The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - June 14, 2026


PREVIEW： Epochs #267 ｜ The French Revolution - Part 1 with Apostolic Majesty

Topics
left-right dichotomy
Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Louis XIV Henry II Henry VIII Maximilian Robespierre Eric Hobsbawm Catherine D Stalin Apostolic Majesty Queen Elizabeth Charles Dickens Thomas Carlyle Ancien Regime Leon Trotsky Lézard Canot Montagnard Condorcet Rousseau Marxists Flouros Jacobin and 1 more
PREVIEW： Chronicles #51 ｜ Sharpe's Eagle w⧸ Beau & Samson： Part II Why Restore Britain Matters to Makerfield

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Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

161.78

Word count

3,481

Sentence count

167

Harmful content

Hate speech

13

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of Epochs, I am joined by the brilliant French historian and royal biographer, Anne-Anne de la Fontaine, to discuss the French Revolution and why it is so important to modern historians. We talk about the reasons why the French revolution is so significant and why we should all be paying attention to it.

Transcript

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Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to this episode of Epochs where I shall be taking a brief hiatus from
00:00:22.340 Henry VIII to talk about something completely different and I'm joined by a returning guest
00:00:27.980 a man who I'm proud to call my friend, one of the most intelligent people I've ever heard,
00:00:34.040 and certainly the most knowledgeable person I've ever met in real life.
00:00:36.920 Apostolic Majesty, how are you, sir?
00:00:38.580 Hi, Beau. That's very kind, and hopefully I can live up to that description today.
00:00:44.180 It's interesting, however, you mention Henry VIII,
00:00:47.200 because I think you can actually draw a lot of comparisons between Henry VIII
00:00:50.860 and what goes on with the French Revolution. 0.99
00:00:53.100 Maybe that's one of the few benefits of being an Anglo who was sort of
00:00:57.980 sidewalked into being your sort of resident French commentator so to speak. 0.60
00:01:03.500 So we're going to talk about the French Revolution today and the French history is actually one of
00:01:08.300 your many fortes. So I know for an absolute fact you know a vast amount more than me even though
00:01:16.780 I've been reading around it for half a lifetime. So as always a bit of a pleasure just to pick your
00:01:22.380 brain. So one of the first questions really is where to begin. It's one of these things start
00:01:26.380 talking about World War I, where to begin. Start talking about Napoleon, where to really begin.
00:01:30.540 So for the French Revolution, we were saying just off camera, you could start in the 12th
00:01:34.700 century if you wanted to. But obviously we've only got a couple of hours, an hour and a half,
00:01:39.020 a couple of hours to play with. So where would you like to really pick up the narrative?
00:01:44.620 I think perhaps we should start with a slightly different question, which is
00:01:48.620 why study the french revolution why is it so enduring and significant because
00:01:54.460 on that question you're mentioning about you know where to start where to pick up
00:01:59.640 what i was really thinking about before coming on the stream was okay how is the french revolution
00:02:06.660 different to certain events where you can draw comparisons to it so for example
00:02:12.140 i may i have a great interest in the period of french history called the wars of religion
00:02:18.600 It's something that English historians pay very, very little attention to
00:02:22.520 because it's around the same time as Queen Elizabeth,
00:02:24.740 so everything tends to be focused on Gloriana,
00:02:27.820 even though she has a wonderful counterpart in France
00:02:30.500 known as Catherine de' Medici.
00:02:33.140 Did a whole episode on Catherine de' Medici, by the way.
00:02:35.220 English people, armchair English historians like to think,
00:02:37.280 oh, the worlds of religion didn't affect us, we were above it all,
00:02:41.020 but that's super low resolution.
00:02:43.460 Well, thankfully, people know otherwise.
00:02:46.600 But 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.
00:03:03.140 Henry III of France, not our Henry III.
00:03:05.840 indeed, Henry III of France. So why don't we talk about Louis XVI's death in the same way that we
00:03:12.980 talk about Henry III's death, for example? In the same way, I was actually thinking further back
00:03:19.380 and looking at someone like Philip the Fair, also known as the Iron King, and looking at many things
00:03:26.580 that he was trying to implement, which are actually, as far as I'm concerned, very consistent
00:03:31.180 with the aims of the French Revolution
00:03:32.700 because the whole point was maximising the power of France
00:03:36.360 and, by extension, the power of the French state.
00:03:39.080 And when was he the 16th century?
