00:02:43.460Well, thankfully, people know otherwise.
00:02:46.600But you can look at that. You can look at a huge amount of intellectual development during that time and what happened to so many of the kings. For reference, Henry III was murdered under the idea that he was a tyrant and it was a righteous act.
00:03:03.140Henry III of France, not our Henry III.
00:03:05.840indeed, Henry III of France. So why don't we talk about Louis XVI's death in the same way that we
00:03:12.980talk about Henry III's death, for example? In the same way, I was actually thinking further back
00:03:19.380and looking at someone like Philip the Fair, also known as the Iron King, and looking at many things
00:03:26.580that he was trying to implement, which are actually, as far as I'm concerned, very consistent
00:03:31.180with the aims of the French Revolution
00:03:32.700because the whole point was maximising the power of France
00:03:36.360and, by extension, the power of the French state.
00:04:01.180And why would I actually attest to the fact that if anyone who is a modern historian, and by that I'm going to be very boring and say anyone who sort of covers history after like the Protestant Reformation, 1517, up until today, why should you focus on the French Revolution?
00:04:18.160Why, if you're going to read about historians, historiography, the writing of history for the first time, do you focus on the French Revolution?
00:04:25.260Because the French Revolution almost encapsulates everything. I would almost say that the French Revolution represents a traumatic incident, not just in terms of European history and world history, but also for the sake of the historians writing about it, it represents a trauma for themselves.
00:04:45.200What do I mean by that? Well, unlike the other events which I was alluding to, the French Revolution creates a trauma in the sense that it is severing from a period that is now consigned morally to the ash heap, which is the whole idea of ancien regime, old regime.0.55
00:05:05.940It's something to be superseded and forgotten and buried and denigrated as this great period where we should all despise it because of all the wrongs and injustices and violations of rights and that sort of thing.0.69
00:05:18.740But then look at it from the other perspective. The trauma of the left, the trauma of the people looking at the French Revolution over the course of the 19th and even today and saying, we had hoped for so much more. We were anticipating a utopian realization of the perfectibility of man.
00:05:37.040And that's actually paraphrasing one of the great thinkers of the French Revolution and the prominent Gironde, Condorcet.
00:05:45.900The idea that, you know, or Rousseau's idea that man is free, but everywhere is found in chains.
00:05:51.260I'm sure you can sort of tighten that up later on.
00:05:53.280But all of this is to emphasize is that when Marxists were writing about the French Revolution in the 19th century,
00:06:00.420it was all looking at the French Revolution and realizing, OK, where do things go wrong?
00:06:05.180And how can we improve the situation? How can we tinker and learn lessons as active forces within the development of history itself? So it becomes a program for the future, as well as this great despoliation in history where there is a severance with things in the past.
00:06:22.760I mean, one of the great things you can draw to, say, for example, is the fact that aristocracy as a concept in Europe will never recover from the French Revolution.
00:06:31.680There will be fragmented aspects of restoration, but never to the extent that, say, for example, we saw at the beginning of the 18th century.
00:06:39.460And so if you look at that, and even the whole notion of time itself, with the French Revolution, time seems to speed up.
00:06:46.160because there is, as with the creation of a new calendar,
00:06:50.200setting year one, there is now the expectation of progress,
00:06:54.380the expectation of realising utopia on Earth.
00:06:57.420And so as long as these ideas are delayed,
00:06:59.880then it creates a moral and political crisis
00:07:13.580But you can imagine sort of a Marxist or a socialist thinking, oh, for a moment there, we were starting to worship reason, completely godless, literally worship reason.
00:09:05.760I mean, I've already alluded to Ancien Regime as one,
00:09:08.140but the Thermidorian reaction where Robespierre falls
00:09:11.640is another great moment of moral crisis
00:09:14.180as far as the left are concerned for the revolution.
00:09:17.260And then we have the whole notion of Bonapartism.
00:09:20.160The whole trajectory of Bonapartism and socialists
00:09:23.360looking at Bonapartism affected the creation of the Soviet Union.
00:09:26.580And it creates a huge amount of phobias regarding certain Bonaparte-esque traits in someone like Leon Trotsky, the idea that military men can subvert the revolution and cause, again, this great counter-revolutionary impetus to regress time to put things back, which, of course, things can only go forward.
00:09:45.080So, yes, just to reaffirm the point that if you're going to read the French Revolution, you have to take into account all these things.
00:09:52.040It's almost like being that schizophrenic who has the board with all of the threads connecting all of these things together.
00:10:03.920And I think if you're trying to approach this as a historian, you're almost left in the situation, okay, well, how can my analysis be even more complex, convoluted, schizophrenic and novel than the previous person I've encountered because so much has been said about it?
