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.

This, my bon ami, is where the intrigues and the little plots of those reckless and guilty aristocrats have led. They have abused the weakness of the king to advise him to undertake so pernicious a deed. For their own selfish interests and the vengeance of their pride, they have exposed the patrie to the horrors of the most murderous civil war, the king whom they say they love to the loss of his crown and all his family to the most frightful consequences. They have been undone as they always will be, and their criminal efforts will come down on their heads. I won't complain of that. They deserve their fate. But the king, what humiliation. That was the Marquis de Ferrières, Dominic, who we heard from in the previous episode. He was the aristocratic deputy at the National Assembly. That is a letter that he wrote to his wife, describing one of the most dramatic episodes in European history, namely the attempt by Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette with their children to escape Paris in disguise in June 1791, leave Paris behind. We'll be discussing what Louis actually hoped he would achieve if the attempt had been successful. But it wasn't Dominic, and yet another turning point in the transformation of France from the greatest monarchy in Europe to a Republic.

It's a truly extraordinary story, this, Tom. There are moments in the French Revolution that feel like the purest melodrama on. This is absolutely one of them. It's a thriller, actually. It's a really thrilling story. The climax, the way it unfolds, changes the course of French history to, arguably, European history, arguably European history. This gamble that goes, spoiler alert, horribly, horribly wrong.

I love it because it goes with the grain of so much of what we know already about some of the main players, Louis, Marie-Antoinette, some of their hangers on who we've been hearing about throughout the series, and they appear yet again. It's a very dramatic story. But of course, as you say, really, its significance is the impact it will have on the whole course of the revolution and therefore, a French history.

Yeah, definitely. Let's remind ourselves where we got to last time. Last time, actually, Tom, you took us through an equally extraordinary episode, the Women's March on Versailles in October 1789. We ended with the Royal family being brought back in that an incredibly humiliating moment there, actually. They're brought back in this great procession by the Fishwives and by the National Guard, with the National Assembly eventually trailing behind them to Paris, and they're installed in the Tuilerary Palace. So that was last time. And now let's move on, 12 months to the end of 1790, and look at where the revolution has got to. The revolution proper, I suppose you call it, has been going for more than a year. It's more than a year after the fall of the Bastille, the estate's general becoming the National Assembly, and basically the deputy seizing sovereignty, seizing power from the king. The focus of the story now is no longer in Versailles. Versailles has been shuttered. It's become a museum. It has. The focus is in Paris. If you'd gone to Paris as a visitor, you would have noticed straight away at the end of 1790, how for ordinary people, life looks different.

There's a unbridled sense of political freedom. People are wearing tricular cockades. There are newspapers everywhere, that people are singing patriotic songs. They would sing them in the interval at the theater and the opera. The revolution is a daily experience. It is a living experience for Paris's hundreds of thousands of inhabitants.

Dominic, this is, I think, when William Wordsworth, the great romantic poet, goes to Paris and he writes his feelings about it, the famous lines, Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven. So that sense of joyous expectation of the entire world on the cusp of a brilliant new dawn is absolutely what is animating people in the streets, isn't it?

It is absolutely, yeah. And there's a sense of people pushing all the time boundaries, people saying the unsayable, saying things they wouldn't have said a year ago or two years ago. It's a perfect example, actually, of a city that is living politics every day. The tone is increasingly set by radical journalists. You mentioned WAM. In fact, you mentioned a couple, Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat. The tone of their stuff is, I think, what we We would now call populism. They have, on the one hand, the people, the nation, who are virtuous, who are destined for greatness, but have been frustrated up till now by the machinations of conspirators. Theirs could be foreigners, they could be priests, aristocrats. That sense of a hardening, that goes along with, I think, with the egalitarian democratic excitement that you get.

There's also a sense that you also get in the National Assembly of excitement excitement at the limits that you're pushing and the sense that actually everything could be new. So all traces of history could be effaced. France could be completely reborn and perhaps the world with it. I guess that that sense of excitement is what is new about the politics of the situation, do you think?

Yeah, I think so. I think it's a sense of radical excitement that goes beyond anything that's been seen in previous revolutions. Of course, there's been a degree of excitement in the English Revolution, in the 17th century of the American Revolution. But this sense that everything that went before, you can get rid of it. You know better now. You can do something new. Of course, for the deputies of the National Assembly, that's both very exciting, but also potentially very exhausting. Sure.

This is a lot of work to do, isn't it?

Yeah. They have been working now for the best part of two years on a constitution, on a new framework for France, and they're rethinking everything. Government, law. You talked before about the most incendium of all these things, which is the relationship of the Church and state. And all of these things It's have massive repercussions in the countryside, and they're getting letters back the whole time. It's actually the French Revolution is, if nothing else, it's a story about paperwork. So it's a story about young men basically being overwhelmed with enormous quantities of paperwork. Actually, the people at the National Assembly, of course, they are very excited, but they're also unbelievably tired. Historians who talk about this period notice that in their letters, they say all the time that they're suffering from massive headaches. They're not eating, they can't sleep. They are just overwhelmed. Actually, more and more, it's a hard core who are driving the politics. So there are about 1,200 people in the National Assembly, but only 400 of them are actually still turning up. The nobles and a lot of the priests are now staying away.

And is that an a fashion of hostility to what is happening? Or is it nervousness, or is it just they don't really identify with what's happening?

I think it's all of those things. I think they're worried about the way it's going. I think many of them are outraged at the course it has already taken. And I think there's a sense that suddenly these people the old guard, if you like, are in a world that they don't understand. They no longer want to be part of it. So they've gone back often to their states in La France Profonde.

There is also a sense, though, isn't there, that even as they are pushing into a bright new future, they are also increasingly starting to look to ancient exemplars, which are Republican exemplars. That's true. Particularly in the club. We talked about the Jacquiman Club at the end of the previous episode. The exemplars are becoming Republican, aren't they?

Well, so the Jacquiman Club that you ended with last time, officially the Society of the Friends of the Constitution that meets in this old monastery, very close to the National Assembly. If you went into the Jacquiman Club, they would have busts of Brutus, Cato, Benjamin Franklin. They had framed copies of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. There is a sense that you're in, I mean, it's a Metropolitan elite, but it's a Republican. It is.

Brutus and Cato are both famous people who fought against an autocrat.

But they don't see themselves as Republicans at this stage. That's the interesting thing. They're almost unconsciously Republicans, I would Actually, on the clubs, the Jacquemin Club, there's a network of them. It's a bit Soho house. So they've opened basically subsidiaries all across France. There are about 400 of them by the beginning of 1791. With spas. Yes, right.

