Listen
Transcript
Disclaimer: The transcript that follows has been generated using artificial intelligence. We strive to be as accurate as possible, but minor errors and slightly off timestamps may be present.
You can click the timestamp to jump to that time.
Mike Duncan (00:01):
This week’s episode is brought to you by Lynda.com. Lynda.com is the online learning platform with over 3,000 on-demand video courses to help you strengthen your business, technology, and creative skills. For a free 10-day trial, visit Lynda.com slash Revolutions. That’s L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash Revolutions.
Lynda.com is for problem solvers, for the curious, for people who want to make things happen. Maybe you want to master Excel, learn new negotiation tactics, build a website, or boost your Photoshop skills. Go to Lynda.com and feed your curious mind. I can hardly recommend all their audio and video software tutorials, but I am about to start plowing my way through Lynda’s extensive library of business skills tutorials. Accounting fundamentals, finance fundamentals, income tax fundamentals… About time I started taking this stuff seriously.
With a Lynda.com membership, you can watch and learn from top experts, stream thousands of video courses on-demand, and learn at your own schedule. The courses are structured so you can watch them from start to finish or consume them in bite-sized pieces. You can browse each course’s transcript to follow along, or search for an answer and skip to that point in the video. Take notes as you go, and refer to them later. You can download tutorials and watch them on the go, including access on your iOS or Android device. You can create and save playlists of courses you want to watch to customize your learning path, or share it with friends and colleagues or other team members.
Your Lynda.com membership will give you unlimited access to training on hundreds of topics, all for one flat rate. Whether you’re looking to become an industry expert, you’re passionate about a hobby, or you just want to learn something new, I want you to visit Lynda.com slash Revolutions to sign up for your free 10-day trial. That is L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash R-E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N-S.
Hello and welcome to Revolutions. Episode 3.36 – The Liquidation Process So last week was a bit of a grab bag of topics to bring everything up to speed so that we could spend today talking about the great factional battle between the Danton-led indulgence and the Jacques-Hébert-led Ultras in the first few months of 1794. As we established last week, this latest factional battle was fought over de-Christianization and the terror. The indulgence wanted to pull back from both, the Ultras wanted to go even further with both. Now had the revolution continued on the path it had been on since controller General Calonne first declared bankruptcy back in 1786, the outcome would not have been in doubt. The radical de-Christianizing terrorists would have defeated the moderate indulgence. I mean, that’s the way it’s always gone, right? Except, that since the insurrection of September 5th, the revolution has been on a new path. So this time around, the radical Ultras will actually be the first ones to go down. Not that the more moderate indulgence would have longed to savor their victory, as they themselves would be led to the guillotine less than two weeks later. Because the revolution’s new path is now being paved by Maximilien Robespierre, and it was a very narrow path that only he could see.
The battle between the indulgence and the Ultras burst out into the open in early December 1793, when Camille de Moulot launched a new weekly newspaper specifically designed to counter Jacques Hebert’s anti-Christian pro-terror screeds. De Moulot dubbed his new paper the Old Courlier, clearly trying to recapture the magic of the early revolution, and reclaim spiritual ownership of the Courlier name. You see, when the original core Courlier leaders surrounding Danton had graduated up to running the country, control of the Courlier club had passed into the hands of the Saint-Qulot-backed radicals, and the current president was none other than Jacques Hebert. It had to hurt de Moulot to see the club he and his buddies had founded now perverted to serve the bloodthirsty, sacrilegious ends of the Ultras.
The first issue of the Old Courlier was published on December 5th and was an instant bestseller. There were tons of people in Paris who had been cowed into silence by the radical fury of the Ultras, and they were thrilled to finally have someone giving voice to all their fears.
