Thank you very much for coming out this evening. It's a great honour to be giving their best men lecture.
I'm very appreciative of that, but it's terrible, obviously, to come here and talk about terror in Paris in and week,
which has seen terror on the streets and the cafes and restaurants of the city.
So I would just like to start us in the sort of mood that Nicholas evoked by stating the obvious, especially in this company,
that we all think with fondness and concern for our friends and colleagues and indeed the citizens of Paris.
Second, that the terror of the French Revolution is a very different kind of phenomenon to the to what Parisians have just experienced.
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,
perhaps you'll say, but I'll be focussing.
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.
In a tale of two cities, Dickens had in his sights the whole experience of the French Revolution after 1789.
But invariably we tend to see the quotation targeted at the city of Paris during the revolutionary terror of 1793,
in which his gripping novel climaxes for Dickens.
The perceived horrors of the terror were so all encompassing that the best of times epithet seems to attach only
to the possibility for self-sacrifice or martyrdom of a quintessentially stiff upper lip English Sydney cartoon.
Rather, that is to anything intrinsically good, let alone superlatively good about the revolution and the terror in themselves.
What historians call the terror was such a period of emergency government in France 1793 to 1794 France's National Assembly.
The convention, elected in 1792 by Universal Male Suffrage Place,
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,
the Committee of General Security, which attended largely to policing matters and internal security.
It comprised what was called the revolutionary government.
The Committee of Public Safety's role was to run the war effort, essentially, and France was at war with almost every European state.
It also sought to crush internal dissent through a self-conscious policy of deterrence terror.
In fact, for many, the period of the terror would come to be embodied.
Moreover, in in the person of Maximilian Robespierre, nicknamed as you'll know, the incorruptible,
certainly the most conspicuous of the 12 deputies who made up the Committee of Public Safety.
We hardly need Charles Dickens to remind us that the French Revolution has often maybe even invariably had a bad press in British culture.
Even before it happened, and we think before the terror happened, we think here of these short term predictions and long term,
massive long term influence of Edmund Burke reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790.
The revolution was widely viewed in Anglo-American culture as substantive, with violence and authoritarian rule.
1793 to fall was thus 1789 writ larger and deadlier.
The drift into European warfare in 1792 to three stimulated, state sponsored,
ideologically driven repression at this faced violence seemed to find embodiment in the person of hope, Pierre.
It was to eclipse even Napoleon, I think, as an as 19th century, Europe's most hated historical figure.
Yet there are always been those indubitably far more numerous in France than in England or the United States and North
America who've praised the work of revolutionary government and justified the terror and Robespierre role within it.
Revolutionary government held France together as a national territorial unit at a time of
extraordinary stress for France to have fallen back into the hands of covetous great powers.
Vengeful emigre, aristocrats and I learnt nothing. Forgotten nothing.
But and dynasty would have ramped up considerably the already high levels of bloodshed.
Revolutionary government also allowed a historic Republican continuity to emerge for the human rights that had been outlined so spectacularly in 1789.
In addition, some of the values which the revolutionary government sought to enforce equal rights democratic elections,
egalitarian social measures, imaginative programmes of poor relief still strike a chord in our own society.
Or at least it would be nice to think they did.
Thus, while in the context of the negative fetishisation of terror, respect and admiration for Robespierre,
for example, has been meagre in the extreme in the Anglo-American Academy and more widely, its culture.
The notion of Robespierre as incarnation of an ideal of a virtuous, just egalitarian.
Society has fared rather better in France, though, far from universally, because, of course,
always think of how few streets and monuments in France are dedicated to the incorruptible one.
Politicians and historians on the left in France, sometimes usually a little self dramatising.
They, I think, call themselves hobbies based.
It is simply impossible to imagine any historian standing up in public in England or the United States and proclaiming themselves the Robespierre
est without one imagines drawing the speedy attention of the mental health services or being led quietly away by Homeland Security or whatever.
Robespierre and the terror that seem to mark a spot of sheer incommensurate ability between
the cultures of the French left and the values of Anglo-American conservatism and liberalism.
And I think this has proved strikingly the case after World War Two in the Cold War period.
The Israeli scholar Jacob Tillmans influential book The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, published in the 1950s,
argued that 20th century populist dictatorships could trace their ideological origins back to Robespierre and the terror in the convention.
That Robespierre in turn derived his ideas from what Talman saw as the intolerant general,
well, theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French revolutionary terror,
which thus approvato totalitarian regime and early instantiation of a political tendency to be brought to grim maturation in the 20th century.
In this Cold War, black legend hating Robespierre came to stand proxy for hating not only Lenin and Stalin, but also Hitler and Mussolini.
Indeed, thanks, I think, partly to the invariably bloodcurdling analysis of psycho biographies.
It was extended to any dictator or damaged personality that one could rustle up.
It certainly seems the case that any historical figure who like Robespierre invites comparison not only with all of the above,
but also more recently with Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Cambodia's Pol Pot present at the initiative of Iran.
