Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much loved chat community, go to therestishistory. Com and join the club. That is therestishistory. Com. The King left at noon. The heads of the two bodyguards led the procession on pikes. Following them were 40 to 50 members of the bodyguard on foot and unarmed, escorted by a body of men armed with sabers and pikes. After that came two of the bodyguard wearing high boots with neck wounds, blood stained shirts, and torn garments. Each was held by two men in the national uniform with drawn swords in their hands. Further back, one could see a group of the bodyguard mounted on horses, some riding pillion and others in the saddle with a member of the National Guard riding behind them. They were surrounded by men and women who compelled them to shout, Vive la Nation, and to eat and drink with them. A mixed bag of Pijkmen, Swiss guards, soldiers of the Flanders Regiment, women plastered with cockades and carrying poplar branches, and other women sitting astride on the guns, came before and after the King's coach.

Every musket was read in oak leaves in token of the victory, and there was a continual discharge of musketry as the people cried, We are bringing the baker, Mrs. Baker and the baker's boy, slogans of gross insult to the Queen and threats against priests and the nobles. Such was the procession, barbarous and criminal, that surrounded the king, the queen, and the royal family on the 6-hour drive to the hôtel de ville. So that was the Marquis de Ferrières, Charles-Élie de Ferrières, no less, who we met a couple of episodes ago. He was a diplomat, an aristocrat, and a delegate to the Estates General. This is his account, Tom, of the October days, a truly shocking moment in French monarchy or history. Certainly a very traumatic moment for Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. It's the moment when they are effectively dragged by a mob from the palace of Versailles.

Well, Dominic, a mob, or depending on your perspective, revolutionaries burning with a zeal for liberty.

Yeah, it sounds like it, doesn't it? All the neck the people eating and drinking, shouting. But he's an aristocrat.

I mean, obviously, this is the whole point. Perspectives on this differ quite radically.

They do differ. And so we're joined by Rob Speer himself, Tom Holland. Tom, this is one of the great set piece moments, not just in French history, but in all European history, isn't it? The humiliation of the King and Queen by this group, either, as you would say, of tender-hearted representatives of the people or slavering beast from the slums and sewers, depending Depending, of course, on the way you frame it. The Baker, Mrs. Baker, and the Baker's boy, they're the King, the Queen, and the dauphin. Who's what? Five? Something like that?

Yeah, something like that.

They effectively, from this point onwards, they are prisoners of the revolution held in captivity. You could argue this is the great turning point in the story of the revolution?

I think certainly for the King and Queen, it's a much more significant turning point than the storming of the Bastille. It's clearly a massive turning point in the history of the revolution. But you could I truly argue that it is drawing a line under a whole series of measures and developments that have been happening over the previous months. It's a logical conclusion to what's been happening. So just to remind listeners of what those developments are. The Bastille stormed on the 14th of July, and then that August of 1789, you have the revocation of feudal privileges, where all the aristocrats and abbots and people stand up and renounce all their various perks, and that's passed on the 11th of August. And then on the 26th of August, approval is given in the National Assembly for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which is what we were talking about in yesterday's episode. But what we briefly touched on, but didn't really explore, is the way that the Declaration of the Rights of Man, just on the ideological level, it raises as many questions as it answers. And there are definitely those in the National Assembly, but also more broadly in Paris, who feel it does not go far enough.

So So what we didn't talk about yesterday, which I'm sure lots of our particularly female listeners will have been wondering, is what about the rights of women and the citizeness? And that is a topic that we'll be looking at later. Essentially, there is quite, I think, her misogynist tone to revolutionary zeal.

Well, all the stuff about virtue and virility has been laying the ground for that, right? They always talk about the oath of the Horatii, great Romans, but they're always talking about men, never about women.

Yes. And although women do play a key part in this story, they They tend to be a anonymous mass. That is how they're celebrated, not as individuals. Also, the other burning question, then as now, what about slaves? The French own huge plantations in the Caribbean. They say, liberty for all, but equally, they say, property rights must be respected. So there is an unresolved tension there, again, that we might explore in due course. But of course, more immediately for the future of France and its constitution, What about the monarchy? Because how is the role of the king to be squared with the Declaration and with the ideals of the Revolution? Yesterday, we were looking at the church, but in a way, the king is an even bigger roadblock to that idea of a single nation, a single country.

Because as we were saying before, a lot of these revolutionists are inspired by Montesquieu's ideas about a mixed constitution, a separation of powers, and the idea of the British constitutional monarchy as a model. So somebody like the comte de Mirabeau, who we've talked about, a great figure in the assembly at this point. He's all about a British style monarchy, isn't he? And they need somebody to play that part. What they're not talking about at this point is a Republican democracy. They have a king-shaped hole and they want a Patriot king to fill it.

They do. So Mirabeau is the hero of the revolution. He's seen as a great patriot, but he is allying himself with nobles who are less motivated by revolutionary fervor. I mean, they are literally a Metropolitan elite. These are nobles from Paris who are very rich, very highly educated, and who are fascinated by the British example. So Anglomanie, the fascination with England as a model, has been a trend running throughout the 18th century, even as France has been at war with Britain. And so Mirabeau and these Metropolitan nobles are proposing in the National Assemblies, they've got a constitutional committee set up to ponder these issues. They're saying that we should model our Constitution on British practice, although they are very, very careful to point out that their version will be better than the British one because they will learn from the British example.

No such version exists, even in theory.

You might think that. What they are proposing is an elected National Assembly, which would correspond to the House of Commons, a Senate, which would be drawn from the great and the good, and obviously, it corresponds to the House of Lords. This Senate, initially, they wanted to be for life, and then there were objections to this. They say, Well, it could be for six years. So drawing on the the American exemplar. As you say, they want the king to play the part that the British king plays. Essentially, the British king, with the Glories Revolution hanging over his or her head, the sense that a king who doesn't play his part can be kicked out. The British King has the power of veto over all legislation, but essentially, it's very, very reticent in using it. I think that is what they want. They want someone who will have the power of veto because that will provide a check on what they we would see as excesses of popular fervor. But at the same time, they need a king who will not be too ready to use it. And the question is, is Louis XVIth qualified to play that role?

