The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - June 21, 2026


PREVIEW： Epochs #268 ｜ The French Revolution： Part II with Apostolic Majesty

FREEMIUM： Chronicles #48 ｜ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner： Part I The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1445

Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

149.03

Word count

3,181

Sentence count

103

People

Also mentioned:
Charles I. Right Catherine D Louis XIV Marie Antoinette Alexander Soros III Lyon Gambetta Henri Catt Charles IX Charles III Joseph Wu Henry II Henry IV Rousseau Atelier Lenin Ansem

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, we take a look at the events leading up to the fall of the French monarchy in 1789, and the events that led to the eventual deposition of King Louis XVI and his removal from power by the Estates General.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 but he must have known though do you think do you not think that the second you call an estates
00:00:24.740 general the second the moment the third estate has got any sort of voice or power or influence
00:00:31.180 or anything that again he's playing with fire then or do you think he just thought no i i'm
00:00:37.960 still the king i'm still the puppet master essentially i can still move pieces around
00:00:42.360 the chessboard and if worse comes to the worst i'll just sweep it all aside or something
00:00:47.520 I 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.
00:01:03.000 And, you know, having succeeded this man who was basically universally considered to be, you know, if not thoroughly divorced, then perhaps a tyrant.
00:01:13.080 the issue in holding it in 1789 is the fact that it's not just the third estate because they're
00:01:22.060 not the functionaries and the members of the third estate aren't actually really much affected
00:01:26.120 by this but it's the situation in Paris the population in France had increased significantly
00:01:34.040 in the previous sort of 20 years by 1789 the population of France was around 30 million
00:01:39.640 which meant if I recall one in five Europeans was French so France relative to the rest of
00:01:48.920 the European population was far more significant in 1789 and part of the reason actually why they
00:01:54.180 would be able to assemble such large armies in the subsequent wars but the whole basis of French
00:02:01.820 agriculture industrialization had not occurred so and also with the free trade policies there
00:02:08.500 wasn't this great system of barriers preventing food from leaving the country.
00:02:17.200 And so the price of bread was going up exponentially. And of course, in the country,
00:02:24.000 the peasants could afford some sort of surplus, but in the cities, it meant that it was eating
00:02:29.360 into such a substantial salary of the artisan classes in particular, that it causes this
00:02:36.640 febrile situation within the capital so really you have people starving to death and food bread
00:02:43.960 riots and things exactly and um in many cases uh uh you know bakery owners and sellers uh were
00:02:52.260 accused of profiteering and hoarding and they were lynched in many cases so it seems to be again
00:03:01.000 louis the 16th in hindsight could have looked at this and said you know all of these events
00:03:05.160 are converging at this one point
00:03:08.440 at the summoning of the Estates General.
00:03:10.920 But I don't think, again, it's fair to predict.
00:03:12.700 There's another point, again, to consider with Louis XVI,
00:03:16.100 is that his eldest son had died
00:03:19.040 during the proceedings of the Estates General,
00:03:21.560 so he was in mourning.
00:03:22.400 I mean, it doesn't have quite the same implications,
00:03:26.360 unfortunately, it has in terms of how we sort of,
00:03:29.240 in modernity, view tragedy,
00:03:31.400 because infant mortality was very high in those days,
00:03:33.820 so it was expected to some extent that all your children
00:03:36.360 would not necessarily survive to adulthood.
00:03:39.960 But nonetheless.
00:03:40.700 But it was nevertheless a tragic incident.
00:03:42.940 Yeah, yeah.
00:03:44.040 I mean, yeah, again, that's no small thing.
00:03:46.500 The mind, the stability, the emotional stability of Louis XVI
00:03:51.760 all plays into it, right?
00:03:53.180 And losing your eldest son.
00:03:56.620 Well, to state the obvious, it's not going to help matters, is it?
00:03:59.820 But, I mean, I just wonder, I don't want to labour the point too much,
00:04:02.180 But, 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?
00:04:18.600 I think the only element pointing to that is his knowledge of the history of Charles I.
