. I've come from Caen. I've got secret information. I want to do France's service. Can I come and see you? She gets no reply. The day goes by. The next day, the 13th of July, is a Saturday. And Paris, there are always loads of people coming at the weekends into Paris, from the suburbs and the villages.

1:07:02But they're expecting more people than usual, because tomorrow, of course, is the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, the 14th of July. The authorities have just organised a big festival. They're launching yet another new constitution. And they're going to have a big festival for it. The city has been decorated with red, white and blue, you know, the tricolour colours. It's going to be a really hot day. So it's sort of the temperature is rising. People have started gathering early. There are going to be executions.

1:07:33There are nine people from Orléans who had attacked deputies on mission. And they're going to be guillotined. So the crowds are very excited. It's going to be a brilliant day, basically. It's a great day of entertainment. At about eight o'clock in the morning, Charlotte Corday leaves her hotel. And she walks to the arcades of the Palais Royal. Lots of shops, stalls. She buys a newspaper and the newspaper tells her that the convention are likely to ask for death sentences for the imprisoned Giron d'Air deputies.

1:08:03Charlotte buys a new hat. She was wearing a white bonnet, which was a characteristic dress of Normandy. She buys a black Parisian hat with green ribbons. And she goes into a shop called Le Coutelier Badin, a sort of cutlery shop. And she buys a black-handled kitchen knife with a big blade, a blade about 15 centimeters long.

The assassination of Marat

1:08:24Between about 11.30 and 12, sometime at that point, she arrives by a cab at Mara's house in the Rue des Cordilliers. She doesn't, though, have an appointment. And Mara's sister-in-law is there. And Mara's sister-in-law says, He's too ill to have any visitors today. I'll have to come back another day. So Charlotte goes back to her hotel. And she writes a second letter. And she says, I've come all this way from Caen. I actually have vital information about the security of the Republic.

1:08:55Furthermore, I am being persecuted in the cause of liberty. I am unhappy. That should be enough to give me the right to your protection. So she's written this letter. The afternoon goes by. And that evening, at about half past six, she takes another cab to the Rue des Cordilliers. And she's got her letter. And she's got the knife. And as she arrives, she sees that the door to Mara's apartment is open. And the reason is that a delivery man is taking in the newspapers and fresh bread. Baguettes, surely.

1:09:26And Charlotte starts to go upstairs. And on the stairs, she's intercepted by Mara's wife, Simone. I mean, you can understand why. I mean, if you find, you know, you're married to someone and there's a woman creeping up towards the bathroom where your husband is lying naked, I think you'd feel justified. Yeah, but Mara often has visitors, I think. Doesn't he? I mean, I suppose it depends how beautiful the young Charlotte is. Charlotte, very beautiful, of course. I think we've established that. So Simone says, what are you doing? You know, who let you in? Why are you coming upstairs?

1:09:56And Charlotte doesn't say. She shouts. She says, I've got the names of Girondin traitors. Because she wants Mara to hear. And Mara can hear the confusion from his bath. And he says, let her in. Let her in. You know, she goes into his bathroom. This has always puzzled me. I'm assuming he's mostly not visible under the, you know, the lip of the bath and the surface of the water. Because superating genitals. It can't be a very attractive sight.

1:10:27Anyway, he's in the bath. He's tied a wet cloth around his head, like a sort of turban. And he's working on some paperwork on this plank across the bath. And he says, you know, sit down, my dear. And Charlotte sits down. And she starts to tell him what's going on in Caen. She says, well, they've turned up. They're giving speeches, all this. And Simone, his wife, is a bit suspicious of all this, unsurprisingly. And she stays there as well, listening. So they're chatting for about 10 minutes.

1:10:58And then at 10 minutes in, Mara says to Simone, can you go and get me some more kaolin solution for my bath water? I don't know why this is such a great thing, but apparently it is. And Simone goes out to get it. And at this point, Mara says, okay, let's cut to the chase. Give me the names of all the Jérôme d'Incant and their supporters. And Charlotte begins to recite the names of 18 people. And when she's got to the end, Mara says, good, in a few days I will have them all guillotined. He's such a fun guy. He's such a funster.

1:11:28Well, as is Charlotte. Because at this point, she gets to her feet from the chair. She reaches into her dress. She pulls out this kitchen knife. And she plunges it deep into Mara's chest. And Mara shrieks out. He howls out. To me, my dear friend. Meaning to his wife. But those are the last words he ever says. Immediately, he sinks back into the water. And there's blood pouring out of his chest. And Simone rushes back in with other people from the household.