The journalistic broadsides were echoed in the convention by the alliance between Robespierre and Danton that we touched on a bit last week. They both delivered speeches denouncing de-Christianization and the excesses of the terror. On December 6th, the convention passed a decree reaffirming the right to the freedom of worship – a right that was a core part of the Declaration of Rights, and a right that de-Christianization clearly threatened. And I completely forgot to mention this last week, but this is the moment in history when the word vandalism enters the world lexicon. Opponents of de-Christianization likened the destruction of church property with the destruction of Rome by the Vandals. So that’s where vandalism comes from.
In the third issue of the Old Courlier, published on December 15th, Demoulin riffed off Tacitus and drew a specific parallel between revolutionary Paris and Rome under Tiberius – a time when fear and brutality spread like a sickness through a once-great civilization. With the rhetorical foundations laid, the Old Courlier stalwart Fabre de Glantina stood up in the convention and denounced two primary carriers of the dreaded sickness – Charles-Philippe Rosson and François-Nicolas Vasson.
Rosson was the leader of the Paris Revolutionary Army, and he was just back from Lyon where he had been a zealous accomplice of Collo d’Ivoire. Vasson was General Secretary of the War Department, and he had been using his position to push for an even more rigorous application of the terror. Both were arrested December 17th. A few days later, Robespierre gave his tacit approval to form yet another committee – a committee who would be tasked with investigating wrongful arrests. Obviously, this oversight panel would act as a check on those who wanted to turn the terror into an indiscriminate bloodbath.
The sudden and surprisingly popular attacks on their position caught the Ultras off guard. But despite the flurry of attacks against them, the Ultras regained their footing just a few days later. When Collo d’Ivoire heard that Rosson had been arrested, he raced back from Lyon to Paris. He reached the capital on December 22nd and gave a fiery speech in the Jacobin Club, denouncing what he saw as a sudden turn to spinelessness. When I left, we were united behind the goal of purging France of her enemies, and now I return to find the best and most patriotic men we have in jail? I mean, what the hell, people?
This speech re-energized the radicals. Collo then teamed up with his fellow radical on the Committee of Public Safety, Jacques-Nicolas Biot-Varennes, and together they got the new oversight panel shut down before it even started up. So as 1793 gave way to 1794, it looked like the Committee of Public Safety itself might become a front in the war between the Indulgence and the Ultras, and then maybe inevitably a casualty.
But then the East India Company scandal blew up and changed the whole dynamic. Because in the current political fight, Maximilien Robespierre was the critical swing vote. He had been leaning towards the Indulgence, but after the East India scandal broke, he straightened up very quickly. So what was the East India Company scandal? Or maybe we should start with, so what was the East India Company?
The East India Company was first chartered by Louis XIV back in 1664 to help the French compete with the English and Dutch in the rapidly expanding Oriental trade markets. The company was given a monopoly over trade in the Pacific and Indian oceans, but as everyone discovered over the next century or so, state-chartered monopolies are a horrible, horrible way to do business. The French East India Company was a mess, thoroughly corrupt, and always in financial trouble.
As the ministers surrounding Louis XV started to attempt some much-needed reforms after the disastrous conclusion to the Seven Years’ War, the East India Company was targeted and abolished in 1769. But sixteen years later, the company was re-chartered by Controller General Calonne, and once again given a monopoly over trade east of the Cape of Good Hope.
Now originally, this monopoly was supposed to run for seven years, but of course then along comes the Revolution in 1789, and in January 1790, the more free-market-inclined delegates of the National Assembly stripped the company of its monopoly. Now exposed to the terrors of competition, the company predictably started to implode, and by the summer of 1793 was limping towards death. It was finally put out of its misery when the newly reshuffled Committee of Public Safety banned all joint-stock companies in August 1793, and the East India Company was ordered to liquidate all its assets by January 1, 1794.
And that is when the scandal comes into it. The scandal itself is a little complicated, but the gist of it is that with the company slated for liquidation, financial speculators with insider information started manipulating the process to reap huge profits for themselves by selling the stock short. But that in and of itself wasn’t actually the scandal. The scandal was when certain members of the convention discovered this illegal stock manipulation, and rather than doing something about it decided, hey, let’s get in on the action.