00:04:26.200 Right, because there are a fair few parallels.
00:04:27.560 And 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.
00:04:57.560 So and it therefore intensified also its demands and was a variance with this foreign policy and things like that.
00:05:04.660 But 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.
00:05:15.380 So, 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.
00:05:26.540 In 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.
00:05:42.900 Of course, the folk in Brabant were French and Flemish-speaking.
00:05:47.740 So 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.
00:05:56.540 I 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.
00:06:18.980 but it was also a system that had succeeded in war and had succeeded financially in a way that
00:06:25.900 the French system simply had not so it was not seen it was seen as both morally conducive and
00:06:31.100 politically conducive to the events of the time so you have an example in England and you have
00:06:36.680 revolts in these you know quote-unquote absolutist states across Europe then of course I think it's
00:06:44.320 fair to say, with the example of Charles I, that there was the possibility in the mind that these
00:06:50.600 things could go terribly wrong. So I suppose one of the most famous, one of the most pivotal things
00:06:55.400 is when the Third Estate felt, whether they really were or not, felt that they'd been locked out,
00:07:00.920 physically locked out of the chamber, and they decided that the government rests with them,
00:07:08.360 and wherever they are that's where the government is and they can go quite literally anywhere
00:07:15.300 including a tennis court uh any building that's big enough any room that's big enough for them
00:07:20.420 to actually physically get in um that's fine they'll do that and so we've got the sort of
00:07:24.740 famous tennis court oath um that is um well would you say there's a famous david painting isn't
00:07:33.200 there. Would you say that is the pivotal moment, if you had to put a pin in one moment, one
00:07:39.880 afternoon, that was of the key importance, a lot of historians do, how does that sort
00:07:44.920 of sit in your mind, the Tennis Court Oath?
00:07:48.160 Just to sort of buttress that point, it was a royal procession, which was a constitutional
00:07:54.140 procedure involving the king and his opening of the Estates General.
00:08:03.200 And it was, I would say, politically interpreted as the third estate being shut out of the proceedings due to a whole etiquette of the...
00:08:15.200 It may have been a comedy of errors, right?
00:08:17.660 You can interpret it that way, but I think the feeling was strong enough that any slight excuse, pretext was used.
00:08:25.420 And that is the case with the tennis court oaf.
00:08:28.520 I 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.
00:08:47.400 So 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.
00:09:05.500 And 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.
00:09:26.100 And 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.
00:09:37.620 So the king can't do that move of, I'm the puppet master, I just sweep the chess pieces off the board.
00:09:42.320 Indeed.
00:09:42.800 He can't do that.
00:09:43.880 He can't summon them, achieve his limited agenda, disperse them and not call them again for 200 years.
00:09:50.260 So from their point of view, you can say it's an entirely rational decision.
00:09:54.080 And 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.
00:10:02.920 But 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.
00:10:22.280 and more or less had a massive crackdown,
00:10:26.080 which, of course, isn't unprecedented.
00:10:28.100 That thing happens routinely throughout European history.
00:10:30.740 Because at that moment in time, in 1989,
00:10:34.020 there's not necessarily a giant galvanised militant mob in Paris.
00:10:38.800 But there is.
00:10:40.260 That's what changes it.
00:10:42.040 I mean, I go back to my situation regarding the French wars of religion
00:10:47.320 and I reference how superficially, at least,
00:10:51.340 you can draw many comparisons to it.
00:10:53.160 I reference the assassination of Henry III
00:10:55.140 under a similar mantra of death to tyrants.
00:10:59.000 But with the French Wars of Revolution,
00:11:01.860 there is a specific event
00:11:03.920 which is crystallized in the mind of the Parisians,
00:11:07.640 which is the Bartholomew's Day Massacre.
00:11:10.600 The Bartholomew's Day Massacre was this event
00:11:13.420 where you have the wedding of Henry of Navarre,
00:11:15.740 who later becomes Henri Catt,
00:11:17.780 Henry IV of France, and the first Bourbon king.
00:11:20.960 One of Catherine de' Medici's sons?