Julian Assange and most recently, Jeremy Corbyn.
It is unlikely to have been all good, shall we say, but even so, that demonising overkill almost invites scepticism.
Could anyone really be that bad? So with the Cold War now over, that is true.
There are some signs of an ideological thaw in this area of clash of cultures.
Yet popular culture still place, I think very much the old Cold War tunes, the old Cold War stereotypes, especially outside France.
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,
which was set in Paris under the terror and in which, sure enough,
Robespierre is in very emphatically portrayed as a 20th century style, dictator [INAUDIBLE] genocidal maniac.
Moreover, at a much loftier level, Jonathan Israel's recently published Revolutionary Ideas An Intellectual History of
the French Revolution shows that the old stereotypes are still very much in place.
Israel diagnosis Robespierre in particular, as characterised by quote, megalomania, paranoia and vindictiveness.
He was, Israel asserts, quote a self than confessed dictator and are going to come back to that an authoritarian populist,
a proto fascist who seised personal power by engineering a putsch.
His words again cheer on the enemies in the convention and then going on to rule with a rod of iron.
Clearly, the prototype totalitarian black legend is alive and well and walking, and it walks amongst us.
So my aim this evening is to reconsider this persistent and enduring proto totalitarian
interpretation of the revolution and the terror and its coverage of Robespierre.
But proving Robespierre wasn't a prior incarnation of Hitler,
Mussolini then in Stalin or even Tony Blair isn't actually terribly difficult and more challenging and more complicated,
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.
And today, what I'm going to try to do is to explore these questions while focussing very much on the city of Paris.
Paris was the cockpit of terror, even if terror reached far beyond the walls of the nation's capital in terms of body counts.
For example, the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris accounted for less than 3000 deaths in the city.
And this is a new country, an amount, obviously,
when set up against the great multimillion hecould tombs of which 20th century dictators have managed.
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.
But though relatively few in number, those Parisian executions, I think, had cultural visibility.
I got into the newspapers. They have influenced the historiography. Paris was also.
Hardly needs saying which where national politics were conducted by the National Convention sat,
where the Committee of Public Safety was based here to the songcraft movement was located,
that movement of radical artisans, clerks and shopkeepers from 1890 1789 had consistently pushed revolutionary culture to the left,
and Paris was ultimately where terror was undone,
a process that really started on 27th of July 1790 for the 9th of Thermidor Year two in the revolutionary
calendar with the overthrow and then the execution the following day of Maximilian Robespierre,
which is where I'll begin with the fall of Robespierre and the overthrow of what a dictator.
This was certainly the received wisdom.
Even before, on the 28th of July, Roche-Posay head had hit the executioners basket, a rumour that once his dictatorship was established,
Robespierre was planning to make himself king rippled through the sections of Paris even on the night of 9th and 10th of Thermidor,
before being further embroidered in following weeks in the light of Robespierre strong anti-monarchist.
This seemed to rank hypocrisy on his part. Every historic precedent was henceforward mine for damning dictator like dictatorships comparisons.
Robespierre was an inhuman and cruel conspirator, a catalin, a Caesar, a nero, a Cromwell.
Another more colourful way of underlining his inhumanity and bestiality was to compare him to an animal.
Thus, he was a vampire, a chameleon, a harpy, but especially in fact a cat, especially, and most of all, a tiger.
Historians even today talk of rugby as feline or tigress character,
and they don't realise they think they're borrowing more than they realise from posh thermidor and propaganda.
No one, for example, thought of Robespierre as a tiger before he was executed or a cat, for that matter, before he was executed.
Those who would overthrown him after the night, the thermidor thought of very little else.
As this example suggests, historians of Robespierre on the terror are condemned to view the man and away his
intentions against a huge barrage of ex post facto denigrated propaganda almost at once.
Moreover, in the frenzied circumstances of his overthrow, a kind of blame game got underway that had little regard for truth.
When fattier, one of the members of the Committee of General Security, many years later owned up to purely inventing the story.
The rumour that Robespierre planned to be king. Whaddya stated quote the danger of losing one's head had made one imaginative after the
night of thermidor personal responsibility for all radical legislation of the convention.
All the unpopular and most overtly terroristic measures could be dumped at his door by colleagues who had shared power with him.
Robespierre was the ultimate scapegoat, Robespierre once claimed.
That is one of the 12 members of the Committee of Public Safety.
He enjoyed only one twelfth of its power and authority, and I think this is more than a little disingenuous.
But he did. He made many striking speeches and the convention, which sought to theorise that the the use of the terror in particular.
But so did some of his colleagues. It's certainly the case, moreover, that decisions on the committee were collective and collegial.
In fact, Rosaria Signature was found on a very small proportion of the decrease of the Committee of Public Safety.
Deborah to Bill Vahan and Barry are three of the most important figures who overthrow him.
On the day of night.
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.
