00:00:00.000but he must have known though do you think do you not think that the second you call an estates
00:00:24.740general the second the moment the third estate has got any sort of voice or power or influence
00:00:31.180or anything that again he's playing with fire then or do you think he just thought no i i'm
00:00:37.960still the king i'm still the puppet master essentially i can still move pieces around
00:00:42.360the chessboard and if worse comes to the worst i'll just sweep it all aside or something
00:00:47.520I think, again, it was probably one of the worst times to hold the estates general, because, you know, had he held an estates general in the first year of his reign, there would have been a huge amount of public sympathy towards him as the great new king.
00:01:03.000And, you know, having succeeded this man who was basically universally considered to be, you know, if not thoroughly divorced, then perhaps a tyrant.
00:01:13.080the issue in holding it in 1789 is the fact that it's not just the third estate because they're
00:01:22.060not the functionaries and the members of the third estate aren't actually really much affected
00:01:26.120by this but it's the situation in Paris the population in France had increased significantly
00:01:34.040in the previous sort of 20 years by 1789 the population of France was around 30 million
00:01:39.640which meant if I recall one in five Europeans was French so France relative to the rest of
00:01:48.920the European population was far more significant in 1789 and part of the reason actually why they
00:01:54.180would be able to assemble such large armies in the subsequent wars but the whole basis of French
00:02:01.820agriculture industrialization had not occurred so and also with the free trade policies there
00:02:08.500wasn't this great system of barriers preventing food from leaving the country.
00:02:17.200And so the price of bread was going up exponentially. And of course, in the country,
00:02:24.000the peasants could afford some sort of surplus, but in the cities, it meant that it was eating
00:02:29.360into such a substantial salary of the artisan classes in particular, that it causes this
00:02:36.640febrile situation within the capital so really you have people starving to death and food bread
00:02:43.960riots and things exactly and um in many cases uh uh you know bakery owners and sellers uh were
00:02:52.260accused of profiteering and hoarding and they were lynched in many cases so it seems to be again
00:03:01.000louis the 16th in hindsight could have looked at this and said you know all of these events
00:03:56.620Well, to state the obvious, it's not going to help matters, is it?
00:03:59.820But, I mean, I just wonder, I don't want to labour the point too much,
00:04:02.180But, I mean, do you think, if you had to put money on it, do you think Louis XVI in 1789 thought that this might well end with his deposition and murder, execution?
00:04:18.600I think the only element pointing to that is his knowledge of the history of Charles I.
00:04:26.200Right, because there are a fair few parallels.
00:04:27.560And the conclusion he drew from Charles I and, of course, his summoning of Parliament, Charles I's summoning of what turned out to be the long Parliament from 1740 onwards was a ruinous act because Parliament basically positioned itself as the judiciary over the favourites and over the main sponsors of the personal reign of the monarchy.
00:04:57.560So and it therefore intensified also its demands and was a variance with this foreign policy and things like that.
00:05:04.660But anyway, so there was that expectation that following a long period of personal rule that having the states general could have been a really sort of unstable element.
00:05:15.380So, yes, I think that is another point. And if you look at Russia, in Russia, there had been the Great Pugachev Rebellion of the serfs against Catherine the Great.
00:05:26.540In Austria, just over the border, there had been the Brabant rebellion against Joseph II, who were rebelling against his attempts to centralise and turn the administration into more a uniform German administration.
00:05:42.900Of course, the folk in Brabant were French and Flemish-speaking.
00:05:47.740So there was a series of revolutionary upheavals, you can say, in Europe, but also that's not to discount the revolutionary upheaval that we see in America.
00:05:56.540I mean, if you look at the situation in England, England was such a tempting sort of system to imitate for many French elites, because not only was it a system where broadly larger sections of the population, even though it was predominantly aristocratic, larger sections of the population had the right to participation.
00:06:18.980but it was also a system that had succeeded in war and had succeeded financially in a way that
00:06:25.900the French system simply had not so it was not seen it was seen as both morally conducive and
00:06:31.100politically conducive to the events of the time so you have an example in England and you have
00:06:36.680revolts in these you know quote-unquote absolutist states across Europe then of course I think it's
00:06:44.320fair to say, with the example of Charles I, that there was the possibility in the mind that these
00:06:50.600things could go terribly wrong. So I suppose one of the most famous, one of the most pivotal things
00:06:55.400is when the Third Estate felt, whether they really were or not, felt that they'd been locked out,
00:07:00.920physically locked out of the chamber, and they decided that the government rests with them,
00:07:08.360and wherever they are that's where the government is and they can go quite literally anywhere
00:07:15.300including a tennis court uh any building that's big enough any room that's big enough for them
00:07:20.420to actually physically get in um that's fine they'll do that and so we've got the sort of
00:07:24.740famous tennis court oath um that is um well would you say there's a famous david painting isn't
00:07:33.200there. Would you say that is the pivotal moment, if you had to put a pin in one moment, one
00:07:39.880afternoon, that was of the key importance, a lot of historians do, how does that sort
00:07:44.920of sit in your mind, the Tennis Court Oath?
