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[Assistant] Bordeaux then sent delegations out to other cities, calling on them all to first elect a shadow national convention that would meet anywhere but Paris,


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[Assistant] And second, raise an armed force at least 80,000 strong to march on the capital and bring the Parisians to heel.


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[Assistant] This call was heeded in the north by the Norman city of Ca, and the Breton city of Rennes, and then down in the southeast most fatefully by the Mediterranean port city of Toulon, which happened to house France's naval dockyard, and it's really not good when the city that houses your navy goes into revolt.


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[Assistant] As I said last week, this wave of declarations against Paris has been dubbed the Federalist Revolt.


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[Assistant] Federalism in this case, meaning a movement to decentralize power, as opposed to the old American federalism, which was a movement to centralize power.


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[Assistant] But though they are now in revolt against radical Paris, in many ways the Federalists were more revolutionary than the Parisians.


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[Assistant] Because when you look at the program that has been emerging from the capital these last few months, forced conscription, committees of surveillance, arbitrary tribunals, attacks on freedom of the press, price controls, a general police state watched over by representatives on mission with unlimited powers,


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[Assistant] I mean, none of that is what the revolution was supposed to have been about.


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[Assistant] Every single part of it was just a recasting of the most despotic elements of the Ancien Regime.


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[Assistant] So, who was really the counter-revolutionary here? Both sides, of course, pointed to the other guys.


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[Assistant] A 75 delegate signed an official protest against the purge of the Girondins.


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[Assistant] Now there is no reason to believe that most of those signatures did not simply represent principled rejection of the idea that armed mobs could just expel representatives that had been legally elected.


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[Assistant] But when the terror picks up, every one of those signatures would stand as proof enough of complicity in some far-reaching Girondin plot, and they too would be arrested for their alleged crimes.


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[Assistant] The prescribed Girondins, meanwhile, sat under a very loose house arrest that was only tightened when a few of them, including Jerome Pétion, got up and walked out the door one day, eventually surfacing up in Normandy.


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[Assistant] No, they did not like those guys, but their alliance with the Enragé was something of an embarrassment.


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[Assistant] Though, they were clearly the beneficiaries of the insurrection. That did not mean they really wanted to encourage lawless upheavals like this.


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[Assistant] And as we'll see once the terror gets going, Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety would be as quick to use la guillotine against radical populace in the streets as they were to use it against some aristocratic swine.


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[Assistant] For the moment though, the mountain tried to co-op some of the Enragé demands, and hopefully keep the streets mollified.


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[Assistant] The convention voted to enroll that so-called revolutionary army, which was really just organized bands of sans-culottes to enforce things like the maximum on grains. That would hopefully keep them occupied.


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[Assistant] They also voted to spend every working day working on the thing that was supposed to have been the whole reason the convention had been called in the first place.


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[Assistant] I mean, does anyone out there even remember why the convention had been called? That's right, to draft a new constitution.


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[Assistant] Well here we are eight months later, and virtually nothing had been done about that new constitution.


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[Assistant] That constitution wound up being far more egalitarian and democratic than just about anything that had come before it in world history.


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[Assistant] It's a pretty stunning document in terms of the political access it granted and the breadth of the rights it guaranteed.


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[Assistant] But the funny thing about the Constitution of 1793 was that as idealistic as it was, and as popular as it was, it was never actually implemented. The moment it was ratified, it was set aside.


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[Assistant] The threats facing France were determined to be too dire to abandon the emergency revolutionary government currently in place


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[Assistant] Led by the Committee of Public Safety, that revolutionary government was attempting to navigate the multiple crises that threatened to destroy France. And by navigate, I of course mean cut off as many heads as possible, and hope for the best.


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[Assistant] It will be two weeks before we pick up that story, because when you add up all the episodes from the history of Rome and revolutions and exclude the supplementals, next week's episode turns out to be my 250th career podcast episode, which is pretty crazy.


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[Assistant] That's a big number for one guy, one computer, and a pile of books.


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[Assistant] So to celebrate, next week will be question time, where I will answer questions about Rome, the revolutions we've covered so far, my work process, and where I'd like to go if I have a time machine.


