1 00:00:02,040 --> 00:00:08,400 Thank you very much for coming out this evening. It's a great honour to be giving their best men lecture. 2 00:00:08,400 --> 00:00:16,500 I'm very appreciative of that, but it's terrible, obviously, to come here and talk about terror in Paris in and week, 3 00:00:16,500 --> 00:00:20,400 which has seen terror on the streets and the cafes and restaurants of the city. 4 00:00:20,400 --> 00:00:30,060 So I would just like to start us in the sort of mood that Nicholas evoked by stating the obvious, especially in this company, 5 00:00:30,060 --> 00:00:36,180 that we all think with fondness and concern for our friends and colleagues and indeed the citizens of Paris. 6 00:00:36,180 --> 00:00:45,330 Second, that the terror of the French Revolution is a very different kind of phenomenon to the to what Parisians have just experienced. 7 00:00:45,330 --> 00:00:53,490 But further that in writing this paper, the resilience of Parisians in this and other times has been firmly in my thoughts as I think towards the end, 8 00:00:53,490 --> 00:00:56,160 perhaps you'll say, but I'll be focussing. 9 00:00:56,160 --> 00:01:06,840 Of course not on 2015, but on the seventeen nineties, which was Charles Dickens reminds us the best of times and the worst of times. 10 00:01:06,840 --> 00:01:13,590 In a tale of two cities, Dickens had in his sights the whole experience of the French Revolution after 1789. 11 00:01:13,590 --> 00:01:21,150 But invariably we tend to see the quotation targeted at the city of Paris during the revolutionary terror of 1793, 12 00:01:21,150 --> 00:01:25,140 in which his gripping novel climaxes for Dickens. 13 00:01:25,140 --> 00:01:32,460 The perceived horrors of the terror were so all encompassing that the best of times epithet seems to attach only 14 00:01:32,460 --> 00:01:40,080 to the possibility for self-sacrifice or martyrdom of a quintessentially stiff upper lip English Sydney cartoon. 15 00:01:40,080 --> 00:01:48,720 Rather, that is to anything intrinsically good, let alone superlatively good about the revolution and the terror in themselves. 16 00:01:48,720 --> 00:01:57,090 What historians call the terror was such a period of emergency government in France 1793 to 1794 France's National Assembly. 17 00:01:57,090 --> 00:02:02,670 The convention, elected in 1792 by Universal Male Suffrage Place, 18 00:02:02,670 --> 00:02:10,200 the executive power in the hands of a dozen of their colleagues who operated as the Committee of Public Safety and with its sister committee, 19 00:02:10,200 --> 00:02:15,990 the Committee of General Security, which attended largely to policing matters and internal security. 20 00:02:15,990 --> 00:02:19,710 It comprised what was called the revolutionary government. 21 00:02:19,710 --> 00:02:27,270 The Committee of Public Safety's role was to run the war effort, essentially, and France was at war with almost every European state. 22 00:02:27,270 --> 00:02:33,180 It also sought to crush internal dissent through a self-conscious policy of deterrence terror. 23 00:02:33,180 --> 00:02:37,240 In fact, for many, the period of the terror would come to be embodied. 24 00:02:37,240 --> 00:02:43,800 Moreover, in in the person of Maximilian Robespierre, nicknamed as you'll know, the incorruptible, 25 00:02:43,800 --> 00:02:49,680 certainly the most conspicuous of the 12 deputies who made up the Committee of Public Safety. 26 00:02:49,680 --> 00:02:58,500 We hardly need Charles Dickens to remind us that the French Revolution has often maybe even invariably had a bad press in British culture. 27 00:02:58,500 --> 00:03:04,440 Even before it happened, and we think before the terror happened, we think here of these short term predictions and long term, 28 00:03:04,440 --> 00:03:10,440 massive long term influence of Edmund Burke reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790. 29 00:03:10,440 --> 00:03:17,250 The revolution was widely viewed in Anglo-American culture as substantive, with violence and authoritarian rule. 30 00:03:17,250 --> 00:03:22,530 1793 to fall was thus 1789 writ larger and deadlier. 31 00:03:22,530 --> 00:03:28,350 The drift into European warfare in 1792 to three stimulated, state sponsored, 32 00:03:28,350 --> 00:03:35,340 ideologically driven repression at this faced violence seemed to find embodiment in the person of hope, Pierre. 33 00:03:35,340 --> 00:03:43,530 It was to eclipse even Napoleon, I think, as an as 19th century, Europe's most hated historical figure. 34 00:03:43,530 --> 00:03:48,510 Yet there are always been those indubitably far more numerous in France than in England or the United States and North 35 00:03:48,510 --> 00:03:54,870 America who've praised the work of revolutionary government and justified the terror and Robespierre role within it. 36 00:03:54,870 --> 00:03:59,760 Revolutionary government held France together as a national territorial unit at a time of 37 00:03:59,760 --> 00:04:05,580 extraordinary stress for France to have fallen back into the hands of covetous great powers. 38 00:04:05,580 --> 00:04:09,840 Vengeful emigre, aristocrats and I learnt nothing. Forgotten nothing. 39 00:04:09,840 --> 00:04:15,330 But and dynasty would have ramped up considerably the already high levels of bloodshed. 40 00:04:15,330 --> 00:04:25,650 Revolutionary government also allowed a historic Republican continuity to emerge for the human rights that had been outlined so spectacularly in 1789. 41 00:04:25,650 --> 00:04:31,740 In addition, some of the values which the revolutionary government sought to enforce equal rights democratic elections, 42 00:04:31,740 --> 00:04:39,150 egalitarian social measures, imaginative programmes of poor relief still strike a chord in our own society. 43 00:04:39,150 --> 00:04:41,850 Or at least it would be nice to think they did. 44 00:04:41,850 --> 00:04:48,720 Thus, while in the context of the negative fetishisation of terror, respect and admiration for Robespierre, 45 00:04:48,720 --> 00:04:56,310 for example, has been meagre in the extreme in the Anglo-American Academy and more widely, its culture. 46 00:04:56,310 --> 00:05:01,400 The notion of Robespierre as incarnation of an ideal of a virtuous, just egalitarian. 47 00:05:01,400 --> 00:05:06,860 Society has fared rather better in France, though, far from universally, because, of course, 48 00:05:06,860 --> 00:05:14,090 always think of how few streets and monuments in France are dedicated to the incorruptible one. 49 00:05:14,090 --> 00:05:20,270 Politicians and historians on the left in France, sometimes usually a little self dramatising. 50 00:05:20,270 --> 00:05:23,420 They, I think, call themselves hobbies based. 51 00:05:23,420 --> 00:05:31,340 It is simply impossible to imagine any historian standing up in public in England or the United States and proclaiming themselves the Robespierre 52 00:05:31,340 --> 00:05:41,120 est without one imagines drawing the speedy attention of the mental health services or being led quietly away by Homeland Security or whatever. 53 00:05:41,120 --> 00:05:45,800 Robespierre and the terror that seem to mark a spot of sheer incommensurate ability between 54 00:05:45,800 --> 00:05:51,360 the cultures of the French left and the values of Anglo-American conservatism and liberalism. 55 00:05:51,360 --> 00:05:57,260 And I think this has proved strikingly the case after World War Two in the Cold War period. 56 00:05:57,260 --> 00:06:05,090 The Israeli scholar Jacob Tillmans influential book The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, published in the 1950s, 57 00:06:05,090 --> 00:06:14,510 argued that 20th century populist dictatorships could trace their ideological origins back to Robespierre and the terror in the convention. 58 00:06:14,510 --> 00:06:19,220 That Robespierre in turn derived his ideas from what Talman saw as the intolerant general, 59 00:06:19,220 --> 00:06:23,720 well, theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French revolutionary terror, 60 00:06:23,720 --> 00:06:33,320 which thus approvato totalitarian regime and early instantiation of a political tendency to be brought to grim maturation in the 20th century. 61 00:06:33,320 --> 00:06:43,070 In this Cold War, black legend hating Robespierre came to stand proxy for hating not only Lenin and Stalin, but also Hitler and Mussolini. 62 00:06:43,070 --> 00:06:48,800 Indeed, thanks, I think, partly to the invariably bloodcurdling analysis of psycho biographies. 63 00:06:48,800 --> 00:06:54,170 It was extended to any dictator or damaged personality that one could rustle up. 64 00:06:54,170 --> 00:07:00,530 It certainly seems the case that any historical figure who like Robespierre invites comparison not only with all of the above, 65 00:07:00,530 --> 00:07:09,260 but also more recently with Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Cambodia's Pol Pot present at the initiative of Iran. 66 00:07:09,260 --> 00:07:12,320 Julian Assange and most recently, Jeremy Corbyn. 