So that's one issue. But the other issue facing the Monarchia, as they come to be called the monarchists, is the fact that there are lots of radical deputies in the assembly who view any prospect of the king having any veto as an absolute outrage. Yeah.

One difference between the as it were the British Revolution, if you want to call it that, which nobody ever does. And the French Revolution is in Britain. The idea of the separation of powers, as in the United States, is seen as incredibly healthy and organic and a necessary check and a balance. But in France, you now have this romantic fervor and the idea of la nation and the assembly reflecting the general will of the nation. So there are lots of people who say, well, why would we divide it up? We've just done away with different orders.

So the three estates have all been swallowed up into the National Assembly because essentially, if you're having a sentence of the great and the good, that means bishops, it means aristocrats. You can understand the suspicion. The Abbé de Cie, who we met early on in the debate around the three estates, Versailles. He describes the whole proposal as a lettre de cachet, launched against the national will, against the entire nation. Comparing it to a unjust, monarchical repression of liberty.

That idea of the national will, quite a dangerous idea, you might say in the long run.

But also the idea that sovereignty resides in the nation, which is one of the key principles of the Declaration of Rights. If that is the case, then how can any individual, even the King, stand against the sovereignty of the nation? It's a real problem. It results in the National Assembly, essentially splitting into rival factions. What happens is the Monashian, the enthusiasts for the British-style Constitution, start to congregate on the right side of the meeting hall, and their opponents, those who want a more radical solution, on the left. Dominic, that's a division that we still see stamped on politics to this very day.

Yeah, left and right. But actually, they reach a compromise, don't they? So this is what, September 1789? They reject a second chamber.

That's decisively rejected. And the Constitutional Committee, which is full of all these kinds of Metropolitan and elite types, that gets dissolved. So that's clearly a victory for the more radical wing. But you're right, around the veto, there is a compromise that doesn't really satisfy anyone. So the King is allowed a veto, but it's a suspensive one. So It's a bit like the House of Lords in, was it, 1910 or something?

It's great to get Asquith back on the show, and Asquith's Britain. So, yeah, the House of Lords can postpone legislation or block it, but then basically the Commons can break the Log Jam under the Parliament Act. So the King can veto legislation three times, and then basically, if they bring it back again.

Which I think effectively means two years. Right. So he has a two-year block on legislation.

And then if they come back and say, No, we still want it, he then... He can't He then can't resist it. Can't resist it. Which actually, to me, seems quite a good... It's a safety valve. It's a cooling off period.

But the right wing don't like it because it makes it impossible to preserve a genuine balance of powers. That's very important to them. And it doesn't satisfy the radicals because the king can still frustrate the will of the sovereign people. So both sides are cross. But there's also, I think, by this point, a sense that what people in the National Assembly think is not necessarily decisive because there is also the will of the people as expressed by the inhabitants of Paris. And in Paris, people don't understand the veto at all. They think it's a new tax, lots of them. And even those who don't, they don't really know what it is, but they're against it. That's the bottom line. And this is driven, I think, by, first a growing sense of hostility to the King personally. This is fostered by the fact that he has been notably silent about the repudiation of feudalism and the Declaration of Rights. Then on the 19th of September, he does finally comment on this repudiation of feudal rights, but he hedges it around with so many qualifications that it ends up sounding like he's actually rejecting it. The deputies are very upset about this, and in Paris, everyone is absolutely furious.

And then on the fourth of October, he voices reservation regulations about the Declaration of Rights. I suppose the King would say, well, why shouldn't I? I'm the King.

He can say what he likes.

But in the context of a liberty-loving people with sovereignty, this is dangerous. I think also there is a sense in Paris that the National Assembly itself is compromised by its willingness to treat with the King. There's talk that they want to move it from Versailles and the Paris region to Tau, the city on the Loire, which is famously royalist and would therefore get them out of the crosshairs of Parisian popular opinion, and they're not in favor of that at all. The other thing that is happening in August and through into September, which everyone knows is incredibly problematic, both for those who are starving and those who have to keep a lid on things that are bubbling away in France, is the fact that the price of bread is starting to go up again. So it had declined in early August, but it's now going up. And this isn't because it's terrible weather. The weather's very The grain is ripening. It's ready to be harvested. But the problem is that the weather is so good that all the mills have been immobilized because there's no water in the rivers. So you start to get bread riots, you get demands for higher wages, and you get these familiar accusations, which the Marquis de Sade makes such play within his novels, that the King and the aristocracy are deliberately trying to starve the revolution to death.

It's a useful reminder, isn't it? That there are these two different dimensions to the revolution. On the one hand, there's the dimension of politics and ideas and everything that's going on in the National Assembly as people are moving into their different factions, left and right. None of that would have the salience, and it wouldn't be so charged, were it not for the fact that outside there are people starving. There is a real anger on the streets, isn't there? And the danger, the huge danger for the authors of the revolution is that they've given people the impression that changes to the political and financial structure will magically transform the situation on the streets and mean that bread prices fall and all that thing. Actually, a lot of them, they're what we would call neoliberals. They have no intention of fixing the price of bread and helping people out and doing all these kinds of things.

