The Terror: The Fall of Robespierre (Part 6)

Tom Holland (0:10)

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. Maximilien Robespierre 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.

Dominic Sandbrook (1:55)

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 Herculean 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 by and large. It is worse than a bad speech, as we will discover. It is a terrible political mistake by Robespierre.

Tom Holland (2:26)

Yes, worse than a crime and mistake.

Dominic Sandbrook (2:27)

Exactly. So, and what is more, this is his envoi to the French Revolution and to this podcast. This is the last speech he ever made. Well, as we will see, there is a later speech that he makes, but actually no one could hear what he was saying.

Tom Holland (2:43)

Yeah, he didn't have any strepsils.

Dominic Sandbrook (2:45)

Exactly. So, ladies and gentlemen, we are at the climax of this series. We are at the climax of the entire saga of the French Revolution. Before we started recording, we were trying to work out how many episodes we've done. I think it's either 25 or 26 in total on the Revolution. Now, initially, we did it in one 45-minute episode.

Tom Holland (3:09)

And I think the average length of these episodes is about, what, about four hours now.

Dominic Sandbrook (3:15)

Twice as long as that episode.

SPEAKER_3 (3:17)

Yeah, exactly.

Tom Holland (3:18)

Back then, it was kind of 40 minutes, wasn't it?

Dominic Sandbrook (3:20)

So let's hope this isn't like the climax of Game of Thrones or something, that people say it was poor, they threw it away, and the wrong person won. Well, we'll find out, won't we? So, happily, the French Revolution, as it's commonly told, ends with a narrative banger, like The Fall of the Bastille, like The Flight of Arenne, like The Murder of Marat, like The Executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, or The Fall of Danton. It is a fantastic story, and there is 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, from all the different sections, which were the kind of neighborhoods of Paris, as well as hundreds of different individual police reports. A great historian, Colin Jones, wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Fall of Robespierre, 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.