00:11:23.180 No, but Catherine de' Medici's son, Charles IX, who was then king.
00:11:28.640 Just to make this sort of very base,
00:11:31.120 it's kind of like he's kind of like Tommen from Game of Thrones
00:11:33.680 who jumps out of the window.
00:11:35.860 That's basically the inspiration.
00:11:38.160 But anyway, this event, there is an incident 0.77
00:11:40.540 which revolves around the murder of one of the highest-ranking Protestants.
00:11:45.100 And in response, Catherine de' Medici closes the gates of Paris
00:11:49.120 and basically incites a pogrom against the Protestants
00:11:53.960 and a massacre of the high-ranking members of the Huguenots at that wedding.
00:11:58.500 So it is one revolutionary Camille de Moulin
00:12:01.680 who whips up a huge amount of revolutionary fervor in the capital
00:12:08.120 based on this expectation of a second St. Bartholomew's Day massacre
00:12:14.500 following the inciting incident isn't actually the calling
00:12:19.020 of the estates, of the calling of the National Assembly and the Tenors Court of Hope. It's the
00:12:23.660 resignation of Necker. The resignation of Necker as Comptroller General of Finances is interpreted
00:12:29.840 by the mob as the king cleaning house in terms of his own administration. He's now going to rely
00:12:36.800 on figures like Marie Antoinette and the Comte d'Atoile, the more reactionary elements of the
00:12:41.760 court, to restore order and reverse the agenda that was outlined by the grievances in the Estates
00:12:48.100 general do you think their fears were legitimate or are they just being paranoid well it's very
00:12:52.500 difficult to say what do you think though well i i would say they were given the fact that we see
00:12:59.820 so many of the um the noble regiments actually defect to the revolutionary cause intimates
00:13:07.000 obviously that they were paranoid and obviously you have to count on the fact that with the
00:13:11.080 bartholomew's day massacre it was the populace who committed the greatest atrocities in that
00:13:17.200 instance. I mean, Paris, as funny as it is to consider in this context, Paris was once
00:13:24.640 considered a great Catholic bastion. So the idea that there is going to be this reactionary
00:13:29.940 counterpopulation in Paris who's going to be murdering the followers of Desmoulanges in this 0.98
00:13:35.260 period is frankly ridiculous. But the impetus behind this leads to this idea that we need to
00:13:41.900 arm ourselves you know when we talk about the marseillaise you know it was armed citoyen you
00:13:47.060 know um to arm citizens to arms build barricades build you know to the barriers have rivers of
00:13:53.060 blood if we need them you know we have we have the guns now we need the gunpowder you know to
00:13:57.160 the bastille um the bastille funny enough was actually um demarcated to be demolished because
00:14:05.480 it no longer served a you know a viable sort of military function it was this um uh completely
00:14:11.400 in Atelier's sort of ancient medieval fortification.
00:14:14.620 It was essentially empty, wasn't it?
00:14:15.920 There was like five people in it or something
00:14:17.120 when they got in there, wasn't it?
00:14:17.920 There were seven people.
00:14:18.380 Seven, seven, sorry.
00:14:19.380 Seven, yeah.
00:14:20.240 So it wasn't the king's dungeon
00:14:23.000 filled with thousands of hard-put-upon...
00:14:25.580 Well, that was obviously,
00:14:26.820 it was very conducive to revolutionary propaganda
00:14:29.120 to associate that,
00:14:30.280 which also, I mean,
00:14:31.360 it's sort of wonderfully assumed also
00:14:33.400 in The Tale of the Two Cities
00:14:35.300 that to have been a prisoner in the Bastille
00:14:38.920 is kind of like when we were talking about Lenin's background,
00:14:45.240 how to have been an assassin, how to get Alexander III
00:14:48.300 as this great revolutionary badge of honour,
00:14:50.700 to have been one of the victims, one of the martyrs of the Bastille.
00:14:54.500 But of course, it's all sort of post-hoc and romantic in that sense.
00:14:59.600 But nevertheless, what I've always found so, I would say, horrific
00:15:04.860 about the commemoration of the stormy of the Bastille
00:15:08.140 is that it is, you know, in the few days following the Tennis Cordeauve,
00:15:13.260 the fact that it's celebrated is the most incendiary element of, you can say, anti-ruralism,
00:15:19.360 anti-restorationism, and that it's the galvanizing and mobilization of the French population to
00:15:25.380 commit violence against the pre-established order, which they do in terms of the beheading
00:15:30.880 and the murder of the governor of the Bastille. If you look at the whole veneration of the Bastille,