Yeah, because May's radical could be September's Conservatives. Exactly. Things are moving so fast. So there's a sense that lots of deputies are running very fast up a down escalator, just trying to avoid themselves being chewed up by the revolution. And this is turbocharged by the fact, of course, that the Declaration of Rights has officially abolished censorship. And that means that there's basically nothing the authorities can do to restrain expressions of hostility, whether it's to the King or to the National Assembly or whoever. And there is a particular newspaper which is launched on the 12th of September. So against the backdrop of all these events, which really demonstrates how potent journalism can now be. And this is a paper, it's not its original name, but its ultimate name is L'amid du Peuple, so the People's Friend. And its editor is a man called Jean-Paul Marat, who is basically drifted from job to job. He's someone who's never really held down a secure position. He's a scientist, he's a physician, he's a political theorist. Actually, for a while, a bit like our goalhanger stablemate, Allan Sheerer Dominic. He lived in New Castle. Except Allan Sheerer never ended up physician to the bodyguard of the Comte d'Artois, I don't think.

Allan Sheerer also. You can say what you like about Alan Sheer, but he's got lovely skin, and Mara has terrible skin.

Mara does have absolutely terrible skin. Also, he's never written a paper on the goneria of one of his friends, I think Alan Sheer. As far as you know, Tom.

As far as I know. You don't know about what he's been up to with Craig Bellamy or Les Ferdinand or any of his Newcastle stablemates.

Mara comes back from St. James's Park to Paris, and he's drifting around. He's a bit of a bum. He's the classic example of the The underpaid intellectual, the undervalued intellectual, is always the great driver of revolutions. And Mahrer is a classic example. And he finds in the Revolution and the chance to edit this paper, The People's Friend, absolutely everything that he's ever been made for. It's completely his vocation. Essentially, he is brilliant at blaming everything on conspiracies, on plots, on attempts by sinister figures to destroy the people. So he calls his enemies bloodsuckers, very much into the language of a vampireism. While the deputies in the National Assembly are trying to sort the Constitution out, he's piling in full angry person on Twitter. So open your eyes, shake off your lethargy, purge your committees, preserve only the healthy members, sweep away the corrupt, the royal pensioners, and the devious aristocrats, intrigues, and false patriots. You have nothing to expect from them except servitude, poverty, and desolation.

Marat is such a familiar figure. He's that person who suddenly sees He's been a loser, basically, and a drifter, as you said. And he's suddenly, in the chaos of the revolution, sees his opportunity to make a name for himself by this unbelievably ferocious, invective. We do see people like it today, don't we?

I think it's not too much of an anachronism to call them centrists. People who initially had been in favor of the revolution, and now with this ever more radical language, are starting to think, oh, hold on. So often these are foreign, foreign admirers of the revolution. So there's an English visitor in Paris who'd come there because he was so excited by what was going on, who is following these attacks on the National Assembly. And he writes, Woe be to the legislature that employs a senseless, profligate rabble to enforce its laws. Lanterns are arguments in this country. So lanterns, you sling a rope over it and hang your enemies.

Yeah, lynching, basically.

Basically lynching, yes. And so there you have opposed senses of where sovereignty should lie. Does the people's sovereignty lie on the streets or does it lie in constitutional forms? And this is the great question that the revolution is focusing. And as in early July, so in September, moving into October, a sense of potential violence in the capital, directed now, not just against the Royal Family, but also against the National Assembly, both of whom, of course, are in Versailles. And even in August, you had had an aristocrat who They'd been imprisoned in Charenton, where the Marquis de Sade had been sent. And the Sardian quality of quite a lot of this is, I just find fascinating. But anyway, this is a Marquis, and he had proposed a march on Versailles, and that had fizzled out. But in the Palais-Royal, which is this great center of free speech owned by the Duke of Orléans, the cousin of Louis XVI, lots of radical circles are saying, We should organize a coup. We should march on Versailles. We should get the royal family. Essentially, the city feels that it is poised between further expressions of revolutionary fervor or counter revolution.

For those who are in charge of stopping riots, breaking out, this is a nightmare because how do you stop it?

Well, this is the question, right? Why don't the authorities, they have money, they have armed men, why don't they in some way clamp down and try and police this?

Well, for starters, as you said, there's the issue around censorship. They can't control what is now being said. As in the in the 1650s in England, revolution has bred freedom of speech, which in turn fosters further revolution activities. That's one part of it. But the other thing is that if you were saying that the structures of power are feudal and expressions of a blood-sucking vaporism, very difficult to take charge of them. So all of those have been erased. The Bastille has gone, the Lettre de Cachet has gone, all of that. So essentially in a very Orwellian step, the revolutionaries find that they have to resurrect what they have eliminated. Yeah.

And it's interesting, they're doing this so early, in 1789. So within just a couple of months, really, of the fall of the Bastille, at the end of that summer, in the autumn, they're already thinking we have to bring back, what do they call it, the Search Committee. They're opening letters and doing all that thing.

Yeah. So Shama in Citizens, describes it as the first organ of a revolutionary police state. Essentially, it takes for itself all the powers of the Ancien Regime that everyone had condemned. So they can open they can sponsor spies, they can search houses without warrants, and amazingly, they can even imprison people who are suspected of being in danger to the revolution without trial, which is basically the whole lettre de cachet system. So that's one aspect of it. You got the development of a proto secret police. But you also have the National Guard, of course, who we talked about before, commanded by Lafayette. And it's his job, essentially, to maintain order in the capital. But he's finding an increasing struggle. He's coping with a situation that no one has ever had to cope with before.

Well, you and I disagree about Lafayette, don't we? I think if he had been a man of greater cold-blooded ruthlessness, he could have seized this opportunity and really made a name for himself. But he's a bit of a dithre, do you think it's fair to say?

No, I look on him much more favorably. I mean, he's an enthusiast for the revolution. He's not a counter-revolutionary, and he is struggling with a situation that no one has really ever had to face before.

Well, actually, to you what, Tom, somebody has faced this before. And later on, as we will see in this episode, people compare him with an English predecessor. And if he'd had anything like the backbone and the spirit of that English predecessor, he'd one day have been Lord Protector of France, but it wasn't to be.