So a huge intensification in the activity of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
More than half of the tribunal's capital sentences were meted out in the two months of June and July alone.
Yet for that period of the great terror, as historian sometimes call it,
Robespierre had in fact absented himself entirely from both the convention and the Committee of Public Safety.
This didn't stop the post thermidor accusations of him dictatorial presiding over the
great terror the thermidor and made great play of Robespierre as dictatorial plotting.
Yet the circumstances up to the 8th and 9th of thermidor as far as one can restructure
reconstruct them showed precious little sign of organisation of any sort.
There's no evidence of closet mobilisation for a coup d'etat.
In the days leading up to his fall, Robespierre didn't really have a party Robespierre East,
although that's a term it's used a [INAUDIBLE] of a lot after the thermidor was rarely, if ever, used before,
then the final speech when he came back to the convention on the 8th of Thermidor,
which he repeated then in the evening at the Jacobin club in the same evening,
contained a lost lot of bluster, much of it aimed over the heads of the fellow deputies.
Towards Parisian chocolate, but it wasn't followed by any move to mobilise supporters on the streets.
He didn't establish contact with a National Guard or with army commanders.
And on the morning of night, the thermidor, he calmly breakfast in his lodgings as usual before walking,
unperturbed to the convention with his friends were without any prominent true sign of anything untoward happening at all.
Robespierre really was plotting a Jonathan Ezra style putsch.
He left no convincing signs of this fact in the slightest.
The great set set piece speeches of Robespierre and the convention in early 94 are sometimes taken,
particularly in 94 particularly taken, sometimes taken to be the considered credo of Robespierre and his followers.
I think this underestimates the extent to which they were less ideological expositions than performative events distillation,
someone would say almost of wishful thinking and to rally the troops and to paper over cracks amongst Republicans at a very difficult time.
Indeed, in some ways, they were a sign of weakness than a statement of overweening strength.
They underline the extent to which politics during the terror in the capital
and in the country at large was characterised less by a sort of homogeneous,
monolithic, top-down, robespierre driven ideology of terror that is always imagined in the proto totalitarian narrative,
but rather by a somewhat and sometimes bewilderingly assorted set of initiatives and strategies going in very different directions.
Although the use of fear of terror then as a weapon of government was a constant
leitmotif throughout 1793 to for the policies that undermined underpinned,
that fear could be very various.
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.
Then again, the existence of competing programmes grounded but all grounded in fear and violence may be seen in the fact that
Robespierre openly expressed antagonism towards at least two competing versions of what revolutionary government was.
The first of these was the idea that the people of Paris themselves should be allowed to act as a revolutionary vanguard.
Though his speeches, Robespierre speeches endlessly hyperbolically invoked the people and indeed were addressed to them,
Robespierre, like many of his fellow deputies in the convention,
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.
He therefore distrusted champions of the people on the left, stimulating popular discontent and preaching autonomous song Cool Art Action.
Secondly, Hospira had no truck at all,
with deputies on mission in the provinces in 1793 to for who used their powers to attack Catholicism and violently to enforce social legislation.
More radical than the convention would countenance.
This version of terror he held would drive neutrals into the camp of counter-revolution and was thus dangerously subversive.
So in this perspective, maybe we should talk less of the terror.
And indeed, that usage only really came into existence after the 9th of Thermidor, in fact.
And maybe what we should be talking of as a period of revolutionary government witnessing the interplay of a
range of political strategies which did have a common factor in the means the use of fear as a political weapon,
more so than the ends. As I've suggested, those ends could be mutually antagonistic, as, of course,
was also strike, which strikingly be demonstrated in Robespierre to overthrow,
though that was engineered not by his long term political enemies on the right,
but rather by this most enduring allies and colleagues on the left, on the Montagnier, on the Jacobin left.
Of course, this was no lam going to slaughter historians supportive of hope,
spare or sometimes guilty of bending over backwards to minimise his role in some
of the most disturbing episodes of the most repressive actions of the terror.
His growing obsession in '94 with the dangers of a foreign plot corrupting the revolution from within,
let the vicious, deadly attacks to a left and right.
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.
It is simply implausible that he really believed in the truth of some of the charges that he made against them.
He personally wrote via personally drew up the blueprint for the infamous law of 22nd Second Prairie,
which massively extended the definition of political suspect and made trials in
the Revolutionary Tribunal speedier and more likely to produce a guilty verdict.
It was he who pushed through the law against the concerns of many deputies, in fact,
and it was a Robespierre and his allies who originated the General Police Bureau,
as it was called that call that sought to take security and policing matters in-house to the Committee of Public Safety.
In the last months of his life, Robespierre signed more decrees about individual policing matters than about anything else.
In fact, he it was he who oversaw the purchase of perceived left wingers in the sections and on the Revolutionary Tribunal,
and he filled both with his own suitably patriotic nominees.
And he also fully supported the decree of the convention proposed by his colleague, Professor that after battle in battle.
No British or Hanover area and soldier should be captured alive.
