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Buttier is no more. His head is nothing more than a mutilated stump separated from his body. A man, o gods, a man, a barbarian, tears out his heart from his palpitating viscera. He is avenging himself on a monster. His hands dripping with blood, he holds up the steaming heart under the eyes of the men of peace assembled in this august tribunal of humanity. Tyrants, cast your eyes on this terrible spectacle. Shudder and see how you and yours will be treated. This body, so delicate and so refined, bathed in perfumes, is horribly dragged in the mud, and over the cobblestones, despots and ministers, your reign is over. Frenchmen, you are exterminating tyrants. Your hatred is revolting, frightful, but you will at last be free. Think how ignominious it is to live as slaves. Think what good, what satisfaction, what happiness awaits you and your children when the August and holy temple of liberty will have set up its temple for you. That was the journalist Elysee Lostallot writing in his paper Revolution de Paris, which he launched in the fateful month of July 1789. And he is describing with some relish the lynching of the royal official Berthier de Sauvigny a week after the fall of the Bastille, on the 14 July and Dominic, the fall of the Bastille.

It is viewed by many people in France and across the world as a moment of liberation. It's the national day of France, of course, and it is celebrated, and always has been celebrated by many, many people as a moment when the chains of tyranny and despotism are broken. And that is the reading that you have chosen to mark this glorious moment when the sunshine of liberty is let in on the dank darkness of royal despotism.

Well, hello, everybody. Yes, Tom, when you say I've chosen that passage, actually is quoted by Simon Sharma in his book Citizens and Sharma's argument in that book, which was published in 1989, the bicentennial of the Revolution, was that violence, horrific violence, was at the heart of the French Revolution from the very beginning, that it was one of the great motors of the revolution and that historians had tended to downplay it. And I think when you read that passage and you read what happens to Berthier de Sauvigny, and indeed, you read what happens to so many people in that period in July 1789 surrounding the fall of the Bastille. So the few days before and then the week or so afterwards, I think it's actually quite hard to see it as a moment of utopian celebration. Liberty, equality, fraternity. There's an awful lot of quite horrific bloodshed that if it had happened in different circumstances, you would say, unbelievably repellent. And actually, of course, there'll be lots of people listening to this podcast. You say, oh, you know, Dominic is taking far too harsh a line. And in a way, you can say that what you think of the fall of the Bastille expresses your political identity.

You know, you tell me what you think of July 1789, and I have a pretty good shot at guessing youre modern day politics. That's true. Do you think, Tom?

I think it is. I mean, it's clearly true in France, although I suppose in France, the attitude is generally more positive, isn't it? But there has been a kind of a lengthy tradition that views the revolution as a mistake in France. But in Britain, we've already talked about this, the division in opinion between Edmund Burke, who sees it as a blood spattered disaster, and Tom Paine, who sees it as a moment of liberation, much as the French do. I mean, he ends up becoming a french citizen, doesn't he?

He does indeed, before ending up in.

Prison and threatened with execution. But, I mean, this question of whether the bloodshed at the Bastille foreshadows the bloodshed of the terror or whether the moment of liberation foreshadows the sense of a new understanding of humanity and of politics, I mean, that is a really fundamental division.

Yes. What does Sharma say? The terror was just 1789 with a higher body count.

Yes. So the argument would be that it's not a bug, it's the system.

Yes, exactly. But there are then a lot of historians, and even at the time, reviewing Sharma's book, Sharma's not the only historian to write about the revolution. And there are lots who said, no, no, he's missing the genuine progressive. You know, he's just reheating Edmund Burke. And actually, the revolution had lots of progressive consequences. And we'll get into that in the course of the series. But let's dig today into what really happened in July 1789. And let's start by picking up from last week's episodes so listeners will remember there was a social crisis born of the horrendous weather, the bad harvest, the hunger, the frustration, the fear that has swept through so much of France. As people begin to starve, there's a financial and political crisis that goes back for decades to do with the french government running up debts to pay for its foreign wars. Its political system, unlike, say, Britain's, not really having a mechanism that allows them to do that. France has been on the verge of bankruptcy. Louis XVI has recalled the estates general, this great gathering of the commons, the lords and the church, which has then morphed into a national assembly and basically made a move to take sovereignty from the monarchy.

And we ended last time. 20,000 troops are moving towards Paris from the frontiers, many of them swiss or german speakers, so feared and hated by much of the parisian population. They are advancing on the capital, triggering panic in the streets of Paris. And there's a sense when you get to the beginning of July 1789, everything is building towards a peak. The food prices are rising, the panic on the streets, the sense of paranoia is growing all the time, because, famously.

The bread price reaches its pinnacle on the 14 July, doesn't it?

It does indeed, about 15 sous, having been normally about eight sous. So, in other words, bread has doubled. And for a lot of people, that means destitution.

Cost of living crisis, cost of living.

Crisis with knobs on. And a lot of people at this point, even though that cost of living crisis is driven by acts of God, which is to say, the weather, people are already looking for scapegoats. And that is a real theme of the entire french revolutionary story. So a guy, a deputy in the new National Assembly, a future member of the committee of public safety called Bertrand Barre, said on the 19 June that the food shortage was the result of the disastrous projects of the enemies of the people, enemies of humanity, and they need to be discovered, intimidated and punished. And there again, a preview of what's to come.

But brilliantly, the people's hero, rather unexpectedly, is a banker. Not what you see today.

That's right. So this is somebody again we talked about last time, Jacques Necker, the finance minister, a swiss Protestant. He's the one person that most of the french public view as their savior. But as we said last time, Louis has been losing confidence in Necker. And at 05:00 on Saturday, the 11 July, Necker and his wife leave Versailles for good in a coach. He has been sacked by the king in a very kind of underhand means. Necker was about to sit down to have dinner when he got a note telling him he had to leave France immediately and not go via Paris. He goes to Brussels. And actually, Necker then does something, Tom, which I think shows very admirable. It'd be nice to sort of have a revisionist view of Necker. But Necker gets to Brussels the next day and he writes a letter to the dutch bankers, hope, and he says to them, I put up 2 million pounds in my own money as security for grain shipments to the people of France. Even though I have been fired, I'm still good for the 2 million pounds. I mean, he's a pretty decent fellow.

Admirable. Yeah.