They threatened to expose the corruption and turn the speculators over to the Revolutionary Tribunal unless they were given a cut of the ill-gotten gains. To make sure no one else was tipped off to this extortion, the convention committee assigned to oversee the company secretly altered the rules of the liquidation process, allowing the company to sell off its own assets rather than having government agents handle it. This would mean fewer questions about what was being sold, how much it was being sold for, who it was being sold to, and of course whose pockets the money was actually winding up in. And wouldn’t you know it, Fabre de Glantina was the chairman of that committee, and he was the one who signed the crooked paperwork after being promised a fat bribe. This was a fatal mistake, not just for de Glantina, but for all of his friends.
By mid-October, the fishiness of the liquidation process started to stink, and de Glantina decided to get out in front of things before it all blew out into the open. And that is when he went to Robespierre with the details of the foreign plot, a plot that just so happened to implicate his accomplices in the East India Company extortion racket. By coming forward first with the denunciations, de Glantina was briefly insulated from the scandal, because when another one of the compromised delegates came to Robespierre in mid-November with his own version of what was going on, a version that implicated de Glantina, Robespierre believed that this was just a revenge denunciation. But then at some point in late December or early January, Robespierre was handed incontrovertible proof of de Glantina’s involvement, probably the falsified paperwork he had signed. The incorruptible Robespierre was furious, doubly so, because he had been clearly duped by the slick-talking de Glantina.
On January 8, Robespierre publicly denounced de Glantina in the convention, and on January 12, the corrupt poet revolutionary was arrested. But always one to embrace a guilt-by-association mentality, Robespierre could not believe that de Glantina’s corruption was the personal failing of just one man. Instead, it was proof that the indulgent faction he fronted for was compromised. Robespierre was only further convinced of their shared guilt when Danton stood up and defended de Glantina, the only member of the convention willing to do so.
In Robespierre’s head, Danton could not possibly be motivated by old ties of personal loyalty. It had to be something more sinister. And then, in an unfortunate coincidence of timing, just as de Glantina’s guilt was being established, Desmoulas used the old courtelier to criticize the Committee of Public Safety and the leadership of Robespierre. So now we have a conspiratorial pattern.
Now, Desmoulas had strayed over the line once before, but in that case Robespierre had merely ordered copies of the offending issue burned. But by mid-January, with the East India Company scandal swirling, word went round to the printers of Paris that the old courtelier was a dangerous thing to be caught printing. And it was only after considerable delays that Desmoulas was able to get the sixth issue published on February 3rd. And that sixth issue would also be the final issue. After just three months, the old courtelier was killed stone dead.
With Robespierre now coming to believe that the indulgence were a bunch of self-serving partisans, he really started to go in for the notion that factional fighting in itself was a danger to the nation, and that everyone needed to stop the bickering, come together as one or else.
As an olive branch to the ultras, Rossin and Vasson were released from jail in early February, and it was hinted to them that now would be a very nice time to take the high road and not seek reprisals. Danton tried to get in the spirit of things by publicly applauding their release. But then he undermined his own position by saying, hey, maybe we should let Deglantina out of jail, too. He’s a good guy, I swear.
Then on the 5th of February, Robespierre laid out his vision for the future in a speech to the convention entitled Report on the Principles of Public Morality. Now, I’m going to set aside the details of that speech until next week when we talk more about Robespierre’s Republic of Virtue. But just to give you a heads up, as it turns out, that Republic of Virtue will only be achieved after everybody who isn’t virtuous is murdered. And that has a lot to do with what comes next. But after giving this speech, Robespierre got very, very sick, and he disappears off to bed for a month. Nobody took his advice about coming together as one in his absence.
As soon as Rosin and Vasson were let out of jail, they started gearing up for a big fight. They could see the effect that the Law of 14 Frémaire was having, and saw how the Committee of Public Safety was now stifling dissent on all sides. If they didn’t act now, they might never have another chance. But unlike the past two years, when the dark days of winter helped radical forces muster sans-cula anger into political action, this time the drive to insurrection went nowhere.