On the eve of his execution, he was complaining that this decree was not being enforced.
Other generals at the front whose patriotism he called into question so Robespierre was
undoubtedly closely associated with some of the most repressive acts of the terror.
But this didn't make a dictator of him, certainly not in the 20th century model of the trilogy of the Black Legend dictates.
And in fact, Jonathan Israel's claim that I mentioned earlier that Robespierre was a self-confessed dictator.
When you look at it is intensely problematic. He does make a speech in which he says he does use that wording.
Israel cites this.
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.
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.
The unsavoury revolutionary journalist Jean-Paul Maha nor the former aristocrat look to sound far show,
whose ambitious educational reforms were adopted by Robespierre,
in fact, could by any stretch of the imagination be viewed as dictator's son in any conventional sense of the term.
What united with them was that they were both martyrs for the revolutionary cause.
Mara, of course, famously in July 1793 at the hands of Charlotte de la Policia,
killed in a restaurant in January of the same year by Wales Lone Assassin.
These men had nothing of the dictator about them. Israel completely misses, in other words, the heavy handed irony.
Rather, they had given their lives for what they what Robespierre thought and thought of as the cause of the people.
This is how Robespierre saw himself.
Moreover, a willing martyr for the people awaiting the moment of immolation this was the image he cultivated in his personal life.
It was the image he projected in the public sphere. This is the image that had made a political celebrity of him.
Let's let's linger.
A little over the idea of Robespierre as a political celebrity, it's really excellent book, which came out last year by Antoine Adulti,
figure of public, which is about the what he calls the invention of celebrity in 18th and early late,
18th and early 19th century France and England, which his book highlights this this period and shows how demonstrates how the emergence of the
modern idea of celebrity and an ensemble of practises around it really develops at this time.
What was distinctive there had been obviously fame, glory, repute and all the rest of it before.
But what was distinctive about celebrity live talk is what was it represented a new
form of notoriety in which there was a rapport between a public figure and a wide,
very wide audience.
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,
theatre, painting, crime, politics subject to the status of celebrity, which could have its emotional lows, as well as its highest moreover.
And at the other end was the modern fan,
effectively compulsively drawn into fascination with a private as well as the public life of celebrity figures.
Fans experienced adoring, albeit wholly fantasy driven intimacy with their subjects,
their celebrity subjects sometimes interspersed with melancholic, heartbreaking feelings of distance and loss.
Letter writing was, of course, the choice form of expression of fan ship.
But it also found outlets in a vibrant commercial sector of engravings, medallions, waxworks, porcelain mementos and illustrated China bric a brac.
Nifty passes quite quickly and lightly over the politics of the revolutionary decade,
highlighting mainly the role of the place of Mirabeau as what he calls the great the first great star of modern democratic politics.
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,
fits quite nicely into the same celebrity and niche.
Robespierre was the sort of person that people named their children after or wanted as a godparent to their back to a new baby.
Some renamed themselves in his honour. There was one the Jean-Michel G.A., a radical Montmartre song Killshot,
who adopted Robespierre as family name as his own first name, thus becoming hopes Pierre la gente.
Now, I think that was an unwise move myself, actually.
People named their pets after him to they were hobbies, Pierre.
Shut up, Robespierre. This This call resounded around the Luxembourg prison on the night of night, the thermidor.
But in fact, it only was a jailer ordering ordering his mastiff of that name, guarding the door to stop barking people above,
or wrote to Robespierre as they wrote to few others except their closest family and friends,
expressing an intimacy that nothing except their own strong feelings often justified.
Correspondent stalked him too, sometimes with love, but sometimes with vengeance in their hearts.
They liked to boast he was their friend that visited him, that dined with him.
They could cite his most memorable remarks and even extensive and indeed extensive police enquiries after his death revealed
individuals in and around Paris who did use their putative closeness to Robespierre as a means of leveraging local power.
Do, as I say, or Robespierre will get to know. And then that's the logic Robespierre was a name to conjure with.
Indeed, in the terror, it was a celebrity name to kill with.
It's noteworthy that in the session of the Convention on the Night of Thermidor,
when Rupture his colleagues turned on him, they accused him of being what a dictator of public opinion.
I think a backhanded way of acknowledging the way that rough name seemed to attract the unreflective, irrational adoration of fandom.
Many of the earliest his celebrities celebrated their celebrity milked it for all it was worth built their careers upon its premises,
luxuriate it in its unexpected benefits.
Yet that celebrity model that he talks about had variance and none more important, in fact, than the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
whose confessional writings lilt he views as mocking the original moment in the making of modern celebrity,
whose show won an enormous following of admirers throughout France, of course, but not least amongst whom was Maximilian Robespierre.
Both men, however, shrank from the celebrity whose benefits they enjoyed and indeed stimulated despite my repugnance.
