French First Republic

They say power to the people, but of course, uh, this has been a very fragile and sometimes radical experience there in France.

And so the First French Republic was basically over in 1804 when Napoleon...

After Napoleon, there was a Second French Republic that was declared in 1848.

It only lasted four years.

Washington was elected for a second term in 1792, again with Adams as his vice president.

He continued to struggle with the new French Republic as in 1793 they executed King Louis XVI and were engulfed in a series of revolutionary wars.

Washington leaned hard into his desire for American isolation from Europe, much to the frustration of the pro-French members of his cabinet, like Thomas Jefferson.

In 1793, during his second term, Washington was forced to remove himself and the government from their temporary capital in Philadelphia due to an outbreak of yellow fever.

Now, even at this point, there are people who say this has definitely gone too far now.

There's a Republican bookseller called Nicolas Rouault.

I think we've quoted him a few times in earlier series.

He's often quoted in histories of the revolution because he's such a great source.

And when these barges get out into the middle of the Loire or, you know, some other river, the, um, the plugs are pulled out, the guards leap into boats, and the people with their hands and legs fettered just sink into the, the river and are all drowned.

And Carrier, Carrier, it amuses him to describe these mass drownings as Republican baptisms.

So that's, uh, massive banter there.

Um, and some of them, if they are young men or women, um, they might have been stripped of their clothing, um, because, uh, clothes are part of the perks that you get if you're a revolutionary guard, um, dealing with counter-revolutionaries.

And so the, the, the men and women, um, naked would then be bound facing one another, um, and these were described by Carrier as Republican marriages.

So I guess you either find that funny or you don't.

Um, Carrier obviously thinks it's hilarious, uh, and Robespierre back in Paris, I mean, he's, he's not amused by this at all.

No, it disgusts him.

In the battered fortress of Torque in Normandy, where the hopes of the aristocrats suffered a mortal blow, a man sits writing.

Before his door stands a Republican guard.

Halt! Out of my way, citizen guard.

I must see Simodin.

Of what, Simoudin? Is the lad with his uncle? Has the boy, now a man, taken up arms against all I hold most dear, the Republic of France? Can you not see, D'Anjou? Is the lad my enemy? The night fell about us like a great dark cloak as we walked down toward the Rue du Pont.

And I, Simondin, was filled with a strange troubled sense, as if stalked by a dream.

Before the café stood a unit of the Paris Republican Guard with their blue uniforms and primed muskets.

I showed my credentials, and leaving Donjou downstairs, I climbed the café stairs.

Welcome back to The Rest is History.

So, the Republican government in Paris is locked in a life or death struggle against what it sees as the forces of royalism and reaction and counter-revolution.

And as we have heard, the National Convention have stripped from the Great Basilica in Saint-Denis every last trace of monarchical history.

And that same day that they voted, the 1st of August, they moved Marie Antoinette from her prison in the temple late at night for the first time.

And to lots of patriots with the death of Marie Antoinette, perhaps even more than with the death of her husband, It seems that a new world has been born.

And so a pamphlet is published shortly after her execution, which expresses this in the most exulting terms.

Frenchmen, Republicans, you have purged the earth of a monster who was its abomination.

And on one level, this is obviously a massive exaggeration because purely on the symbolic level, of course, it was the death of Louis XVI that had been the key moment.