Now, the king's advisors, they'd sacked him on a Saturday. They thought they were being very clever. They thought that because the National assembly wouldn't meet on the Sunday, there wouldn't be an immediate reaction and they would therefore be able to manage it. But what they didn't bargain for, they didn't think it through, because on Sunday in Paris, a lot of people obviously are not working and they have taken to the streets. There are a lot of sightseers, there are peasants who've come in from the countryside to kind of go into the city. And a lot of these people have gathered at what's called the Palais Royale, which is a part of the city, a great complex of sort of arcades and cafes and shops that is under the jurisdiction not of the king, but of the Duke of Orleans. Right.

And we've talked about that, haven't we? And talked about how, for instance, when we were talking about the abuse level at Marie Antoinette, that a lot of this is coming from factions within Versailles, within the royal family. And the Duke of Orleans, he is Louis cousin, and although he's absolutely committed to the causes, I mean, he will end up voting for Louis death.

Yeah. He's not a good man. I think the Duke of a real.

I mean, there's a sense in which even now, there is a slight quality of kind of the internal royal faction fight going on.

Yeah, I think so.

But it's obviously spiraling massively out of that.

Massively out of control. Yeah. So there are huge crowds that have assembled in the Palais royal, thousands of people, and the news arrives by about midday, that necker has been sacked. And the crowds are very cross and angry and they're all shouting. And there would be a tradition of kind of orators standing up and giving impromptu speeches on the street corners and things. By about 03:00, a large crowd, it's said to be thousands of people, has gathered around one particular cafe where a young man is standing on a table shouting at the crowd. The cafe Feuille, it's called. And this young man will be very familiar to people who've read Hilary Mantel's book, a place of greater safety, because he's really the hero of that book. And he's called Camille Desmoulins. He's 26 years old. He came from Picardy. He's the kind of slightly spoiled son of a lieutenant colonel who had sent him to Paris for his education. And at the Lysee Louis le Grand in Paris, Camille had become great pals with a man whose name will definitely be familiar to a lot of listeners, Maximilien Robespierre. So they're a real sort of inseparable duo.

And Desmoulins is not a deputy at the estates general, but he's very much of that ilk. So he's. He's obsessed with the Romans, with Cicero, with liberty, with virtue. He's written a poem, an ode to the estates general.

So he's a very sandbrook figure.

Oh, thank you, Tom. Yeah, great. Exactly.

He's a kind of Shelley, isn't he?

He is. He's a wannabe Shelley.

Poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Exactly. That's exactly. He's a young, long haired idealist. He's everything I dislike in a man.

Tom, I look forward to you being fair.

Well, Selma says he's an exponent of the breast beating, sob provoking declamation then in vogue at the Palais Royal. His style, a tone of virtue militant, mingled with the patriotic martyrdom exemplified in neoclassical history paintings in the salon and on the stage. So you can. Absolutely the type. In 1968 at Columbia, in New York or in Paris or at the London School of Economics, he'd have been the first one to do the sit in or whatever.

Or 1848.

Yes.

I mean, he's there at the beginning of that tradition, isn't he? Of the long haired poets throwing cobblestones?

Yes, absolutely, he is. So Desmoulins stands on the table and he says to everybody, necker has been kicked out, you the nation, we've been insulted. And he says, osam uzam to arms, to arms. And supposedly he grabs the leaves from a tree and he says, let us all take a green cockade the color of hope. And he kind of wears these leaves.

So that's a marketing strategy that doesn't work out.

No, but everybody at the time says, oh, brilliant. Love it. Everyone's shouting, bravo. And people are kissing him and kissing each other and they take kind of green ribbons or they take bits of branches or sort of leaves and stuff, anything green. And then they go out into the streets of the capital, out of the Palais royal into the streets of the capital, some of them wearing kind of mourning clothes to mourn Necker's dismissal. They burst into theaters. It's very kind of just stop oil or something, isn't it? They disrupt performances and they say there's a crisis on. This is a moment of mourning. You know, everyone should go out in the streets and mourn the departure of Necker. They invade a wax museum.

I mean, this is so meta. So meta.

Yeah. Run by a guy called Philippe Curtius. Now, Philippe Curtius, here's the patron of a little girl called Marie who ends up becoming Madame Tussaud. Madame Tussauds, yeah. Wax museum. And in the wax museum, Philippe Curtis, Wax Museum.

Lots of heads, aren't they?

They've got a head of the Duke of Ornia and a head of necker, and the crowd grab these heads and they're kind of parading around in the streets. I know.

I mean, it's unbelievable.

It is so bizarre.

Yeah. So the whole story is bookended with heads.

It is. It is indeed. So anyway, the crowd rampage through the streets, shouting and waving the heads and all this. And they get to the place vendome. And at the place vendome, some of these troops are there. They're the royal allemands. They're german speaking troops. And they try to clear the square. And basically, this degenerates into fighting between these dragoons and the crowd. And the fighting spills over from the place vendome into the place Louis Quinze, which is at the end of the Tuileries gardens.

And that's the Place de la Concorde now.

Exactly, Tom. Yes. This great kind of royal pleasure park in the center of Paris. Now, the gardens are filled with middle class Parisians on a Sunday stroll, women, children, families and whatnot. And the fighting, which it has now become between the crowd and the dragoons, basically spills right over into the park, into where all these people are strolling. Total chaos. The crowd are grabbing things from kind of cafe terraces and throwing them at the soldiers chairs, kind of stones, bits of statues. And because as people are fleeing in panic, screaming and stuff, the word spreads around the city. The Germans and the Swiss have gone mad. They're massacring the people. And at that point, another military detachment. These are called the gardes francaises. So the french guards, they arrive on the scene to try and protect the people from the german and swiss troopers. Now, the gardes francaises are an infantry unit, and they are very different. They are young men. They are often provincial from northern towns and they have proved in recent weeks extremely unreliable pamphlets have been circulating among the french guards. We are citizens before we're soldiers. We are frenchmen before we are slaves.

In other words, you know, they have been, as it were, I was going to say, tainted. That's not the right word. But the rhetoric of liberty and virtue has permeated them, as it has so many other aspects of french life.

It's like the police taking the knee in 2000.

Yeah, the police taking the knee, exactly. So together, the rioters and the garde francaise drive the cavalry troopers out of the Tuileries gardens. And at that point, the royal commander in the city, who is called Baron de Besenval, he gives the order to all his troopers to evacuate, effectively, the whole of the city, rather than fight. And he's frightened, rightly, he says, we cannot trust our own soldiers to hold the line. They are breaking and defecting to the rioters. So in that moment, the city is lost to the authorities. And that then is the cue for a kind of. Well, there's no other way of putting it. An orgy of destruction, Tom, or a.