So once wrote famously, I have to talk about myself. Like poor Jean-Jacques, Robespierre was always self-effacing, discursive Lee, retiring,
backing modestly into the limelight of fame and reputation while simultaneously holding up his own arc lights and talking endlessly of himself,
making his political reputation through an evolving, autobiographical chronicle about his life, his innermost thoughts,
his career in 1791 as the closure of the constituent assembly in which Robespierre had made his political reputation.
The people of Paris had cheered him through the Straits, placed laurels on his head and threw flowers at him.
But by 1794, he was saying he was, let's say, let's say, except at a distance fears of assassination from.
Spring onwards meant that he ventured out of his lodgings in the warmly protective display residence on the Hussan town of Hay,
where he stayed only relatively rarely as far as we can judge.
And he was usually accompanied by anything up to a dozen Walkers fans and friends who served as his personal guard.
This peekaboo style of celebrity probably only enhanced his celebrity status on the grounds that lack of familiarity bred mistake.
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.
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
emergence over the middle of the chaos of the century of a media infrastructure in which celebrity culture could evolve and and function.
Obviously, we know what that is, you know, increasing levels of literacy, cheaper, more widely diffused print items,
nobles, newspapers, pamphlets, gazette satires and top quality Postal Service as well.
All that provided the essential support for the emergence of a public sphere, that bourgeois public sphere that harbourmaster analysed for us.
A few years ago, when set against our own standards or even against the regime of freedoms indicated initiated in 1789,
Paris under the terror seemed to fly under the flag of unfreedom and repression.
It's true, true. In 1793 to fall, there was tight censorship of newspapers and pamphlets.
No royalist views since late 1792. No yet the opinion circulate till midday since 1793 left and right wing titles under surveillance.
Journalists were jailed and they could be guillotined.
People watch their mouths even smiling was avoided as people kept their heads beneath the parapet.
Spies seem to be everywhere everywhere, including in the city's numerous prisons, which house getting on for 8000 individuals.
Arrests were preventive on the basis of suspicion of counter-revolutionary intent, which was very difficult to disprove.
Religious freedom existed in theory, but priests who hadn't sworn an oath of allegiance to the revolution prudently lay low.
Nobles were routinely assumed to be counter-revolutionary and from late April had been banished totally from the city.
And by June and July 1794, huge numbers of communists were rubbing shoulders with nobles and priests on the timbres.
As repression tightened. Still,
I think it would be misleading to imagine repression of individual freedoms under the terror operating like some
efficient top down hydraulic machine operating with oiled protoc totalitarian efficiency to crush dissent.
The adjective revolutionary in the title revolutionary government actually signifies emergency.
It's emergency government, not session on constitutional government to deal with an emergency.
And as you have suggested earlier, there's far more cobbling together of policies on the hoof than the protest totalitarian label allows.
In addition, while there was indeed a stark contrast between 1793 four and the early years of the revolution,
which had enjoyed the individual freedoms enshrined in the Declaration of Man,
the deficiency is far less striking when set against the situation of Paris in the last half century, say of the ancient regime.
As we know, ancient regimes society provided the matrix and the communications infrastructure,
as I just talked about, to which to those to those freedoms that were particularly in fact instantiated in 1789.
But pre 1789, Paris was hardly a free society.
Particular ism and hierarchy there prevailed over equality and liberty.
Catholicism prior to 1789 was, of course, the state religion, meaning Protestants and Jews enjoyed no rights.
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.
Censorship varied in intensity, but was always to be reckoned with.
A great many of the major figures of the Enlightenment, as you well know,
endured periods of imprisonment and or exile to say nothing of minor authors.
The Bastille was far from the joke.
It is sometimes accounted, and the same was true of the latter the cachet the theatre world was closely regulated by the Crown, too.
Newspapers had to be careful about political reporting. Indeed, most political coverage was supplied by newspapers situated beyond French borders.
The Paris Police Force, directed by a ministerial level appointment, the Attorney-General.
The police was intrusive, arbitrary and cruel,
and owed much to its effectiveness of its effectiveness of its effectiveness to attend tackle a network of spies.
There were Louis Sebastian Melchior stated quote spies that caught spies in town, spies in the street, spies amongst [INAUDIBLE].
Spies on wit. The terror had not invented spies.
It had not invented repression or unfreedom.
Furthermore, the terror unfurled in France that was fighting almost the whole of Europe with an intensity that even when it was at war,
the unsound regime monarchy never had to endure.
The terror then looks bad when set against any of against the very real gains of 1789 stands out less.
I think when compared with the social and intellectual conditions of Paris prior to 1789,
in spite of its sharp limitations on social and intellectual freedom,
the ancient regime was unable to prevent obviously the blossoming of the French Enlightenment.
We know that. So just taking that further. One wonders whether the repressive character of Paris,
the terror Parisian Paris under the terror really was sufficient to squeeze into extinction
the values and practises of the public sphere as they protest totalitarian narrative,
which suggest my sense is, in fact,
that a massive transformation of the world of print during the revolutionary decade provided a propitious terrain for freedom,
allowing authors and their censors often to beat the censor.