67 00:07:12,320 --> 00:07:19,700 It is unlikely to have been all good, shall we say, but even so, that demonising overkill almost invites scepticism. 68 00:07:19,700 --> 00:07:25,070 Could anyone really be that bad? So with the Cold War now over, that is true. 69 00:07:25,070 --> 00:07:29,630 There are some signs of an ideological thaw in this area of clash of cultures. 70 00:07:29,630 --> 00:07:37,490 Yet popular culture still place, I think very much the old Cold War tunes, the old Cold War stereotypes, especially outside France. 71 00:07:37,490 --> 00:07:45,470 And many of you remember last year the French left in the National Assembly, reacted angrily to the contents of the video game Assassin's Creed, 72 00:07:45,470 --> 00:07:48,290 which was set in Paris under the terror and in which, sure enough, 73 00:07:48,290 --> 00:07:55,610 Robespierre is in very emphatically portrayed as a 20th century style, dictator [INAUDIBLE] genocidal maniac. 74 00:07:55,610 --> 00:08:02,210 Moreover, at a much loftier level, Jonathan Israel's recently published Revolutionary Ideas An Intellectual History of 75 00:08:02,210 --> 00:08:07,400 the French Revolution shows that the old stereotypes are still very much in place. 76 00:08:07,400 --> 00:08:14,510 Israel diagnosis Robespierre in particular, as characterised by quote, megalomania, paranoia and vindictiveness. 77 00:08:14,510 --> 00:08:22,130 He was, Israel asserts, quote a self than confessed dictator and are going to come back to that an authoritarian populist, 78 00:08:22,130 --> 00:08:26,600 a proto fascist who seised personal power by engineering a putsch. 79 00:08:26,600 --> 00:08:32,030 His words again cheer on the enemies in the convention and then going on to rule with a rod of iron. 80 00:08:32,030 --> 00:08:39,320 Clearly, the prototype totalitarian black legend is alive and well and walking, and it walks amongst us. 81 00:08:39,320 --> 00:08:45,410 So my aim this evening is to reconsider this persistent and enduring proto totalitarian 82 00:08:45,410 --> 00:08:50,480 interpretation of the revolution and the terror and its coverage of Robespierre. 83 00:08:50,480 --> 00:08:53,900 But proving Robespierre wasn't a prior incarnation of Hitler, 84 00:08:53,900 --> 00:09:01,880 Mussolini then in Stalin or even Tony Blair isn't actually terribly difficult and more challenging and more complicated, 85 00:09:01,880 --> 00:09:08,780 I think, is to understand just what the terror was and was not and what Rumsfeld's role was and what's not within it. 86 00:09:08,780 --> 00:09:16,490 And today, what I'm going to try to do is to explore these questions while focussing very much on the city of Paris. 87 00:09:16,490 --> 00:09:24,650 Paris was the cockpit of terror, even if terror reached far beyond the walls of the nation's capital in terms of body counts. 88 00:09:24,650 --> 00:09:31,310 For example, the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris accounted for less than 3000 deaths in the city. 89 00:09:31,310 --> 00:09:33,230 And this is a new country, an amount, obviously, 90 00:09:33,230 --> 00:09:39,350 when set up against the great multimillion hecould tombs of which 20th century dictators have managed. 91 00:09:39,350 --> 00:09:48,710 But the figure was also dwarfed by the tens of thousands who lost their lives in violent and repressive civil war zones in 1793 to four. 92 00:09:48,710 --> 00:09:55,100 But though relatively few in number, those Parisian executions, I think, had cultural visibility. 93 00:09:55,100 --> 00:10:00,690 I got into the newspapers. They have influenced the historiography. Paris was also. 94 00:10:00,690 --> 00:10:05,700 Hardly needs saying which where national politics were conducted by the National Convention sat, 95 00:10:05,700 --> 00:10:10,770 where the Committee of Public Safety was based here to the songcraft movement was located, 96 00:10:10,770 --> 00:10:20,670 that movement of radical artisans, clerks and shopkeepers from 1890 1789 had consistently pushed revolutionary culture to the left, 97 00:10:20,670 --> 00:10:24,780 and Paris was ultimately where terror was undone, 98 00:10:24,780 --> 00:10:32,160 a process that really started on 27th of July 1790 for the 9th of Thermidor Year two in the revolutionary 99 00:10:32,160 --> 00:10:38,580 calendar with the overthrow and then the execution the following day of Maximilian Robespierre, 100 00:10:38,580 --> 00:10:46,110 which is where I'll begin with the fall of Robespierre and the overthrow of what a dictator. 101 00:10:46,110 --> 00:10:48,210 This was certainly the received wisdom. 102 00:10:48,210 --> 00:10:57,840 Even before, on the 28th of July, Roche-Posay head had hit the executioners basket, a rumour that once his dictatorship was established, 103 00:10:57,840 --> 00:11:04,830 Robespierre was planning to make himself king rippled through the sections of Paris even on the night of 9th and 10th of Thermidor, 104 00:11:04,830 --> 00:11:11,220 before being further embroidered in following weeks in the light of Robespierre strong anti-monarchist. 105 00:11:11,220 --> 00:11:22,350 This seemed to rank hypocrisy on his part. Every historic precedent was henceforward mine for damning dictator like dictatorships comparisons. 106 00:11:22,350 --> 00:11:29,280 Robespierre was an inhuman and cruel conspirator, a catalin, a Caesar, a nero, a Cromwell. 107 00:11:29,280 --> 00:11:35,250 Another more colourful way of underlining his inhumanity and bestiality was to compare him to an animal. 108 00:11:35,250 --> 00:11:43,110 Thus, he was a vampire, a chameleon, a harpy, but especially in fact a cat, especially, and most of all, a tiger. 109 00:11:43,110 --> 00:11:47,880 Historians even today talk of rugby as feline or tigress character, 110 00:11:47,880 --> 00:11:53,280 and they don't realise they think they're borrowing more than they realise from posh thermidor and propaganda. 111 00:11:53,280 --> 00:12:01,290 No one, for example, thought of Robespierre as a tiger before he was executed or a cat, for that matter, before he was executed. 112 00:12:01,290 --> 00:12:07,890 Those who would overthrown him after the night, the thermidor thought of very little else. 113 00:12:07,890 --> 00:12:13,320 As this example suggests, historians of Robespierre on the terror are condemned to view the man and away his 114 00:12:13,320 --> 00:12:19,980 intentions against a huge barrage of ex post facto denigrated propaganda almost at once. 115 00:12:19,980 --> 00:12:27,600 Moreover, in the frenzied circumstances of his overthrow, a kind of blame game got underway that had little regard for truth. 116 00:12:27,600 --> 00:12:35,760 When fattier, one of the members of the Committee of General Security, many years later owned up to purely inventing the story. 117 00:12:35,760 --> 00:12:44,400 The rumour that Robespierre planned to be king. Whaddya stated quote the danger of losing one's head had made one imaginative after the 118 00:12:44,400 --> 00:12:49,020 night of thermidor personal responsibility for all radical legislation of the convention. 119 00:12:49,020 --> 00:12:56,280 All the unpopular and most overtly terroristic measures could be dumped at his door by colleagues who had shared power with him. 120 00:12:56,280 --> 00:13:01,260 Robespierre was the ultimate scapegoat, Robespierre once claimed. 121 00:13:01,260 --> 00:13:03,840 That is one of the 12 members of the Committee of Public Safety. 122 00:13:03,840 --> 00:13:10,950 He enjoyed only one twelfth of its power and authority, and I think this is more than a little disingenuous. 123 00:13:10,950 --> 00:13:18,240 But he did. He made many striking speeches and the convention, which sought to theorise that the the use of the terror in particular. 124 00:13:18,240 --> 00:13:25,200 But so did some of his colleagues. It's certainly the case, moreover, that decisions on the committee were collective and collegial. 125 00:13:25,200 --> 00:13:31,680 In fact, Rosaria Signature was found on a very small proportion of the decrease of the Committee of Public Safety. 126 00:13:31,680 --> 00:13:36,330 Deborah to Bill Vahan and Barry are three of the most important figures who overthrow him. 127 00:13:36,330 --> 00:13:37,350 On the day of night. 128 00:13:37,350 --> 00:13:45,810 The Thermidor were the committee's workhorses really and signed far more than he the last five or six weeks before the 9th of Thermidor. 129 00:13:45,810 --> 00:13:50,220 So a huge intensification in the activity of the Revolutionary Tribunal. 130 00:13:50,220 --> 00:13:57,480 More than half of the tribunal's capital sentences were meted out in the two months of June and July alone. 