Possibly. Anyway, so September turns to October. Capital is getting ever more ready to blow up. Price of Bread is going up. Then on the second of October, details of a scandal in Versailles arrives in Paris. Again and again, we've been talking about how important the details of royal scandals are in affecting the course of events. This is seen as an absolute shocker. Marat is all over it, the people's friend. He loves this. The story goes that the king has summoned a regiment from the northeast frontier, the Flanders Regiment. They've arrived in Versailles, and his bodyguard have staged a banquet for them. Staging a banquet at a time when people in Paris are starving is seen as being very offensive anyway. But this banquet is supposed to have degenerated into an orgy sponsored by the Queen. Most shockingly of all, all the participants in this banquet are supposed to have taken the revolutionary cacade, so the tricolor, and trampled it underfoot. And the Queen is said to have approved of it all. And in Paris, this is seen as a blasphemy. And it turbocharges all the old rumors that the Queen of her depravity, of her empiric qualities, her desire to starve the poor of Paris to death.

But it combines two different conspiracy theories, really, doesn't it? One is the thing about Mara and so on, which you mentioned. But the other is all through the summer and the autumn, people have been anxious about the arrival of troops from the frontiers, German-speaking troops in particular. So the Flanders Regiment, the idea that these people have turned up, they're going to be the vanguard of the counter revolution. They're in league with the bloodsuckers in the courts. I mean, it could not be a better gift to somebody like Mara.

Yeah. And it spreads terror throughout the poorest quarters in Paris. And on the fifth of October, early in the morning, a market woman, she stands up, she addresses all the other women who are starting gathering for the day's market, and she harangues them saying that the fact that they can't afford to get bread, that they can't afford to put food on their families tables, that this is due to the Queen, due to theampires of Versailles, and they should march on the palace. Well, who knows what. But what happens, Dominic, will change the face of France forever.

What drama, Tom. We're going to take a break now because we're just too excited.

Hello. This is William Derempel here from the Empire podcast, also from Gohanger. I'm here to tell you about a new mini-series 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 postwar history. In America, 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. It harvested this incredible host of films and literary works of art. I grew up on books like Dispatches, and we've mentioned Apocalypse Now, but also The Deer Hunter, Sorrow of War, Full Metal Jacket. It goes on and on and on. 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 mini-series at the end of this episode for you to enjoy.

Welcome back to The Rest is History. The storm clouds have gathered over Versailles. There are people shouting about the Queen being a vampire, and the Flanders Regiment treading down people's cockades. It's all happening. And yet, Tom, the tragedy. In Versailles, the King and Queen are about their simple pleasures in complete obliviousness towards his coming.

It's as though the revolution had never happened. That morning, Marie-Antoinette is in her little model village, the Petty Trianor. She's been feeding her her goldfish, and then she's been left a bit tired by this. And so she retires to a grotto for a little rest.

Oh, that's nice. Be a colic.

Her husband, the King, has been out shooting. Normally, he would have gone hunting, but he is aware that trouble is brewing in Paris. And so by going shooting, it means that he can be as easy to contact him should developments happen. And he has a very successful day shooting. And in his journal, he notes, Killed 81 Head.

A poor show by the standards of Franz Ferdinand George IV.

Absolutely. But I think not bad for a morning.

Yeah, that's the difference between the Austrians and the French, isn't it? The Austrians are so ruthless.

Well, that's certainly what the mobs in Paris would say when they talk about Marie-Antoinette. And of course, both of these activities are absolutely calculated to infuriate virtuous patriots, because Marie-Antoinette playing with her animals in the Petit Trianor, I mean, this will become, in a way, the defining image of her, the role-playing seen as feckless. We talked about how I think Marie-Antoinette sees it as an expression of her sympathy with the poor, but this is not how the poor themselves see it. And the king going shooting. Again, this is deliberately offensive because as one of the feudal privileges that have been jettisoned is the right that the nobility had to go shooting. And so with the abolition of the feudal monopolies on hunting and shooting, basically every bird in France has been wiped out. So you may complain that the king hasn't been shooting enough birds. But I mean, all over France, it's just bang, bang, bang. Our old friend Arthur Young, the Englishman who's been traveling across France and who's a journalist we've been drawing a lot for this series, he's in Provence when suddenly it becomes legal for everyone to go out shooting. And he says, I've been pestered with all the mob of the country shooting.

One would think that every rusty gun in Provence is at work, killing all sorts of birds. The shot has fallen five or six times in my chase and about my ears. So that's something that hasn't changed, really, in France. That's all very much going on. But you know, Dominic, this is the last time the king will have the option of choosing whether to go shooting or hunting, and it will be the last time that the queen will get to feed her ducks at the petty tree.

The ducks are the real losers in all that, aren't they? They'll probably end up being eaten by sansculottes.

I imagine they'll be shot. Yes. So as Louis notes in his journal, interrupted by events. And that, of course, is his shooting journal. So 10:00 in the morning, Marie-Antoinette is reposing in her grotto when she is informed that an armed force has left Paris and is merging on Versailles.

And brilliantly, she's informed by her hairdresser.

Is that right? Monsieur Léonard.

Monsieur Léonard, who is the the metrosexual friend of Marie-Antoinette, isn't he?

Yes. Well, that's what he That's what he later says. It has to be said that this is uncorroborated by anyone else. But yes, absolutely. Coming to the rescue of his diva friend. Trickier to get in touch with Louis XVI because he's out shooting. But they find him and he is back by three o'clock in the afternoon. And there's a meeting of the Royal Council, and they don't know what to do. And there is discussion that perhaps the King and Queen should, I don't know, head for the frontier, head for somewhere secure. But what's fascinating is that even at this stage, the King is thinking in terms of a factual court politics because he blames the Duke of Orléans, who owns the Palais-Réal, where all these radicals are meeting. It's as though he still hasn't got the hang of the fact that this is no longer about Duke's conspiring not against their cousins, but about something much profounder.