1:12:01There's a man called Laurent Bas, who works on Mara's paper. And very ungallantly, I think, he seizes the opportunity to grab Charlotte Corday by the breasts. And pushes her down onto the ground. And holds her down while groping her. Which I think is poor from him. And at this point, either Simone or her sister, we don't know which, starts basically punching Charlotte in the face. Pummeling her. But the neighbours then all rush in. Because they've heard the screaming. And then the police rush in. And basically drag them off Charlotte. The neighbours try to lift Mara from the tub.

1:12:33To staunch the bleeding. But it's no good. The knife has gone through an artery. It's pierced his lung and his heart. He probably died within seconds. Basically, just after he shouted out. He probably died moments later. Now we'll come back to Mara. First of all, Charlotte Corday. The police, as I said, were there almost straight away. She's caught red-handed. She's interrogated straight away. And by an extraordinary coincidence, one of the people who interrogated her is a guy called Jean-Baptiste Drouet. And people who listened to one of our earlier French Revolution series will remember, Drouet was the postmaster who had spotted Louis XVI during the royal family's flight to Varennes.

1:13:16So he's now in Paris. And he's on hand to interrogate her. And Charlotte is completely open. I mean, it's not like she can possibly deny doing it. She says, yeah, I did it. I came to Paris to kill Mara. And they're like, well, who put you up to this? And from the beginning, she says, I acted alone. Now, meanwhile, while she's saying all this, there's this huge crowd gathering, baying for blood. And, you know, they really would have lynched Charlotte on the spot had the police not been there. One woman says, is shouting, I would like to rip her apart and eat her bit by bit by bit.

1:13:48And Drouet says, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't touch her. Because if you touch her, we will lose the links in the plot, which is an important point. So they don't want a Jack Ruby style intervention. They don't. And so she's taken to the Abbey prison. The Abbey prison is where the September massacres of the prison inmates had begun. And she's questioned three times by officials of the Revolutionary Tribunal. They question her again and again. And it's always about this issue of the links in the plot.

1:14:19And this is because they are absolutely convinced that she must be part of a Girondin conspiracy. Is that because she's a woman, a young woman? I think that's part of it, unquestionably. There's no doubt that they think that a mere woman cannot have acted alone. And it's just not possible for a woman to take the initiative in this way and to be so bold. I suppose also they're massively into conspiracy theories, aren't they? So it's like Kennedy's assassination. You know, you can't have a lone actor. It's got to be some sinister conspiracy behind it.

1:14:51That, but even more so, absolutely embedded in the political imagination of Paris in 1793 is the notion of a foreign conspiracy and a conspiracy involving people, enemies within as well as without. So when something like this happens, it must be part of the conspiracy in which foreigners, aristocrats, priests, and Girondins are all implicated. There's a really telling exchange with a guy called Montanay, who is the president of the Revolutionary Tribunal. And he says to her, well, who told you to do this? And she says, well, nobody. I alone conceived the plan and executed it.

1:15:23And he says, that's just not possible. Because you are telling us that you think Marat is the cause of all the evil in France, but Marat is the man who has never ceased from unmasking traitors and conspirators. So someone must have been lying to you about Marat. And who was that person? And she says to this guy, you're mad. It is only in Paris that people have eyes for Marat. In the other departments, he is regarded as a monster. But of course, the Revolutionary Tribunal can't get their heads around that. The failure of political imagination is such they cannot conceive that in the other parts

1:15:57of France, people would think of Marat as a bad man. And they thought, well, it must be a conspiracy that's brainwashed this girl. Georges Couton and Montagnat, I know we'll be talking about him next time. He said, it has been mathematically demonstrated that this monster to whom nature has given the form of a woman was sent by the conspirators of Caen. Mathematically, Peru. I want to see that equation. So anyway, Charlotte's trial is on the 17th of July. The trial was six hours. There's the verdict to foregone conclusion.

1:16:29And it's a very sort of moving moment, actually. They had gone through all her letters to try to find evidence of this conspiracy. And one of the letters they read out was a letter to her father. Forgive me, dear Papa, for having disposed of my existence without your permission. I have avenged many innocent victims. I have prevented many other disasters. One day, the people will lose their illusions and rejoice at being delivered from a tyrant. Anyway, she's condemned to the guillotine. The sentence is going to be carried out immediately, as is the way with the Revolutionary Tribunal.