Toppling of symbols of oppression and tyranny.

A carnival of liberation. So, as the royal troops withdraw to the Pont de Sevres, a bridge to the west, the crowd invades gun shops, armorers and so on, and they force them to hand over whatever weapons they can find. They've also, many of them by now, armed themselves with daggers and clubs, even kitchen knives. And they head to the north of the city where there is this great wall, a customs barrier, because remember we said in a previous episode, France at this point has a lot of internal duties, internal economic barriers, protectionist barriers, and literally customs barriers. And this is the most famous one.

And it's built by Lavoisier, who is the greatest chemist in France. And he has done it because he has invested in this kind of tax farming company.

Yes.

So therefore, with this war, they can regulate the goods that come in and out of the city. And he's doing that, obviously, to raise money. And this will not look good in due course and Lavoisier will end up guillotined. But I always love this story. I actually did a school project on Lavoisier.

Oh, no way. Yeah.

So he's always been close to my heart because although he's undoubtedly part of this kind of exploitative framework, he is also, of course, a brilliant chemist. I mean, he basically disproves that there's this kind of weird element, supposedly called phlogiston, that kind of results in explosions and things. And he says, no, it's all about oxygen and stuff. I'm slightly paraphrasing here. Chemists may be able to refine that take on it, but also, he is investing a lot of the money that he is making in charitable causes. Among those is prison reform. He's very, very keen on improving conditions for prisoners. And the other, rather topically, bearing in mind that this is going out in the fortnight of the Olympics, he's very keen on purifying the water in the Seine.

All right? Yeah.

So it's kind of weird nexus of the ancien regime, that it's exploitative, it's oppressive, it's enlightened and it's compassionate, all in one kind of confusing hall of mirrors.

History's complicated, Tom. It is complicated. People are complicated, aren't they? Yeah, it is complicated. So, I mean, his wall is an amazing thing. It's 18 miles in circumference and 10ft high. You know, it's a really. If it was standing today, you'd go and see it as it would be a tourist attraction. Anyway, it's not standing because the crowd demolished the wall and they demolish 40 customs posts, which are intervals around the wall, and they burn all the records from the customs post. Now, burning the records. People are doing this in the countryside. At the same time they're breaking into castles and things.

It's very like the peasants revolt.

Exactly. Burning the feudal records. The evidence, as it were, of their own subordinate status. So this is what people are doing outside Paris, and they're doing this all night. Now, back inside the city, of course, there are a lot of people with a lot to lose. There are the propertied middle classes, basically, the people who, up till now, have been directing the revolutionary process, and a lot of them are extremely worried about the fact that the army has vacated the city and law and order is completely breaking down. And there's a group of royal officials that huddle around a guy who's effectively the mayor. He's called the provost of merchants, the prevost de marchand. His name is Jacques de Flesselles, and we will come back to him at the end of this episode. Spoiler alert. He does not come to a very happy end. And the mayor basically says, listen, we need to kind of rally the forces of order and we will do this at dawn on the 13 July. We'll sound the tocsin the churches, the bells will toll an emergency signal, we'll fire cannons, there will be drums. And these will call out representatives from the electoral districts to the Hotel de ville, the city hall, and we will meet and we will decide what to do.

And presumably this will have a very calming effect on everyone else.

This is what they're hoping. Yeah, madness. Because as soon as the toxin starts tolling at dawn, bells and cannon people are like, what's going on? And everyone pours out into the streets thinking the city's under attack from the army or who knows what. Now, at the Hotel de ville, the representatives of the electoral districts arrive and they agree to form a commune, a sort of an informal city administration to run their own affairs. The commune will become one of the great power bases in the French Revolution, although nobody, of course, knows this at the time. And they also say there are now mobs roaming the streets. There are also bands of vigilantes roaming the streets. We should regularize all this with a militia, they call it, entertainingly, the guard bourgeoise. The bourgeois guard. And this is what becomes ultimately the National Guard again, a key player in the revolutionary story. And they've been wearing, of course, Camille Desmoulins green sprigs. Green sprigs, exactly. And they say, well, this green business is rubbish, not least because green is the symbol of one of the great reactionaries, the king's brother, the Comte d'Artois. And they said, we can't be wearing his color.

Why don't we wear the colors of Paris red and blue? So that morning they swapped their cockades for red and blue cockades and we will discuss the symbolism of cockades a little bit later. So meanwhile, the anarchy on the streets is actually getting worse. That morning, rioters sacked the convent of.

St Lazare, which is where Beaumarchais had been imprisoned.

Right, exactly. A nice nod back to your thing about the marriage. Figaro tom. Exactly. They find there are a lot of food, wine vinegar, 25 gruyere cheeses, which is exactly what I'd expect to be in a monastery, frankly. And a large dried ram's head. I mean, who knows what you'd be doing with that? Is that the basis for a soup? Who knows?

Well, I don't know. I mean, so monasteries and convents are always the setting for pornographic fantasies. They are the Aussie, our regime. So who knows what's going on there?

About cheese? About. So anyway, they take all this stuff and they say, oh, well, this absolutely proves the privileged classes, the monks, the priests, the bigwigs have been hoarding food all this time and that's, of course, only inflames them more. Now they're desperate to get weapons because they think they're going to come under attack. They ransack a royal storehouse, they get loads of halberds. And we had a few halberds in our british elections episode, so it's great to have halberds back on the show.

Brilliant.

Crossbows. They've got a cannon that was given by the king of Siam to Louis XIV. What a detail. A silver lined cannon. It was basically a toy. A toy cannon. Life size toy cannon. Anyway, they've got this cannon, I like.

To think, decorated with elephants. Do you think?

Yeah, almost certainly. They go to the great sort of military hospital, les invalides. This is when I say hospital, it's a place where old soldiers went to retire.

That's where Napoleon ends up buried. I have filmed there, Dominic.

Have you? I've never been to this invalid, Tom. I really should go and pay my respects to Napoleon.

I have stood next to his tomb and been filmed pondering.

Were you?

Yes.

Were you dreaming about invading Russia, leaving your troops behind as you'd left them behind after invading Egypt, cursing the british.

Mastery of the sea?

Exactly. Cursing the nation's shopkeepers.

But obviously at this point, it's not there. I mean, that goes without saying.