The revolution witnessed, as Ralph Reichert has has put it, an epochal media transformation, an absolutely huge expansion of the world of print,
which was jacks up far, far higher than that, even though that obviously achieved under the Enlightenment.
Newspapers, pamphlets, songs and prints that had been 36 print shops in Paris before 1789.
It reached a level of two hundred and twenty one in 1798, a six fold increase.
In fact, the volume of print production, as I shall suggest, may well have risen more than this.
Before 1789, Paris had one daily newspaper, the show, not by established 1776, maybe another 50 or 60 circulated or published in the city.
Political reportage was minimal within the press, as I said, but in 1789, 90 300 new papers emerged over the decade as a whole.
There would be sixteen thousand in France as a whole. In 1793 to four over 100 papers, newspapers still circulated in Paris.
While it's been suggested that the height of the revolution, the city printed some three to 300000 copies daily.
Alongside the newspaper press was the print world of pamphlets and prints, of course, some 40000 over the course of the decade.
By one estimate, prints and caricatures had been particularly heavily censored and the ancien regime after 1789,
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.
Print generated an extraordinary extension of the public sphere.
Harbour Mask designated the public sphere of the age of Enlightenment a bourgeois public sphere, as we know.
But the public sphere of the mid 1790s? Well, let's call it for some give it a name.
The Republican public sphere reached parts of the population that had never reached been reached under the consent regime.
It constituted a kind of democratic dividend, providing readers and consumers with a larger, richer and more varied print diet than ever before.
This was all the more the case in the print interacted with emergent forms of sociability.
So to amplify impact, 18th century reading practises we know were often collective occurring in bars and coffeehouses,
family settings on street corners and the like. Now new sites of sociability, political clubs, reading rooms, popular societies, sectional assemblies.
All of those things offered an expanding number of venues for reading.
It's been suggested that a multiplier of 10 may be used to give a total readership of a single newspaper.
Well, if this is true, then the 300000 copies coming out of Paris each day reached a readership of three millions.
And that's not far off half the adult male population of France.
And that density of reading practises was likely to have been much higher in Paris, of course,
which took a disproportionate share of the total newspaper production,
especially in 1793 to four in fact, and where literacy rates were at their highest.
In this connexion, it's also worth mentioning the vibrant singing culture that the 1790s inaugurated.
More than 3000 songs were published over the revolutionary decade, nearly half of them actually in 1793 and 1794 under the terror.
Then the revolutionary government's commitment to intellectual and artistic production actually boosted production of songs,
newspapers, pamphlets and caricatures. The realm of theatre also felt that dynamic wind of change.
The South Asian monarchy had regulated performances, concentrating them in the three state run theatres the comedy franchise,
the opera comedy The Italian around which it's true, clustered a number of secondary event venues.
The revolution totally deregulated the theatre, allowing the number of theatres in the city to expand hugely.
Nearly 40 institutions on the day that Robespierre was executed,
one could take one's choice between performances at around a dozen or so theatres, and one could also visit Ashley's amphitheatre.
Now run not by the eponymous English leisure entrepreneur, but by Antonio Franco, any future circus impresario.
The theatre that day hosted a fit civic. The high point of which was quite an illuminated chariot pull.
It pulled by four richly comparison charges, followed by a display of horse racing exercises, tricks and stunts, and highly amusing scenes.
The Franconia Spectacular serves as a reminder that the revolution also ensures introduced a wide array of festivals.
Public festivals are wearing shorts and intensity.
The most intensive and extravagant of these were, of course, those devised and managed by pageant master Jacques-Louis David.
Enormous spectaculars like the Festival of the Supreme being in June 1794,
which literally hundreds of thousands of people were present and were very enthusiastic by most accounts.
And then there were, of course, minor ceremonies. Every 10 days.
The decadal ceremonies, songs and hymns played a particular role in such ceremonies.
The robust Democratic culture of print and performance that I've been describing was not its true running at
full throttle in 1793 to fall under the shadow of the guillotine with a political and security stakes so high.
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,
for example, and the press has political diversity was definitely reduced.
High profile deterrent measures could have a sharp effect on freedom of speech and shape cultural creativity along politically Orthodox lines.
The brouhaha caused by the production in August 1793, for example, of the politician and dramatist password in a chateaux play Pamela,
which is based on Samuel Richardson's great novel of sensibility, is a case in point.
The censors were shocked to discover that Pamela herself may have been of noble stock in the plot,
a pedigree construed as clearly counter-revolutionary. The play closed.
The theatre was shut down. No chateau was imprisoned along with all the actors in the play.
This was a very good way to oncology leisure, as Voltaire would have said.
Of course, in the light of such issues, Parisians, as I said, they obviously watched their mouths during the terror.
But then, as I've tried to show, they always had done. But this didn't equate to dumb conformity.
There were ways of expressing dissent and political insouciance that had a long history in Paris's past.