1:17:01But she actually has a last request. She's seen an officer of the National Guard, a man called Hauer, sketching her during the trial. And she says, could he paint my picture before I have my head cut off? And permission is given. And this guy, Hauer, came to her cell and painted her portrait before she was executed. So this is the portrait that you see of her when you Google her. And when the executioner, Sanson, came to cut her hair before her death, she cut off one of the locks herself. And she gave it to this guy, Hauer. And she said, take this as a souvenir of a poor, dying woman.

1:17:32And then she was loaded into the cart, the tumbril, taken to the guillotine at the Place de Grève. And there's a huge crowd there to watch her die. Everybody said she died really well, you know, composed, calm. She'd known this was coming when the moment she got on the coach to Paris, she had known this would happen. People said, you know, her face was so calm that one would have said she was a statue. Not everybody dies well in the French Revolution, but she dies really well. Do you know this fantastic story that's told about what happens when her head drops into the basket and the executioner goes to pick it up?

1:18:08And he supposedly holds it up to the crowd and gives the cheeks, her cheeks, a slap because he's a Marat enthusiast. And it's said that she blushed. So still feeling, even though her head's been chopped off. She's still demure. Still demure.

Marat's funeral and rise of Robespierre

1:18:26Now, so that's Charlotte Corday. What about Marat? So Marat, in death even more than life, becomes this great symbol of revolutionary militancy. He becomes a martyr for a sacred cause. And I use those words very deliberately. Within hours of his death, someone posted a poem on the door of his house. People, Marat is dead, the lover of the fatherland. Your friend, your sucker, the hope of the afflicted, has fallen beneath the blows of the withered horde. Weep, but remember that he must be avenged.

1:18:57I feel it's always a bad sign in a revolution when people start writing poetry. Completely. I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, there's a lot of artistic reaction, of course, to Marat's death. So the man they turn to is the artist Jacques-Louis David, who is a montagnard, who's the most famous, the most celebrated and influential painter in France. Well, Dominic, we will be hearing about him in this week's bonus with Laura coming and she'll be looking at David's career more generally because he is a remarkable figure.

1:19:28And he's been kind of hovering on in the background of so much of the episodes that we've been doing on the French Revolution. And so we're putting the camera on him, the focus on him. How can I hear that? Because I'd love to hear it. You could join this thing called The Rest is History Club. And apparently there's a website, therestishistory.com, and you just go there and sign up. And I gather there's a whole range of supplementary benefits as well. I do like a supplementary benefit, to be fair. So I'll probably do that. I'll do that straight after doing this, actually. All right. So David organized the funeral, and David wanted to turn it into this great political tableau, a sort of Roman public spectacle.

1:20:07And his plan was, he said, I'm going to embalm Marat, and we will exhibit him in the Cordelier Convent, former convent, as a sort of classical martyr. So we'll give him a crown of oak leaves. We'll design a Roman-style bed on which he will recline. His pen will be in hand, and we'll pin up his writings around there. Everyone says, oh, this is absolutely brilliant. Can't wait. Actually, doing this is a nightmare. Marat, as soon as they get hold of the body, David says, oh, Jesus. Because basically it's covered in those sores, in blisters and separating post-ridden sores.

1:20:43So they have to make him up to disguise his skin. Then when they prop him up on the bed, Marat is obviously dead. He's a corpse. And his tongue is lolling out madly from his mouth. So they have to cut his tongue, cut it up and stuff, just hold it in place. They sew up his wound in his chest. That started to gape and to sort of reek. So they have to sew that up. Now, there are also some claims. I don't know how true this is, actually. That his arm had become dislocated in all the sort of to-ings and fro-ings.

1:21:18So they decide to just take his arm off completely and sew on somebody else's arm. An arm from another body. Like Frankenstein's monster. It would be a twist of it with Charlotte Corday's arm. So that is a massive twist. With the knife. With the knife. Yeah. They sewed on this arm. But when they came back the next day, the arm had fallen off. And they kept having to sew it back on. So they do that. Now, that's not even the biggest thing. The biggest thing is that I've mentioned multiple times deliberately, and people may have wondered why, that it was very hot.