Swimming pools.

Yeah, and they look very similar. And dare I say, the influences of the time go to the local Jacquemin Club because that is where the aspirational, upwardly mobile, the people with momentum, with social and cultural momentum, where they go. But it's also a sign of a factualism and of a radicalization, a radical ratchet, because there are lots of other clubs competing to outflank the Jacques-Auban on the left. And the most famous one is a club called the Society of the Rights of Man, which is called the Cordelier Club. This meets on the left bank near the Latin Quarter. It's the artistic publishing journalistic district. The tone is set there at the Cordeliers by people like Des Mulins and Marat. They are really pushing two things. One is saying the revolution needs to go much further. Democracy, egalitarianism, the people's rights and all that stuff. Then the other side of it is that very aggressive populist side. It's the cordelier that people are going on about conspiracies the whole time.

Dominic, the issue of democracy, because that then begs a question which I'm sure people have been wondering about who actually has the vote in all this. The Constitution, as it's being structured, has come up with the notion of active and passive citizens, hasn't it? Yeah, that's right. That active citizens are basically males over 25 who pay a certain amount of money in tax or whatever each year, and they have voting rights, and everyone else doesn't. And that, of course, includes women. So there is scope there for a leftward push inherent in the model of democracy that's being structured.

There is, absolutely. So that's one of the things that is, as it were, pushing the revolution, a sense of democratic excitement and a sense that you can actually... There are always more boundaries to cross. Simon Sharma says of these clubs, so there are these fraternal societies, as they call, that are associated with the Cordelier, that are, in some ways, become even more radical. He says the rhetoric was Ruso with a horse voice and sharpened with bloody-minded impatience. That bloody-minded impatience is very important because in late 1790, early 1791. Bread prices are still very high. In fact, inflation has gone through the roof because the government is now printing a lot of paper money, they're called. When you have high inflation, you have labor unrest because people say their wages aren't high enough to meet their outgoings. There's a wave of strikes through the winter, 1791 in Paris, that basically it adds to the sense of unrest and anarchy and things being a bit out of control. It's not good for the deputies in the National Assembly's blood Russia because they're living in the midst of all this. They're living in Paris, and they look out of their window when they get up in the morning and they see crowds on the streets, people shouting, people saying, Where are the fruits that we were expecting?

All of that stuff.

They have sat in the assembly and had the the poor and the starving burst in and demand bread, haven't they? Back when they were in Versailles, the women from Paris who took the King and Queen back to the capital.

They have. That's a warning to them, that what's happened to the Royal family could easily happen to them.

Sitting on the edge of a volcano, Dominic.

They are, Tom. They're dancing on the brim of a Tinder box, if that's possible. So some of the more farsighted members of the National Assembly had seen this coming, had actually said, even years earlier, in 1789, you know Actually, turning the Estates General into a National Assembly, having a new constitution, it's not going to solve the financial problems overnight, nor is it going to give people cheaper bread. Actually, one of the people who noticed this was the comte de Mirabeau, who we talked about before, this gigantic, incredibly ugly, very successful with the ladies.

Yet another of the figures in the French Revolution with bad skin.

Exactly. He said in early 1791, The people have been promised more than can be promised. They have been given hopes it will be impossible to realize. In the last analysis, he said, They'll judge the by this fact alone. Are they better off? Do they have more work? Is that work better paid? So he can see that you've got to give people concrete results. Now, Mirabeau, a lot of people have thought he would be the man to do that. He would preside over a transition to a constitutional monarchy in the British model. Certainly, he thought that himself. But actually, because he thinks that so conspicuously, a lot of people in the National Assembly are opposed to him. And there's a sense that he's losing momentum in early 1791, not least because he's become very close to the royal family. So he's been taking money from them. Yeah.

And do you know who the go-between was who established contact?

Andy Caddic, Tom.

No, it was Monsieur Léonard, again.

The hairdresser.

The hairdresser who pops up in all kinds of unexpected places. According to his own version.

Okay, well, who knew that was coming? But then Mirabeau dies in 1791, so he's out of the equation.

So he's basically the only major figure in the entire revolution who dies in his bed.

Is he?

Pretty much, don't you think? There's the Abbé Decié, isn't there, who famously says, Of the French Revolution, I survived.

And Talleyrand.

Yeah, and Talleyrand. But Mirabeau is... I mean, of all the the Titanic figures, he's the only one who doesn't end up.

It's amazing how many people in this story basically end up having an appointment with a guillotine, isn't it? I mean, extraordinary. Anyway, so Mirabeau is out of the equation. There's a group of moderate jacobins. The totemic figure is a guy called Antoine Barnave, who's a lawyer from Grenoble. So remember how we said that Grenoble was the motor of the revolution? So this young man from Grenoble, Barnave, have with his pals is now basically directing the momentum of the revolution. Actually, what they want to do, they're like, Well, actually, the revolution has gone far enough now. France has had enough politics. Let's calm things down. Let's bring in a few of the restrictions. Calm the press down, calm the strikes down, all of this thing. Actually, they think the key to this is really to get a deal with the king. Let's get the king back, get a constitution, get him back in his rightful place, presiding over a constitutional monarchy.

The Bon Bonpère.

Yeah, the Bonpère of France, exactly. Hopefully, the streets will quiet down and things will return to normal. The question, of course, is, is Louis XVI somebody they can do business with? They think he is, and they've got good reason to think that. Because when you did that amazing set piece about him being brought back and Marie-Antoinette on the balcony and the terrible scenes. So obviously, after that, they're pretty traumatized, Louis and Marie-Antoinette, and they didn't go out of the twilery for weeks, for months. They didn't even go to walk in the garden. They were so depressed, basically being turned into prisoners. But eventually, they surface, and Louis actually seems like he will work with the Revolution on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille in 1790, he goes to the altar of the fatherland, as it's called, and the Shon de Mars, and he swears an oath that he will, when they finally get round to doing the Constitution, he will uphold it.

He wears a plain black coat, doesn't he? He does. There's no Versailles swagger.

Exactly. People say, Listen, he's not a bad man. No one's ever thought he was a bad man, by the way. They think he's a bit useless, he's a bit weak, he eats too much, he drinks too much, and he's much too interested in hunting.

I mean, he's very fat by this point.