00:15:37.660 It actually takes place much later in French history.
00:15:41.460 Now, if you look at someone like Napoleon,
00:15:44.120 Napoleon wasn't really that interested.
00:15:45.560 Did they not particularly celebrate it in the 90s, 1790s?
00:15:50.320 Napoleon wasn't really.
00:15:51.380 It was celebrated immediately after,
00:15:53.540 especially with the fate of Federation in 1790.
00:15:57.420 But when it comes to the time of Napoleon,
00:15:59.500 Napoleon is wanting to de-emphasize the more, again,
00:16:04.380 sans-culottes, artisanal lower middle class elements
00:16:09.140 of the French Revolution and that impulse
00:16:10.920 towards spontaneous risings.
00:16:13.780 He's a man of order.
00:16:14.800 He doesn't want that sort of thing.
00:16:16.720 So when it comes back, it comes back in 1879
00:16:20.960 with Lyon Gambetta.
00:16:23.980 So even after the Franco-Prussian War?
00:16:26.400 After the Franco-Prussian War and well into it.
00:16:28.540 So it's a reimagination of it really, isn't it?
00:16:32.060 Sorry, go on.
00:16:33.120 Well, 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.
00:16:44.320 But you can understand looking at it in the sense that it is this great incendiary moment.
00:16:50.940 And 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.
00:17:02.140 because it's celebrating the annihilation of the past in a sense
00:17:08.440 because what happens after the stormy, the Bastille,
00:17:11.240 on the one hand, the revolutionaries have seized the initiative.
00:17:15.120 They have seized power in the capital.
00:17:17.600 They're going to reorganize themselves as a national guard.
00:17:20.920 They're going to wear revolutionary cockades.
00:17:23.160 They are going to present their wishes and their demands to the king.
00:17:28.600 And anyone that stands in their way, they'll rip them to bits physically. 0.98
00:17:31.160 And 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
00:18:00.360 this government is antithetical to nature we need to reclaim the natural state of man and the natural 0.83
00:18:06.600 state of man of course is free and to live in the state where the national community is sovereign
00:18:13.640 the national community of france has the power it simply needs to now dispossess the old tyrannical
00:18:21.100 kings and of course now we need to remove them everywhere having kings or nobles anywhere is
00:18:26.300 an infringement upon the basic principle that all men are created equal. 0.96
00:18:31.820 So when you look at the Bastille, and as you mentioned,
00:18:35.860 then basically the lynching of the governor, the military governor there,
00:18:42.260 are you surprised, maybe not surprised,
00:18:47.960 how do you view that eruption of violence, basically?
00:18:54.360 that is it surprising to you that that's how the Parisians behaved,
00:19:01.000 not that it sort of comes out of nowhere?
00:19:03.300 Because it wouldn't have come out of nowhere, would it?
00:19:08.180 I don't know, when you, as a historian, with your historian's hat on
00:19:11.580 and you see that event...
00:19:15.360 Had the governor surrendered instantly to the mob,
00:19:21.060 you know, he would obviously have been very derelict in his duty,
00:19:23.960 but I think he would have survived in that incident,
00:19:27.340 is the fact that he prevaricated, he met a deputation, and then...
00:19:32.940 Did he fire on them?
00:19:34.280 There was an incident, if I remember correctly.
00:19:35.920 Did he fire on them once? He killed a few of them, didn't he?
00:19:37.700 He actually removed the cannons from the crinels of the fortification
00:19:45.620 as a gesture of goodwill, and it was interpreted, I believe,
00:19:50.240 by the mob, I could be wrong, that they were reloading the cannons
00:19:53.460 in order to fire them.
00:19:55.660 Did he actually even fire even one thing at them?
00:19:59.060 There were, if I recall correctly, when there was the actual storming,
00:20:05.200 I believe the soldiers ultimately opened fire,
00:20:09.160 but it would have been self-defence at that point.
00:20:11.640 So effectively it was a comedy of errors and a very angry
00:20:15.120 and riled up hungry population who again believed from their point of view
00:20:20.740 that they were fighting for their right to defend themselves
00:20:24.740 against a potential, you know, reactionary counterinsurgency.
00:20:31.380 So again, from that point of view
00:20:33.240 and from the point of view of people who defend the revolution,
00:20:35.940 their action was completely justified.
00:20:37.880 Not only justified, it should be celebrated
00:20:40.160 by one of the most ostentatious military parades
00:20:42.820 every 14th of July.
00:20:50.740 Thank you.