But here's the interesting thing, I guess. He is so ill-travelled. He's only ever been out of the Versailles bubble, really, twice, hasn't he? He went for his coronation and he went to Cherbourg to inspect some defenses. So he's very poorly... I mean, he's been to his palace in Paris, the Tuileries, but he doesn't have any sense of what is going on. So how could he understand, I guess, the anger on the streets and all of that? It would take a profound political imagination to grasp that. And he is a very unimaginative man.

And Marie-Antoinette, I think, is the same, that for her, crowds are a background for the display of her own magnificence. And she simply has no comprehension of what they might be feeling, what the individual components of those crowds might be like. So for both of them, it's really difficult. And even for the members of the National Assembly, they don't know what is coming. They're not sure what to expect. Who is coming from Paris? Why? What do they want? And And it takes time for them to properly appreciate what's going on. So to that question, who is coming? There are basically three groups of people. There is the market women of Paris, the Fishwives. And there, it's been escalating very quickly since the one woman stood up and said, we should march on Versailles. One of the women gets a hold of a drum and she starts beating it. And then they get the bells of a nearby church to start ringing. So it talks in ringing out. A huge crowd forms. They start to march on the Hotel de Veal. They are chanting the title of a particularly popular pamphlet, When Will We Have Bread?

They start reaching for cudgels, for sticks, for knives, any weapon that they can get. By the time these various groups converge on the Hotel de Veal, there are about 6,000 or 7,000 of them, and they absolutely ransack it, seizing it for muskets, for rifles, for whatever they can get. They even find two cannon. So this is, again, quite like the Bastille, a huge mob, looking for weapons. By this point, it is pouring down with rain. And normally, rain is what stops revolutions, but not in this case. Despite the rain, the women with their two cannon and all their weapons and their cudgels and things start heading off for Versailles.

Can I just interrupt at this point, Tom? So the interesting thing about them heading to Versailles, is these women, the fishwives, market women, they were known as Poissard, and they would go to Versailles every year anyway. They used to go to Versailles on the 25th of August, the of Saint-Louis, and they would give flowers to the queen. So it was a ritual. And so she was used to seeing them. And she actually, you know you were saying about the thing with the and pretending, feeding the ducks and pretending to be an ordinary farm girl and stuff. They would do plays, a Versailles, where they would affect the dialect of the Fishwives. And these were very common in France. The Fishwives, they were stock figures. They were laughing stock, I guess. And Marie-Antoinette herself had got people to try and teach her their lingo and stuff. So there is a dreadful irony at the back of all this.

There is. And that is exactly the tension between Marie-Antoinette's understanding of what a crowd should be and what a crowd might actually be is part of what makes the whole experience that is coming so completely traumatic for her. And I don't think there's any ambivalence in the attitude of the women towards the Queen. I think they are pretty universally hostile to her for all the reasons that we've been discussing. Attitudes to Louis is a slightly more ambivalent. So they're calling him Le Bon Papa, the good father, and they want him to give them bread. And it's unclear whether they are calling him Le Bon Papa out of hostility, sense of irony, or whether they genuinely mean it. And it may be that there's a gray area where they can't quite decide whether he is the enemy or their friend. But definitely, they are also saying that if he is Le Bon Papa, he should be with his children in Paris, not stuck out in Versailles. And this increasingly becomes part what they're talking about as they head out to the palace. As they go, they start picking up large numbers of men as well. On their way, they meet with a contingent of the Flanders Regiment.

They're nervous about this because the Flanders Regiment is seen as the great defenders of the monarchy. But the Flanders Regiment, they're all in favor of it. These are the people who have been accused of trampling the cacade. But actually, they turn out to be great enthusiasts for the revolution. They greet the marchers and they say, Brilliant, we're with you. Hooray, let's crack on to Versailles. And this is an expression of a familiar problem. That the King can't trust his own troops.

Because troops are people, too. They're hungry, they're impatient with authority, and they're like, Yeah, why not? Actually, this is great fun. Let's all go to Versailles. And troops have been disobeying their officers since the very beginning of the revolution for months.

Yeah. And I think the fact that it is fun, if you are subject to brutal discipline as dragoons are, or if you're starving and hungry and you can't feed your children, as so many of the women are, quite aside from anything else, the chance to have a expedition to Versailles, even if it's pitting down with rain, it's something exciting.

It's so important in all revolutions and riots, actually, Tom, and something that I think historians sometimes underplay, is exactly this point, that one of the key things I always think in the momentum of any uprising, any rebellion, any riot is the sense of the carnivalesque, I guess, of it being a tremendous laugh. Actually, yeah, let's go for it. And the momentum and the giddiness of it all. And you really get that sense, don't you? The closer they get to Versailles, more and more people are joining them because This is a tremendous occasion. I don't want to... Who knows what's going to happen? Let's pile in all this. More women. There's a woman who looks amazing on a... What's her name? Tehuan de Mercur.

Yeah, so the Amazon. And again, there's a sense of cosplay there, I think. She's wearing a plumed hat. She's got a red riding coat. She's got loads of pistols in her belt. She's got swords. She cuts a tremendous dash on her horse. And she will always be remembered as the emblematic figure of this March of the Women And even though she is not a fishwife. She's got a horse, for starters. But the sense that there is a slightly carnivalesque quality to what is happening. I think that if it was just the women marching and even members of the Flanders Regiment, it wouldn't be quite as alarming as it turns out to be for the National Assembly and for the King, because the other group of people who end up marching on Versailles is the National Guard. So under Lafayette, who was supposed to be keeping order in Paris, and they are marching on Versailles five hours behind the market women. This is not Lafayette's doing. He's basically appalled that his men want to go out and join the women on the march on Versailles because he immediately understands that this is an altogether different quality of insurrection to a bunch of fishwives going out to Paris.