No. The invalides managed to sort of keep them away for the time being. Meanwhile, that guy, the mayor Flesselles, is sort of playing what seems to be a very strange game. People are saying to him, where are the arms? And he's sending them off to different parts of the city where I. It seems like there's obviously not going to be any weapons. And people are starting to be suspicious and thinking, is he playing a double game? Is he just trying to buy time by sending us some wild goose chases? But all that day the 13th, there is a sense of kind of increasing disorder. And then dawn breaks the following day, Tuesday the 14th, and the bread price, not surprisingly, given the chaos, has now reached its all time peak. So it's now about 15 sous. And women who are going out to the markets to get bread are incredibly angry and saying, you know, this is intolerable. We can't eat. We must take matters into our own hands. So that morning, the crowds are bigger than ever. About 80,000 people return to they invalides. They break in scenes of tremendous chaos, kind of stampede.

There's a crush. People have been crushed underfoot. They get muskets, about 5000 muskets. They take out about 20 cannons and they're passing them out among the crowd. But there is one thing they don't have. They don't have any gunpowder? They don't have anything to basically make the cannons work.

And so, Dominic, is there anywhere in Paris that might have a ready supply of gunpowder?

There is one place, Tom, and that place is the Bastille, the great fortress in the center of Paris. And now the crowd turn their attention to the Bastille. And, Tom, the excitement has reached such a pitch that I wonder if we should take a break just for our own health and safety reasons.

I think we should. I can't cope with the stress otherwise.

Yeah.

We'll be back in a few minutes with the storming of the Bastille.

Hello. This is William Dyrymple here from the Empire podcast, also from Gohanger. And I'm here to tell you about a new miniseries we've just done on the Vietnam War. I'm from the generation of kids that grew up on Apocalypse now and went to bed memorizing phrases like, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. But this series, I think, really is something we really get to the heart of this conflict that consumed so much of both american and southeast asian post war history in America. It. It consumed six presidents and led to America dropping more bombs on Vietnam than they did in the entirety of the second world war and the loss of millions of lives. It also, of course, encouraged the cynicism about government that has become so prevalent in modern America and its politics, and it harvested this incredible host of films and literary works of art. I grew up on books like dispatches, and we mentioned apocalypse now, but also the deer hunter science, horror of war, full metal jacket. It goes on and on and on. So if you want to know more about this war and the Titanic scar it left across the whole of southeast Asia, but also very much on the american psyche, we have left an excerpt from the miniseries at the end of this episode for you to enjoy.

Hello. Welcome back to the rest is history. And Dominic, we are approaching one of the most celebrated moments in french history, in global history.

Yeah, the Bastille.

Take it away.

So, the Bastille, Tom, you will know, because you did a wonderful episode about the man in the iron mask, that the Bastille is not quite what we think it was. So in our imagination, the Bastille is this towering gothic castle.

Well, that's how it's shown in the paintings, isn't it?

In the paintings, it's looming over the city. It's this terrible symbol of royal oppression, the embodiment of despotism and tyranny and whatnot.

Well, it's gothic, isn't it as well, because this is the kind of the period of gothic fiction.

Yes.

And it's a transplantation of a sinister baronial pile in the alps or something, right into the middle of Paris. But that's not actually what it is exactly.

It's got a bit of a tower of London quality to it, I suppose, but it's quite squat. It has eight round towers and it has walls that are 5ft thick. But it had been built in the Hundred Years War as a defense against the English, I'm proud to say. And Charles the mad Charles VI had converted it into a prison.

Well, we'll be looking at this in a series we're going to be doing on Henry V in a few weeks time.

The Hundred Years war. Exactly. But it was Cardinal Richelieu in the 17th century who really said, let's use it as a prison for prisoners of state and the people who were sent there, as you described in your episode that you did on the man in the iron mask, there's a thing called a lettre de cachet, and this is a kind of sealed letter approved by the king, in which your crime is often not really nearly named. But basically, if there's a lettre de cachet, you can be sentenced without any process, without any trial. You can be basically thrown behind bars. So people are obviously up in arms. They see this as a symbol of arbitrary government and despotism and absolutism and whatnot.

But there are kind of three kinds, really, aren't there?

Yeah.

So there's people who are seen as engaged in conspiracy against the monarchy.

Yes.

Of whom, whoever he is, the man in the iron mask would be the exemplary example. And there are writers whose works are seen to be seditious. So the most famous of these writers is Voltaire, the great kind of wit and philosophe, who actually writes the story of the man in the iron mask and kind of invents it as a symbol of royal tyranny. And then there are people who are seen by their own families as trouble. And again, there is a famous archetype of this, a literary figure who we've also done an episode on, and that is the Marquis de Sade.

That's right. So delinquents, aristocratic, usually, whose own families basically petitioned the monarchy. Please, can you have my son locked up? He's totally out of control. I mean, that's what it is, isn't it?

And actually, it's quite a kind of mark of status, isn't it? If you're a writer or a rebel.

To be sent to the bastille.

Yeah, to be sent there, because that's what Beaumarchais finds so humiliating when he's sent to Saint Lazare, that he isn't sent to the Bastille.

Yeah. And actually, conditions in the Bastille, when I read up on it, it reminded me of the prisons that Dickens describes, like the marshalsea or something. So it's all a bit Dickensian. Sharma compares it to an overgrown lodging house with guests living in different rooms according to their station. If you remember the public, you can actually walk into the Bastille. You can go in and sort of. There are shops on the inside, there's a garden. The governor has a vegetable garden, so you can have a stroll and stuff. And inside, further inside, there's the kind of warren of rooms where the inmates are kept and the conditions are actually not really that bad. So the extraordinary thing is you are better off inside the bastille than the vast majority of french people who live outside it.

Well, the Marquis Desard lives quite well. I mean, he's able to write his.

Novel and, yeah, you have alcohol.

He sends his wife out to get him cheese and all kinds of things.

That's right. He has 133 books when he's in there, and he has a desk and he has dressing gowns, he has aftershave, he's allowed all these kind of treats. This is the norm. There are card games, there's a billiard table. There's a writer called Jean Francis Marmontel. He was asked what was the food like in the Bastille? And he said, I always remember an excellent soup, a succulent side of beef, a thigh of boiled chicken oozing with grease, a little dish of fried marinated artichokes, really, some fine croissant, pears, a bottle of old burgundy, the very best mocha coffee. So it's more like a hotel than a prison. And the demonology of it was invented by writers to criticize the regime. So, Voltaire, yes, the most famous is a guy actually called Linge, who was a barrister who was sent there, and we don't really know why, in 1780, and he published a book called Memoirs of the Bastille. And this is your classic kind of gothic nightmare, you know, clanking chains, the door crashing shut behind you. And he invented the idea, really, that the Bastille was this kind of living tomb, that everybody in it was the walking dead.