00:03:41.120 Oh, even before.
00:03:42.220 We're talking 1285 to 1314.
00:03:44.940 Oh, OK, OK.
00:03:45.920 I'm thinking of a completely different...
00:03:46.780 So you can go much further than that.
00:03:47.900 And, of course, Napoleon would draw lots of rather spurious
00:03:51.260 and, in many ways, substantial connections
00:03:53.520 towards Charlemagne, who was even before then.
00:03:55.420 But the point I make, yeah,
00:03:57.380 why is everyone so focused on the French Revolution?
00:03:59.900 Why is it the event?
00:04:01.180 And 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?
00:04:18.160 Why, if you're going to read about historians, historiography, the writing of history for the first time, do you focus on the French Revolution?
00:04:25.260 Because 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.
00:04:45.200 What 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
00:05:05.940 It'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
00:05:18.740 But 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.
00:05:37.040 And that's actually paraphrasing one of the great thinkers of the French Revolution and the prominent Gironde, Condorcet.
00:05:45.900 The idea that, you know, or Rousseau's idea that man is free, but everywhere is found in chains.
00:05:51.260 I'm sure you can sort of tighten that up later on.
00:05:53.280 But all of this is to emphasize is that when Marxists were writing about the French Revolution in the 19th century,
00:06:00.420 it was all looking at the French Revolution and realizing, OK, where do things go wrong?
00:06:05.180 And 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.
00:06:22.760 I 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.
00:06:31.680 There will be fragmented aspects of restoration, but never to the extent that, say, for example, we saw at the beginning of the 18th century.
00:06:39.460 And so if you look at that, and even the whole notion of time itself, with the French Revolution, time seems to speed up.
00:06:46.160 because there is, as with the creation of a new calendar,
00:06:50.200 setting year one, there is now the expectation of progress,
00:06:54.380 the expectation of realising utopia on Earth.
00:06:57.420 And so as long as these ideas are delayed,
00:06:59.880 then it creates a moral and political crisis
00:07:02.680 for the system that it engenders.
00:07:04.880 It's interesting, actually.
00:07:05.900 I've really, although I have a couple of times,
00:07:07.540 really thought about the French Revolution,
00:07:09.380 really from the point of view of the left, the modern left,
00:07:12.660 how they must look at it.
00:07:13.580 But 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.
00:07:26.940 And we were close.
00:07:29.980 We were close to something we, the left, would have liked.
00:07:33.160 And it all fell apart catastrophically.
00:07:35.940 You know, how so?
00:07:36.820 What a shame.
00:07:37.240 But I absolutely think the French Revolution, again, everyone says this, and it should be studied.
00:07:44.940 It's one of those things, perhaps it's a bit trite, but if I was to plot on a graph of human history,
00:07:52.860 certainly modern human history, and by that I mean sort of, yeah, 15th century, 16th century onwards,
00:07:57.820 if there were certain spikes in that graph of things of seismic importance,
00:08:04.660 You know, like World War I would surely be a spike on that graph.
00:08:09.300 The French Revolution would surely be just a giant, giant spike.
00:08:13.420 And that in so many ways, we just simply live downstream of that. 0.79
00:08:17.620 We're still living in the ripples of World War I.
00:08:19.860 We're still living in the ripples of the French Revolution.
00:08:22.740 Do you think I'm overstating it?
00:08:25.020 No, that's sort of precisely, I think, the point of studying the French Revolution.
00:08:30.940 i mean i mentioned the catastrophe for aristocracy with the french revolution well of course world
00:08:37.840 war one is a catastrophe for monarchy everywhere it represents really the end of so much of european
00:08:44.460 history and that which hasn't been restored really in any capacity since then so you're
00:08:49.720 completely right in identifying these these great turning points in history and i mean just to focus
00:08:58.360 and the idea of how the left perceive it.
00:09:01.220 The whole left-wing view of the French Revolution
00:09:03.680 is baked into popular understanding.
00:09:05.760 I mean, I've already alluded to Ancien Regime as one,
00:09:08.140 but the Thermidorian reaction where Robespierre falls
00:09:11.640 is another great moment of moral crisis
00:09:14.180 as far as the left are concerned for the revolution.
00:09:17.260 And then we have the whole notion of Bonapartism.
00:09:20.160 The whole trajectory of Bonapartism and socialists
00:09:23.360 looking at Bonapartism affected the creation of the Soviet Union.
00:09:26.580 And 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.
00:09:45.080 So, 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.