To have the officially mandated guard in Paris do that, that is very, very menacing revolutionary activity. An expression of hostility to the Constitution and to the monarchy, which Lafayette is sufficiently a centrist dad not to want to be involved in. But basically, he has very little choice because I think he has the feeling that if he doesn't go along with his men, they'll either desert or murder him or nothing good will come of it. So rather than grossly, he gets onto his horse and rides out of their head. It's still driving rain. He's got 15,000 of the guard behind him. So that's an enormous number of people. And he heads off. And one witness describes him as the prisoner of his own troops, which effectively is what he is. So you now have two groups of people. You have the women and you have the National Guard, both descending on Paris. So the women arrive first. They try and break into the palace of Versailles itself, but the King's bodyguards and the Swiss Guard turn them back. So then they march on the National Assembly, and they invade it, and they demand to see the King.

There are amazing descriptions of them in the National Assembly, by the way, because they're sudden.

They're absolutely drenched, smelly. They're literally like steaming as they come in.

You said the Metropolitan elite delegates, which basically they all are. They're all lawyers and stuff, aren't they? Are sitting there incredibly awkward and frightened and disturbed a lot of them as this great mob of people breaks to the assembly and people start messing around with the deputies stuff and all that shouting in their ears.

They're like a walking holiday in the Lake district. They all burst in, absolutely drenched and steaming. So the deputies send a messenger to the king who's back now, and they say, look, would you receive a delegation of the women? And he says, yes, of course. So the women choose the perfect person to speak to him, which is a 17-year-old flower girl called Pierrette Chabri, which is very shy, very pretty, very virtuous-looking, which is very important. And she doesn't speak like a fishwife. She is renowned for her genteel language. So she has chosen the spokeswoman. She goes forward, she looks at the king, and she's so overwhelmed that she faints. And the king then fetches her smelling salts, helps her to her feet. It's all tremendous PR. He then explains to the women that he's given orders for any grain that has been held up on the roads leading into Paris to be delivered as a matter of absolute urgency, that he'll do his best to source them more grain. The women are mollified. But Louis knows even so that he is staring down a barrel here. That evening, unsurprisingly, he finally accepts both the abolition of feudalism and a Declaration of Rights without any qualification whatsoever.

It is said that as he signs his approval, he does so with tears in his eyes.

But Tom, this is just the first group. It is. Because 15,000 men are also on their way, and they're not really... I mean, Lafayette is now basically their trophy rather than their commander. They are a much more terrifying prospect than the market women are, aren't they?

They are. They are absolutely set on bringing the king and queen back. When Lafayette arrives, he goes to the National Assembly, he explains this to them, and he then demands an audience with the king who has retreated to the palace. The king sends a messenger out and says, Yeah, you can come in, but you have to be unarmed. Lafayette agrees to this, And so a courier comes, that Chamberlain comes and gets him, and he is led into the palace. Dominic, you referenced this in the end of the first half. As he goes in, a courier sees Lafayette walking into the palace and says, There goes Oliver Cromwell. And Lafayette turns around and says, Cromwell would not have come unarmed. So you may feel that that proves what you're saying.

But I think it's worth just stopping a second. Lafayette does have a tremendous opportunity here. He is a hero of the American War. He is arguably one of the two or three most famous men in France. He has under his command tens of thousands of men, potentially. A different man, a Napoleon or a Cromwell, could have turned that into a power baser, a really ruthless, hard-nosed political operator. Actually, Lafayette doesn't.

I think it's to his credit that he doesn't. Of course you do.

Of course you think that. But I mean, I don't.

I think that he's a centrist dad, and he is trying to ensure that the center holds, and he's doing his best. But we know that that is not going to succeed. But I think it's to his credit that he, as it were, sticks to his guns, even though he will end up with not many guns by the end of the day, effectively.

He doesn't stick to his guns. He lets other people take them. Anyway, tell us what happens when he gets in to see the king.

He, like the women, he's drenched, he's spattered with mud, he's an absolute picture. He comes into Louis' presence and takes off his hat, sweeps, all this thing. He declares in ringing tones, I have come to die at the feet of your Majesty. Obviously, pre-prepared. Again, I imagine that this will confirm you in your sense of content for him. I like it. I like a man who prepares a melodrama statement.

No, you got to prepare. Anyway, go on.

Lafayette then reiterates to the king, Look, You've got to get as much grain to the capital as you possibly can. And, Your Majesty, I'm afraid that you have to come with me and the National Guard back to Paris. The National Guard are not going to have it any other way. He agrees to the first request. He's already given orders that all the grain that can possibly be found be sent to Paris as soon as possible. But he does Stonewall II, and he says, Look, I'm going to have to consult with the Queen. And Marie-Antoinette has already gone to bed, so it will have to be left to the morning. And on these terms, Lafayette and the King part. So the King goes to bed about two o'clock. Lafayette stays there. He wants to make sure that there's not going to be any trouble. But by about five o'clock, he feels, Okay, so the night's past. It's just before dawn. I could probably go and grab a few winks. So He is married to a member of the Noi family, you remember? I do. They have a big house in Versailles, so he goes off there and he finds a sofa and curls up and has a sleep.

I mean, that is Lafayette to a T, right? That is absolutely textbook. I'm in Versailles with a huge mob of 15,000 men who are totally out of control. I think I'll just go for a little nap now and have a lie down. What could go wrong?