They would never be heard from again.

Well, he must be drawing on the Voltaire, the idea of the man in the eye mask as well. Those ideas have quite deep roots.

They do. And they're actually so successful, those ideas, that the government themselves have decided the Bastille has to go, because even though it's fine, it's kind of bad publicity to have it. So by the 1780s, they have a plan to redevelop the bastille. They're going to build a park instead, with a column and fountains in the middle. And there'll be an inscription that says, ironically, Louis XVI, restorer of public freedom. Of course, that part that never happens.

I mean, the shades of irony that veil the totemic episodes in the French Revolution are amazing.

So the Bastille has featured in people's imagination in the days leading up to the 14 July parliament, because of the Marquis de Sade, actually. So he's in the Bastille. He's been following all the news from Versailles. He's really into it, isn't he? And he's been shouting political harangues from the window.

Yes, because he takes the thing that he pees into kind of metal, a funnel, and he uses that to shout out revolutionary slogans.

Exactly. And he says, I'm in here with hundreds of inmates and the governor is planning to kill us all. And this is a complete fantasy.

So he gets bundled off to a lunatic asylum.

Lunatic asylum. He's got to go. He's a real pain. Now, actually, we've mentioned the governor. So the Marquis de Sar was kicked out nine days ago, and the governor in those nine days has been getting increasingly worried, as you might expect. His name is Bernard Rene Delaunay and he is 49 years old. He was born in the Bastille. His father had been the governor as well. And basically, he's a very, very dutiful, humdrum, you know, uncontroversial civil servant. The guy who runs the Bastille. He's not a bad man, he's not a torturer. He's nothing like that. He's just kind of a boring official.

He doesn't cackle evilly while fettering people in dripping dungeons.

Not at all. And he's been given this gunpowder to guard. The gunpowder has been sent to him, 250 barrels of it, and he's been told, you know, don't let anyone have it. He has been sort of making vague preparations like moving the cannons to the embrasures. He's told his men to gather some stones to throw at people if they try to get in, and bits of iron mungery and stuff. And I say his men he has 82 old soldiers, like pensioners, invalides, as they're called, and they are just loafers. They're completely useless. They're not going to be at all used in a fight. And he's also been sent 32 swiss guards. He has enough food to last him two days, and he has no water supply whatsoever. So when he sees this giant crowd advancing towards him, he thinks, oh, for God's sake. Like, this is the last thing I need now. This crowd later ends up being sort of, dare I say, sacralized. Tom, there are 954 of them, and they are aged between eight and 72, and they're known officially as the vanqueur. So most of these vankur are artisans from the Saint Antoine neighborhood, the neighborhood around there, Bastille.

And they are joiners and glaziers and cabinet makers and locksmiths. So because they ended up as these great heroes of the revolution, we know loads about them. Only one of them is a woman, a laundress, or Marie Charpentier. Most of them, historians, have really done tremendous work kind of analyzing their background. Most of them had not been born in Paris. So that gives you a sense of just how transient the parisian population is. How many migrants have come from the countryside for work or for bread, and are now angry and resentful, because in.

A city like Paris, people are going to die, disease. And so the population cannot be maintained without this constant influx of people.

Constant flow. Yes, exactly. So they are angry, resentful, hungry. They're also frightened. There are lots of rumors that the army out preparing to retake the city. They're desperate to get this gunpowder. So they've assembled, thousands of them or so, shouting and roaring outside the walls of the Bastille. More happily for Delaunay, two delegates arrive from the city hall, from the Hotel de Ville, and they say, look, we've come to see you. And he says, well, funnily enough, I'm about to have dinner. It's 10:00 so it's described as his Dejanee, but it's more of a brunch. He's about to have brunch, petite Dejeuner, and he says, why don't you come in? So these guys go in, and they have this enormous. I mean, obviously, it's France, right? They have this enormous meal which goes on for hours, and the crowd become very restless.

Well, if they're all starving to death outside, right? And they're all having their croissant, and.

Of course, we know what they're eating in the Bastille. They're having an excellent soup, a sucking inside of beef, a thigh of boiled chicken oozing with grease. They're having all this. Brilliant.

Yeah.

The crowd get very restless. Another deputy arrives called Touriou de la Rosiere, and he goes in to see Delaunay. By this time, he's got a very firm list of demands. He says, we want all your guns as cannons as well as the gunpowder, and you must allow our new militia, the bourgeois guard, to take over the bastille. And Daronay says, look, I can't do that. I need instructions from Versailles. I've got my orders, I'm just doing my job. I don't want any trouble, but you can't ask me stuff that I can't deliver. Tourio says, you know, I understand where you're coming from. I'm not happy about it, but I will go back to the Hotel de ville and report back and find out what's going to happen. So Tourio goes back to the Hotel de Ville and there all these sort of electors and officials are huddled together and they're chatting for about an hour about what are we going to do about the Bastille. And actually their attitude is we don't want to fray in the center of Paris and Dominican.

But just to be clear, at this point, their concern is with the Bastille as a source of ammunition rather than its role as an emblem of royal tyranny.

Yes, that is what they want. They want the gunpowder, they want the guns, but they're not talking about, you know, the Bastille as the gothic castle and stuff. I mean, they can see the Bastille, they know what it is, but they've been talking for about an hour. It's 130. Turio is going to be sent back to the Bastille with a loud halo to kind of address the crowd and stuff, when suddenly they heard there's this enormous explosion and the Hotel de Ville literally shakes. And then they hear this further explosions, gunfire, and it's all coming from the direction of the Bastille. What has happened? Well, while Tourio and his friends have been meeting in the city hall, the crowd outside the bastille have run out of patience and have just decided to take matters into their own hands. And some of them have started to burst into that outer courtyard with the vegetable garden and the shops, shouting, give us the bastille. Give us the bastille. A load of them climb up to the top of a perfume shop, which is next to the gate that goes into the inner courtyard and there's a drawbridge which is closed.