And it’s not that the sections of Paris weren’t getting restless. They were. As usual, there were commodity shortages in the capital. The general maximum had gone some way towards alleviating the problem of spiraling costs, but mostly it just pushed everything into a thriving black market that even the threat of the guillotine couldn’t close down. So there were street clashes regularly through February that looked eminently exploitable. So from their base in the Cordelier Club, the new Cordelier Club, Jacques Hebert and the Ultras started trying to organize yet another Paris insurrection.
And that is when they discovered that by early 1794, the well of sans-cula political wrath was mostly empty.
It had been sucked dry by all the decrees passed in the wake of the insurrection of September the 5th. The insurrection, ironically enough, that Hebert himself had orchestrated. Because for the average sans-cula, every decree he had ever wanted had already been enacted. The general maximum, the law of suspects, punishment for hoarding, the streamlined revolutionary tribunal, men they trusted placed on the Committee of Public Safety. And on top of all that good stuff, the convention had just passed the so-called Laws of Vontos — that is, the Republican Month of Vontos — at the end of February and beginning of March. Those laws promised to take property confiscated from suspects and émigrés and redistribute it to the poor. And that is to say nothing of the payments they were all receiving for attending sectional assemblies. Now, super radicals denounced these 40 Sioux patriots who came down twice a week to pick up their checks, but it was working out exactly the way the Committee of Public Safety hoped it would. The Parisian streets were pretty well bought off. All of this made it very hard to convince the Parisians that there was a desperate need for yet another revolt.
And oh, one more thing. Since taking power, all the Committee of Public Safety had done was push the Allied armies out of France, crush the Federalist uprising, and put down the Vendée insurrection. And now you want me to overthrow these guys? I’m sorry dude, but I’m actually kind of on their side now.
But the Ultras pressed on. On March the 4th, they launched a new incarnation of the Friend of the People — obviously trying to recapture some old magic themselves — and then they scheduled a mass demonstration. On March the 6th, Hebert and the Ultras let a mob out of Section Marat — which is what they were calling the old quarterly district these days — to the Hôtel de Ville. But not a single one of the other 47 Paris sections followed their lead. It was a combination of lack of interest and poor planning. So there will be no insurrection of March the 6th on the test, because it pathetically fizzled out and went home.
While the Ultras found themselves unsupported from below, they also found themselves unsupported from above, because this was the moment that Collod de Bois decided it was far better to stay in power with the Committee of Public Safety than to tear it down and try to start over again. He went down to the Jacobin Club and gave another fiery speech — except this one was about the importance of sticking with the revolutionary authorities. Look at all the good we’ve done. Don’t throw it away just for the sake of a few crazy radicals. His speech successfully kept the Jacobin Club on the side of the Committee, and the Ultras suddenly found themselves dangerously isolated.
After that, it didn’t take long for the hammer to fall. Or I guess I should say it didn’t take long for the guillotine to fall. The members of the Committee of Public Safety were all collectively re-elected on March the 10th, and then Robespierre emerged from his illness, ready now more than ever to destroy the hated Ultras.