He is very fat now. The more things go against him, the more he eats. But when this gigantic figure appears and swears the oath, everybody says, Well, Louis is a very religious man. Everybody knows that. It's the one thing people know about him. So for him to swear this oath, he would not lie. He must be determined to work with the revolution to accept the new order. He's a well-meaning guy, and he's the father of his people, and isn't that great? But the reality is they are deceived. So even in 17 1989, we know now, historians found letters in the 20th century that he had been writing to other monarchs like the king of Spain, his relative, and he had said, I hate the revolution. Everything that they have extorted from me has been under duress. I owe it to myself. I owe it my children. I owe it to my entire family, he said, to make sure that I rebuild royal authority. I don't let this get out of hand. Of course, he's being fed in all this by Marie-Antoinette because she is dead against the revolution.

She's been completely traumatized.

She has. You understand why she's dead against it. She's been abused. She's been mistreated. She says these people are monsters and what they represent is evil.

But equally, it's not great advice, is it?

No, it isn't great advice, I think you could say Tom. But Louis is primed to believe it because he's horrified in particular about the religious thing. I mean, I don't think you can underestimate the importance of that. But Louis, he was an anointed king. I can't believe I'm the person saying this on the podcast. Carry on, Dominic. He's an anointed king. He takes mass every day. He had written in his journals when he was a boy that God had chosen him to be king, and he took this really seriously. When it comes to the great hula-baloo about the civil constitution of the clergy, the fact that priests have to swear an oath to the constitution and that the Pope then at the beginning of 1791, says, Don't do this. You're in danger of excommunication if you do it. For Louis, this is the most horrendous, horrendous dilemma. He's caught between his country and his God, and for him, it's just an intolerable position to be in. A different man, a more cynical character.

A Telleroy type figure.

Captain Ben Tine from the Custer series. He could absolutely have dealt with this. Louis XVI, psychologically, and I guess because the institutional pressures of his family, his role, the weight of history, he just can't do it. Why doesn't he run away? Why doesn't he make a break for it? Because that's, of course, what so many of his councilors have been saying ever since 1789. The reason he doesn't, as all his biographers say, He's well-meaning, and he's well-meaning and he's earnest and he's- Indecisive. He's indecisive. He's a dithera. He doesn't want to do the wrong thing. So he just sits there paralyzed and paralyzed. Now, it seems to have been a change at the end of 1790, and And he says, okay, we'll draw up a contingency plan. All these plans about going to the east, going to the frontier garrisons, and there are loyal troops there. Fine. Tell me how this would work. And the man who's in charge of drawing up the plan is our old friend, top Swedish swath dasher. I was going to say a bounder, but he's not a bounder, is he? No, I don't think he is. He'd be played by Roger Moore, but he behave in a good way.

And he's Axel von Fersen, the Swedish accountant friend of Marie-Antoinette. And he draws up an excellent plan. He He's coming to the Tuileries Palace, and he's in disguise when they're making the plans.

I mean, he's the person who would love a disguise. Yeah, totally is.

Because he's a swashbuckling. He's the Scala Pimpernell, basically, isn't he? Yeah.

So him and Mr. Léonard are both clearly figures who love the sense of conspiracy, dressing up, carrying secret messages, but in a slightly ostentatious way.

There's a Sunday night BBC Two drama in Mr. Léonard and Axel von Fersen, Solving Crimes in Revolutionary Paris.

I don't think they do it very well.

A camp hairdresser and a dashing Swede. Alexander Skarsgaard could play Axel von Fersen.

Yeah, he could.

I don't know who would play Monsieur Léonard. Mathieu Amalric, the French actor. Anyway, that's- That's by the by. Yeah, it is by the by. He draws up this plan to get out in disguise. The issue that he has is his plan was initially for Louis and Marron to Annette, and he says it would be better for you to travel separately. They say, There's no way we'll do that. We have to take our children. We I have to take the King's Sister Elizabeth, who's hanging around in the palace with them. Marie-antoinette also says, I'd like to take two nannies for the children. And there are three young noblemen who they want to take as bodyguards. So now the party is basically 11 people. And there's the hairdresser, but he's going to travel separately.

But he gets sent out on a scoping mission.

He does indeed. So end of 1790, early 1791, they know who they want to take. Axel von Fursten looks at this and he says, Well, this is too many people for one coach. We're going to have to have more than... We have, A, one very big coach and another coach for the Nannies. And he commissions the coach that will take them. So it's called a berline. It's a luxury coach. It took three months to build it. It cost 6,000 French pounds. A lot of books, a lot of general histories of the Revolution say it was a carriage and it looked inconspicuous. It absolutely was not.

It's enormous, isn't it?

It was like a luxury limo of coaches. It's black, but it has a yellow frame, so it's very conspicuous. And inside, Timothy Taket, who wrote this wonderful book about the Flight of the King, says it has a leather interior, padded seats, a picnic set, bottle racks, and a leather-covered chamber pot. So it's like a private jet of coaches.

Absolutely. And it raises the question that even at this point, do they understand what they're up against? They're not really taking the danger seriously. They could have done a Charles II hiding in oak trees approach. They could have really gone undercover. They could They could have not traveled with coaches just for a week or something. They could have foregone the luxury, but they just can't bring themselves to do it.

I think there's three things there. I think the Charles II embarrassing is a brilliant one. Because of course, Charles II faces, I mean, worst pressures. Do during his life. But here's all those things that Louis isn't. Charles II is very cunning. He can be quite malign. He's incredibly cynical, and he wins. He plays his cards brilliantly. So there's that element to it. I think they don't understand France, as we will see.

Of course, because they haven't been going out into the country at all, have they? I mean, they've just been in Versailles most of their lives.

No, they don't understand France. They're such prisoners, aren't they, of their own upbringing. They've lived in that extraordinary environment of Versailles, and they cannot conceive of doing a Charles II and just going completely incognito.

The irony of it is that Marie-Antoinette, of all people, is the person who loves the ideal of simplicity, of escaping Hydebound Convention. And yet, at the end, she is destroyed by her inability to realize what that might actually mean.

Yeah, I think that's true. She loves the dressing up.

Well, as we'll see. But I want to be like common people. It's very pulp. There's real cosplay about it.

Are they going to do it? That's the question. Actually, it's still hanging in the air a bit in the early months of 1791, and then something happens that pushes Louis over the edge. They've got a house at Santa Cloud, country house, and he wants to go there for Easter because basically there are priests there who have not sworn the oath to the Constitution so far, who are still loyal to Rome, as it were, and he wants to go and have Easter with them. And news of this gets out in Paris. A huge crowd assembles. When he and Marie-Antoinette go to leave the Tuileries, they are blocked by the crowd in their carriage, and they have to sit there being abused by the crowd for almost two hours. And Marie-Antoinette is in floods of tears. Louis is really shaken. It is clear to them now that they are prisoners. And after this, actually, instead of feeling sorry for them, the National Assembly actually tightens up restrictions on them and basically sends a lot of their court away. So they are alone in this echoing palace, surrounded by guards. And understandably, psychologically, Louis and Marie-Antoinette say, We can't live like this.