131 00:13:57,480 --> 00:14:01,200 Yet for that period of the great terror, as historian sometimes call it, 132 00:14:01,200 --> 00:14:08,190 Robespierre had in fact absented himself entirely from both the convention and the Committee of Public Safety. 133 00:14:08,190 --> 00:14:13,530 This didn't stop the post thermidor accusations of him dictatorial presiding over the 134 00:14:13,530 --> 00:14:21,150 great terror the thermidor and made great play of Robespierre as dictatorial plotting. 135 00:14:21,150 --> 00:14:26,010 Yet the circumstances up to the 8th and 9th of thermidor as far as one can restructure 136 00:14:26,010 --> 00:14:31,260 reconstruct them showed precious little sign of organisation of any sort. 137 00:14:31,260 --> 00:14:34,740 There's no evidence of closet mobilisation for a coup d'etat. 138 00:14:34,740 --> 00:14:39,720 In the days leading up to his fall, Robespierre didn't really have a party Robespierre East, 139 00:14:39,720 --> 00:14:44,880 although that's a term it's used a [INAUDIBLE] of a lot after the thermidor was rarely, if ever, used before, 140 00:14:44,880 --> 00:14:50,010 then the final speech when he came back to the convention on the 8th of Thermidor, 141 00:14:50,010 --> 00:14:54,930 which he repeated then in the evening at the Jacobin club in the same evening, 142 00:14:54,930 --> 00:15:00,260 contained a lost lot of bluster, much of it aimed over the heads of the fellow deputies. 143 00:15:00,260 --> 00:15:06,550 Towards Parisian chocolate, but it wasn't followed by any move to mobilise supporters on the streets. 144 00:15:06,550 --> 00:15:10,570 He didn't establish contact with a National Guard or with army commanders. 145 00:15:10,570 --> 00:15:16,420 And on the morning of night, the thermidor, he calmly breakfast in his lodgings as usual before walking, 146 00:15:16,420 --> 00:15:24,130 unperturbed to the convention with his friends were without any prominent true sign of anything untoward happening at all. 147 00:15:24,130 --> 00:15:28,210 Robespierre really was plotting a Jonathan Ezra style putsch. 148 00:15:28,210 --> 00:15:33,820 He left no convincing signs of this fact in the slightest. 149 00:15:33,820 --> 00:15:39,610 The great set set piece speeches of Robespierre and the convention in early 94 are sometimes taken, 150 00:15:39,610 --> 00:15:46,150 particularly in 94 particularly taken, sometimes taken to be the considered credo of Robespierre and his followers. 151 00:15:46,150 --> 00:15:53,360 I think this underestimates the extent to which they were less ideological expositions than performative events distillation, 152 00:15:53,360 --> 00:16:01,570 someone would say almost of wishful thinking and to rally the troops and to paper over cracks amongst Republicans at a very difficult time. 153 00:16:01,570 --> 00:16:06,340 Indeed, in some ways, they were a sign of weakness than a statement of overweening strength. 154 00:16:06,340 --> 00:16:09,820 They underline the extent to which politics during the terror in the capital 155 00:16:09,820 --> 00:16:13,960 and in the country at large was characterised less by a sort of homogeneous, 156 00:16:13,960 --> 00:16:21,940 monolithic, top-down, robespierre driven ideology of terror that is always imagined in the proto totalitarian narrative, 157 00:16:21,940 --> 00:16:30,610 but rather by a somewhat and sometimes bewilderingly assorted set of initiatives and strategies going in very different directions. 158 00:16:30,610 --> 00:16:36,940 Although the use of fear of terror then as a weapon of government was a constant 159 00:16:36,940 --> 00:16:42,400 leitmotif throughout 1793 to for the policies that undermined underpinned, 160 00:16:42,400 --> 00:16:45,070 that fear could be very various. 161 00:16:45,070 --> 00:16:53,290 Not all of Robespierre colleagues at all were fully on board with the Cult of the Supreme Being, which he inaugurated in June 1794, for example. 162 00:16:53,290 --> 00:16:59,980 Then again, the existence of competing programmes grounded but all grounded in fear and violence may be seen in the fact that 163 00:16:59,980 --> 00:17:07,330 Robespierre openly expressed antagonism towards at least two competing versions of what revolutionary government was. 164 00:17:07,330 --> 00:17:13,990 The first of these was the idea that the people of Paris themselves should be allowed to act as a revolutionary vanguard. 165 00:17:13,990 --> 00:17:20,950 Though his speeches, Robespierre speeches endlessly hyperbolically invoked the people and indeed were addressed to them, 166 00:17:20,950 --> 00:17:23,920 Robespierre, like many of his fellow deputies in the convention, 167 00:17:23,920 --> 00:17:32,920 had a deep seated fear of popular violence getting out of hand as it had, of course, in the September press prison massacres of 1792. 168 00:17:32,920 --> 00:17:41,710 He therefore distrusted champions of the people on the left, stimulating popular discontent and preaching autonomous song Cool Art Action. 169 00:17:41,710 --> 00:17:43,780 Secondly, Hospira had no truck at all, 170 00:17:43,780 --> 00:17:53,110 with deputies on mission in the provinces in 1793 to for who used their powers to attack Catholicism and violently to enforce social legislation. 171 00:17:53,110 --> 00:17:56,500 More radical than the convention would countenance. 172 00:17:56,500 --> 00:18:03,910 This version of terror he held would drive neutrals into the camp of counter-revolution and was thus dangerously subversive. 173 00:18:03,910 --> 00:18:07,600 So in this perspective, maybe we should talk less of the terror. 174 00:18:07,600 --> 00:18:13,480 And indeed, that usage only really came into existence after the 9th of Thermidor, in fact. 175 00:18:13,480 --> 00:18:18,640 And maybe what we should be talking of as a period of revolutionary government witnessing the interplay of a 176 00:18:18,640 --> 00:18:25,810 range of political strategies which did have a common factor in the means the use of fear as a political weapon, 177 00:18:25,810 --> 00:18:32,470 more so than the ends. As I've suggested, those ends could be mutually antagonistic, as, of course, 178 00:18:32,470 --> 00:18:36,910 was also strike, which strikingly be demonstrated in Robespierre to overthrow, 179 00:18:36,910 --> 00:18:40,690 though that was engineered not by his long term political enemies on the right, 180 00:18:40,690 --> 00:18:48,010 but rather by this most enduring allies and colleagues on the left, on the Montagnier, on the Jacobin left. 181 00:18:48,010 --> 00:18:53,800 Of course, this was no lam going to slaughter historians supportive of hope, 182 00:18:53,800 --> 00:18:58,090 spare or sometimes guilty of bending over backwards to minimise his role in some 183 00:18:58,090 --> 00:19:02,530 of the most disturbing episodes of the most repressive actions of the terror. 184 00:19:02,530 --> 00:19:08,830 His growing obsession in '94 with the dangers of a foreign plot corrupting the revolution from within, 185 00:19:08,830 --> 00:19:12,610 let the vicious, deadly attacks to a left and right. 186 00:19:12,610 --> 00:19:21,670 It was he who led the charge against his former ally George Downtown, and his old schoolmate Camilla de Moola in the spring of 1794. 187 00:19:21,670 --> 00:19:27,790 It is simply implausible that he really believed in the truth of some of the charges that he made against them. 188 00:19:27,790 --> 00:19:33,130 He personally wrote via personally drew up the blueprint for the infamous law of 22nd Second Prairie, 189 00:19:33,130 --> 00:19:37,780 which massively extended the definition of political suspect and made trials in 190 00:19:37,780 --> 00:19:42,310 the Revolutionary Tribunal speedier and more likely to produce a guilty verdict. 191 00:19:42,310 --> 00:19:46,780 It was he who pushed through the law against the concerns of many deputies, in fact, 192 00:19:46,780 --> 00:19:51,280 and it was a Robespierre and his allies who originated the General Police Bureau, 193 00:19:51,280 --> 00:19:59,050 as it was called that call that sought to take security and policing matters in-house to the Committee of Public Safety. 194 00:19:59,050 --> 00:20:04,900 In the last months of his life, Robespierre signed more decrees about individual policing matters than about anything else. 195 00:20:04,900 --> 00:20:12,820 In fact, he it was he who oversaw the purchase of perceived left wingers in the sections and on the Revolutionary Tribunal, 196 00:20:12,820 --> 00:20:16,300 and he filled both with his own suitably patriotic nominees. 197 00:20:16,300 --> 00:20:23,860 And he also fully supported the decree of the convention proposed by his colleague, Professor that after battle in battle. 198 00:20:23,860 --> 00:20:28,270 No British or Hanover area and soldier should be captured alive. 