As the poet and wit Shafir put it, the government of France before 1789 had been an absolute top of a partisan song,
an absolute monarchy tempered by songs by titters.
Political irreverence of the Parisians was legendary, as Messier himself noted, they quote, laugh at everything, quote they repulse Kashan.
Sorry, they repulsed Cannon by vaudeville. They enchaine royal power by epic dramatic cellars.
Why should we believe this? Irreverence died out completely within the Republican public sphere of 1793 to four?
Was the terror really able to silence? Shatteringly contentious Parisians.
Perhaps it's true the gravity of the military sexual situation encouraged conformity.
Perhaps those repressive measures did play a big part, perhaps, and they certainly would have had a big, a strong inhibiting effect.
But one can, I think, legitimately legitimately wonder whether even these factors were completely effective.
The scale of the Republicans fare was so extensive, I think that it resisted policing such criticism out of all existence.
Even with the deterrence of censor, jail and guillotine, other motions of other emotions apart from fear bubbled up to the surface.
As long as the comic is running well. Louis Sebastian, messy, messy, I had remarked to Paris under the same regime,
as long as the her comic is running well, one doesn't have to worry about civil war.
Well, of course, in a way, 1789 proved the latter of his prediction wrong by the spirit of that commitment
to pleasure that Parisians expressed maybe an emotion worth taking seriously,
even at the height of the terror government and its censors were finding it difficult to break old habits in theatre going, for example.
There were lots of evocations of Republican virtue and celebrations of military success in the repertoire in 1793 that,
you know they played pretty well to Parisian tastes.
Some 200 new plays were staged in 1794 alone, half of which historians tell us could be classified as patriotic.
Politically correct then, but then half of those, it means, were not patriotic or political and were in fact, largely traditional fare.
Moreover, censoring often failed in its operations as a result of political and institutional rivalries.
There was a decree on the 2nd of August 1793, which, for example, which barred to force theatres to play every ten days.
One of three state endorsed plays either Voltaire's Brutes vs. Lumias, William Tell or Marriage Reception.
Yes, Aeschylus crackers, but that was only enforced extremely haphazard haphazardly.
It left the field relatively clear for the continuance of the old repertoire and additions in its spirit.
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.
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.
And indeed, it was playing at the Omega comic in July 1794.
So Parisians could, if they chose lap up militaristic celebrations of the war effort.
But then they often showed a preference for entertainment over propaganda, laughter over austere Republican exemplars.
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.
Parisian theatre audiences thus seem to exhibit similar traits to those of their own series shameful bars as mockingly satirised by messier.
They may have been genuinely patriotic, authentically and sincerely Republican, but they also wanted to enjoy themselves.
I'm suggesting so that one might plausibly wonder whether the government that failed to respect this fact did so at its own peril.
And in this context, I think it's worth noting the excessive government response in late June and
early July to a spontaneous campaign of what were called fraternal banquets,
which arose. They rose spontaneously throughout the sections of Paris to celebrate the great military victory of flourish on the 26th of June 1794.
I was like street parties absolutely everywhere throughout Paris and the response of the revolutionary government and Robespierre in particular,
in fact and his allies was quite ridiculously out of proportion because Robespierre
saw these sort of joyful street parties as aristocratic traps for Saki Lite,
in which good patriots clink glasses with their potential assassins and they were closed down their forbidden.
Of course, we should never lose sight of economic factors,
explaining a loss of enthusiasm amongst the Parisian labouring classes for revolutionary government.
Food shortages were still there. The threatened imposition of wage control.
But that fraternal banquets incident, I think, showed a dangerous drifting apart between Parisian opinion,
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.
This was where Rob Spears celebrity status played against him.
He was less visible than he had been before, as I've suggested,
and certainly more inaccessible in the discontent that surrounded government policy in June and July 17, not 94.
The Walkers and the devoted fans who followed him lovingly between the convention and the Jacobin club in his lodgings on the horizontal away,
were transmuted into a praetorian guard, sharpening their knives for the seizure of power.
Celebrity left him ultra exposed, in other words, to covert criticism.
Far more exposed, I think, than was the case with his fellow members of the Committee of Public Safety,
who didn't have that celebrity status on neither term at all.
It was his celebrity as much as any other thing which really counted against him.
It allowed his transport to transmutation by a process of what we might call celebrity demonisation into an arch villain,
the arch villain of the revolution.
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.
Four days before his overthrow. On 23rd of July.
Excuse me. 23rd of July 1794, the Parisien newspaper the Federal Republic had reviewed a new and much applauded one act comedy by Dominion,
which had played at the touts to direct a variety.
A couple of days before and that play was entitled, it will create all hibernation hypocrite in revolution.
It was the paper explained about quote one of those crafty men who, by their robust oratory under the cloak of patriotism,
influence uneducated citizens and popular assemblies and for a while seduce
worthy sunk a lot who imprudently give their support to such false patriots.