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[Assistant] Audible is the internet's leading provider of audio entertainment with over 150,000 titles to choose from.


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[Assistant] When you're done with this episode, go to audiblepodcast.com forward slash revolutions.


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[Assistant] By going to that address, you qualify for a free book download when you sign up for a 30-day trial membership. There is no obligation to continue the service, and you can cancel any time and keep the free book. You can also keep going with one of the monthly subscription options and get great deals on all future audiobook purchases.


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[Assistant] So, I've just had an epiphany about audiobooks, maybe even a revelation. I can't believe it hasn't occurred to me before, there is absolutely nothing like an audiobook to help keep you moving through ultra-dense or ultra-convoluted prose that you might get lost in if you tried to sit and read it.


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[Assistant] So with that in mind, I decided to download a mainstay of my life reading list that was in danger of never getting crossed out. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. And guys, it's great!


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[Assistant] And there's no chance that my eyes were gonna get heavy trying to plod my way through whole paragraphs on labor theory that deploy but a single period.


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[Assistant] So Wealth of Nations, I heartily recommend if you're looking to better understand the economic underpinnings of like, the whole world.


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[Assistant] But the next book you look to download, think about picking up one of those dense masterpieces you always wanted to read, but they just seemed too daunting to tackle.


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[Assistant] And when you're done with this episode, go to audiblepodcast.com forward slash revolutions so that they know who sent you.


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[Assistant] So last week, we witnessed a massive turning point in the French Revolution. A massive turning point in world history.


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[Assistant] The insurrectionary commune, backed by an army of militant sans-culottes and ultra-patriotic national guardsmen, violently seized control of Paris on August 10, 1792. The king was now suspended, the royal family imprisoned.


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[Assistant] And though it wasn't yet official, this insurrection had just brought an end to a thousand year old monarchy. And for the men who successfully pulled it off, that was hopefully just the beginning. And it was just the beginning. That wasn't necessarily a good thing.


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[Assistant] Because this second French Revolution is about to open the door for all the worst excesses we think of when we think of the French Revolution. And today, the revolutionaries will officially set out on the bloody road that will lead them all to the reign of terror.


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[Assistant] In the days after August the 10th, power was shared haphazardly by three institutions. First, the insurrectionary commune, who had just seized control of Paris by force. Second, the legislative assembly, who were trying to put on a brave face but who surely recognized that they had just been rendered impotent.


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[Assistant] And finally, a new thing called the Provisional Executive Council.


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[Assistant] This six-man council was essentially the restored Girondin Royal Ministry, plus Danton as Minister of Justice.


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[Assistant] But because the entire constitutional order had just been overturned, it was difficult to tell who had authority over what.


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[Assistant] But in those first few days, it became clear that the Legislative Assembly was now taking its orders from the Insurrectionary Commune, that is, if they knew what was good for them.


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[Assistant] So, under pressure from the radical Parisians, the legislative assembly passed a law granting municipalities the right to arrest anyone they thought suspicious for any reason.


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[Assistant] Then, the assembly appointed commissioners to head out into the departments to make sure that the provincials understood that August the 10th meant that there was a new sheriff in town, and that anyone who didn't like it, or who was suspected of supporting the now suspended king, or who just happened to make a joke at the wrong time, faced arrest or worse.


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[Assistant] These commissioners also spread the word that new elections would commence in a few weeks to elect a national convention, whose job it would be to write a constitution that reflected true revolutionary principles, and that in keeping with those principles every man would be allowed to vote.


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[Assistant] Back in the Capitol, the Legislative Assembly then took no steps to halt the suppression of royalist-leaning newspapers. Conservative editors were arrested and their presses seized by armed units under the direction of the insurrectionary commune.


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[Assistant] Because the revolutionary principle of freedom of speech could not possibly apply to men who advocated counterrevolution.


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[Assistant] While the Legislative Assembly deferred to the will of the Commune, the Provisional Executive Council deferred to the will of new Minister of Justice Donton.