199 00:20:28,270 --> 00:20:33,080 On the eve of his execution, he was complaining that this decree was not being enforced. 200 00:20:33,080 --> 00:20:39,050 Other generals at the front whose patriotism he called into question so Robespierre was 201 00:20:39,050 --> 00:20:44,540 undoubtedly closely associated with some of the most repressive acts of the terror. 202 00:20:44,540 --> 00:20:51,830 But this didn't make a dictator of him, certainly not in the 20th century model of the trilogy of the Black Legend dictates. 203 00:20:51,830 --> 00:20:57,500 And in fact, Jonathan Israel's claim that I mentioned earlier that Robespierre was a self-confessed dictator. 204 00:20:57,500 --> 00:21:05,450 When you look at it is intensely problematic. He does make a speech in which he says he does use that wording. 205 00:21:05,450 --> 00:21:08,510 Israel cites this. 206 00:21:08,510 --> 00:21:15,890 He may appear, at least to the over casual reader, to be confessing to be a dictator, but in fact, Roosevelt has the exact opposite of that. 207 00:21:15,890 --> 00:21:26,630 In the speech, which Israel posts for Robespierre states that he is a dictator quote just as Maha and Loper later were dictators or neither. 208 00:21:26,630 --> 00:21:34,010 The unsavoury revolutionary journalist Jean-Paul Maha nor the former aristocrat look to sound far show, 209 00:21:34,010 --> 00:21:36,830 whose ambitious educational reforms were adopted by Robespierre, 210 00:21:36,830 --> 00:21:43,130 in fact, could by any stretch of the imagination be viewed as dictator's son in any conventional sense of the term. 211 00:21:43,130 --> 00:21:46,760 What united with them was that they were both martyrs for the revolutionary cause. 212 00:21:46,760 --> 00:21:52,400 Mara, of course, famously in July 1793 at the hands of Charlotte de la Policia, 213 00:21:52,400 --> 00:21:56,750 killed in a restaurant in January of the same year by Wales Lone Assassin. 214 00:21:56,750 --> 00:22:04,100 These men had nothing of the dictator about them. Israel completely misses, in other words, the heavy handed irony. 215 00:22:04,100 --> 00:22:10,580 Rather, they had given their lives for what they what Robespierre thought and thought of as the cause of the people. 216 00:22:10,580 --> 00:22:12,740 This is how Robespierre saw himself. 217 00:22:12,740 --> 00:22:21,200 Moreover, a willing martyr for the people awaiting the moment of immolation this was the image he cultivated in his personal life. 218 00:22:21,200 --> 00:22:28,830 It was the image he projected in the public sphere. This is the image that had made a political celebrity of him. 219 00:22:28,830 --> 00:22:32,600 Let's let's linger. 220 00:22:32,600 --> 00:22:42,650 A little over the idea of Robespierre as a political celebrity, it's really excellent book, which came out last year by Antoine Adulti, 221 00:22:42,650 --> 00:22:49,730 figure of public, which is about the what he calls the invention of celebrity in 18th and early late, 222 00:22:49,730 --> 00:23:01,940 18th and early 19th century France and England, which his book highlights this this period and shows how demonstrates how the emergence of the 223 00:23:01,940 --> 00:23:09,710 modern idea of celebrity and an ensemble of practises around it really develops at this time. 224 00:23:09,710 --> 00:23:15,110 What was distinctive there had been obviously fame, glory, repute and all the rest of it before. 225 00:23:15,110 --> 00:23:19,970 But what was distinctive about celebrity live talk is what was it represented a new 226 00:23:19,970 --> 00:23:25,370 form of notoriety in which there was a rapport between a public figure and a wide, 227 00:23:25,370 --> 00:23:26,750 very wide audience. 228 00:23:26,750 --> 00:23:35,270 The latter of which felt that relationship was warm and close on one side of the equation then were figures from all walks of public life, literature, 229 00:23:35,270 --> 00:23:43,880 theatre, painting, crime, politics subject to the status of celebrity, which could have its emotional lows, as well as its highest moreover. 230 00:23:43,880 --> 00:23:47,960 And at the other end was the modern fan, 231 00:23:47,960 --> 00:23:55,010 effectively compulsively drawn into fascination with a private as well as the public life of celebrity figures. 232 00:23:55,010 --> 00:24:00,890 Fans experienced adoring, albeit wholly fantasy driven intimacy with their subjects, 233 00:24:00,890 --> 00:24:07,550 their celebrity subjects sometimes interspersed with melancholic, heartbreaking feelings of distance and loss. 234 00:24:07,550 --> 00:24:11,300 Letter writing was, of course, the choice form of expression of fan ship. 235 00:24:11,300 --> 00:24:20,900 But it also found outlets in a vibrant commercial sector of engravings, medallions, waxworks, porcelain mementos and illustrated China bric a brac. 236 00:24:20,900 --> 00:24:25,850 Nifty passes quite quickly and lightly over the politics of the revolutionary decade, 237 00:24:25,850 --> 00:24:34,250 highlighting mainly the role of the place of Mirabeau as what he calls the great the first great star of modern democratic politics. 238 00:24:34,250 --> 00:24:41,390 My sense, however, is that Robespierre, who was widely believed in fact to be an adoring emulator of Mirabeau in the early years of the revolution, 239 00:24:41,390 --> 00:24:45,200 fits quite nicely into the same celebrity and niche. 240 00:24:45,200 --> 00:24:52,760 Robespierre was the sort of person that people named their children after or wanted as a godparent to their back to a new baby. 241 00:24:52,760 --> 00:25:01,040 Some renamed themselves in his honour. There was one the Jean-Michel G.A., a radical Montmartre song Killshot, 242 00:25:01,040 --> 00:25:07,810 who adopted Robespierre as family name as his own first name, thus becoming hopes Pierre la gente. 243 00:25:07,810 --> 00:25:11,900 Now, I think that was an unwise move myself, actually. 244 00:25:11,900 --> 00:25:16,820 People named their pets after him to they were hobbies, Pierre. 245 00:25:16,820 --> 00:25:24,260 Shut up, Robespierre. This This call resounded around the Luxembourg prison on the night of night, the thermidor. 246 00:25:24,260 --> 00:25:32,810 But in fact, it only was a jailer ordering ordering his mastiff of that name, guarding the door to stop barking people above, 247 00:25:32,810 --> 00:25:38,270 or wrote to Robespierre as they wrote to few others except their closest family and friends, 248 00:25:38,270 --> 00:25:44,750 expressing an intimacy that nothing except their own strong feelings often justified. 249 00:25:44,750 --> 00:25:50,240 Correspondent stalked him too, sometimes with love, but sometimes with vengeance in their hearts. 250 00:25:50,240 --> 00:25:53,870 They liked to boast he was their friend that visited him, that dined with him. 251 00:25:53,870 --> 00:26:02,300 They could cite his most memorable remarks and even extensive and indeed extensive police enquiries after his death revealed 252 00:26:02,300 --> 00:26:09,920 individuals in and around Paris who did use their putative closeness to Robespierre as a means of leveraging local power. 253 00:26:09,920 --> 00:26:16,220 Do, as I say, or Robespierre will get to know. And then that's the logic Robespierre was a name to conjure with. 254 00:26:16,220 --> 00:26:20,450 Indeed, in the terror, it was a celebrity name to kill with. 255 00:26:20,450 --> 00:26:23,930 It's noteworthy that in the session of the Convention on the Night of Thermidor, 256 00:26:23,930 --> 00:26:29,330 when Rupture his colleagues turned on him, they accused him of being what a dictator of public opinion. 257 00:26:29,330 --> 00:26:39,260 I think a backhanded way of acknowledging the way that rough name seemed to attract the unreflective, irrational adoration of fandom. 258 00:26:39,260 --> 00:26:47,210 Many of the earliest his celebrities celebrated their celebrity milked it for all it was worth built their careers upon its premises, 259 00:26:47,210 --> 00:26:50,780 luxuriate it in its unexpected benefits. 260 00:26:50,780 --> 00:27:00,020 Yet that celebrity model that he talks about had variance and none more important, in fact, than the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 261 00:27:00,020 --> 00:27:07,070 whose confessional writings lilt he views as mocking the original moment in the making of modern celebrity, 262 00:27:07,070 --> 00:27:15,410 whose show won an enormous following of admirers throughout France, of course, but not least amongst whom was Maximilian Robespierre. 263 00:27:15,410 --> 00:27:23,120 Both men, however, shrank from the celebrity whose benefits they enjoyed and indeed stimulated despite my repugnance. 