We might note such individuals so that each of us can point out the deceitful knives when the
sections use up a false popularity that they wished to use so as to overthrow the Republic.
For me,
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
hypocrisy overlap to an extraordinary extent with the anti-Arab spurious propaganda campaign that followed instantly after Robespierre overthrow.
And indeed, do many on goes on, and a few months later, he produces a classic anti-Arab as text.
Let me do this. Tell me, though lamo to Tehran,
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?
Was this. A. Robespierre ism out there on the public sphere sphere before the fall of Robespierre,
I've been arguing that the repressive apparatus of the revolutionary government
was perhaps too sketchy to cope with the vitality and the scale of a still very
capacious Republican public sphere whose anti-authoritarian instincts honed under
the ancient regime monarchy was still in place to manage play and its journalist.
Critics suggest that to uncover resistance to authority,
we need to look more carefully for covert and even coded expressions of dissent prior to the night.
The Thermidor.
And indeed, we do have a methodology for doing this, which has been developed precisely for detecting resistance to authoritarian regimes.
And that, of course, as I'm sure you'll be familiar with the work of the sociologist James C. Scott.
His 1990 study, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, highlights what he calls hidden transcripts by which dominated groups develop a collective
critique of power by utilising a set of terms and codes that are kept away from those in power.
If we look closely at the newspaper press in Paris in the months leading up to the night,
the film thermidor, which is an astonishingly large and almost totally underused source.
In fact, there are a number of points in which one begins to suspect the existence of such of just such hidden transcripts.
In the Constituent Assembly of 1789 to 91 royalist politicians and journalists used to drive Robespierre completely mad to distraction,
even by misspelling his name.
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,
whom the would be registered assassin of Louis, the 14th whom Robespierre was held totally erroneously to have been related to.
So that was in 70 days, nine to 91. So why was it five years later in the summer of 1794?
Why were some journals still misspelling his name? Then again on the 3rd of Thermidor?
The editor of the Arabia Turf Universelle noted a typo that had crept into the report of one of Robespierre speeches.
Instead of using the verb tower to sign be silent that the text had used fair.
Well, you know, it's the letter single letter.
So the editor told us readers Robespierre Speight should not read it was we who made false denunciations.
Making denunciations later held university to be a force where a chatbot judged to be Robespierre speciality.
After the night, the thermidor on the 5th of Thermidor, several newspapers advertised the appearance in French translation of an English tracked,
a political treatise published originally published in English in Seventeen Eighty Five by one William Allen.
It was the paper's noted attacks that have been written quote by an enemy of the tyranny of Cromwell.
Within days, this covert reference would be followed by far more copious equations between Robespierre and Cromwell, the dictator.
So maybe these are just coincidences.
My sense is that they're more than that, and at once is happenstance twice as coincidence and three times as enemy action.
I don't have time, obviously, to look more briefly at this phenomenon of resistance through typo and through tipping the wink,
except to say that these are by far far, far from lone examples.
And I think it's interesting the kind of perspective that this opens up on the public sphere,
that Republican public sphere that had developed since 1792 and which I'm stressing is still so buoyant and and vibrant,
and it provides a far more satisfying lens, I think,
for us to consider the terror than the kind of sort of retro genealogies thing inherent in seeing the terror as essentially proto totalitarian.
One of the problems of seeing the terror through the lens of a totalitarian regimes of the
20th century is that it overestimates the capacity of governmental instruments of repression,
and it underestimates the capacity of the people to have opinions of their own and to find ways of expressing that.
On the 10th of Thermidor year to on the 28th of July 1794,
then the execution of Robespierre toppled from power the previous day and the convention so huge.
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
the people could at last open their mouths in criticism after months of silence and repression.
But I think this underestimates the role of the people of Paris in instigating his fall.
It actually underestimates the people of Paris altogether.
So I've demonstrated elsewhere, I think, and it's an article which came out last year in the American Historical Review.
Parisians in their thousands and in the tens of thousands had mobilised that
previous evening to thwart the insurrectionary plans of the proposed Paris commune.
Furthermore,
examining more closely the state of public opinion and being alert to those covert and coded languages in which resistance could be expressed,
will, I hope,
anyway allow us to detect continuities between the bourgeois public sphere of the Enlightenment and the Republican public sphere of the 1790s.
The people of Paris who were instrumental in the overthrow of Robespierre had, I'm suggesting,
been growing tired of the austere and rigid form of power that Robespierre had come to represent.
Celebrity Robespierre had come to represent ultimately in the face of violence,
a violence they found increasingly difficult to square with their more generous conception of humanity.
They deployed in resistance the weapons of wit and humour.
I'm always sceptical of identifying tracks, historical characteristics and individuals, let alone groups of individuals.
But here let hope over override scepticism that is expressed confidence in
the ability of Parisians and our own day to continue to deploy humanity wit,
who knows even humour in the pursuit of social harmony at another troubled time in its history?
The best of outlooks, even in the worst of times. Very much the Parisian way.
Thank you.