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[Assistant] If any one man could be said to be in control in these chaotic days after the second French Revolution, it was Danton.


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[Assistant] The insurrectionary commune was basically his creation. The Song Q lot out in the streets hailed him as their champion. And the Legislative Assembly had just given him more votes than any other member of the Provisional Council.


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[Assistant] So, it was not surprising that Danton, now all of 32 years old, found himself the most powerful man in Paris.


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[Assistant] But most powerful does not mean all powerful.


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[Assistant] Danton was not some dictator, not by a long shot. He simply radiated a bit more authority than any other man in the city.


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[Assistant] Yielding to this radiant authority, the Legislative Assembly appointed Danton's close confidants, Camille Desmoulins and Fabre Deglantine, to be his official secretaries. And then they voted the Justice Minister 550,000 livre to go attend to his duties.


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[Assistant] Danton and his friends then started spending this money right away, mostly to build up a network of spies and informants to quickly root out all the internal enemies of France before they could form a fifth column to aid the about to invade allied armies.


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[Assistant] Now just to foreshadow a little bit though, the liberal spending of all this money, the inadequate receipts kept, and the elevation of Deglantine to a position of official power, would all come back to haunt Danton.


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[Assistant] But for the moment he had things to do, money to pay for it, and trusted friends to help him get it done.


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[Assistant] After the insurrection, Danton himself was pretty much forward looking. That is, what can we do to prepare Paris to defend itself from the Austrian's impressions?


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[Assistant] But his Sankyu lot friends out in the streets, and their representatives in the Paris sections and the insurrectionary commune, were stuck looking backward.


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[Assistant] Specifically, they wanted revenge on all those who had spilled patriot blood on August the 10th. So that meant the few Swiss guards left alive, and a few other random army officers and court functionaries who had been taken into custody.


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[Assistant] The whole insurrection was now being cast as a necessary response to some vaguely defined royalist conspiracy, and the conspirators had to be punished.


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[Assistant] But more generally, the Sang-Kyu Lot now demanded all the revolution's enemies be hunted down and locked up, reserving particular wrath for non-juring priests who had abused the leniency with which they had been treated to foment counterrevolution. It was time for that leniency to end.


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[Assistant] So under pressure from the sections, the legislative assembly decreed that a new, new civic oath must be taken immediately to distinguish the patriotic clergy from the traitorous clergy.


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[Assistant] And finally, there was one guy above all who the sans-culottes singled out for intense hatred. The Marquis de Lafayette, aka the Butcher of the Chambre de Mars.


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[Assistant] The Parisians wanted his head on a platter, and they wanted it right now.


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[Assistant] Don Hahn himself personally loathed Lafayette, and so he wasted no time obliging his people. On August the 14th, a warrant was issued for Lafayette's arrest.


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[Assistant] Out on the frontier, Lafayette was tipped off about the warrant, and knowing full well that if he gave himself up, he would likely be put on trial and executed, he did the prudent thing.


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[Assistant] Accompanied by a few loyal officers, he packed his bags, and on August the 17th he crossed the lines into the Austrian Netherlands.


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[Assistant] Now since the start of the war, the French officers who deserted across the lines had, for the most part, been allowed to pass through Austrian territory unmolested. I mean, it made sense to encourage defections.


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[Assistant] So Lafayette's plan was to find a port and sail to the United States, where his adoptive countrymen would welcome him with open arms, unlike his actual countrymen who were now trying to cut his head off.


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[Assistant] But when Lafayette's party encountered another French émigré officer attached to the Austrian army, the émigré recognized Lafayette, and Lafayette was in way too deep with the revolution to just be allowed to pass like some disgruntled second lieutenant.


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[Assistant] Lafayette was taken into custody, declared a prisoner of state by a military tribunal and then transferred to an old fortress run by the Prussians.


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[Assistant] He would remain in Prussian custody until May 1794 when he was handed back over to the Austrians, who would then keep him locked up until Napoleon negotiated his release in the Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797, which we'll get to roughly 147 episodes from now.