1:21:52But, and Mara's corpse has begun to rot in the heat. So there's a terrible stench. And they're having to spray Mara's body, and indeed the surrounding room, with perfume and vinegar the whole time. But the stench is so disgusting that after a day and a half, they give up. And they say, we're just going to have to have the funeral now. We're going to give up on this. So they have the funeral. They have a torch-lit procession. There's loads of maidens in white robes.

1:22:22They've taken out his heart, and they have it in an urn. One of the members of the club gives this massive rant. And he lies down in front, prostrates himself in front of the urn. And he says, I mean, Tom, this is such Tom Holland bingo. He says, oh, heart of Mara, sacre cœur. Like Jesus, Mara loved the people ardently. Like Jesus, Mara detested nobles, priests, the rich, the scoundrels. Like Jesus, he led a poor and frugal life. Their Jesus was but a false prophet. But Mara is a god.

1:22:54Long live the heart of Mara. I mean, that is dominion bingo. And, you know, they suspend that urn with the heart of Mara from the ceiling of the Cordelia Club. And the Cordelia Club was a Franciscan convent. So, I mean, they're kind of the Christian undertow to the French Revolution. When you look for them, you see them everywhere. I mean, they are everywhere. I mean, they have relics, don't they? They have Mara relics. So, you can buy all sorts of sort of locks of his hair.

1:23:26You can buy merch. You can buy plates. You can buy little obelisks of Mara. Women go and have the special Mara haircuts, which is insane because Mara was such an unattractive person. And they renamed towns after him. So, Montmartre was renamed Montmarat. Le Havre, the town of Le Havre, was renamed Le Havre Marat. I think the French should lean back into this, actually. I think visiting Montmarat. Montmartre was quite an annoying place with all sorts of people, caricature artists and things.

1:23:59I think it was Montmarat. I know it's for Marat impersonators. Sitting in baths. Yeah. Mime artists performing the death of Marat. I'd definitely go to see that. So, Marat is dead and now the descent into the terror becomes unstoppable. Because, of course, if you are on the radical wing of the revolution, if you have this conspiratorial mindset, you say, look, this is it now. This is the final proof. We had the king and queen running away.

1:24:29We had the revelation that the king and queen were kind of plotting against us and the revolution. We had General Dumourie defecting to the Austrians. Now, this proves basically no one can be trusted. Any man or woman in the street that you pass could be part of the conspiracy walking around with a kitchen knife, you know, to stab a patriot. So, in the next few days, the Girondin deputies who haven't fled the city are taken from house arrest and taken formally into prison.

1:24:59And everybody knows this isn't going to end well for them. However, the national emergency is far from over. So, the Vendée's in flames. Lyon's in revolt. The poor haven't got any bread. The Royal Navy. So, finally, Tom, someone in this story that we can really root for. The Royal Navy are blockading France's ports and the Austrians and the Prussians are advancing in the east. So, the question now is who on earth is going to save the Republic? Now, a year earlier, France had been in a mess and they had looked at Danton.

1:25:30But Danton is distracted. His wife had just died. He's married again. He's married a 17-year-old. He's taken this child bride back to his native Champagne and he's been out of town. Also, Danton's not quite in step with the new mood. He's a little bit too worldly, a bit too pragmatic, a bit too keen on deals and compromises. Well, he's turned into a centrist dad, hasn't he? Relative to the more radical elements of the Jacobin Club. Yeah, he has.

1:26:01He doesn't have the icy, pitiless clarity that the Montagnards are looking for. So, actually, while he's away, they vote him off the Committee of Public Safety. Danton's a kind of busted flush. So, the question is, who is going to replace him? And the answer comes 17 days later when a new member joins the Committee of Public Safety. And this man will become the embodiment of the reign of terror. And this man is, of course, Maximilien Robsbierre.

1:26:32So, next time we will have a deep dive into his life, his character. Terror will become the order of the day. The carts will start rattling towards the guillotine in escalating numbers and France will become ever more soaked in blood. And after that episode, we have another four epic episodes, one on the execution of Marie Antoinette, one on the fall of Danton, one on the attack on Christianity, and one on the fall of Robsbierre himself.

1:27:08And club members can hear all of them now. And to join them, just to reiterate, therestishistory.com. And you can also hear Leo coming, talking about the painting, David's painting, The Death of Marat. And if you sign up at therestishistory.com, you will also be able to get our super, soar-away, revolutionary newsletter absolutely free. But for now, au revoir. Au revoir.

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