On March the 13th, Saint-Just denounced the radicals in the convention as agents of a vast foreign plot to discredit the revolution. The next day, Jacques Hebert, Vasson, and Rosson were arrested along with a dozen or so foreigners living in Paris, including the colorful Prussian on anarchist Klutz, who has been around the revolution since the early days, but who I’m just mentioning now because he’s about to get his head chopped off. This group was collectively tried from March the 21st to March the 24th on charges of fomenting insurrection, intentionally inducing famine, and plotting another prison massacre, all apparently at the behest of British Prime Minister William Pitt. They were of course all found guilty, and led straight away to the scaffold. Apparently their executions drew the largest crowd of any execution in the whole revolution. Now I’m surprised it drew better than the King’s execution, but I guess there was something thrilling about watching men who had just spent the last year calling for everyone and their mother to be shaved with the national razor to themselves get shaved by the national razor. For the next week, the Committee of Public Safety completed its liquidation of the Paris radicals. Three days after the execution, the oh-so-recently organized Revolutionary Army was dissolved. Then using its authority under the Law of 14 Frémère, the committee purged the Paris Commune’s General Assembly of anyone it didn’t like, including its president, Pierre Gaspar Chamet, who was one of the arch-instigators of de-Christianization. He and another batch of radical sympathizers were arrested, and would subsequently be executed on April the 13th. Just like that, the Paris Commune was put under the thumb of the Committee of Public Safety. And for the first time since, let’s see, probably the flight to Varennes, the Paris Commune was subservient to the national government rather than the other way around. Once the engine of the revolution, the Paris Commune is now a broken shell of its former self. So here we are now at the end of March 1794. The terror is clearly about to start winding down, right? The Law of 14 Frémère is in place, and most of the out-of-control representatives have been brought to heel. Jean-Baptiste Carrier, for example, has just been recalled to Paris so that he would stop doing all the terrible things he was doing in Nantes. Collo de Bois just reaffirmed his loyalty to the Committee of Public Safety. And in a fine and ironic twist, the most zealous advocates of the terror have just fallen victim to it. So this has got to be the end, right?
You can’t blame everybody for thinking this at the time. But they turned out to be very wrong. In an even finer ironic twist, the execution of the Ultras turned out to usher in not the end of the terror, but the beginning of its darkest phase, the so-called Great Terror, which was run of course by the incorruptible Robespierre, following that very narrow path of virtue that only he could see. The first sign that this was not in fact the end of the terror came when the Revolutionary Tribunal turned its attention to prosecuting those implicated in the East India Company scandal. Because the Tribunal is about to cast a far wider net than the facts would possibly warrant, in a blatant attempt to catch the biggest revolutionary fish of them all, the one guy who might possibly be able to beat Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety in a fair fight, Georges Danton.
On March the 16th, the head of the Committee of General Security, the head of the National Police Force, if you will, finally issued a report on the India Company scandal. And he dutifully found that a number of convention delegates and assorted speculators had indeed committed fraud on a massive scale. But Robespierre found the report too narrowly focused on the financial details. It failed to properly take into account the broader political crimes. So three days later, the Committee of General Security came out with a new report that called for a much more open-ended trial of these traitors to France.
Once Hebert and the Ultras were dispatched, the defendants in the India Company trial were next up on the Revolutionary Tribunal’s docket. As the trial date approached, a debate erupted in both the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security about whether all the right suspects had been rounded up. Some wanted to keep the scope of the next trial narrowly focused on the fraud, execute the men guilty, and leave it at that. But another camp wanted to use this all as an excuse to dispose of the whole indulgent faction, and most especially their leader, Georges Danton.
The swing vote in this debate was Robespierre. And though a lot of later historians are always ready to paint Robespierre as nothing but a poisonous little snake who you should always think the worst of, I, for one, am willing to believe he was genuinely conflicted about going after Danton and Démoula, I think it’s well established that he pulled back from any public alliance he might have been forging with the indulgence after Deglantina was exposed. And I think it’s also well established that Deglantina’s corruption had made Robespierre very suspicious of his old allies.
But Danton and Démoula were not aristocratic swine, or out-of-control rabble-rousers, or mere faceless enemies of the state. However Robespierre and Démoula had gone to school together as children. They were friends. Robespierre was the godfather of Démoula’s son.
And Danton… well, it was no secret that Robespierre privately thought Danton an immoral ogre. And it was also no secret that Danton thought Robespierre a repressed little prig who needed to loosen the hell up. But neither had ever doubted the other’s revolutionary commitment. And in a couple of key moments, they had stood side-by-side when the winds were blowing really hard in the other direction. I’m thinking here of the run-up to the war with the Austrians, when Robespierre was practically the only guy to oppose war fever, and Danton was practically the only guy who would stand up and defend him.
