The Terror: An Assassination in Paris (Part 1)

Tom Holland (0:12)

How long, Frenchmen, will you put up with disorder and divisions? Oh, Frenchmen, 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, Marat, whose name alone is the image of all crimes, is falling under the avenging blade, shaking the mountain and making Danton and Rospierre 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 Marat. Condemned by the universe, he is outside the law. What court will judge me? Let my last breath be useful to my fellow citizens. Let my head, held aloft in Paris, be a rallying point for all the friends of the law. Let the universe declare that I deserved well of humanity.

Frenchmen, I have shown you the way. You know your enemies. Rise up. Strike. So, a very punchy manifesto there and had a very catchy title, Address to the French Friends of Law and Peace, and it was found on a young woman who was arrested in Paris on the 13th of July 1793 And the name of this young woman, Charlotte Corday, 24 years old, strikingly good looking. Everyone commented on this all the time. And of course, her looks and her youth made her a rest all the more of a sensation because she was charged with the assassination of perhaps the single most controversial man in France. A radical journalist, a revolutionary firebrand, the supreme champion of terror, Jean-Paul Marat.

And it is one of the most famous episodes in French history, The Murder of Marat, the pretty young woman who comes from the provinces, talks her way into Marat's apartment, finds him soaking his pustule-ridden body in a bath, pulls out a knife, plunges it deep into his chest. A scene famously painted by Jacques-Louis David, one of the most famous illustrations of the French Revolution ever painted. But Dominic, it's not just an incredibly exciting story in and of itself, is it? It is also the trigger for perhaps the most celebrated, the most notorious passage of the entire revolution, the passage that is known as The Terror.

Dominic Sandbrook (3:17)

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 she says, France descends into the reign of terror. So loads of people will be familiar with the images of this. The triumph of Madame Guillotine, you've seen it in films, you've seen it in video games and books, whatever. The carts rattling through the streets loaded with prisoners, the old women, the tricoteurs knitting at the foot of the Guillotine. They're going to mob howling for blood as the blade begins to fall. It's something that English writers in particular have always adored. They're turning the melodrama right up to the maximum. So Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities or Hillary Mantell in A Place of Greater Safety.

But in this series, we will be looking behind those images to explore exactly what happened and why, and we have an amazing cast of characters. So we'll be talking about the revolutionaries, people like Danton and Robespierre.

We've got an amazing episode to come on the execution of Marie Antoinette.

And then we have today's protagonist, the man who kicks off the whole story, and he really is an extraordinarily grotesque and fascinating character with his lovely blisters and his squint and his vehement rhetoric, and that is Jean-Paul Marat. So Marat is actually born in what's now Switzerland in 1743 in a small town. His father was a Sardinian friar who converted to Calvinism. So as a little boy, Marat is something he has in common with a lot of revolutionary figures. He's very ambitious. He said later, of five, I wanted to be a schoolmaster, at 15, a professor, at 18, an author, and at 20, a creative genius.

Actually he's none of those things. He moves to France initially, and then he goes off to London, lives in London, and he arrives in London when London is gripped by the great controversy about the radical journalist and MP, John Wilkes.

Wilkes is a great sort of newspaper man who's always slacking off the British government and the establishment and corruption. And this is a great influence on Marat. He's really taken with Wilkes' radical style and his 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.