00:09:52.040 It's almost like being that schizophrenic who has the board with all of the threads connecting all of these things together.
00:10:03.920 And 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?
00:10:19.800 But 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.
00:10:35.160 One last slight aside, seeing as we've been talking about this, how the left view it.
00:10:41.460 I'm not sure if I'm aware or properly got it clear in my mind.
00:10:44.440 What 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?
00:10:56.300 Whether it was terrible or a great thing, I don't even know. 0.60
00:11:02.140 Imagine a 1950s Stalinist, a Russian.
00:11:05.840 Would they look at the French Revolution, do you think, and be like, that was a great thing, we just missed. 0.88
00:11:10.680 Or it was terrible, they did everything wrong from start to finish.
00:11:13.320 Well, 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
00:11:41.720 Of course he does.
00:11:42.780 We have to talk about the preservation of the state.
00:11:44.960 We have to talk about the counter-revolutionary elements,
00:11:48.080 which is sailing France in all times.
00:11:50.400 And one point he makes, which is very interesting
00:11:52.900 because it's not, again, a point that many people will consider,
00:11:56.220 is that the period of the terror was the heroic period of the French Revolution.
00:12:02.220 From the point of view of something like Hobsbawm?
00:12:03.800 No, but there is a kernel of truth and an interesting fact in there,
00:12:08.160 which is the reason he ascribes it from a Marxist point of view
00:12:11.500 as being the moment of
00:12:13.760 terrorism in the French Revolution
00:12:15.520 is that in
00:12:17.520 1812, 1314
00:12:19.440 when Napoleon's empire is crumbling
00:12:21.800 he looks at the situation
00:12:23.720 of how the French Republic fared
00:12:25.660 in 1793, 1794
00:12:27.720 and says that despite
00:12:29.640 being
00:12:30.480 subject to the same situation
00:12:33.820 which was enemies
00:12:35.580 on all sides
00:12:36.500 Lézard Canot and Maximilien Robespierre
00:12:39.960 were able to
00:12:40.980 organize an entire mobilized nation of war which were able to turn great defeats at the beginning
00:12:48.140 of the wars when the monarchy was still there into the great victories like Valmy and Flouros
00:12:54.020 by 1794 and had a true revolutionary government been in power in 1812 and 1830 not this as far
00:13:02.100 as Marxists are concerned this bonapartist deviation then there would have been this
00:13:08.040 this great realisation.
00:13:09.960 Do you think that's true?
00:13:11.500 That sounds like nonsense to me.
00:13:14.580 It's nonsense in one very important respect.
00:13:18.160 France's manpower reserves have been completely and utterly exhausted
00:13:21.540 by that time. 1.00
00:13:23.440 Are you just going to send in civilians as human waves,
00:13:25.740 hundreds and hundreds of thousands of civilians?
00:13:27.580 Well, that was the logic of the first mass mobilisation to begin with.
00:13:31.000 Would that have worked in 1813?
00:13:33.920 I doubt it.
00:13:35.020 Again, you have to sort of look at it from a Marxist,
00:13:37.540 is that everyone has an active duty to participate
00:13:41.680 in revolutionary upheaval.
00:13:44.180 And so the whole lines between military and civilian are blurred.
00:13:48.360 And that, of course, was the logic of the French Revolution.
00:13:50.900 I mean, the other classical Marxist point of view
00:13:54.020 is to look at the French Revolution as being entirely,
00:13:57.480 it is the banner case of history being a progression
00:14:02.340 of economic systems.
00:14:04.420 So in this case, feudalism to capitalism,
00:14:06.300 and out-of-class struggle from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie.
00:14:11.500 I mean, the reason, again, we have Frenchified terms
00:14:14.960 in understanding this, the reason, say, for example,
00:14:18.160 we have the quote, you know, in terms of the two Bonapartes,
00:14:22.480 you know, history appears first as tragedy and farce.
00:14:25.040 Again, this all goes back to classical Marxist analysis.
00:14:28.480 Well, even the distinction of left and right comes out of...
00:14:31.500 The distinction between left and right comes out of the revolution itself.
00:14:35.540 It comes out of the aisles established for the National Convention.
00:14:40.340 To be on the left was to be a Jacobin, which was then part of the Montagnard or the mountain faction.
00:14:46.320 And to be on the right was to be a Girondin.
00:14:48.940 And broadly speaking, there are many elements that sort of carry over in terms of the left-right conception.
00:14:54.860 The left, by and large, is more extreme, but it's also more politically savvy in many ways.
00:14:59.960 It doesn't have the same sort of issue regarding trying to implement the theoretical precepts of the revolution.
00:15:07.140 It's like, okay, well, the revolutionary constituency in Paris is the sans-culottes.