I’m also thinking about what’s just happened in the last episode. Danton had gone out on a limb by saying, look, the emergency is passed, let’s wind down the terror. He was lambasted by the rest of the Jacobin Club, but Robespierre rose to his defense. They both thought de-Christianization to be the height of folly and joined forces trying to combat it. This is all just a few months ago. I think it’s fair to say that Danton and Robespierre were not friends. But they clearly had had each other’s backs for years. So the idea of now going after Danton, arresting him, accusing him of treason, and then executing him, that cannot have been an easy idea to swallow even for somebody as heartlessly pure as Robespierre. Plus, Danton was Danton. He was a giant, a force to be reckoned with. Going after him might actually blow up in all their faces, and it would be their heads, not Danton’s, that would wind up in the basket.
In March 1794, Danton and Robespierre met twice to try to hash out their differences and avert any kind of dramatic conclusion to their shared revolutionary careers. I don’t think Robespierre was yet ready to abandon Danton after the first meeting. And when he was pushed to support an arrest warrant while the trial of the Ultras was occupying everyone’s attention, Robespierre, for the moment, refused to do it.
But at some point before they met for the second and final time on March 29th, Robespierre had made up his mind that Danton posed too great a threat to let Rome free. Events after the meeting progressed too quickly and were too well-prepared for the wheels to not have already been in motion. At the meeting, Danton begged Robespierre to recognize that his mind was being poisoned, and Robespierre demanded Danton denounce his old friends as proof of his commitment to the revolution. Neither really heard a word that the other was saying. But as I said, I’m pretty sure Robespierre had already begun drawing up Danton’s indictment, and this whole exercise was simply meant to lull the great ogre into a false sense of security.
Initially, the plan was for Saint-Just to take to the floor of the convention on March 31st and denounce Danton and his friends, paving the way for their collective arrest. But when this was all being laid out for the members of the Committee of General Security, they shook their heads and said, holy crap, are you crazy, first arrest Danton, then denounce him. If you give that guy even a five-minute head start, he’ll kill us all. So that’s what they did. Danton was of course tipped off that an arrest warrant was being prepared, but it appears that he just couldn’t believe it was true. He was Georges Danton. Surely, of all the men in France, he was the one guy who could not possibly be accused of being a counter-revolutionary. He was the revolution.
Except he wasn’t anymore. Robespierre was. And Robespierre was the one who prepared the indictment. On the night of March 30th, Danton and Desmoulas and a few of their closest associates were arrested. Also picked up were Marie-Jean-Herault de Sacheaux, the nobleman on the Committee of Public Safety Robespierre had been keeping his eyes on these past few months, and then also Danton’s old friend and recent scourge of the Bonde, General Francois Vesterman, who had come back to Paris just in time to get picked up in the sweep. The trial of Danton and his friends was of course a complete farce.
Not to get off on a tangent here, but I’ve really come to love this whole historical subgenre of political show trials when the defendants refused to play the part assigned to them. When the Earl of Stratford runs circles around the long parliament, or when Charles I refuses to enter a plea and just grinds his trial to a halt, or then when the Girondins get up one by one and just eviscerate every charge levied at them. And now here we have one of the greatest shows of them all. Because if you think Danton is just going to sit back and take it, you are out of your mind. The courtroom was packed, the crowd was rowdy and ready for a show, and Danton gave it to them. The farce of it all was obvious from the beginning. All the East India Company defendants and Danton’s group would be tried together. Daimler was immediately outraged and he protested. He said, let us be sacrificed alone. What do we have to do with these rogues?
When Vesterman was brought in after the others and neither asked to identify himself nor formally indicted, the General protested. When the judge shrugged and said, those are mere forms, Danton shouted out form, we’re all of us here only for form, much to the laughing delight of the audience. When the judge told him to pipe down and respect the proceedings, Danton boomed back that the judge had better respect their proceedings too. Remember, said Danton, I’m the one who created this tribunal, so I know something about it.