264 00:27:23,120 --> 00:27:31,700 So once wrote famously, I have to talk about myself. Like poor Jean-Jacques, Robespierre was always self-effacing, discursive Lee, retiring, 265 00:27:31,700 --> 00:27:41,030 backing modestly into the limelight of fame and reputation while simultaneously holding up his own arc lights and talking endlessly of himself, 266 00:27:41,030 --> 00:27:47,510 making his political reputation through an evolving, autobiographical chronicle about his life, his innermost thoughts, 267 00:27:47,510 --> 00:27:55,640 his career in 1791 as the closure of the constituent assembly in which Robespierre had made his political reputation. 268 00:27:55,640 --> 00:28:01,070 The people of Paris had cheered him through the Straits, placed laurels on his head and threw flowers at him. 269 00:28:01,070 --> 00:28:08,750 But by 1794, he was saying he was, let's say, let's say, except at a distance fears of assassination from. 270 00:28:08,750 --> 00:28:15,050 Spring onwards meant that he ventured out of his lodgings in the warmly protective display residence on the Hussan town of Hay, 271 00:28:15,050 --> 00:28:19,310 where he stayed only relatively rarely as far as we can judge. 272 00:28:19,310 --> 00:28:27,080 And he was usually accompanied by anything up to a dozen Walkers fans and friends who served as his personal guard. 273 00:28:27,080 --> 00:28:37,430 This peekaboo style of celebrity probably only enhanced his celebrity status on the grounds that lack of familiarity bred mistake. 274 00:28:37,430 --> 00:28:45,200 I want to be alone. The line was, of course, not rough spears, but Greta Garbo's, but Maximilian Hunchback could have could have coined it. 275 00:28:45,200 --> 00:28:52,640 And analysing why the phenomenon of celebrity emerged from the middle of the 18th century on 20th T ascribes a lot of importance to the 276 00:28:52,640 --> 00:29:00,800 emergence over the middle of the chaos of the century of a media infrastructure in which celebrity culture could evolve and and function. 277 00:29:00,800 --> 00:29:06,590 Obviously, we know what that is, you know, increasing levels of literacy, cheaper, more widely diffused print items, 278 00:29:06,590 --> 00:29:11,810 nobles, newspapers, pamphlets, gazette satires and top quality Postal Service as well. 279 00:29:11,810 --> 00:29:19,580 All that provided the essential support for the emergence of a public sphere, that bourgeois public sphere that harbourmaster analysed for us. 280 00:29:19,580 --> 00:29:28,730 A few years ago, when set against our own standards or even against the regime of freedoms indicated initiated in 1789, 281 00:29:28,730 --> 00:29:33,950 Paris under the terror seemed to fly under the flag of unfreedom and repression. 282 00:29:33,950 --> 00:29:41,480 It's true, true. In 1793 to fall, there was tight censorship of newspapers and pamphlets. 283 00:29:41,480 --> 00:29:51,800 No royalist views since late 1792. No yet the opinion circulate till midday since 1793 left and right wing titles under surveillance. 284 00:29:51,800 --> 00:29:54,740 Journalists were jailed and they could be guillotined. 285 00:29:54,740 --> 00:30:00,620 People watch their mouths even smiling was avoided as people kept their heads beneath the parapet. 286 00:30:00,620 --> 00:30:08,390 Spies seem to be everywhere everywhere, including in the city's numerous prisons, which house getting on for 8000 individuals. 287 00:30:08,390 --> 00:30:15,080 Arrests were preventive on the basis of suspicion of counter-revolutionary intent, which was very difficult to disprove. 288 00:30:15,080 --> 00:30:22,430 Religious freedom existed in theory, but priests who hadn't sworn an oath of allegiance to the revolution prudently lay low. 289 00:30:22,430 --> 00:30:28,620 Nobles were routinely assumed to be counter-revolutionary and from late April had been banished totally from the city. 290 00:30:28,620 --> 00:30:34,910 And by June and July 1794, huge numbers of communists were rubbing shoulders with nobles and priests on the timbres. 291 00:30:34,910 --> 00:30:39,330 As repression tightened. Still, 292 00:30:39,330 --> 00:30:45,600 I think it would be misleading to imagine repression of individual freedoms under the terror operating like some 293 00:30:45,600 --> 00:30:53,490 efficient top down hydraulic machine operating with oiled protoc totalitarian efficiency to crush dissent. 294 00:30:53,490 --> 00:30:58,860 The adjective revolutionary in the title revolutionary government actually signifies emergency. 295 00:30:58,860 --> 00:31:04,830 It's emergency government, not session on constitutional government to deal with an emergency. 296 00:31:04,830 --> 00:31:13,410 And as you have suggested earlier, there's far more cobbling together of policies on the hoof than the protest totalitarian label allows. 297 00:31:13,410 --> 00:31:21,750 In addition, while there was indeed a stark contrast between 1793 four and the early years of the revolution, 298 00:31:21,750 --> 00:31:25,530 which had enjoyed the individual freedoms enshrined in the Declaration of Man, 299 00:31:25,530 --> 00:31:33,300 the deficiency is far less striking when set against the situation of Paris in the last half century, say of the ancient regime. 300 00:31:33,300 --> 00:31:38,850 As we know, ancient regimes society provided the matrix and the communications infrastructure, 301 00:31:38,850 --> 00:31:46,710 as I just talked about, to which to those to those freedoms that were particularly in fact instantiated in 1789. 302 00:31:46,710 --> 00:31:51,750 But pre 1789, Paris was hardly a free society. 303 00:31:51,750 --> 00:31:56,640 Particular ism and hierarchy there prevailed over equality and liberty. 304 00:31:56,640 --> 00:32:04,800 Catholicism prior to 1789 was, of course, the state religion, meaning Protestants and Jews enjoyed no rights. 305 00:32:04,800 --> 00:32:13,080 While the state church was internally riven by the Johnson, this controversy marked by high levels of repression in many of the parishes of the city. 306 00:32:13,080 --> 00:32:17,460 Censorship varied in intensity, but was always to be reckoned with. 307 00:32:17,460 --> 00:32:20,280 A great many of the major figures of the Enlightenment, as you well know, 308 00:32:20,280 --> 00:32:24,810 endured periods of imprisonment and or exile to say nothing of minor authors. 309 00:32:24,810 --> 00:32:26,640 The Bastille was far from the joke. 310 00:32:26,640 --> 00:32:34,200 It is sometimes accounted, and the same was true of the latter the cachet the theatre world was closely regulated by the Crown, too. 311 00:32:34,200 --> 00:32:42,780 Newspapers had to be careful about political reporting. Indeed, most political coverage was supplied by newspapers situated beyond French borders. 312 00:32:42,780 --> 00:32:47,190 The Paris Police Force, directed by a ministerial level appointment, the Attorney-General. 313 00:32:47,190 --> 00:32:50,850 The police was intrusive, arbitrary and cruel, 314 00:32:50,850 --> 00:32:58,140 and owed much to its effectiveness of its effectiveness of its effectiveness to attend tackle a network of spies. 315 00:32:58,140 --> 00:33:05,880 There were Louis Sebastian Melchior stated quote spies that caught spies in town, spies in the street, spies amongst [INAUDIBLE]. 316 00:33:05,880 --> 00:33:11,390 Spies on wit. The terror had not invented spies. 317 00:33:11,390 --> 00:33:15,470 It had not invented repression or unfreedom. 318 00:33:15,470 --> 00:33:22,400 Furthermore, the terror unfurled in France that was fighting almost the whole of Europe with an intensity that even when it was at war, 319 00:33:22,400 --> 00:33:25,700 the unsound regime monarchy never had to endure. 320 00:33:25,700 --> 00:33:33,290 The terror then looks bad when set against any of against the very real gains of 1789 stands out less. 321 00:33:33,290 --> 00:33:40,370 I think when compared with the social and intellectual conditions of Paris prior to 1789, 322 00:33:40,370 --> 00:33:44,210 in spite of its sharp limitations on social and intellectual freedom, 323 00:33:44,210 --> 00:33:48,890 the ancient regime was unable to prevent obviously the blossoming of the French Enlightenment. 324 00:33:48,890 --> 00:33:55,220 We know that. So just taking that further. One wonders whether the repressive character of Paris, 325 00:33:55,220 --> 00:34:02,480 the terror Parisian Paris under the terror really was sufficient to squeeze into extinction 326 00:34:02,480 --> 00:34:07,820 the values and practises of the public sphere as they protest totalitarian narrative, 327 00:34:07,820 --> 00:34:10,440 which suggest my sense is, in fact, 328 00:34:10,440 --> 00:34:18,530 that a massive transformation of the world of print during the revolutionary decade provided a propitious terrain for freedom, 329 00:34:18,530 --> 00:34:26,660 allowing authors and their censors often to beat the censor. 