00:07:48.160Just to sort of buttress that point, it was a royal procession, which was a constitutional
00:07:54.140procedure involving the king and his opening of the Estates General.
00:08:03.200And it was, I would say, politically interpreted as the third estate being shut out of the proceedings due to a whole etiquette of the...
00:08:15.200It may have been a comedy of errors, right?
00:08:17.660You can interpret it that way, but I think the feeling was strong enough that any slight excuse, pretext was used.
00:08:25.420And that is the case with the tennis court oaf.
00:08:28.520I mean, in terms of the painting, there's the famous Bailey, who later becomes the revolutionary mayor of Paris, holding up his hand, declaring the oath that we are now a constituent assembly and an assembly of the nation, a national assembly, and we will not disperse until we have a constitution.
00:08:47.400So I was alluding to the point earlier that holding the estates general was, you know, almost creating a new political system because this institution had so many expectations that weren't undergirded like the English political system by a system of precedence.
00:09:05.500And so you could almost say that the move from, first of all, increasing the number of representatives of the third estate, demanding that votes by orders be eliminated and there be a simple majority vote, and then the demands of a new constitution, it seems to be a logical escalation of the demands of the third estate.
00:09:26.100And of course, signing a constitution would more or less enshrine and create a sense of permanency for their situation and their right of participation in the French political system.
00:09:37.620So the king can't do that move of, I'm the puppet master, I just sweep the chess pieces off the board.
00:09:43.880He can't summon them, achieve his limited agenda, disperse them and not call them again for 200 years.
00:09:50.260So from their point of view, you can say it's an entirely rational decision.
00:09:54.080And also based on the political expectations and the grievances that I was alluding to earlier, again, you can say from their point of view, it was a completely morally justified position.
00:10:02.920But there was still the situation when the nobility, which are now galvanized in their opposition to, well, a large section of them at least, the higher nobility, could have supported the king in a self-coup, eliminated or imprisoned those representatives.
00:10:22.280and more or less had a massive crackdown,
00:10:26.080which, of course, isn't unprecedented.
00:10:28.100That thing happens routinely throughout European history.
00:10:30.740Because at that moment in time, in 1989,
00:10:34.020there's not necessarily a giant galvanised militant mob in Paris.
00:16:33.120Well, no, well into the French Third Republic, which so happens is the government, which ensures that all subsequent regimes in France will be republics in name at least.
00:16:44.320But you can understand looking at it in the sense that it is this great incendiary moment.
00:16:50.940And this, again, is why the celebration of the Bastille, if anything, undergirds my notion of why it's such a traumatic act in terms of European history.
00:17:02.140because it's celebrating the annihilation of the past in a sense
00:17:08.440because what happens after the stormy, the Bastille,
00:17:11.240on the one hand, the revolutionaries have seized the initiative.
00:17:15.120They have seized power in the capital.
00:17:17.600They're going to reorganize themselves as a national guard.
00:17:20.920They're going to wear revolutionary cockades.
00:17:23.160They are going to present their wishes and their demands to the king.
00:17:28.600And anyone that stands in their way, they'll rip them to bits physically.0.98
00:17:31.160And they were decapitated. We will inaugurate the era of Madame de Guillotine. And of course, the physical dismantling of the Bastille and turning it into the Bastille Monument. All of these things, again, is to establish that the entire preceding regime, the Ansem regime, was completely illegitimate and epitomized all of the vices and the worst elements of the, again, as far as someone like Rousseau would understand it, the perversion of the state of nature.0.98
00:18:00.360this government is antithetical to nature we need to reclaim the natural state of man and the natural0.83
00:18:06.600state of man of course is free and to live in the state where the national community is sovereign
00:18:13.640the national community of france has the power it simply needs to now dispossess the old tyrannical
00:18:21.100kings and of course now we need to remove them everywhere having kings or nobles anywhere is
00:18:26.300an infringement upon the basic principle that all men are created equal.0.96
00:18:31.820So when you look at the Bastille, and as you mentioned,
00:18:35.860then basically the lynching of the governor, the military governor there,
00:18:42.260are you surprised, maybe not surprised,
00:18:47.960how do you view that eruption of violence, basically?
00:18:54.360that is it surprising to you that that's how the Parisians behaved,
00:19:01.000not that it sort of comes out of nowhere?
00:19:03.300Because it wouldn't have come out of nowhere, would it?
00:19:08.180I don't know, when you, as a historian, with your historian's hat on