00:15:12.300 We need to support them. 0.91
00:15:13.660 We need to take the food sources outside of Paris and ensure that our constituency is well-fed.
00:15:19.960 Yet at the same time, they're the ones massacring the monarchists of Bondi.
00:15:24.020 Whereas 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.
00:15:39.960 Yeah, 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?
00:16:03.360 yes i think um it might be interesting actually to to try and talk about an archetype from that
00:16:11.740 period which is the louis cans and louise's period have you i'm assuming people listening
00:16:19.440 to this have um either read carlyle's french revolution or have read uh charles dickens
00:16:26.420 tale of two cities yes in a tale of two cities one of the characters is um if i remember correctly
00:16:32.700 It 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.
00:16:51.140 because this is a man who is sort of, he's living out of time in the sense that he is this
00:16:58.200 sort of great portrait masquerade or grotesque even of what a noble ought to be because France
00:17:06.360 has sort of long gone past its period of shining knights in armour and winning great battles and
00:17:12.920 victories in the late stage of the sort of the monarchy before the French Revolution.
00:17:18.540 So what the nobility in France really represents by the time of the end of Louis XV and Louis XVI
00:17:24.640 is an atrophied and you can almost say morally bankrupt institution in many respects.
00:17:31.920 If not actually bankrupt, but we'll get on to that.
00:17:34.460 But certainly morally bankrupt in that sense.
00:17:36.800 And it is remarkable because it's sort of, you're almost given when it comes to, again,
00:17:44.580 broad oversimplifications of this period.
00:17:48.940 You are given several what I believe
00:17:50.620 to be contradictory narratives.
00:17:52.580 One is absolute monarchy.
00:17:54.920 The other is feudalism.
00:17:57.000 The other is, you know,
00:17:58.680 the coarse and sort of despicable state 0.96
00:18:01.940 of the French nobility. 0.95
00:18:03.560 All of these things are actually somewhat
00:18:05.620 mutually incompatible.
00:18:07.480 You can't have an entrenched and powerful nobility
00:18:12.680 and have an absolute monarchy at the same time.
00:18:15.900 One precludes the other.
00:18:17.820 When Louis XIV was ruling France,
00:18:21.480 one of the great achievements which made actually
00:18:23.640 the original absolute monarchy in the late 17th century
00:18:26.500 so versatile is that people could buy in
00:18:29.900 to the system of nobility.
00:18:31.880 You had the nobles of the sword
00:18:33.520 and you had the nobles of the robe.
00:18:35.620 You had a whole series of nobles who,
00:18:38.800 in a similar way to the only nobles
00:18:41.400 who are allowed in the House of Lords today
00:18:42.980 are the nobles who have bought that position.
00:18:46.760 Imagine that, but actually doing so
00:18:49.580 for the purpose of actually acquiring talent
00:18:51.800 and, of course, for the point of the monarchy
00:18:54.420 injecting much-needed cash sums into the system as well.
00:18:57.680 So you have rich lawyers and businessmen
00:19:01.120 and sailors and charters coming in
00:19:05.620 and supporting the system.
00:19:08.960 But by the time you get to the reign of Louis XV, so this is 50, 70 years later,
00:19:17.140 the nobles have by and large won back their position.
00:19:21.520 They have reasserted their dominance over that, what was basically assumed to be before,
00:19:27.900 a hereditary system of administration in France.
00:19:32.860 And as a result, it creates a severe crisis for the monarchy.
00:19:35.880 And I would also say that Louis XVI, right from the outset, is actually responsible for intensifying this crisis for the absolute monarchy.
00:19:44.480 Regardless 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.
00:20:03.720 The 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.
00:20:23.060 Most 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.
00:20:35.800 And 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.
00:20:54.040 They're not buying into the whole basis of the monarchy, which is, you know, Catholic and sacrosanct.
00:20:59.680 So the more you sort of try and unpack these elements
00:21:02.560 sort of undergirding the absolute monarchy,
00:21:04.600 it would seem again to fall apart.
00:21:06.240 But like I said, one of the great victories of Louis XV
00:21:08.600 was in suppressing their institution, 0.95
00:21:12.000 only for Louis XVI to come back
00:21:14.260 and in their moment of great largesse,
00:21:16.740 which is somewhat symptomatic of what kings were
00:21:19.060 at one time expected to do,
00:21:20.960 show clemency towards the victims perceived
00:21:23.480 of the previous regime, re-establish the Parlement.
00:21:26.320 and then of course
00:21:27.840 you have a whole
00:21:28.420 cascade of problems
00:21:29.460 going forward
00:21:30.040 regarding the ability