330 00:34:26,660 --> 00:34:37,490 The revolution witnessed, as Ralph Reichert has has put it, an epochal media transformation, an absolutely huge expansion of the world of print, 331 00:34:37,490 --> 00:34:44,480 which was jacks up far, far higher than that, even though that obviously achieved under the Enlightenment. 332 00:34:44,480 --> 00:34:51,830 Newspapers, pamphlets, songs and prints that had been 36 print shops in Paris before 1789. 333 00:34:51,830 --> 00:34:57,170 It reached a level of two hundred and twenty one in 1798, a six fold increase. 334 00:34:57,170 --> 00:35:01,970 In fact, the volume of print production, as I shall suggest, may well have risen more than this. 335 00:35:01,970 --> 00:35:11,870 Before 1789, Paris had one daily newspaper, the show, not by established 1776, maybe another 50 or 60 circulated or published in the city. 336 00:35:11,870 --> 00:35:20,390 Political reportage was minimal within the press, as I said, but in 1789, 90 300 new papers emerged over the decade as a whole. 337 00:35:20,390 --> 00:35:29,540 There would be sixteen thousand in France as a whole. In 1793 to four over 100 papers, newspapers still circulated in Paris. 338 00:35:29,540 --> 00:35:37,520 While it's been suggested that the height of the revolution, the city printed some three to 300000 copies daily. 339 00:35:37,520 --> 00:35:44,240 Alongside the newspaper press was the print world of pamphlets and prints, of course, some 40000 over the course of the decade. 340 00:35:44,240 --> 00:35:52,670 By one estimate, prints and caricatures had been particularly heavily censored and the ancien regime after 1789, 341 00:35:52,670 --> 00:36:02,510 the France Paris into the world of popular images last seen in the wars of religion and the fraud over the 1790s as a whole. 342 00:36:02,510 --> 00:36:06,860 Print generated an extraordinary extension of the public sphere. 343 00:36:06,860 --> 00:36:12,500 Harbour Mask designated the public sphere of the age of Enlightenment a bourgeois public sphere, as we know. 344 00:36:12,500 --> 00:36:17,690 But the public sphere of the mid 1790s? Well, let's call it for some give it a name. 345 00:36:17,690 --> 00:36:24,530 The Republican public sphere reached parts of the population that had never reached been reached under the consent regime. 346 00:36:24,530 --> 00:36:34,010 It constituted a kind of democratic dividend, providing readers and consumers with a larger, richer and more varied print diet than ever before. 347 00:36:34,010 --> 00:36:38,750 This was all the more the case in the print interacted with emergent forms of sociability. 348 00:36:38,750 --> 00:36:45,620 So to amplify impact, 18th century reading practises we know were often collective occurring in bars and coffeehouses, 349 00:36:45,620 --> 00:36:54,380 family settings on street corners and the like. Now new sites of sociability, political clubs, reading rooms, popular societies, sectional assemblies. 350 00:36:54,380 --> 00:36:59,060 All of those things offered an expanding number of venues for reading. 351 00:36:59,060 --> 00:37:06,050 It's been suggested that a multiplier of 10 may be used to give a total readership of a single newspaper. 352 00:37:06,050 --> 00:37:12,680 Well, if this is true, then the 300000 copies coming out of Paris each day reached a readership of three millions. 353 00:37:12,680 --> 00:37:17,090 And that's not far off half the adult male population of France. 354 00:37:17,090 --> 00:37:22,130 And that density of reading practises was likely to have been much higher in Paris, of course, 355 00:37:22,130 --> 00:37:25,820 which took a disproportionate share of the total newspaper production, 356 00:37:25,820 --> 00:37:30,890 especially in 1793 to four in fact, and where literacy rates were at their highest. 357 00:37:30,890 --> 00:37:36,830 In this connexion, it's also worth mentioning the vibrant singing culture that the 1790s inaugurated. 358 00:37:36,830 --> 00:37:44,300 More than 3000 songs were published over the revolutionary decade, nearly half of them actually in 1793 and 1794 under the terror. 359 00:37:44,300 --> 00:37:50,930 Then the revolutionary government's commitment to intellectual and artistic production actually boosted production of songs, 360 00:37:50,930 --> 00:37:59,260 newspapers, pamphlets and caricatures. The realm of theatre also felt that dynamic wind of change. 361 00:37:59,260 --> 00:38:05,830 The South Asian monarchy had regulated performances, concentrating them in the three state run theatres the comedy franchise, 362 00:38:05,830 --> 00:38:11,980 the opera comedy The Italian around which it's true, clustered a number of secondary event venues. 363 00:38:11,980 --> 00:38:17,890 The revolution totally deregulated the theatre, allowing the number of theatres in the city to expand hugely. 364 00:38:17,890 --> 00:38:22,660 Nearly 40 institutions on the day that Robespierre was executed, 365 00:38:22,660 --> 00:38:31,840 one could take one's choice between performances at around a dozen or so theatres, and one could also visit Ashley's amphitheatre. 366 00:38:31,840 --> 00:38:39,040 Now run not by the eponymous English leisure entrepreneur, but by Antonio Franco, any future circus impresario. 367 00:38:39,040 --> 00:38:45,460 The theatre that day hosted a fit civic. The high point of which was quite an illuminated chariot pull. 368 00:38:45,460 --> 00:38:54,850 It pulled by four richly comparison charges, followed by a display of horse racing exercises, tricks and stunts, and highly amusing scenes. 369 00:38:54,850 --> 00:39:00,970 The Franconia Spectacular serves as a reminder that the revolution also ensures introduced a wide array of festivals. 370 00:39:00,970 --> 00:39:03,700 Public festivals are wearing shorts and intensity. 371 00:39:03,700 --> 00:39:12,400 The most intensive and extravagant of these were, of course, those devised and managed by pageant master Jacques-Louis David. 372 00:39:12,400 --> 00:39:17,080 Enormous spectaculars like the Festival of the Supreme being in June 1794, 373 00:39:17,080 --> 00:39:23,290 which literally hundreds of thousands of people were present and were very enthusiastic by most accounts. 374 00:39:23,290 --> 00:39:26,960 And then there were, of course, minor ceremonies. Every 10 days. 375 00:39:26,960 --> 00:39:34,320 The decadal ceremonies, songs and hymns played a particular role in such ceremonies. 376 00:39:34,320 --> 00:39:40,770 The robust Democratic culture of print and performance that I've been describing was not its true running at 377 00:39:40,770 --> 00:39:49,050 full throttle in 1793 to fall under the shadow of the guillotine with a political and security stakes so high. 378 00:39:49,050 --> 00:39:55,800 There was a marked falling away in a number of domains. There may have been a lot more singing seemingly, but the number of newspapers dropped, 379 00:39:55,800 --> 00:40:00,060 for example, and the press has political diversity was definitely reduced. 380 00:40:00,060 --> 00:40:09,540 High profile deterrent measures could have a sharp effect on freedom of speech and shape cultural creativity along politically Orthodox lines. 381 00:40:09,540 --> 00:40:18,780 The brouhaha caused by the production in August 1793, for example, of the politician and dramatist password in a chateaux play Pamela, 382 00:40:18,780 --> 00:40:23,910 which is based on Samuel Richardson's great novel of sensibility, is a case in point. 383 00:40:23,910 --> 00:40:30,030 The censors were shocked to discover that Pamela herself may have been of noble stock in the plot, 384 00:40:30,030 --> 00:40:33,870 a pedigree construed as clearly counter-revolutionary. The play closed. 385 00:40:33,870 --> 00:40:39,060 The theatre was shut down. No chateau was imprisoned along with all the actors in the play. 386 00:40:39,060 --> 00:40:44,550 This was a very good way to oncology leisure, as Voltaire would have said. 387 00:40:44,550 --> 00:40:50,370 Of course, in the light of such issues, Parisians, as I said, they obviously watched their mouths during the terror. 388 00:40:50,370 --> 00:40:56,820 But then, as I've tried to show, they always had done. But this didn't equate to dumb conformity. 389 00:40:56,820 --> 00:41:04,110 There were ways of expressing dissent and political insouciance that had a long history in Paris's past. 390 00:41:04,110 --> 00:41:13,350 As the poet and wit Shafir put it, the government of France before 1789 had been an absolute top of a partisan song, 391 00:41:13,350 --> 00:41:17,510 an absolute monarchy tempered by songs by titters. 392 00:41:17,510 --> 00:41:27,710 Political irreverence of the Parisians was legendary, as Messier himself noted, they quote, laugh at everything, quote they repulse Kashan. 393 00:41:27,710 --> 00:41:35,150 Sorry, they repulsed Cannon by vaudeville. They enchaine royal power by epic dramatic cellars. 