We have to get out. And what then happens is he is very clever because the very next day, he goes to the National Assembly for the first time in a year and reiterates how keen he is to work with them and to uphold the Constitution. Institution. And the National Assembly, especially the more moderate deputies, this is what they want to hear, and they're like, Oh, brilliant. Louis is really coming round. He's really behaving well these days. Isn't this great? But while the National Assembly congratulating themselves that everything's going to be fine, Louis and Axel and Axel and co are finalizing the plan. The plan is they will get out of the city and they will head for the garrison town of Monmedy, which is on the border of the Austrian Netherlands, now Belgium. And there, the Marquis de Bouy is waiting with Swiss and German troops who they think will be more loyal than French-speaking troops, and it will all be great. Now, there was a direct road that went through Reims, where Louis had been crowned, and it went through a lot of empty countryside, and it was a good road to take. And the Marquis de Buys says, Go that way.

Louis said, No, because I was crowned in Reims, there'll be people who would recognize me. So it'd be much better to go this other road, which admittedly goes through lots of small towns and villages. But of Louis is very confident that in the small towns and villages, there will be no problem, because even if he is recognized, those people will surely still be loyal to the king. These aren't the urban freaks of the jacobin. These are ordinary French men and women, decent people. Salt of the Earth. Salt of the Earth, exactly. But the real question is, you raised this at the beginning, Tom, what's the end game? What is the point? Let's imagine he gets to Montmédy and he rendezvous with the troops. What then?

I mean, does he have enough troops? It's the first question.

There are attachments for Swiss troops and German troops. But we know that Commanders had said to him in 1789, We don't really have enough troops to take Paris. It's a big place. We're not confident we have enough troops to take Paris if the population of the city is against us. Of course, the National Guard are in Paris, and there will be French-speaking troops who will rally shortly to the National Assembly. So there's that. The Austrian ambassador who was in touch with Marie-Antoinette, who was what we now call a Belgian because it's a French speaker from the Austrian Netherlands. He had been writing getting to Marie-Antoinette and he had said, Don't do this, because if it works, if you get out of the capital, basically, you're going to declare civil war and the French people will suffer immeasurably, and you might not even win, But he then says to her, I don't think you will get out. I think every village and town you go through will be against you. If you are caught, it will be a catastrophe for you and for the monarchy. The Austrian ambassador had actually said, Listen, I just think you have to wait this out.

The mad creations of the revolutioners will collapse by themselves. But for perfectly understandable human reasons, Louis and Marie-Antoinette don't want to wait. They don't believe the revolution will collapse. But more importantly, I think this terrible sense of doom hanging over them, that they're in this palace in the center of Paris.

Yeah, echoing.

Yeah, and the streets outside seething with tension. It's not easing. It is growing because people are angry that the bread prices are still high, that the conspiracies of their imagination are still... Well, there is a conspiracy. I mean, let's be frank about it.

Marie-antoinette has heard people of the kind that she hears outside the tweelery back in Versailles, demanding that her guts be made into cacades. I think she's entitled to feel a bit twitchy.

Of course. And they've got the children. Just as parents, they would want to get their children out of this environment. So the die is cast as it were, Tom. The decision is made.

Rubicon is about to be crossed.

It is. There are various postponements and delays, but the date is set for Monday, the 20th of June.

Wow. High drama. So let's take a break there. And when we come back, we will find out if the attempt by the Royal Family to escape succeeds. Massive tension. Hello. Welcome back to The Rest is History, Dominic. We are entering the final segment of this eight-part epic on the beginnings of the Revolution. All is set for the attempt by the Royal family to make their escape from Paris. How does it go?

The date, as we said, was set for Monday, the 20th of June. That day, to outside observers, everything seems perfectly normal. The Queen goes to Mass as normal. She goes and has her hair done, very important for her. She goes out for a drive around the city in a coach with her children. Then that evening, she has dinner with her family, and that includes the King's brother, the comte de Provence, and his sister, Madame Elizabeth. Then when dinner is over, or so it seems, she retires for the night. But there have been three odd little signs that day. First of all, the children's attendance had been sent away on the grounds that the children were ill, but they weren't ill. The children themselves noticed this and thought this was peculiar. Number two, if you'd been to the palace, to the Tuilerary Gardens that day, you would have noticed an empty Hackney cab, a fiacre, as they're called in French. Sitting there, the Champs Elyse, nobody in it, nobody really notices it, but there it sits. There's another empty cab just across the River Seine, on the other side of the Seine. Again, just parked by the side of the road, nobody there.

Again, nobody really notices it. Now, while Marion Srinette is having her hair done and all of that stuff, Louis is putting the finishing touches to a letter. This letter is a disaster for him politically, but he, of course, he doesn't know that at the time. He writes it himself. It's in his own handwriting, and it is a note explaining why he intends to flee the capital. He just pours everything out. It's a list of his grievances, justifications for himself. He said, I'm not being kidnapped. No one's making me go. I'm going in my own accord because for two years I've sat here and I've seen, and I quote, The destruction of the monarchy, the subversion of all authority, the violation of properties, the endangered of personal security, crime left unpunished, and the establishment of a complete anarchy. He says, Everything I've done in these two years, my captivity, I didn't mean any of it. You forced it out of me. I did only under duress. I've had enough of living a lie. I hate you. I hate the revolution. I'm out of here. That's his letter. Now, you could say that's an admirably frank political testament.

Or you could say it's mad.

You could say this is a political suicide note.

I mean, it leaves him no place to hide should the escape attempt go wrong.

Yeah, he's burning all his bridges. Of course, he doesn't think that it might go wrong. Now, we can retrace what happens next in some detail because there's a brilliant book by the American historian, Timothy Taket, called When the King took Flight. A lot of general histories are a little bit sketchy about the details, but he basically does it minute by minute. When dinner was finished that evening, Louis embraced his brother, the comte de Provence, and said, I'll see you at the frontier because the comte of Provence is going to go on his own to Brussels, escape to Brussels.

That works, doesn't it? That the comte of Provence, in due time, will become Louis XVIII.

He will indeed say, he gets away. This is, by the way, the last time those two brothers will ever see each other. Then, Marie-Antoinette and her friend, the Marquise de Thourzel, who's going to come with her.