The judge then rang his little bell that signaled for order in the court, and when the court did not return to order, the judge asked, don’t you hear the bell? And Danton barked at him, a man defending his life does not care about a damn bell. No, he keeps shouting.
The prosecutors were clever though, and knowing that Danton would continue to seize the stage any chance he got, they spent the first two days of the trial focused on the boring and eminently provable crimes of the East India Company fraudsters, which gave Danton no ability to talk, since he had nothing to do with it. But on the third day, they finally had to come round to him. The problem was they didn’t really have anything on him, just a bunch of vague stuff going all the way back to the allegations that he had been too busy apologizing for General Dumourie to realize General Dumourie was plotting a coup, and then even further back that he had once been friends with the now disgraced Mirabeau, all of which Danton had very good answers for, and all of which the tribunal had no proof of any actual wrongdoing.
As he parried each thrust, Danton continuously counter-demanded that he and his friends be allowed to call witnesses in their defense. Danton planned to call every member of the Committee of Public Safety, and no doubt subject them to some very uncomfortable cross-examination. These demands were repeatedly rebuffed, but it was getting hard for the judge and prosecutor to maintain order. To help speed matters along, the Committee of Public Safety seized on a report of a rumor that Damoulas’ beloved wife Lucille had been spotted at the prison where the defendants were being kept with a large amount of money, supposedly a bribe to help facilitate a prison break. Not really caring whether the story was true or not, the Committee ordered Lucille arrested on the night of April the 4th, and a decree was passed that if the defendants did anything further to insult the majesty of the tribunal, that they could be removed from the courtroom.
The next day, April the 5th, 1794, Danton once again got into an argument about whether or not he could call a witness, and the judge invoked the new decree. The defendants were removed from their own trial. Especially hand-picked jurors were then asked to deliver a verdict, and they did. Without proof, witnesses, or the defendants present, they found everybody guilty of defrauding the nation and conspiring to restore the monarchy. An absurd verdict, of course, but also a final verdict.
As they waited their last few minutes in the conciergery, Danton lamented the poor state he was leaving the Republic, and allegedly said, If only I could leave my balls to Robespierre and my legs to Coton, the Committee might live a little longer. At four in the afternoon, Danton, Desmoulas, Faberge de Cantina, Westermann, Heroux, some of the most dedicated, passionate, ferocious revolutionaries were led out onto the tumbrels. These were the men who had taken down the Bastille, overthrown the monarchy, sentenced the king to death, and then defended the Republic with every fiber of their being. But now it is time for the revolution to devour a few more of her children.
One wonders if Faberge de Cantina contemplated lettuce on his way to the guillotine, this after all being the 16th of Germinalg, the day he had so poetically set aside for the contemplation of lettuce. Desmoulas no doubt died fearing for his arrested wife Lucille, not that she would suffer for long after his death, she herself would be executed just a week later. Georges Danton was of course the last of the group to be killed. After watching his friends die one by one, he approached the guillotine himself and told the executioner, Don’t forget to show my head to the people. It is worth a look. Then zip thud, the end.
Next week, we will continue to follow Robespierre as he leads France along the razor-thin path to the Republic of Virtue, a republic that could only be forged by its evil twin, the Reign of Terror. And though his accomplice Saint-Just had just promised the convention that the execution of the indulgence would finally, finally bring an end to the political massacres, it will turn out that they were just getting warmed up.
Episode Info
In the spring of 1794. the Revolution devoured a few of her most beloved children.
sponsor link: lynda.com/revolutions
If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider buying Mike Duncan's books:
- Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution: https://amzn.to/3VNqViT
- The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic: https://amzn.to/3h26YpW
- The History of Rome: The Republic: https://amzn.to/3UAvImK
Sponsors
Podscript is a personal project to make podcast transcripts available to everyone for free. Please support this project by following us on Twitter.