394 00:41:35,150 --> 00:41:42,980 Why should we believe this? Irreverence died out completely within the Republican public sphere of 1793 to four? 395 00:41:42,980 --> 00:41:48,350 Was the terror really able to silence? Shatteringly contentious Parisians. 396 00:41:48,350 --> 00:41:53,060 Perhaps it's true the gravity of the military sexual situation encouraged conformity. 397 00:41:53,060 --> 00:42:01,550 Perhaps those repressive measures did play a big part, perhaps, and they certainly would have had a big, a strong inhibiting effect. 398 00:42:01,550 --> 00:42:08,000 But one can, I think, legitimately legitimately wonder whether even these factors were completely effective. 399 00:42:08,000 --> 00:42:16,220 The scale of the Republicans fare was so extensive, I think that it resisted policing such criticism out of all existence. 400 00:42:16,220 --> 00:42:27,500 Even with the deterrence of censor, jail and guillotine, other motions of other emotions apart from fear bubbled up to the surface. 401 00:42:27,500 --> 00:42:34,730 As long as the comic is running well. Louis Sebastian, messy, messy, I had remarked to Paris under the same regime, 402 00:42:34,730 --> 00:42:38,940 as long as the her comic is running well, one doesn't have to worry about civil war. 403 00:42:38,940 --> 00:42:45,020 Well, of course, in a way, 1789 proved the latter of his prediction wrong by the spirit of that commitment 404 00:42:45,020 --> 00:42:51,350 to pleasure that Parisians expressed maybe an emotion worth taking seriously, 405 00:42:51,350 --> 00:42:59,000 even at the height of the terror government and its censors were finding it difficult to break old habits in theatre going, for example. 406 00:42:59,000 --> 00:43:06,290 There were lots of evocations of Republican virtue and celebrations of military success in the repertoire in 1793 that, 407 00:43:06,290 --> 00:43:09,050 you know they played pretty well to Parisian tastes. 408 00:43:09,050 --> 00:43:16,010 Some 200 new plays were staged in 1794 alone, half of which historians tell us could be classified as patriotic. 409 00:43:16,010 --> 00:43:25,880 Politically correct then, but then half of those, it means, were not patriotic or political and were in fact, largely traditional fare. 410 00:43:25,880 --> 00:43:31,580 Moreover, censoring often failed in its operations as a result of political and institutional rivalries. 411 00:43:31,580 --> 00:43:38,570 There was a decree on the 2nd of August 1793, which, for example, which barred to force theatres to play every ten days. 412 00:43:38,570 --> 00:43:45,920 One of three state endorsed plays either Voltaire's Brutes vs. Lumias, William Tell or Marriage Reception. 413 00:43:45,920 --> 00:43:50,810 Yes, Aeschylus crackers, but that was only enforced extremely haphazard haphazardly. 414 00:43:50,810 --> 00:43:57,590 It left the field relatively clear for the continuance of the old repertoire and additions in its spirit. 415 00:43:57,590 --> 00:44:09,680 The most popular play in the whole of the revolutionary decade was Anselm's later halo, the latter the two hunters and the milkmaid, composed in 1764. 416 00:44:09,680 --> 00:44:19,250 It was a light musical piece full of songs based on a la fontaine story and featuring two actors, one actress and a pantomime bear. 417 00:44:19,250 --> 00:44:24,290 And indeed, it was playing at the Omega comic in July 1794. 418 00:44:24,290 --> 00:44:29,720 So Parisians could, if they chose lap up militaristic celebrations of the war effort. 419 00:44:29,720 --> 00:44:37,400 But then they often showed a preference for entertainment over propaganda, laughter over austere Republican exemplars. 420 00:44:37,400 --> 00:44:48,800 Brutus was its true, a staunch and lasting presence in Republican Theatre throughout the 1790s, but so was Harlequin and so was a pantomime bear. 421 00:44:48,800 --> 00:44:57,140 Parisian theatre audiences thus seem to exhibit similar traits to those of their own series shameful bars as mockingly satirised by messier. 422 00:44:57,140 --> 00:45:04,040 They may have been genuinely patriotic, authentically and sincerely Republican, but they also wanted to enjoy themselves. 423 00:45:04,040 --> 00:45:11,930 I'm suggesting so that one might plausibly wonder whether the government that failed to respect this fact did so at its own peril. 424 00:45:11,930 --> 00:45:17,720 And in this context, I think it's worth noting the excessive government response in late June and 425 00:45:17,720 --> 00:45:22,910 early July to a spontaneous campaign of what were called fraternal banquets, 426 00:45:22,910 --> 00:45:31,920 which arose. They rose spontaneously throughout the sections of Paris to celebrate the great military victory of flourish on the 26th of June 1794. 427 00:45:31,920 --> 00:45:39,350 I was like street parties absolutely everywhere throughout Paris and the response of the revolutionary government and Robespierre in particular, 428 00:45:39,350 --> 00:45:45,830 in fact and his allies was quite ridiculously out of proportion because Robespierre 429 00:45:45,830 --> 00:45:52,010 saw these sort of joyful street parties as aristocratic traps for Saki Lite, 430 00:45:52,010 --> 00:45:59,180 in which good patriots clink glasses with their potential assassins and they were closed down their forbidden. 431 00:45:59,180 --> 00:46:01,670 Of course, we should never lose sight of economic factors, 432 00:46:01,670 --> 00:46:06,920 explaining a loss of enthusiasm amongst the Parisian labouring classes for revolutionary government. 433 00:46:06,920 --> 00:46:11,150 Food shortages were still there. The threatened imposition of wage control. 434 00:46:11,150 --> 00:46:17,360 But that fraternal banquets incident, I think, showed a dangerous drifting apart between Parisian opinion, 435 00:46:17,360 --> 00:46:28,500 which had its own ideas about how to balance politics, humanity and pleasure, and a government that was wedded to a more austere political course. 436 00:46:28,500 --> 00:46:33,510 This was where Rob Spears celebrity status played against him. 437 00:46:33,510 --> 00:46:37,140 He was less visible than he had been before, as I've suggested, 438 00:46:37,140 --> 00:46:44,520 and certainly more inaccessible in the discontent that surrounded government policy in June and July 17, not 94. 439 00:46:44,520 --> 00:46:51,720 The Walkers and the devoted fans who followed him lovingly between the convention and the Jacobin club in his lodgings on the horizontal away, 440 00:46:51,720 --> 00:46:58,200 were transmuted into a praetorian guard, sharpening their knives for the seizure of power. 441 00:46:58,200 --> 00:47:02,670 Celebrity left him ultra exposed, in other words, to covert criticism. 442 00:47:02,670 --> 00:47:07,800 Far more exposed, I think, than was the case with his fellow members of the Committee of Public Safety, 443 00:47:07,800 --> 00:47:11,100 who didn't have that celebrity status on neither term at all. 444 00:47:11,100 --> 00:47:16,200 It was his celebrity as much as any other thing which really counted against him. 445 00:47:16,200 --> 00:47:24,570 It allowed his transport to transmutation by a process of what we might call celebrity demonisation into an arch villain, 446 00:47:24,570 --> 00:47:26,430 the arch villain of the revolution. 447 00:47:26,430 --> 00:47:36,020 It allowed him to become, as I've suggested, one of the great villains, one of the great celebrity villains of the 19th and 20th centuries. 448 00:47:36,020 --> 00:47:42,950 Four days before his overthrow. On 23rd of July. 449 00:47:42,950 --> 00:47:56,260 Excuse me. 23rd of July 1794, the Parisien newspaper the Federal Republic had reviewed a new and much applauded one act comedy by Dominion, 450 00:47:56,260 --> 00:47:59,770 which had played at the touts to direct a variety. 451 00:47:59,770 --> 00:48:07,030 A couple of days before and that play was entitled, it will create all hibernation hypocrite in revolution. 452 00:48:07,030 --> 00:48:13,750 It was the paper explained about quote one of those crafty men who, by their robust oratory under the cloak of patriotism, 453 00:48:13,750 --> 00:48:18,820 influence uneducated citizens and popular assemblies and for a while seduce 454 00:48:18,820 --> 00:48:25,000 worthy sunk a lot who imprudently give their support to such false patriots. 455 00:48:25,000 --> 00:48:29,830 We might note such individuals so that each of us can point out the deceitful knives when the 456 00:48:29,830 --> 00:48:37,040 sections use up a false popularity that they wished to use so as to overthrow the Republic. 457 00:48:37,040 --> 00:48:37,460 For me, 458 00:48:37,460 --> 00:48:47,750 it's like totally uncanny to read that text dated as a matter of days before the journey of 9th of Thermidor for its language and the charges of 459 00:48:47,750 --> 00:48:57,620 hypocrisy overlap to an extraordinary extent with the anti-Arab spurious propaganda campaign that followed instantly after Robespierre overthrow. 