Who's been very loyal, stuck by Marie-Antoinette when others have left her.

Yes. So a lot of her friends, a lot of her favorites, a lot of the Petit Trianon set have fled, haven't they? But she's stuck with her. She's the best friend. They slip away from the dining room and they go to wake the two children and to get their nannies. Marion Toinette, who's really leading the way in this, she's planned this with Axel von Fersen. It's her scheme as much as anybody's. They go down these back stairs to the ground floor. There are disguises waiting there, and the nannies help the children change into the disguises. They're both going to be dressed as young girls. We'll explain a due course about the disguise plan. But then the nannies go back upstairs, and it's the nannies. The nannies can easily come and go from the palace. They walk out of the main entrance and they are heading across the river to the cab across the river. So that was for them. Meanwhile, back in the palace, Marie-Antoinette, for their various subterfuges, she's managed to get a key to an outer door. She gets the children and she unlocks the outer door. She's timed this perfectly. She's waited for the point when most of the palace servants will leave.

Now, of course, it's June, so we're at the lightest time in the year. But even so, 10:30, darkness has fallen. So the courtyard is lit by torches. The servants are all leaving. And as they are leaving, the door opens quietly and the marquis de Taucelle and the two children slip out into the crowd, and the guards don't notice them among the mass of servants.

And so they then head to the cab. And Dominic, who is driving the cab?

So they get to the cab outside in the Tuileroy Gardens, and it is Axel von Fersen.

It is his disguise. This is why he'd be so good at solving crimes, isn't it?

He is such a tremendous man, Tom. The marquis and the two kids get into the cab, and then he says, Let's go for a little drive. They go off because he's killing time waiting for the royal couple. He goes off for a little drive around the city.

He's bantering away, isn't he? Yeah.

When he comes back, he puts on the voice of a Parisian coachman. He exchanges banter with the other coachman. He stops and has a smoke with the other coachman, and whistling and humming a tune. He's really behaving splendidly.

I mean, everything that would make him, as you say, a brilliant detective.

Brilliant. He's a tremendous man. Now, the next person out is meant to be the King. The whole story is so Hollywood. He's about to go when suddenly, General Lafayette and Jean-Sylvain Bayy, the mayor of Paris, arrive to talk to him about a minor political issue. I mean, so late at night, who would have imagined it? And he has to stop and chat to them and answer their questions and say, yes, I'll do this or whatever, whatever. All very perfunctury stuff.

And so that's basically an hour, isn't it? Yes. And that means that you're an hour closer to Dawn.

Yeah. So right from this point, actually, they're running late. Nothing quite goes. Of course, it's the nature of these things. Nothing quite goes according to plan. They leave at about 11:30. He then has to pretend to go to bed. He dismisses his servants. Then he gets back out of bed. He puts on his disguise, which is a very plain coat and hats. He goes out, and he goes out through the outer door, across the courtyard. I mean, to be fair to Louis, he is so calm and cool under pressure. He gets halfway across the courtyard, under the eyes of the guards. Then he stops, bends down and fiddles with the buckle of his shoe. And of course, this does not look like a man escaping, right? This looks like a man who's just very relaxed.

Quite impressive that he knows how to buckle his own shoe.

I'm sure he was like Churchill with a boiling of the eight.

He's seen it done.

Yeah, he's seen it done. So then he crosses the courtyard to Axel von Fursten's cab. And the last person to leave is Marion Twinet herself. And as she's out, she goes round a corner and she virtually bumps into Lafayette, who is leaving the palace.

God, it's meeting you here.

But it's in the torch light. There's darkness. He doesn't recognize her, and she shrinks back into the shadows for a second and then continues. It's now about 12:30. They're all in the cab. They're about now, as you said, behind schedule already. Axel von Fursten and he drives very slowly and carefully through the streets, the darkened streets of Paris, all the way to the gate of Saint-Martin, the edge of the city. That's where he has parked this luxury vehicle, the berline discreet. Now there's a little bit of a faff because he can't find the Berlin in the darkness, because the Berlin is with these three guys who are the bodyguards. Finally, they meet up. They've lost another bit of time now. They basically parked their first cab in a ditch, and they all transfer into the Berlin. They are now two Two hours behind schedule. However, they're at the edge of Paris. They've done well. They get in and first and says, go, go, go. It's going to get light very soon. And off they go east, heading out of the city into the countryside. The way they've planned this is that there will be relays of horses.

That's the nature of any long distance journey in France in the late 18th century. One set of horses won't carry the whole way. And they've planned the relay stops intricately. The first relay stop, a place called Bondi, Ax van Fersen splits up with them. He has handled this superbly so far. He is now going to go off on horseback rather like the comte de Provence, he's going to head into Belgium, to the Austrian Netherlands, and then he will meet them again when they finally get to the border at Mourmedy. So it's emotional farewells, and then off he rides. The next stop at a place called Clay, they meet the cab with the two nannies in it. So now there's two of them traveling basically in convoy. And the party is complete, and they are heading east through the Île-de-France towards Champagne. So they rattle east across these roads. This is a major highway. It's not a tarmac road of the kind that we recognize.

And, just to reiterate, this carriage is a massively It is massively indiscreet.

It is massively indiscreet.

And it's painted like a wasp, basically. Yeah, it is.

So I mean, it's- Yeah, black and yellow. Agreed. It's quite a hapsberg colors, actually. But so far, so good. And the hours go by. Dawn breaks over the fields of champagne. They're changing the horses at the relays as planned. They're beginning to think. We could do this. We could do this. The King, Louis, remember with him, his fascination with his looks. Louis is basically a bit of a nerd. And Louis has brought with him maps, and he's brought a very detailed itinerary. I love this about Louis. I admire this, babe. This is what I would have done. And he's got this itinerary. And when they go through each village, he says, this is such and such a place. And he's got a few nice facts about it. And he can plot it on his So really, he's a frustrated tour guide. He totally is. He's loving this. He's a travel agent. Yeah, he's loving all this. Now, while he's doing this, the Queen, Marie-Antoinette says to everybody, Now, listen, remember our parts. Madame de Tauzelle, she's playing somebody called the Barennesse de Koff. The two children are her two daughters. Marie-antoinette and the King's Sister Elizabeth are her two servants.

And Louis, dressed in his plain brown coat, is her business agent, is the baroness's business agent. Monsieur Durand. Exactly, Monsieur Durand. So if anybody asks who we are, that's who we are. Yeah.

But again, it is, I mean, just to reiterate, there's a slight sense in which it's symbolic rather than actual, isn't it? This attempt to be a common person.