As a man who likes to sleep, I have nothing but sympathy. But you are right that this turns out not to be been a brilliant move because about half an hour after Lafayette has gone, it's dawn, it's misty morning, a portion of the crowd, which is intermingled, Fishwives and soldiers of the National Guard, finally break into the Royal Palace. The first thing they say is, Where are the apartments of the Queen? They're saying, We want to make a cacade out of her intestines. Others are saying, We want to decapitate her. We want to fry up her heart and liver, eat them. And we want to do even worse. What's worse? Who knows? Who knows? They descend on the Queen's apartments. There are two bodyguards standing outside. They get cut down, killed, decapitated. These are the heads that will appear on the pikes that are mentioned in the reading that we began this episode with. There's a third bodyguard. He manages to alert a lady in waiting who rushes off to wake up the queen. He is then cut down and left for dead, although amazingly, actually, he survives. Marie-antoinette, meanwhile, she's been gone out of bed.

She's barefoot, and it seems like she's stuck in her apartment. But amazingly and fortuitously for her, way back in 1775, she had ordered the construction of a secret tunnel that would go from her appointments to the king's apartments, because this was a time when she anxious to establish her influence over Louis. And so she is able to use that. And the passageway is concealed in the paneling. So it shuts behind her, and she goes rushing off. As she reaches the King's quarters, knocks on the door, and there's no answer.

And she's in her nightground, and she's barefoot, and she's sobbing with terror. The most unbelievable scene.

And meanwhile, back in her bedroom, the people who've broken in are absolutely infuriated that she's not there. And so they start slashing at her mattress with their swords. And all the while, Marie-Antoinette is hammering on the door saying, Please, please let me in. And finally, someone up here and opens the door and she stumbles in. And it said that the terror of this experience is so great that her hair, which previously had been blonde from this point on, the bottoms go white at the temples. Right.

So a couple of things on this. One is you describe that scene of the two bodyguards. In a way, we just went through that in a sentence, but that is a horrendous scene, right? I mean, a mob basically grabbing these two guys, hacking them to death with knives and then soaring off their heads with the knives. I mean, again, a really horrific scene. Yeah.

And so I think it could absolutely have spiraled hideously out of control.

If they got Marie-Antoinette, she'd be dead. There's no question about that. Do you not think?

Yes, they would have made cacades out of her entrails.

They would have butchered her. And I remember when I was a boy seeing a documentary about the French Revolution, a dramatized documentary or something like that. And this scene was at the center of it. And you could argue this scene is, in a way, the center of, dare I say, the conservative imagination. It's a classic trope, isn't it? The out of control mob and the woman in tears, fleeing for her life, and they are going to butcher her. I mean, that's very Berkian, I guess, that image, isn't it?

It absolutely is, which is why he situates Marie Antoinette in the way he does in his Jeremia'd Against the Revolution. But it doesn't explode in that way. She doesn't end up dead. She is reunited with Louis. And again, I think a lot of the credit for this can be given to Lafayette, who has been alerted to what's happening. Yeah, who's been asleep. He's smashed half an hour of sleep, Dominic. He's woken up. He doesn't go, Oh, leave me alone. I need to catch up on my sleep. He comes rushing out. What a hero. Comes into the courtyard, and he sees these heads of the Royal Bodyguards on sticks bobbing around. And he calms everybody down. I mean, he manages to say, Guys, just chill. And then he goes- You've done him as Tony Blair there. Guys, we're the people's bodyguard. And then he goes in, and it is very Tony Blair in the King and Queen. He tells the King and Queen, Look, we've got to calm the situation down. And Louis is saying, All this stuff about the guard trampling on the cacade, it never happened. And Laffert says, Yeah, fine. Okay. What we've got to do is you've got to go out on the balcony and you have got to address the people outside.

I've done my best to calm them down, but ultimately, it's best coming from you. So Louis then goes out onto the balcony, and he addresses the crowd, and he says, Yes, I will come with you to Paris. Again, he insists that his bodyguards are innocent, that they hadn't trampled on the cacade. Lafayette is with him, and he's very, very good at the PR. What he does is he takes a tricolor cacade, and he embraces an officer of the bodyguard, and he pins the cacade to the bodyguard's hat. And by doing that, he's essentially folding the bodyguard into the warm embrace of the revolution. I think that's... I mean, you may say it's very Tony Blair. I don't necessarily see that as a criticism, Dominic. I think he's done very well.

In a horrific situation, which could easily have ended with the King, the Queen, and La Fert himself being butchered with kitchen knives. He's actually played... I mean, falling asleep, I think, is madness. But actually, the stuff with the cockade is a brilliant bit of political theater, and there's more to come, isn't there, with the Queen?

Well, there is, because there is It's all the question of the Queen who the mob will hate. And so Lafayette says, Look, you've got to go out onto the balcony as well. And she's terrified. I mean, entirely understandably. She's heard what they were shouting about her. But Lafayette says, No, you must. And so she goes out onto the balcony with her children. But the people out in the courtyard start baying at this and saying she has to stand there alone. So she sends the children back in. She steps out onto the balcony facing the crowd who only half an hour before were wanting to rip out her intestines. And again, Lafayette joins her, and he bows low before her, and he kisses her hand. And there's a silence, and it's not clear what the reaction of the crowd is going to be. And then they start shouting, Vive la reine. Long live the Queen. And again, Lafayette has ridden the wave of emotion and turned it, turned the tide. And so Marie-Antoinette goes back inside. But of course, she's still completely traumatized. And I think she sees perhaps even more clearly than Louis, the scale of the horrors that clearly now face them.

So she goes back in and she speaks to a lady in waiting, and she says, They want to force us, the King and me, to go to Paris with the heads of our bodyguards carried before us at the end of their pikes. And this is exactly what happens. And it takes them seven hours to travel in their carriage from Versailles to Paris. The whole way, Louis doesn't utter a single word. You have people shouting slogans and just sticulating the Queen as the carriage rides along. And behind the Royal carriage, there are wagons loaded with all the flour that has been taken from the stores at Versailles. And on their arrival in Paris, they're forced to appear again on a balcony, this time at the Hotel de Ville. And then finally, by 08:00 PM, they are able to collapse into the palace that's been allocated to them, the Tuileries. And unbelievably, the person who is there to greet them is Axel von Fersen, the dashing Swedish diplomat who everyone thinks has been having an affair with Marie-Antoinette. I mean, it's just madness that he's there. And so an A to the the Queen says, Get out of here.