They cut the ropes holding the drawbridge up. Now, this is that classic kind of mad crowd behavior. The drawbridge at this point falls open very unexpectedly, and it crushes people underneath. One person has died. The rest of the crowd don't give a damn about that, and they just run over the drawbridge, presumably further flattening this poor mandeh. There are soldiers up at the top who are shouting, stay away, stay away. We don't want to shoot you. The crowd think they are saying, come in, come in, we won't shoot. So they charge in and the swiss guards start shooting at them. Now, the crowd believe, quite wrongly, the people further behind say, oh, they must have lowered the drawbridge and let us into the inner courtyard as a trick, because they wanted to shoot us down like dogs, and they go ballistic. The crowd is now stampeding further into the Bastille, and the fighting kind of breaks out in earnest. And what then happens, of course, rumors spread, you know, chinese whispers. People are sort of saying, it's all kicking off at the Bastille. The guards are shooting at our people, at the crowd. There's a guy who's called Hulin, Pierre Augustin Hulin.

And he runs out and he gets a load of guard Francaise, french guards, and he says, the criminal de Launay is assassinating our fathers, our wives and our children. Will you let them be slaughtered? So these guardes Francaise arrive and they've brought with them some cannons. And one of those, Tom, is that siamese cannon.

Oh, brilliant. With the elephants.

Well, the elephants, I think, are a figment of your imagination, but let's imagine it with the elephants, which was a present for Louis XIV. And they aim these cannon at the gates. So it's total chaos inside the Bastille. Delaunay, the governor is obviously very distressed what's happening.

Yeah, he's enjoyed a nice breakfast.

And now, yeah, he did get his brunch. I mean, Tom is, fair to say, the last brunch he'll ever have, sadly, he just wants, basically, the whole thing to be over with honor. And he wants an honorable surrender and no more bloodshed. He sends a note to the leaders of the crowd and he says, look, I've got all these barrels of gunpowder. If you don't stop attacking, I will blow up the gunpowder and the fort. I'll blow up the whole thing sky high. They don't want to give in to this ultimatum. And in fact, his own soldiers say, we don't want you to blow up all the gunpowder. On us with it. And so eventually, Delaunay, this wheeze of his, has failed. And he says, fine, call it a day. And he lowers the drawbridge that leads to the inner courtyards. The attackers now swarm over this drawbridge. I mean, even though he's basically surrendered and let them in, they're determined to have their sort of moment of glory anyway. So they climb the walls and they hack down the gate, which is a bit kind of unnecessary. And by about 05:00 in the afternoon, the siege is over.

And there are white flags flying above the Bastille.

And they think they are going to find victims of royal despotism chained up in dungeons, do they?

Of course they do. I mean, don't forget the marquis de Sard has been telling them that this massacre was impending.

Yeah.

And for years, as you said, going back to Voltaire, people have believed that the Bastille is rammed with the victims of despotism.

So how many did they find?

There are seven people in the Bastille tomb. Seven prisoners, four of whom are genuine criminals who are forgers, who cannot be romanticized at all.

But they go free, do they?

Yeah, the forgers do go free. I think one of them is sort of one of your posh libertines, a guy called the Comte de Solaage who'd been locked up at the request of his own family for bad behavior. And two are lunatics. So of the lunatics, as they're called, one of them is just obviously completely mad. And the other one is probably, some sources say English, some Irish, but I think it's generally agreed he's irish.

He has a long white beard, doesn't he? Which is good visuals.

Yeah, people call him major white. He looks good. He's the only possible candidate that they have that they can say they've rescued from this massacre. A symbol of liberation, because he's got.

This beard and he thinks he's Julius Caesar, doesn't he?

Yeah, they put him on their shoulders and carry him around the city. Hurrah. Look at this man.

Now.

He thinks he's Julius Caesar, so he's very confused by the whole thing. He's kind of waving at the crowds. And I think the next day they take him and lock him up in a lunatic asylum again. So actually, he was probably better off in the Bastille with his fine foods and his billiard table anyway, just on the Bastille itself. This is obviously very disappointing from the revolution's point of view. So they have to completely reinvent what happened and what they found revolutionary artists pour out prints and engravings that show torture chambers, you know, iron maidens, men in iron masks, all of that kind of stuff.

And also the battlements being much, much larger than they really were.

Exactly this extraordinary sort of Helm's deep style siege, which is not really what it was. They find some bits of old armor in the sort of cellar and they bring that out and they say torture equipment, they find a printing press, torture machine, all this kind of stuff. Bastille tourism in the next few days becomes a huge thing. So they basically, former warders turn up up. They're giving you a guided tour of the cells. Posh women will have themselves locked in overnight. A really interesting story, and you can read up more about this in a lot of the French Revolution histories. Simon Sharma's really good on this. For example, there was a guy in the crowd who was a building contractor called Pierre Francois Paluey, and he's very entrepreneurial. He basically gets the contract to demolish the Bastille. He makes tons of money from organizing guided tours, lectures, all this kind of stuff. He builds France's first revolutionary altar from chains and manacles that he claimed to have found in the Bastille. And then he becomes the great entrepreneur of Bastille merchandising. So he puts together a traveling revolution kit that his reps, his sales reps take to every part of France, every one of the 83 new departments.

And it includes a big chest of souvenirs, literally inkwells that are supposedly made from fetters paper weights in the shape of the Bastille daggers, snuff boxes.

So, Dominic, it's very like the way the Berlin Wall, you know, the chunks of the Berlin wall were sold when it came down.

Yeah. Enough chunks of the Berlin wall to make millions of Berlin walls, I think it's fair to say. Yeah, it's exactly the same. Yeah. It's a cross between medieval relics and basically modern souvenir TAPD. Mister Palawi's souvenir kits. Anyway, that's to jump ahead. Let's go back to the afternoon, the 14 July. So what happened to all the defenders? The swiss guards were initially unharmed because they'd taken the uniforms off, so nobody knew who they were. Some of the invalides are very, very harshly treated. A good example of this, this guy called Becca. This, I think, is a quite scary warning of what lies ahead. Becar had been one of the key people in dissuading Delaunay from blowing up the gunpowder. So actually the crowd should have been quite grateful to him. But as soon as they get inside, he opens one of the gates and somebody cuts off his hand. The crowd believe that he must have been a jailer, so they wave his hand around and it's presumed he's still.

Got the keys hanging from the.