460 00:48:57,620 --> 00:49:03,110 And indeed, do many on goes on, and a few months later, he produces a classic anti-Arab as text. 461 00:49:03,110 --> 00:49:07,310 Let me do this. Tell me, though lamo to Tehran, 462 00:49:07,310 --> 00:49:16,460 such as the extent of the discursive overlap that one wonders was the play a sort of pre thermidor and augury of what was seen to happen? 463 00:49:16,460 --> 00:49:23,960 Was this. A. Robespierre ism out there on the public sphere sphere before the fall of Robespierre, 464 00:49:23,960 --> 00:49:27,410 I've been arguing that the repressive apparatus of the revolutionary government 465 00:49:27,410 --> 00:49:32,330 was perhaps too sketchy to cope with the vitality and the scale of a still very 466 00:49:32,330 --> 00:49:37,280 capacious Republican public sphere whose anti-authoritarian instincts honed under 467 00:49:37,280 --> 00:49:42,770 the ancient regime monarchy was still in place to manage play and its journalist. 468 00:49:42,770 --> 00:49:46,280 Critics suggest that to uncover resistance to authority, 469 00:49:46,280 --> 00:49:52,470 we need to look more carefully for covert and even coded expressions of dissent prior to the night. 470 00:49:52,470 --> 00:49:53,840 The Thermidor. 471 00:49:53,840 --> 00:50:02,060 And indeed, we do have a methodology for doing this, which has been developed precisely for detecting resistance to authoritarian regimes. 472 00:50:02,060 --> 00:50:07,910 And that, of course, as I'm sure you'll be familiar with the work of the sociologist James C. Scott. 473 00:50:07,910 --> 00:50:16,250 His 1990 study, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, highlights what he calls hidden transcripts by which dominated groups develop a collective 474 00:50:16,250 --> 00:50:23,630 critique of power by utilising a set of terms and codes that are kept away from those in power. 475 00:50:23,630 --> 00:50:28,190 If we look closely at the newspaper press in Paris in the months leading up to the night, 476 00:50:28,190 --> 00:50:33,560 the film thermidor, which is an astonishingly large and almost totally underused source. 477 00:50:33,560 --> 00:50:42,200 In fact, there are a number of points in which one begins to suspect the existence of such of just such hidden transcripts. 478 00:50:42,200 --> 00:50:51,140 In the Constituent Assembly of 1789 to 91 royalist politicians and journalists used to drive Robespierre completely mad to distraction, 479 00:50:51,140 --> 00:50:53,600 even by misspelling his name. 480 00:50:53,600 --> 00:51:04,310 One of the things they did particularly was to call him a hall bath Pierre Roberts Pierre, which was supposed to evoke the the Robert Damian, 481 00:51:04,310 --> 00:51:13,690 whom the would be registered assassin of Louis, the 14th whom Robespierre was held totally erroneously to have been related to. 482 00:51:13,690 --> 00:51:20,170 So that was in 70 days, nine to 91. So why was it five years later in the summer of 1794? 483 00:51:20,170 --> 00:51:25,690 Why were some journals still misspelling his name? Then again on the 3rd of Thermidor? 484 00:51:25,690 --> 00:51:32,800 The editor of the Arabia Turf Universelle noted a typo that had crept into the report of one of Robespierre speeches. 485 00:51:32,800 --> 00:51:38,830 Instead of using the verb tower to sign be silent that the text had used fair. 486 00:51:38,830 --> 00:51:40,990 Well, you know, it's the letter single letter. 487 00:51:40,990 --> 00:51:48,490 So the editor told us readers Robespierre Speight should not read it was we who made false denunciations. 488 00:51:48,490 --> 00:51:55,390 Making denunciations later held university to be a force where a chatbot judged to be Robespierre speciality. 489 00:51:55,390 --> 00:52:03,490 After the night, the thermidor on the 5th of Thermidor, several newspapers advertised the appearance in French translation of an English tracked, 490 00:52:03,490 --> 00:52:10,060 a political treatise published originally published in English in Seventeen Eighty Five by one William Allen. 491 00:52:10,060 --> 00:52:16,660 It was the paper's noted attacks that have been written quote by an enemy of the tyranny of Cromwell. 492 00:52:16,660 --> 00:52:24,670 Within days, this covert reference would be followed by far more copious equations between Robespierre and Cromwell, the dictator. 493 00:52:24,670 --> 00:52:26,740 So maybe these are just coincidences. 494 00:52:26,740 --> 00:52:34,030 My sense is that they're more than that, and at once is happenstance twice as coincidence and three times as enemy action. 495 00:52:34,030 --> 00:52:41,020 I don't have time, obviously, to look more briefly at this phenomenon of resistance through typo and through tipping the wink, 496 00:52:41,020 --> 00:52:46,270 except to say that these are by far far, far from lone examples. 497 00:52:46,270 --> 00:52:50,980 And I think it's interesting the kind of perspective that this opens up on the public sphere, 498 00:52:50,980 --> 00:52:59,290 that Republican public sphere that had developed since 1792 and which I'm stressing is still so buoyant and and vibrant, 499 00:52:59,290 --> 00:53:02,110 and it provides a far more satisfying lens, I think, 500 00:53:02,110 --> 00:53:11,020 for us to consider the terror than the kind of sort of retro genealogies thing inherent in seeing the terror as essentially proto totalitarian. 501 00:53:11,020 --> 00:53:15,880 One of the problems of seeing the terror through the lens of a totalitarian regimes of the 502 00:53:15,880 --> 00:53:22,360 20th century is that it overestimates the capacity of governmental instruments of repression, 503 00:53:22,360 --> 00:53:29,550 and it underestimates the capacity of the people to have opinions of their own and to find ways of expressing that. 504 00:53:29,550 --> 00:53:33,720 On the 10th of Thermidor year to on the 28th of July 1794, 505 00:53:33,720 --> 00:53:39,510 then the execution of Robespierre toppled from power the previous day and the convention so huge. 506 00:53:39,510 --> 00:53:48,870 Hundreds of thousands crowds celebrating his death. There's been a tendency amongst historians to see this as a final sort of release of tension that 507 00:53:48,870 --> 00:53:55,410 the people could at last open their mouths in criticism after months of silence and repression. 508 00:53:55,410 --> 00:54:00,780 But I think this underestimates the role of the people of Paris in instigating his fall. 509 00:54:00,780 --> 00:54:04,080 It actually underestimates the people of Paris altogether. 510 00:54:04,080 --> 00:54:10,290 So I've demonstrated elsewhere, I think, and it's an article which came out last year in the American Historical Review. 511 00:54:10,290 --> 00:54:14,790 Parisians in their thousands and in the tens of thousands had mobilised that 512 00:54:14,790 --> 00:54:20,130 previous evening to thwart the insurrectionary plans of the proposed Paris commune. 513 00:54:20,130 --> 00:54:20,790 Furthermore, 514 00:54:20,790 --> 00:54:30,360 examining more closely the state of public opinion and being alert to those covert and coded languages in which resistance could be expressed, 515 00:54:30,360 --> 00:54:31,170 will, I hope, 516 00:54:31,170 --> 00:54:40,140 anyway allow us to detect continuities between the bourgeois public sphere of the Enlightenment and the Republican public sphere of the 1790s. 517 00:54:40,140 --> 00:54:45,240 The people of Paris who were instrumental in the overthrow of Robespierre had, I'm suggesting, 518 00:54:45,240 --> 00:54:51,300 been growing tired of the austere and rigid form of power that Robespierre had come to represent. 519 00:54:51,300 --> 00:54:56,250 Celebrity Robespierre had come to represent ultimately in the face of violence, 520 00:54:56,250 --> 00:55:02,280 a violence they found increasingly difficult to square with their more generous conception of humanity. 521 00:55:02,280 --> 00:55:08,120 They deployed in resistance the weapons of wit and humour. 522 00:55:08,120 --> 00:55:14,390 I'm always sceptical of identifying tracks, historical characteristics and individuals, let alone groups of individuals. 523 00:55:14,390 --> 00:55:20,000 But here let hope over override scepticism that is expressed confidence in 524 00:55:20,000 --> 00:55:24,650 the ability of Parisians and our own day to continue to deploy humanity wit, 525 00:55:24,650 --> 00:55:30,530 who knows even humour in the pursuit of social harmony at another troubled time in its history? 526 00:55:30,530 --> 00:55:35,090 The best of outlooks, even in the worst of times. Very much the Parisian way. 527 00:55:35,090 --> 00:55:39,703 Thank you.