The Terror: The Reign of Robespierre (Part 2)

Tom Holland (0:12)

We are now, therefore, got to that black precipitous abyss, where all things have long been tending, where, having now arrived on the giddy verge, they hurled down in confused ruin, headlong pell-mell, down, down, till sonculotism have consummated itself. And in this wondrous French Revolution, as in a doomsday, a world have been rapidly, if not born again, yet destroyed and engulfed.

Terror has long been terrible, but to the actors themselves, it has now become manifest that their appointed course is one of terror. And they say, be it so, Que la terreur soit l'autre du jour, Let terror be the order of the day. So what a dramatic moment, a key point in the story of the French Revolution, the start of the terror.

So this passage, which describes this great turning point, the dawning of the reign of terror, comes from the single most influential history of the French Revolution that has ever been written in our native tongue. And the man who wrote it was one of the absolute intellectual titans of Victorian Britain. He was the Scottish historian and philosopher, Thomas Carlyle. Now, some of you might have found that reading a little bit theatrical, but of course that was Carlyle's style. Some people might even say a melodramatic style, and I think they'd be right. So he's writing, often the present tense. So it gives you this incredibly vivid, palpable sense of immediacy. He puts you right in the heart of the revolution. And as you can tell from that passage, Tom, Carlyle sees the revolution as the equivalent of the flood or the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation, this titanic biblical reckoning between the forces of radicalism and violence and the forces of the established order. And the terror, this point in our story, 1793, 1794, is the absolute climax. Yes. So Carlyle casts it as this kind of immense, unstoppable conflagration consumes all in its path and even its own profits. So Saturn devouring its own children. We talked about that in our first episode. And also Dominic, in our first episode, we talked about how for the British and perhaps for the Anglophone world more generally, the terror is really what the revolution is all about. And it's not a coincidence that Carlyle was a massive influence on Charles Dickens, who said that he'd read it 500 times, Carlyle's book on the French Revolution. And so it's his principal source for Tale of Two Cities, which is amazing, the best-selling novel in English. So that is the novel that's imprinted this idea of the revolution as being equivalent to terror, I think in the British imagination. And this is where our sense of it as streams of blood, tongue drills, all of that that we were talking about yesterday comes from. And I would say that in Britain, far more than any other European country, the terror is actually seen almost as synonymous with the French Revolution itself.

So actually, in a lot of European countries, there is an emphasis on the more progressive elements of the revolution. The metric system, not just the metric system, but the language of rights and that kind of thing.

But by and large, for the British, it's just mad people chopping each other's heads off. Do you know the person who magnificently summed this up? I do. I know what you're going to say.

So, this is an interview that Madame Sarture gave in 1989 to Le Monde. In 1989, of course, the bicentennial of Bastille Day, the start of the French Revolution. It was part of a series of interviews with leaders from the G7 who were attending a summit in Paris. All the other six leaders were incredibly respectful of the revolution and everything that is given humanity. So, all this language of rights and stuff. Mrs. Sarture, absolutely uncompromising refusal to be diplomatic. And she said that the revolution is a terrible thing. Up to the final death of Robespierre. Oh, it was an age of terror. It was an age of terror. We did ours much more quietly. She's not entirely wrong, to be fair.

Well, I mean, I suppose we did chop off the head of a king, but I think she's talking about the Glorious Revolution and, you know, there was a lack of guillotining in that. And so you said that in this series, we're going to be looking at the reality behind the myth. And for British listeners, the myth is this notion of the revolution being all about terror.

And so listeners may be thinking, this idea of terror, is this just a kind of francophobic British, something that they've imagined, something perhaps made up by Carlisle, one of his rhetorical flourishes, one of his melodramatic flourishes. But actually, it's not at all, because the idea of terror being the order of the day, it originates with the revolutionaries themselves, doesn't it? Completely, it does, they never use the phrase, they don't call themselves terrorists, as some historians later do, nor do they ever use the expression, the reign of terror, as lots of historians do, and it is very common in the popular imagination. But the word terror, and terror as a positive political policy, as a strategy, as a deliberate choice, is there from 1793, and arguably even earlier, is implicit in a lot of what they're saying, isn't it? So that phrase that Carlile quotes, let terror be the order of the day, he is quoting a slogan that was publicly pronounced by a man called Bertrand Barre, who was one of the 12 men who sat on the Committee of Public Safety, which we talked about yesterday, this kind of proto-dictatorial institution that had been set up on the 6th of April, 1793