Yeah, well, as we will see. Because actually, Louis, as they get out, the further they get from Paris, Louis becomes more and more relaxed. Understandably, he's out of the tweedlery for the first time in ages, and he just feels such a sense of liberation. He says to the others, When I'm back in the saddle, when everything is normal again, I I will be such a different man. You won't recognize me, I'll be so different. I will do such things. Exactly. The tragedy of it, Tom. The day breaks. It's a warm day. It's June in the center of France. They take off their hats, they look out of the windows, they watch the peasants working in the fields as they pass.

Charming.

And then, so charming. And then, when they stop every time to change the horses or to go to the loo or whatever, Louis starts to get out of the camp and he does a bit of an Axel von Fersen. He starts to chat to the people changing the horses. He says, lovely weather. How are the crops this year?

I'm a land agent.

The bodyguards are sitting on the top, and they are attracting a lot of attention because they are wearing yellow uniforms that match the frame of the carriage. But the yellow uniforms are unfortunate because they match the livery of one of the chief emigré counter-revolutionary leaders, a guy called the Prince de Condé, the Prince of Condé, who is one of the exiles who is most feared in all the conspiracy theories. And his men wear yellow, and these guys are wearing yellow, so people are staring at them. And the bodyguards say to the king, People are staring at us. We should be a bit more careful, a bit more discreet. This is, I think, a really important thing. Louis says, Stop worrying. We're outside the capital now. In the countryside, we don't need to worry about all this. It's very Tsar Nicholas Charles II, or even Charles I, or something. The city people are weirdos and have been polluted by the woke mind virus. But in the country, he says, La France Profonde. La France Profonde, people actually love me. So it's fine even if I am recognized. And the thing is, he is being recognized. This is, again, something that I think some of the briefer accounts skip over.

They say, oh, he's spotted later on. He's already being spotted. So in Montmirail, a wagon driver spotted him when they were changing the horses. In the place called Chantriques, there was a postmaster who had seen him at the Bastille Day celebrations in 1790. And then, as the day wears on, they get to the biggest town they're going to cross, which is a place called Chalon. They get there mid-afternoon. There will be a lot of people in this town, by the nature of the town, who will probably have seen them at Versailles. There would be notables and things like that. And by this point, because they've been gone so long, Louis is incredibly relaxed. He doesn't Can't take any precautions at all.

It's just mad. And not least because back in Paris, by now, people will have realized that they've gone, presumably.

Of course, they realized first thing that morning when the servants went in and found their rooms empty.

It just seems mad behavior. He could be hiding up an oak tree, and instead, he's roaming around, pretending to be a land agent.

Mad. But he's got away with it so far, Tom.

He hasn't, though.

We'll find out. Because nobody stops him in Chalon. People recognize him, and people are whispering to each other, and small crowds forming, but nobody stops them. They keep going as evening approaches. They're approaching the Argonne forest and the borders of Lorraine. And they are very confident now that they have basically pulled this off because they've gone a long way.

Because Lorraine is the home of Marie-Antoinette's father, of course.

Yeah, of course. And of course, on the Eastern edge of France. So they're not that far away now. They are now three hours behind schedule, but they're confident that very soon, they will rendezvous with a military escort that has been sent to wait for them under the Duc de Choisal. As they approach the Argonne forest, they get to the place where they think they're going to meet this guy, and he is nowhere to be seen. Actually, what has happened is this. The Duc de Choisal had arrived with a small group of cavalry, but wherever cavalry go in France in 1791, peasants are very alarmed because the peasants, of course, because of the revolution, have not paid their feudal dues, their seigneurial dues.

That was the grand peur, the great fear.

The great fear, exactly. When men and horses, armed men on horseback, arrive, the peasants panic and think they're about to be punished or that these men have been sent to steal their crops or to take their money or something. So Choiseul is actually, and his men, attract a lot of attention, angry crowds and people throwing stones at them and shouting at them and stuff. And by mid-afternoon, because the king has fallen so far behind schedule, Choiseul is sick of waiting or is frightened and basically decides, he's probably not coming. This is awful. It's very awkward and difficult court situation. He's probably not coming. I'm actually just going to fall back to the nearest military encampment. And what is worse, he sends a message to other cavalry detachments in the area to say, I actually don't think they're coming.

And who's He's a messenger, Dominic? Well, the messenger actually delivers the message very competently.

The messenger, Tom, is the hairdresser, Monsieur Léonard. I love it.

I love the way he just keeps popping up.

He does this very well. Of course, it's a disaster for Louis Amérentonet because Monsieur Léonard goes around the the area, the neighborhood, riding or whatever to different cavalry groups and saying, The treasure is not arriving today. There will be new orders tomorrow. And this message-So, Monsieur Léonard. This message Well, he's just doing what he's been told to do.

His mastery of codes. With von Fersen's mastery of disguise and his mastery of codes- It's a brilliant team. It'd be an unbeatable combination.

So darkness Falls and the Royal family have not met up with the escort that they hoped for, and they head on alone into the small town of Saint-Mineu, as it is called. And there they start to change the horses once again. The stable hands at the post station are changing the horses, and they've almost finished when the man who runs the post station, basically the postmaster, arrives from the fields where he has been working. His name is Jean-Baptiste Drouet. He's 28 years old, and he used to be in the cavalry. He's a very ambitious, upwardy mobile, self-confident man. And he comes in, he sees his stable hands changing these horses. And he looks into this huge carriage to see who's there because he's naturally curious. And the first person he sees, he recognizes her straight away. It's Marie-Antoinette. And then he looks at the man sitting next to her, and he's this big, fat, heavyset man who he hasn't seen before, but he had seen Marie-Antoinette at Versailles when he was a Calvaryman, but he hasn't seen this man. But he recognizes the man because the man has the same face that is on the new inflationary paper money.

It's Louis XVI. The horses are now finished to change. Before Drouet can do anything, the carriage rattles away out of the yard. And he's just standing there, and he says to the people around him, That was the King and Queen. I know that was the King and Queen. And Saint-Mesnou is a small place. People start to gather, And Drouet says, there's no doubt in my mind, that's who they were. And the local bigwigs appear, and they're like, what are they doing? Now, in this world where the conspiracy theories have been circulating all this time, they immediately say, he's going to get a foreign army. That's what he's going to do. He's going to invade this country and attack our revolution, stop our revolution.

They might not be wrong.