00:10:19.800But I believe, at least for this conversation, I have enough in terms of these schizophrenic threads, which can hopefully make this at least provide some new information to people who, like yourself, have encountered the subject many times, but perhaps have not approached it from a certain angle.
00:10:35.160One last slight aside, seeing as we've been talking about this, how the left view it.
00:10:41.460I'm not sure if I'm aware or properly got it clear in my mind.
00:10:44.440What do you think a mid-20th century Marxist-Leninist, even a Stalinist, what sort of the classic, their view of the French Revolution would be?
00:10:56.300Whether it was terrible or a great thing, I don't even know.0.60
00:11:05.840Would they look at the French Revolution, do you think, and be like, that was a great thing, we just missed.0.88
00:11:10.680Or it was terrible, they did everything wrong from start to finish.
00:11:13.320Well, it's interesting. I mean, you can look at Stalin, I think, as we are Anglos talking about the French Revolution. I'm actually going to cite another example, which is a Marxist English historian, Eric Hobsbawm. Because his main focus, of course, is that he's a bit of an apologist for Stalin. And he looks at the death count, which he actually underestimates in many of his historical accounts, like the age of revolutions, and basically says, well, you know, this was wartime.0.65
00:15:13.660We need to take the food sources outside of Paris and ensure that our constituency is well-fed.
00:15:19.960Yet at the same time, they're the ones massacring the monarchists of Bondi.
00:15:24.020Whereas the Girondins, who are all about due process and constitutional procedures, are completely outmanoeuvred and annihilated when it comes to the battle of pure politics. So in many ways, it actually sets the tenor of much of the left-right dichotomy going forward.
00:15:39.960Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. How often has that played out? But OK, so where should we start with the actual narrative of events then? Do you think, I mean, at the very least, you should talk about Louis XIV or XV or the causes of the thing, the thing that led us up to 1789?
00:16:03.360yes i think um it might be interesting actually to to try and talk about an archetype from that
00:16:11.740period which is the louis cans and louise's period have you i'm assuming people listening
00:16:19.440to this have um either read carlyle's french revolution or have read uh charles dickens
00:16:26.420tale of two cities yes in a tale of two cities one of the characters is um if i remember correctly
00:16:32.700It is the Marquess d'Evermont. And he is broadly symptomatic of the sort of privilege-defending aristocrat, which someone like Thomas Carlyle despised and would believe to be the righteous object of revolutionary hatred.
00:16:51.140because this is a man who is sort of, he's living out of time in the sense that he is this
00:16:58.200sort of great portrait masquerade or grotesque even of what a noble ought to be because France
00:17:06.360has sort of long gone past its period of shining knights in armour and winning great battles and
00:17:12.920victories in the late stage of the sort of the monarchy before the French Revolution.
00:17:18.540So what the nobility in France really represents by the time of the end of Louis XV and Louis XVI
00:17:24.640is an atrophied and you can almost say morally bankrupt institution in many respects.
00:17:31.920If not actually bankrupt, but we'll get on to that.
00:17:34.460But certainly morally bankrupt in that sense.
00:17:36.800And it is remarkable because it's sort of, you're almost given when it comes to, again,
00:17:44.580broad oversimplifications of this period.
00:19:08.960But by the time you get to the reign of Louis XV, so this is 50, 70 years later,
00:19:17.140the nobles have by and large won back their position.
00:19:21.520They have reasserted their dominance over that, what was basically assumed to be before,
00:19:27.900a hereditary system of administration in France.
00:19:32.860And as a result, it creates a severe crisis for the monarchy.
00:19:35.880And I would also say that Louis XVI, right from the outset, is actually responsible for intensifying this crisis for the absolute monarchy.
00:19:44.480Regardless of everything that I've been saying, one of the great achievements of Louis XV was the fact that his last chancellor, Lord Chancellor de Maupo, had more or less suppressed organizations which were broadly supportive of the aristocracy, the parliaments.
00:20:03.720The parliaments in France aren't what we understand really as modern parliaments, such as our own, especially the Westminster system, but they were more or less entrenched hereditary organisations that were there as the judicial authorities within certain subsets of the realm.
00:20:23.060Most powerful of these, of course, being the one from Paris. But of course, this metamorphosed into this idea of ensuring noble privileges, noble rights will be enshrined in this legal system.
00:20:35.800And then, of course, in terms of amplifying this whole system of a moral crisis and religious crisis for the system, many of these people are either atheists or Jansenist, which is a heretical sub-sector Catholicism, or sort of crypto-Hugonos or whatever.
00:20:54.040They're not buying into the whole basis of the monarchy, which is, you know, Catholic and sacrosanct.
00:20:59.680So the more you sort of try and unpack these elements
00:21:02.560sort of undergirding the absolute monarchy,