708. The Terror: The Reign of Robespierre (Part 2)

[upbeat music] "We are now, therefore, got to that black precipitous abyss, whither all things have long been tending: where, having now arrived on the giddy verge, they hurl down in confused ruin, headlong pell-mell, down, down, till sansculottism have consummated itself; and in this wondrous French Revolution, as in a doomsday, a world have been rapidly, if not born again, yet destroyed and engulfed.

Terror has long been terrible; but to the actors themselves it has now become manifest that their appointed course is one of terror, and they say, 'Be it so! Que la terreur soit l'ordre du jour!' Let terror be the order of the day!" So what a dramatic moment, a key point in the story of the French Revolution, the start of the Terror.

So this passage, which describes this great turning point, the dawning of the Reign of Terror, comes from the single most influential history of the French Revolution that has ever been written in our native tongue.

And the man who wrote it was one of the absolute intellectual titans of Victorian Britain.

He was the Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle.

Now, some of you might have found that reading a little bit, um, theatrical, but of course that was Carlyle's style.

Some people might even say a melodramatic style, and I think they'd be right.

So he's writing often the present tense, so it gives you this incredibly vivid, palpable sense of immediacy.

He puts you right in the heart of the revolution.

And as you can tell from that passage, Tom, Carlyle sees the revolution as the equivalent of the flood or the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation, this titanic biblical reckoning-

Yeah

... um, between the forces of radicalism and violence and the forces of the established order.

And the Terror, this point in our story, 1793, 1794, is the absolute climax.

Yes.

So Carlyle casts it as this, um, kind of immense, unstoppable conflagration that consumes all in its path and even its own prophets, so Saturn devouring his own children.

We talked about that in our first episode.

And also, Dominic, in our first episode, we, we talked about how for the British and perhaps for the Anglophone world more generally, the Terror is really what the revolution is all about.

And it's not a coincidence that Carlyle was a massive influence on Charles Dickens, who said that he'd read it 500 times-

[chuckles]

...

Carlyle's book on the French Revolution.

And so it's his principal source for Tale of Two Cities, which is, I mean, amazing, the bestselling novel in English.

So it's, it's, that is the novel that's imprinted this idea of the revolution as being equivalent to terror, I think, in the kind of the British imagination.

And this is where our sense of it as Streams of blood, tumbrils, all of that that we were talking about yesterday comes from.

Yeah.