Well, they're right. Yeah, they're absolutely right. And the town Bigwig say, who's the fastest rider? It's Drouet, who had once been a cavalryman. They say, you would get your mate, Jean-Guillaume, you go after them. You must tell people in the next town and stop them. The next town is a town called Varennes. At 11:00, the Royal Coach approaches Varennes. It is an hour and a half ahead of Drouet, so they have a bit of time to play with. Varennes is about 1,500 people in the Argonne forest. Don't forget, they don't have their escort. Now, they were expecting that the army would leave horses for them on the outskirts of Varennes. But of course, the message has gone around. The treasure is not coming today. Those horses are nowhere to be seen. The Royal Bodyguards get down, they look for them. They even knock on a few doors. No joy, no horses. There's a lot of dithering and arguing because the people with the current horses don't want to go on. They don't want to push the horses beyond the limits of their endurance. And they've been specifically told not to go past Varennes. So there's then a bit of an argument that drivers don't want to keep going until they've had a rest, until they fed the horses and all this stuff.

And while this argument is going on, by the side of the road, Drouet and Guillaume ride right past them without even noticing them towards Varennes. Finally, the bodyguards get back onto the coach. They agree they'll go into Varennes and they'll see what they can do. And the carriages roll into Varennes, which is in total darkness now. We're virtually midnight. And then as they approach this inn in the center of the town, the inn of the Golden Arm, they can hear people shouting voices. Somebody is shouting, Fire, fire, which is the typical, the classic thing you shout to attract attention with any emergency. And madame de Thurzel said later, she said, When we heard people shouting that, we thought we'd been betrayed. We drove down the street with a feeling of sadness and distress that can scarcely be described. And as they get to the golden arm, there are men standing there who stop the carriages, and they They think, Oh, no. Oh, no. So what had actually happened was that Dure had got there before them. He'd burst into the inn, and he had said, The King and Queen are coming for the sake of the country, for the sake of the revolution.

They must be stopped. People aroused the local councilors, the local National Guard, and the Chief Magistrate, who is a grocer with the excellent name of Jean-Baptiste Saurce, or as he would know, he'd call himself Saurce. They are the people who are standing outside the inn when the carriers arrive. You can picture the scene. People holding torches aloft in the darkness. They ask for their papers. They hand over the papers in the name of baroness de Koff. Actually, Saurce and the others say that these papers seem perfectly in order. Maybe we should let them go on. They're muttering while Louis and on our internet are waiting in terror in the carriage. Drouet says, I swear this is the King and Queen. You can't let them go. You absolutely can't let them go. So the bigwigs of the town, the townfathers say to themselves, Why don't we just play for time and wait till the morning? So they say to the travelers, Look, it's very late. We'll need more time to check your documents. We'll do it in the morning. Also, the road is very dangerous at night. You'd be better off going in the morning anyway.

Why don't you stay here? Jean Maptisot says, Do you know what? You can stay in my house above the grocery shop. I've got a bedroom for you. And very, very reluctantly, they get down from the carriage and they go to the grocery house. And the two children who are, of course, exhausted are put to bed, and then they wait. While Soce is leaving them there, he says, There's a bloke in the town, actually, who's seeing the king and queen, a judge, because he married a woman from Versailles, Monsieur Destez. I'll go and get him. He goes and wakes him up, bangs on his door, brings him to his house. This guy, Destez, comes up the stairs, goes into the bedroom. As soon as he sees Louis XVI, drops to his knees and he says, Oh, your highness, your Majesty. Louis stands up and he says, Yes, I am your king. I have come to live among you, my faithful children. I will never abandon you. Then he does this incredible thing. Timothy Taket says, he took the members of the municipal council in his arms one by one and embraced them, and he told them his story.

He said, I've been living in the capital, surrounded by daggers and bear nets, but I've come to the countryside to seek the freedom and tranquility that you all enjoy.

It's a very Rousseau.

Yeah, totally. But he's basically saying, Please help me. My life and the lives of my family are in danger.

He's framing it in a way that is with the grain of revolutionary sentiment. I mean, that's the extraordinary feat. I mean, not bad, actually, in the context of the absolute meltdown of all his plans.

Well, do you know what? It almost works because they are dumb struck that the king... He's in the upstairs bedroom of a grocer's house. It's an inconceivable... 1789, this would have been beyond the realms of the wildest fantasy that this would happen. They're shaking with nerves and fear and emotion to be in the presence of the King. They say they will help him. For a moment, they say, Of course, if necessary, we will accompany you east ourselves, if that's what it takes. Then they all go downstairs, and it's actually while they're going downstairs that they're like, Actually, maybe we shouldn't do this. And Timothy Taket, who I I mentioned already, his book is brilliant on this. He says, you have to look at Varennes itself, what had happened in Varennes to make sense of this. Varennes is a completely nondescript ordinary town. But in towns like Varennes, there had been a degree of politicization that had never been before since the revolution began. They have sent delegates to the National Assembly. They've had meetings. They have their own little Jacques-abam club in Varennes that all the bigwigs belong to. And also for two years, they have been subject to what you talked about, Tom, la grande peur, the of great fear, fears of brigands and foreign armies.

Particularly being close to the frontier.

Yeah.

They would be in the front line of any invasion coming.

Exactly. They say, Actually, now this is a terrible situation. Maybe he's raising a We're an army. And they start to panic. And they say, Finally, Ring the toxin, ring the bells, call the alarm. Now, this is a terrible situation. And suddenly it's one o'clock in the morning and the church bells are tolling the toxin. People are banging on drums, shouting, Fire, fire, alarm, alarm. People are pouring into the streets. They run to the town hall to get guns. And people are sending messages to the local villages, to arms, to arms. Everything's kicking off. And of course, Louis and Marion to an Edward be upstairs in that room listening to all this and just realizing that it's all going horrendously wrong. If we just fast forward a few hours, by dawn, the street outside the grocery is absolutely rammed with people. Militia bands, basically. People with pikes and with sticks and with battered old muskets and all this thing. Louis and Mariton have not slept a wink there in a terrible state. The kids have been asleep, I guess. But about day break, SOS and the other bigwigs come back to Louis and they say, Actually, we've changed our mind.

We can't let you go on. They say, We're members of a great family who've just found their father, but we fear we may lose him again. They say, Everybody loves you. You're in everybody's hearts, but your place is in Paris, and we want you to go back to Paris. Louis and Marie-Antoinette, you can just picture the scene, they're desperately arguing with them. Please let us go. We'll die in Paris. Then at 6:00 in the morning, two men arrive from Paris in their couriers with a message from General Lafayette. The morning of the 21st, when the news had broken that their palace was déserted, Lafayette and the National Assembly had sent messages all over France. Stop them, intercept them, do not let them get away. They hand these messages, these decrees, the couriers to the royal family. Marion Tournet just spits out. She says, What insolence. And she throws the message to the ground. But a very revealing little sign of their two characters. Louis doesn't react. He's not angry. He's just tired and sad. And he says, There's no longer a king in France. So at 7:30, they're led downstairs and they're put back into these carriages.