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[Assistant] During Lafayette's captivity, emissaries from the United States tried to get him released, but they lacked the standing to pull it off. They did, however, do him one signal favor.


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[Assistant] Congress passed a bill granting Lafayette full back pay for his six years service as a general in the Continental Army. A bill quickly signed by Lafayette's surrogate father and now President of the United States, George Washington. And that money is what Lafayette would live on during his five years in prison.


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[Assistant] The same day Lafayette slipped over the lines, August the 17th, the legislative assembly gave into further pressure from Paris and established an extraordinary tribunal to prosecute those who had committed counterrevolutionary crimes on August the 10th.


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[Assistant] A few days later, this tribunal handed down its first guilty verdict. An administrative secretary of the Paris National Guard was sentenced to death for his role in the alleged royalist conspiracy.


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[Assistant] His execution on August the 21st would have been unremarkable, were it not for the method of his execution.


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[Assistant] Because that's right, my friends, it's time to finally introduce one of the most famous characters of the French Revolution, Madame La Guillotine.


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[Assistant] The unfortunate secretary of the Paris National Guard holds the distinction of being the first political prisoner executed with the guillotine. And oh boy, will he not be the last.


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[Assistant] Now some of you may know, the guillotine, or as it was initially called, the machine,


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[Assistant] was conceived as an instrument of humanitarian reform


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[Assistant] Capital punishment in the bad old days was a brutal process. Criminals were hanged, broken on the wheel, drawn and quartered.


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[Assistant] So as the waves of reform washed over France in those idealistic days of 1789,


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[Assistant] The eminent physician and National Assembly delegate, Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotine, proposed all executions be carried out by a new device he had invented. A device I'm sure you're all familiar with, so there's no need to describe how it works in detail. The benefits of Guillotine's machine were twofold.


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[Assistant] First, it would end needless and frankly barbaric suffering inflicted on the condemned.


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[Assistant] In the new era ushered in by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, why should nobles alone enjoy the privilege of having their heads chopped off?


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[Assistant] But the National Assembly never moved on the proposal, and guillotine shelved his plans for the machine.


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[Assistant] After the Legislative Assembly convened in 1791, however, radicals in the Jacobin Club started agitating again for the idea that every condemned citizen should die in the same way.


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[Assistant] That is, if they weren't as radical as Robespierre, who wanted to abolish capital punishment altogether.


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[Assistant] But nervous Paris executioners explained that beheading someone took precision and concentration, and if the lines got long, the quality of their work might suffer, and if the quality of their work suffered, who knew how much the condemned would suffer.


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[Assistant] So, the plans for Dr. Guillotine's machine were dusted off and problems solved.


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[Assistant] In April 1792, just as war fever was hitting a fever pitch, the legislative assembly took time out of its day to order a piano maker to build a prototype of Guillotine's machine.


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[Assistant] Once the prototype proved effective on corpses, it was handed over to the executioners of Paris.


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[Assistant] On April the 25th, a convicted highwayman became the first official victim of la guillotine.


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[Assistant] And everyone in the crowd that day agreed it was a major letdown.


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[Assistant] Usually they got to watch the victim flail around for a bit, but this was all zip, thud, the end. What is the fun in that?


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[Assistant] So getting back to it, although the extraordinary tribunal had just found a royalist conspirator guilty and executed him, and would over the next few weeks find more men guilty and execute them,


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[Assistant] The pace of their work was far too slow for the liking of the Sankyu lot.


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[Assistant] And these hungry lower classes of Paris were fed red meat by that friend of the people, Jean-Paul Marat.


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[Assistant] Now up until this point, Marat had been regarded by Danton's inner circle of the Cordillier leadership as a crank to be tolerated.


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[Assistant] His angry screeds were lively, and certainly directed at the right people, but they also never circulated widely enough to really be a problem. So the leaders of the Court of Yi indulged and protected Mara.


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[Assistant] But after August the 10th, Murat suddenly became THE voice of the Parisian Saint-Culotte, and his circulation skyrocketed.


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[Assistant] He seemed to be the only man willing to say what they were all trying to say. There are enemies in our midst and they must be destroyed before we are destroyed.