It's got the key in. Yeah, sorry. He's got the key because he's opened the gate. So because of this, they parade around the city carrying this poor bloke's hand. Anyway, he manages to live to the end of the day, but then somebody again misidentifies him and says, I think that Bloke was one of the guys who was firing the cannons at the people, which he wasn't. And so he ends up being hanged along with some of his comrades, which is very unfortunate, but not as chilling as something that has always stayed in my mind ever since I first read it, which must be 30, 40 years ago, which is what happened to Governor Delaunay. Remember I said, he's just a functionary. He wanted to kill himself. He was so shamed by the dishonor of surrendering the fortress, but he was stopped from doing so by a grenadier. And the crowd seize on him and they drag him out and they drag him towards the Hotel de villein. He's being dragged through the streets. People are spitting on him and kicking him and all sorts. A horrible scene. They get to the Hotel de Ville and then they say, let's kill him in a really amusing, baroque way.

And there are some people who say, why don't we tie him to a horse's tail and drag him through the city? And he will die by being dragged over the cobbles.

Because that's the kind of thing that royal executions do to awe and intimidate the masses.

Yeah.

And so I suppose there's a kind of element of paying royal officials in their own kind.

Exactly. And there's a pastry cook called Deneau who says, no, we'll take him into the city hall, the Hotel de Ville, and we will give him a kind of a trial or something. And to Launay, who at this point is, you know, is battered, bruised, covered with blood, you know, crying, whatever, he says, enough of this, let me die. And he lashes out furiously and kicks the pastry cook, Dano, in the groin. And at that point, the crowd kind of close in on him. Daggers drawn, bayonets. People are in a frenzy and they stab and stab and stab and kill him. Poor Delaunay. And then people shoot his body as it lies in the gutter. And then somebody gives Dano the pastry cooker sword, and says, you have the honor of cutting off his head. And Dano throws the sword aside. I don't need the sword, he says. And he gets out a pocket knife and he then kneels down and basically saws this governor's head off.

And so this story began with wax heads being paraded. And now.

Yeah, and now real heads. And they put his head on a pike. There are women in the crowd, kind of. This is what shocks some witnesses, kind of cheering and singing, and they parade around. The mayor has been in the Hotel de ville all this time, Jacques de Flesselles.

This is the double crossing.

There the people suspect of double crossing them. They seize him as well. They say afterwards they found a letter from Delaunay in his pocket saying, you know, hold out, let's distract the rabbit. Whether this is true, we don't know. Of course, there's no evidence for it now. Flesselle, too, was taken outside. He was basically ripped to pieces by the crowd. Shot in the head, his head cut off, put on a pike. And then the crowd parade through the streets with his two heads on pikes. So this is what's been happening in the city that evening. It starts to rain. And anyone who knows anything about riots and mobs knows that basically the single best way to end a riot is for it to start raining.

So, like the Chartists in 1848 got rained on and there was no revolution.

Yeah. So everything has died down in Paris, but the National assembly, of course, is still in Versailles. And that evening, as the rain is falling, a guy called the Vicomte de noailles bursts into the National assembly in Versailles, which is hours away, ride or whatever, and says, all this chaos has kicked off in the city and actually the National assembly are not jubilant. They are anxious and shocked. It is clear to them, to some of them even now, that this process that they thought they were controlling until a few days ago is spiraling well beyond their ability to restrain it. The king himself has been in the palace all day. That is why in his journal, he writes the word crien. Nothing. Because it's a hunting journal and he has not done any hunting, which in itself is a sign of how, you know, things have changed for him. Yeah.

So it's not him being obtuse and failing to recognize the significance of what's happened.

No. There's an apocryphal exchange. Somebody comes in to tell him this in the evening, another duke. And it tells him the Bastilles Fauna Louis supposed to have said is it a revolt? And the guy said, no, sire, it is a revolution again. I think that's too Hollywood, really. But the next day, the 15 July, all morning he dithers and he's not sure what to do. But eventually he decides he should go and address the National assembly personally. He goes in with no guards, with no retinue, just with his two brothers. And he says, obviously things in this capital are totally out of control. I'm going to withdraw all troops. Please help me. He says, help me to assure the salvation of the state. Help me to send a delegation to Paris to sort things out. And the deputies are really impressed by this. They're moved by it. They start cheering and brilliant. The king has shown his willingness to work with us, to recognize, you know, our importance, and he's clearly going to play decently. So at 02:00 that afternoon, they send this great cortege, this procession of deputies in carriages, to Paris. And they are led by the president and the vice president of the National assembly.

The president is an astronomer called Jean Sylvain bailly, and the vice president is a man that our american listeners will know, the Marquis de Lafayette.

Tremendous character.

Do you like the Marquis de Lafayette, Tom?

I do. I like him more than you do. I think it's fair to say I've.

Got no time for him at all. So he's a rich trustafarian, he's a rich aristocrat, but he's gone off to.

Fight in the American Revolution very bravely.

Who went for his gap year very bravely.

And he hangs out with George Washington. And basically he becomes the son that George Washington never had.

Yeah. Salafet's 32, he's come back to France from America. He's a massive celebrity. He's been elected to the estates general. He's a kind of liberal reformer, Lafayette, very much typical of his generation. I have to say, tom, his biographers, especially if they're not american and not as keen on him as you are.

I wouldn't say I'm keen, but I like his dash and his swagger.

One biographer, he calls him, and I quote, vain, naive, immature and egocentric.

What's not to like?

And my favorite one is from the Histoire Dictionnaire de la revolution francaise, which was compiled by french scholars in the 1980s for the bicentenary at the entry of Lafayette describes him as an empty headed political dwarf. Yeah.

I mean, I'm not saying he's a political genius, but he has swagger and dash.

Yeah. And you love that. You love a political dwarf.

If he dresses well.

So they arrive at the Hotel de ville. Huge. Cheers. All this kind of stuff. Bailly, the astronomer, people say, you be the mayor of Paris now. So he's going to be the mayor of Paris. And Lafayette accepts the command of this new militia, the bourgeois Guard, the national guard, as it becomes. And it's Lafayette who says, why don't we, as a mark of compromise and, you know, the coming together of all these different forces, we will add to the red and blue colors of Paris, the white of the Bourbon dynasty.

So, Dominic, I put it to you, is this the action of an empty headed political dwarf?

Yes. Terrible flag, or a man with an.

Eye for political symbolism that has endured to the present day?

I mean, it depends what your views on the french flag, Tom. Do you like the old flag? The flag of tradition, honor and the age old customs, other proud people?

I have a lot of time for the tricolor.