Huge crowd standing around.

This is worse than when they were brought from Versailles to Paris.

Oh, totally. Because they've failed. The October thing in 1789 was humiliating. But this is, they're guilty. They've been caught. That's the thing. They come down, the crowd's all pressing around them, people staring at them, all this, and people start to shout, Vive la nation, go back to Paris, and all this stuff.

But not vive le roi.

Not vive le roi. The journey West, they then head West again with this huge crowd surrounding them. It's a four-day journey this time. It's very tiring, it's very hot, incredibly dusty, because the great weight of the people surrounding them brings up loads of dust from these roads.

All the old abusive canars that have been aimed at both Marie-Antoinette and Louis are wheeled out again, aren't they? Marie-antoinette is this voracious vampire, sexually predatory, been sleeping around everyone. Louis is the feeble cookhold. And their characters are now absolutely being set in that abusive cast.

Totally, they are. If you think about, they're in this carriage, this airless, horrible environment, day after day.

At least they got the chamber pots.

Exactly. And the picnic equipment. And they are surrounded by thousands of people who, as you say, are shouting abuse to the windows, throwing stones. And the Royal Bodyguards The Royal Bodyguards, the Three Nobles in the yellow coats are still sitting on the top. People are hurling earth at them and dung and all this thing. Dead cats. Dead cats, exactly. It's a really horrible scene. There is actually one moment of violence. Outside Santa Meneu, a a cool nobleman, a young count called Dompierre, tries to ride up to the carriage to shout, Long live the King. He wants to show his solidarity with them. The crowd drive him off and he rides off into the fields. Louis is watching all this in the windows. His own peasants pursue him. They shoot him, drag him off his horse, and then stab him to death with their knives and pitchforks and stuff.

That must have helped set Louis' nerves.

It sets my to rest. On the second day, they were joined by three men from the National Assembly. The National Assembly agreed they would send three people of different ideological persuasions to ride back with them, a monarchy, a radical. And this guy, Banab, that we mentioned, the guy from Grenoble, who's the big man in the National Assembly. He sits next to Marie-Antoinette and will have quite the relationship with her in due course. Yeah, he's got a slight... It's not really a crush, but basically, they talk a lot as the carriage rolls West. And he starts to think, She and I, we understand each other. We can do business together. And as we will see for Barnav and his faction who end up being called the Foyon, this is a very bad miscalculation because obviously, it's a reminder, actually, the ground is shifting so quickly that even the person who now seems to have the political upper hand doesn't realise- Yesterday's radical is today's centrist out.

Exactly.

Well, that's exactly it. Finally, they approach the Paris suburbs and the mood now is very aggressive. There are attempts to storm the carriage, which the National Guardsmen have to fight off. The scuffling between the National Guard escort and the crowds, which lead people wounded. And finally, they get into the city walls. They're surrounded by Lafayette's cavalry, and the carriage comes into the city. All Paris has turned out to watch. Tens of thousands of people, people crammed into balconies. They're on trees, and they're packed into the pavements. And it's just a total silence. No shouting. They've been told. They've been ordered. No noise from the orders that come down from the authorities. Their hats remain stubbornly on their heads. They don't remove their hats when the royal carriage passes. It's an atmosphere that actually, it's not just silent, it is terrifying as the carriage comes along. At last, they reach the Tuileries Palace. The guards are all crowding around them to protect them. Louis and Marion Surnet and the children are able to get down and to walk inside. But when the bodyguards, three noblemen, get down in their yellow coats, the crowd break through the They basically rip into the bodyguards and start to tear them apart.

Lafayette's men have to push back to intervene and basically drag away the battered, blooded bodyguards to safety. Then the gates of the Tuileries klang shut and the doors slam shut by Marion Twinet and Louis. They're back home again, and it's over. They've failed. Of course, what's worse, he'd left that note, and everybody has read it, and it is patently clear that he will never work deep down. He will never reconcile himself to the revolution and that he has been lying all along.

Dominic, just before we end this episode and the series with it, I guess one obvious question, could it have worked? Could Louis have got away?

Yeah, I think it could have worked. A lot of consensuses go wrong. They fall behind schedule. He's recognized. If he'd be more careful and if they'd kept to the plan, of course, you can argue that they'd always have fallen behind and that by definition, he was always going to be a bit indiscreet. But the thing is, it doesn't fail by accident. There is a lot of accident, but it's not just accident. There are two reasons, I think, that are crucial why it fails. One is his indecision plays a massive part in the story of the French Revolution, but it also plays a big part in this story Because if he had gone in 1789, when all his advisors were begging him to go, or at least some of them, the chances of success would be much higher. Even in 1790, they'd have been much higher. But by delaying and delaying, he makes it more likely that it fails. And Why? This is the other thing. Because La France Profonde, the countryside, has changed in ways that he doesn't ever anticipate.

Even in two years.

So he thought it was all... It's the classic thing, isn't it? It's Nicolas II in St. Petersburg. It's Charles I in London. Oh, it's just the people in the city. The other people love me, which is what Louis thought. He didn't realize that even a tiny nothing place like Varennes had changed completely, and that actually when push came to shove, they would stick with the National Assembly and their own elected deputies rather than with him. In a way, it's not just chance that stops him. It's the revolution that stops him because the revolution has changed everything.

The revolution in due course now will destroy him and the royal family and the monarchy. The course is now clearly set for France to become a Republic. But that is a story for another time. Probably in the autumn, we will continue this account of the Revolution. But thank you for sticking with us this far. We will be back. Dominic, I've enjoyed doing this so much. One of the great, great convulsive episodes in world history, as we've been saying, and lots more convulsions still to come.

Yeah, we'll be back in the autumn with the fall of the monarchy, the outbreak of war.

The guillotine.

The guillotine, and the beginning of the Reign of Terror.

Murder of Mara. Yeah. So much to come. Brilliant stuff. Our next episode will be something completely different, namely the faking of a prehistoric skull in early 20th century Sussex. We'll be looking at the Piltdown Man, and then after that, we'll be looking at the history of Italian food. So a slight palate cleanser there.

Definitely a palate cleanser.

We will see you soon. Abianto. Au revoir.