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[Assistant] Marat really came into his own after August the 10th, and the articles he wrote left little to the imagination.


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[Assistant] The enemies of the revolution should be rounded up and killed.


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[Assistant] Mara was no longer a fringe crank. He was now a murderous force to be reckoned with.


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[Assistant] In the midst of all this, really, really bad news started coming in on the war front.


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[Assistant] On August the 19th, the allied army of Prussians, Austrians, and French Emigres led by the Duke of Brunswick finally launched their invasion and took the fortress at Looui without a fight.


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[Assistant] Word of this got back to the capital on August the 26th, sparking a new round of paranoid fears that the French army was full of traitors, happily clearing the allies a path to Paris, and that Paris was full of traitors, ready to hand over the keys to the city once they arrived.


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[Assistant] The Legislative Assembly immediately gave all non-juring priests two weeks to either take the new, new civic oath or leave the country.


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[Assistant] After that, if they were caught, they would be deported to Guyana.


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[Assistant] But of course, these days, no one was allowed to leave Paris without a passport. And those passports were issued by the Paris sections. So you can imagine how many non-juring priests strolled into the sectional assemblies to ask for said passport.


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[Assistant] So while the city slowly locked down and the enemies of the state were locked in, Marat howled for counter-revolutionary blood and the pressure inside Paris began to grow unbearable.


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[Assistant] With the capital now seriously threatened by the allied army, there was some loose talk, specifically from Interior Minister Rolland, that the revolutionary leadership should withdraw from Paris to avoid being captured by the enemy.


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[Assistant] But Danton would have absolutely none of this. And on that point, he and Jacques-Pierre Brousseau agreed. They would die before they ran.


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[Assistant] To organize the defense of the city, Danton organized a systematic search of Paris, ostensibly to look for guns, ammunition, or able-bodied men who could be used to fight the approaching allied army.


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[Assistant] But that was really just the pretext fed to the Legislative Assembly to get them to approve the House searches.


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[Assistant] Really, it was about barging into homes and rounding up anybody who was suspect, knew someone who was suspect, or have the same name as someone who was suspect.


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[Assistant] On August the 30th and 31st, armed companies started banging down doors and hauling out suspects. In all, about 3000 were rounded up and shoved into the various Paris prisons, all of which were now badly overcrowded.


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[Assistant] What to do with these prisoners became a topic of heated discussion.


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[Assistant] But the direction things were headed became clear when the insurrectionary commune appointed Jean-Paul Marat to serve on its committee of surveillance, a committee that had jurisdiction over the prisons.


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[Assistant] After agreeing with Danton about not abandoning the capital, Brisseau then tried to pivot and reassert the overarching authority of the Legislative Assembly.


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[Assistant] He engineered a vote demanding the Paris Commune hold new elections to replace the likely illegal insurrectionary commune.


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[Assistant] But of course, the insurrectionary commune ignored this order.


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[Assistant] Well, they didn't just ignore the order, they used it as proof that the faction from Gerand, as Robespierre was just now dubbing them, were themselves suspect.


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[Assistant] Why was Briceau trying to dissolve the commune? Why had Roland just advocated abandoning the people of Paris to the enemy?


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[Assistant] But before this movement to arrest the Girondin leadership picked up too much momentum, Danton appears to have stepped in to squash it, likely saving, at least for the moment, all of their lives.


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[Assistant] He also probably saved the life of Talleyrand, who came around one day asking if maybe he couldn't get one of those passports out of the city.


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[Assistant] Despite having just rendered his most revolutionary service yet, drafting a defence of the August 10th insurrection that would be transmitted to the courts of Europe,


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[Assistant] Talleyrand could see that at the moment Paris was no place for anyone connected to the church or the nobility, and he was connected to both.


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[Assistant] Danton, who liked and respected Talleyrand, wrote out a passport in his own hand, and Talleyrand managed to duck out of Paris one day before the September massacres began.


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[Assistant] Danton had already called for 30,000 men to stand up and go fight them, but he was having difficulty convincing volunteers to leave the city.