Would you like a boring tricolor flag? I don't rate a tricolor flag personally. You know my methods. Anyway, so, yeah, this is the origins of the. Of the french flag. The next day, the 16th. So only two days after the fall of the Bastille, the king holds his final ever royal council. His brothers and his relatives, a lot of them have basically now given up on the whole process. Again, they say to him, you should leave. You should get to the frontier, get loyal troops. This is all out of control. But actually, some people say, now we're not even sure we can get there in safety, that safety cannot be guaranteed. We just have to somehow stick this out and hope we can turn this around.

But, Dominique, you know who does go?

Tell me.

The duchess de Polignac.

Yeah. Marian Antoinette's friend.

Marie Antoinette's great friend. And who doesn't go is our other great friend, the princess de Lamballe.

I know. Should have gone. Should have gone, Tom. Princess de Lamballe.

Yeah. As events will prove.

As events will prove. So quite a lot of them do go that night. The Comte d'Artois, the prince de Conti. The prince de Cond? So these are the first emigre. So for the first time, you have people now fleeing France for the frontiers, determined that there will be no compromise with the revolution. But Louis himself does not flee. He instead, the following day, the 17th, makes an extraordinary gesture. He decides to go to Paris himself in an undecorated carriage, wearing a plain undecorated coat. And he is greeted at the gates of Paris by the new mayor, Bailly, the astronomer from the National assembly. And Bailly hands him the keys of the city. And he says, these are the same keys that were presented to Henri Catinous Henry IV, a great folk hero to the french people, the king who had abandoned Protestantism because he said, paris is worth a mass. Is it?

Paris is worth a mass. Also, he's very keen that every peasant should have a chicken in a pot.

Exactly. Everybody loves him. Chickens and Catholicism. And Bailly says to Louis, these keys were given to Henry IV. He had conquered his people, but now it is his people who have conquered their kingdom. I mean, who wants to hear that? Yeah.

Louis must have loved that.

For Louis, like, smiling weakly anyway, Lafayette is there with his. With his new cockade, the new colors, red, white and blue, looking tremendous. I'm sure there are loads of national guards now lining the streets. They process through the streets, market women dressed in white, making up the rear of the procession. We'll be hearing more about market women, I imagine, in the next couple of days.

We will, yeah.

And people are chanting, not long live the kingdom, but long live the nation. La Nation. They get to the city hall and there, there's a great banner. Louis XVI, father of the French, the king of a free people.

And Dominic key there is. He's not described as the king of France. So the idea that France is the property of the king is gone.

Yes, exactly. Louis gets onto a throne and people make speeches and he's said to have listened with tears running down his cheeks. Of course, some people say wonderful tears of patriotic pride. Others say hes gutted. This is like the worst day of his life. Bailey gives him a tricolor cockade, red, white and blue, and the king sticks in his hat and everybody cheers. But what he is thinking, we dont know. We know he got back to Versailles that night about 10:00 and Marie Antoinette and his family were so worried about him. But what he said to them, what he made of it all, remains a mystery. Most people, though at the time, thought this was a truly exceptional event in history. One third estate deputy, a guy called Jean Antoine Huguet, said it was unique in the annals of the universe to see a people that had taken up arms against their king, now reunited with their king in a world in which the balance of power completely changed. He says it was reserved for the french nation to give this example to the universe and that universalism. We'll be talking about this tomorrow. When you get onto the sort of ideological shift that the french revolution represents.

We will. That universalism is so key to this whole story. There's a great source for this whole period, the letters of a bookseller called Nicolas Rouault, and he wrote to his brother after this, he said, everything will now change. Morals, opinions, laws, customs, usages, government. In very little time, we will be new men. And that, of course, is the french revolution's appeal, the idea of starting anew and making a better world. But actually, Tom, it would be to be Burkean. I think it would be wrong to end on the note of optimism, because actually, the violence doesn't end with the fall of the Bastille. Something has been unleashed now, I would say, and I know this is just my own prejudice talking, but I would say something has been unleashed that cannot now be put back in its box. And the example of this is what we began with. So seven days, one week after the fall of the Bastille, the food prices are still very high. And there are rumors that an official, a royal official in the war ministry called Joseph Foulon de Douai had said about the poor, let them eat straw.

Whether he did say it, we do not know. A crowd grabbed him. They hanged him. They cut off his head. They stuffed grass and straw in his mouth, and they paraded his head around the city on a pike. And then they saw his son in law, who was the intendant of Paris, the royal official responsible for Paris, who was Berthier de Sauvigny, the man you began with. And they grabbed him and they forced him to accompany them round the streets. They held the head of foulon in front of him, his father in law, and they chanted at him, kiss Papa. Kiss Papa. I mean, an absolutely, unbelievably horrendous scene. They got to the city hall. They killed Berthier. They literally tore the heart out of his body and threw it at the walls of the city hall. And then they put his head on a pike, too, alongside his father in laws, and paraded around. And that newspaper you mentioned, Elysees Loustelleuse, revolution de Paris, he wrote a big article about this. That's what we quoted. And Lustello said, it's fine. They were both traitors to the nation, traitors to the people. And actually, it's only by killing such people that frenchmen, you will be free.

And as Simon Sharma says in his book, citizens, this isn't the end of something. This is just the beginning. And he says, when he's described these events, violence was not just an unfortunate side effect to the French Revolution. It was the revolution's source of collective energy. It was violence that made the revolution revolutionary. And I'm afraid there will be a lot more violence to come.

But I think worth mentioning as well, there will also be a lot more idealism and abstract nouns to come. And in tomorrow's episode, we'll look at the ideals that enthusiasts for the revolution are promoting. And one of the most significant texts ever written, the declaration of the rights of man and the citizen being an inspiration across the world. And we will be looking at that and seeing where the french revolution is heading ideologically in the wake of the fall of the Bastille. So we will see you then.

Brilliant.

Bye bye.

Bye bye.

So here's the clip from our Vietnam.

I had expected that when it started, Americans being Americans, were going to be filled with hubris. Nobody's going to be able to stop our military firepower from succeeding. How are these pajama clad gorillas possibly going to stop us? I had expected confidence on the part of us commanders. Some of them had it, but certainly most of the civilians. Johnson himself, Robert McNamara, who's the secretary of defense, George Bundy, national security advisor, the top leadership in Congress. There is a gloomy realism here about what lies ahead. And even now, think about this. Even now, Lyndon Johnson tells his wife, Lady Birdhouse, I'm trapped on Vietnam. Whichever way I go, I'm gonna lose. He understands right at the beginning that this is gonna be his downfall. And this is 1965.

To hear the full series, just search empire wherever you get your podcast.