You're going to be torn to pieces if people find you here. So he does that. They're obviously very depressed. And no one is more depressed than the dauphin who complains that his room is very ugly. Although it has to be said, he will come to no worse, Dominic.

It's interesting, isn't it? Because some listeners might well say, Well, this is terribly biased. I don't feel sorry for them at all. They're pampered and privileged and all that thing. And they're living in the guild of the Splender of Versailles when people are hungry. They had it coming, blah, blah, blah, blah, It's a terrible ordeal, and I think a terrible story.

But to counterpoint that, what we haven't given in this account is the narrative of a woman whose children are starving to death. Of course.

No, I totally agree with you.

So that is the counterpoint to it. So I think there's always the story of the great and the glamorous, because we know the details, always blaze more brightly. We don't have the account of someone who has been driven by despair to march on Versailles, and that is the counterpoint.

French people always say the British, in particular, love telling the story from Burke onwards, Carlyle, Dickens. They love to tell the story through the eyes with a sense of horror, fascinated horror, the Revolution. They, particularly through the eyes of the great and the good, and Marie-Antoinette more than anybody. You mentioned in the very first episode in the series, the Kirsten Dunst film. When that came out, French critic said, Oh, typical Anglo-saxons. They always tell the story through the eyes of Marie-Antoinette.

Well, I think the French Revolution is a great and still enduringly controversial subject because there is scope for both sides to be right or indeed, wrong. That sense of a division in the National Assembly that we talked about between the right and the left, this still structures attitudes to the revolution to this day. We can see that now. But of course, in the aftermath of the transportation of the King and Queen from Versailles to the Tuileries, there are still two obvious problems that have not been solved. In fact, the bringing of the King and Queen to Paris, in a way, has only made more glaring. Firstly, how is the monarchy to be squared with the revolution? In the wake of the October days, as they're called, all the events we've been describing, there's a determined effort on behalf of the Constitutional Committee and the National Assembly to remove any prospect of despotism as they see it coming back. So the King loses all his rights to propose laws. It's decreed that his income will be determined by a vote in the National Assembly. He has to allow that his ministers will be impeached if it is judged that they're betraying the revolution.

So essentially, all the struts upholding his power have been completely knocked away. And the question is, how will Louis adapt to this? How will he cope with being being neutered in this way, becoming a mere constitutional cipher? So that's an open question. But the other open question is, will the National Assembly be able to preserve its role as the voice of the nation? Because it has been upstaged just as the King and Queen have been upstaged.

Well, the National Assembly thought, Sovereigny lies with us. It now appears that sovereignty lies with these crowds on the streets of Paris.

With the people. So it's unsurprising that in mid-October, the National Assembly follows the King and Queen from Versailles to Paris. And they are living with the consciousness of two massive risks. The first is that they will fragment into interfactions, as has already begun to happen, the fragmenting into left and right. But also the ongoing risk of interventions from people who are not part of the assembly. And with the concurrent risk of violence, the threat of what will happen to the deputies if they do not legislate in accordance with the wishes of the people is now Adamically soared, hanging over every deputy in the National Assembly. A sword of damaclese. We've had the storm clouds of revolution, and now we have the sword of Damocles. Brilliant. And this is a development that is obviously very, very pregnant with implications for the future. So back in Versailles, some of the more radical deputies had joined a club that had originally been set up by the deputies from Brittany. And now they've moved to Paris. They are looking for a new place to meet. So they rent a meeting room that is conveniently located near the new hall where the National Assembly a meeting.

And initially, membership of this club is limited to deputies. But as the months go by, it starts to be opened up to ordinary citizens. I mean, citizens, they have to pay a membership fee, but otherwise, they can all join it. And this club, they call themselves Les Amis de la Constitution, the Friends of the Constitution. But increasingly, Dominic, they come to be known by another name, and it's a name that derives from the fact that they have rented their meeting room from the order of the Dominicans. In Paris, the Dominicans have a very distinctive nickname, and it derives from the fact that the very first Dominican Monastery in Paris, way back in the Middle Ages, had been on the Rue Saint-Jacques, and so they come to be called Jacobin. This is the nickname that comes to be given to the most radical of the clubs in Paris. The existence of the Jacobin, as events will prove, spells nothing good for the Royal family.

You know what Ben Kenobi said about the Jacobin Club, Tom? You will never find a more wretched vive of scum and villain. On that bombshell, Thank you so much for this terrifying story or inspirational story. We will be back tomorrow with the final episode for now of the French Revolution series, when we will be talking about how the Royal family tried to make a break for it in disguise, probably the most extraordinary scene in French history, if not European history, the king and queen of Europe's largest country in disguise, fleeing through France, pursued by agents of the revolution, desperate to get to the frontier before they can be stopped.

And accompanied by the hairdresser.

Yeah, for the hairdresser is an important part of their ménage. So the flight to Varennes will be tomorrow's final episode of this part of the series. The rest of the series, we will be pursuing, I think in the autumn. Is that right, Tom? That's right. So you've got that I look forward to. But Tom, merci beaucoup et au revoir.

Au revoir.

Here's the clip from our Vietnam series.

I had expected that when it started, Americans being Americans were to be filled with hubris. Nobody's going to be able to stop our military firepower from succeeding. How are these pyjama-clad guerillas 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 McNamera, 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 Bird, I'm trapped on Vietnam. Whichever way I go, I'm going to lose. He understands right at the beginning that this is going to be his downfall, and this is 1965.

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