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[Assistant] The Sankyu lot were ready to answer the call, eager to answer the call. But there was a problem.


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[Assistant] All those recently apprehended prisoners were dangerous.


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[Assistant] The general belief was that the minute the volunteers walked out of Paris, the prisoners would be able to break out of jail and attack the defenseless families that the volunteers left behind.


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[Assistant] We simply cannot allow our women and children to fall into the hands of the evil counter-revolutionary swine.


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[Assistant] Then, early on September the second, everything came to a head, when word arrived, premature as it turned out, but not by much, that the fortress at Verdun had fallen.


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[Assistant] The fortress at Verdun was the last fortress standing between the Allies and Paris.


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[Assistant] When this terrible news landed, Donton took to the floor of the Legislative Assembly and refused to be anything but heroic, defiant, and fearless.


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[Assistant] He gave a rousing and completely improvised speech, culminating with the call to stand and not shrink before the danger.


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[Assistant] The toxin bell which is about to sound is not a signal of alarm, he thundered. It is a call to charge upon the enemies of the country.


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[Assistant] To vanquish them, gentlemen, we must be bold and bolder, still and forever bold, and France will be saved.


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[Assistant] The speech gave Paris the energetic boost it probably needed to survive, but it also meant that the time to act was now. We have to go fight now.


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[Assistant] And that is when the terrible solution to the problem of the prisoners unfolded.


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[Assistant] At 2 in the afternoon on September the 2nd, a group of about 20 prisoners were being transferred in an open cart from the Hôtel de Ville to the Abbey Saint-Germain, now the main political prison in Paris.


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[Assistant] That little convoy was soon set upon by an angry mob of Song Q Lot. The mob dragged the prisoners off the cart.


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[Assistant] A few of these unfortunate souls were spared, the rest were killed on the spot.


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[Assistant] Later that day, another armed band broke into a Carmelite monastery that had been transformed into a prison. This time, the angry mob set up a little kangaroo court to dispense the people's justice.


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[Assistant] One by one, prisoners were brought forward and accused, convicted, and sentenced all in one breath.


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[Assistant] Then they were pushed towards a group of San Q lot armed with pikes, sabres, daggers, and clubs who proceeded to just gang murder the condemned. Next, prisoner.


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[Assistant] But that did not mean halting the executions. That meant organizing them, and making them more systematic.


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[Assistant] The Committee of Surveillance and its now leading light, Jean-Paul Marat, ensured that the people's justice would be swift and bloody and uncompromising.


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[Assistant] The men who did the killing would be voted wages for their good work.


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[Assistant] Once the commune took over the process, the rest of the Paris prisons were pushed into, and ad hoc tribunals were convened to judge those held inside.


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[Assistant] Those judged were usually found guilty and killed immediately.


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[Assistant] Though, if you can believe it, there were a few acquittals.


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[Assistant] This horrifying brand of justice continued unabated for the next five days before tapering off for lack of further victims on September the 7th.


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[Assistant] Yes, children. In one prison, the executed included kids as young as 12 and 13 years old.


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[Assistant] Among the dead were 200 non-juring priests, all the remaining Swiss guards, and man, you gotta feel for those guys. Survive one frenzied massacre, sit around in jail for a month just to get killed in another more systematic massacre. Yeesh.


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[Assistant] Uh, as well as a handful of aristocrats who had been swept up in the recent house raids. These last included Princess Lombol, one of the Queen's best friends who had been with the royal family on the long night of August the 9th.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The tribunal the princess faced demanded she swear allegiance to France and then swear a hatred for monarchy in general and the royal family in particular.


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[Assistant] She said she would do the former, but could not do the latter.


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[Assistant] So they pushed her into an alleyway, where the waiting murder gang stabbed her to death, hacked off her head, and paraded it down to the temple so the Queen could get a good luck.


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[Assistant] And in case you're wondering, the royal family themselves escaped the September massacres. But only because when an armed soldier burst into their quarters, Louis dressed the soldier down and ordered him to get the hell out of there.


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[Assistant] A lifetime of deference to the sovereign was apparently a hard habit to break, and the royal family was spared. For the moment.


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[Assistant] The majority of those killed in the September massacres, however, were simply common criminals who had been arrested at a really, really bad time. So what political crime could they be guilty of? Well, the tribunal settled on this.


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[Assistant] Their bad character and rotten circumstances would make them easy tools for the evil counterrevolutionaries to employ in their evil counterrevolutionary work. And so, those common criminals too had to die.


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[Assistant] As the tribunals wound down, one last massacre was staged on September the 9th, as a group of prisoners was being transferred down to Paris from Versailles.


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[Assistant] This group included former members of the National Assembly, now suspected of being counter-revolutionaries, as well as Antoine de la Sar.


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[Assistant] Remember him? The hapless foreign minister who was impeached by the Legislative Assembly for not being sufficiently tough with the Austrians? Well, he had been held in custody ever since, and was now among those being brought down from Versailles.


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[Assistant] Along the way the officer in charge of the convoy simply stopped short.


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[Assistant] And wouldn't you know it, a whole group of armed Parisians were waiting to greet them.


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[Assistant] They cut every prisoners throat and left the bodies littered on the ground.


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[Assistant] The response to the September massacres among the respectable bourgeois revolutionaries was complete silence.


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[Assistant] Whatever their own personal feelings, no one made a move to stop it.


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[Assistant] Now it's hard to tell what level of involvement anyone played in orchestrating the massacres, because in the aftermath, everyone blamed everyone else for being in on it.


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[Assistant] Brisseau and the Girondins would accuse Robespierre of masterminding the slaughter in the hopes of getting Brisseau and the Girondins sucked into the woodchipper.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Robespierre would in turn make counter accusations blaming the Girondins. Of course, everyone believed Danton had to be involved somehow, because as justice minister he just seemed to be inescapably guilty.


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[Assistant] Madame Rolland certainly thought he was the puppet master behind the whole thing.


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[Assistant] But Danton's crime appears to have been merely to do nothing to stop it. To consciously sacrifice the prisoners to the Paris streets as an unfortunate but necessary part of maintaining patriotic unity and getting the sans-culottes ready to go fight the looming allied army.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If the price to be paid for saving the revolution was the death of treasonous priests, mercenary Swiss, counter-revolutionary aristocrats, and common criminals, was that really so high a price to pay? Danton made it clear he did not think so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the aftermath of the slaughter, though, Danton was proved right about one thing. The prison massacres freed the Song Q lot from any fear they had about marching to the front, and 20,000 quickly volunteered to heed the new toxin bell and go charge upon the enemies of the country.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But then, suddenly, before the new recruits could even get out there, that army was not only stopped, it was turned around.


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[Assistant] Okay, so the last time we checked up on the front lines, there were three French armies out there in the field. But none of the generals thought their armies were in any shape to fight.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I wrote a whole thing trying to explain the game of musical chairs that occupied the French high command in the summer of 1792, detailing who went where when, and then why they were moved again, but I decided going through all the details would probably make this less comprehensible, not more comprehensible.


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[Assistant] So the bottom line is that after Lafayette skipped town back in August, ex-Minister of War and rabid Austrian hater Charles-Francois de Mourier took command of the Army of the North.


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[Assistant] A guy named Francois Kellerman, a career officer born in France but into an ethnically German family. He was promoted to command the army up the centre.


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[Assistant] And the Prussian-born Nicholas Luckner still commanded the army of the Rhine.


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[Assistant] After taking command of the north, Demourier had been planning to relaunch the invasion of the Austrian Netherlands as the surest way to force the allied army to leave France. But with Loewe and Verdun falling so quickly,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He had to break off preparations and rush down to try to put something between the Allies and Paris.


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[Assistant] He ordered Kellerman's army to rendezvous with him at Saint-Menou, a town which was, well, and I suppose still is, just about 200 kilometres from Paris.


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[Assistant] Demourier then lined up his army running north-south along the main road to Paris to block Brunswick who was coming in from the east.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But Brunswick managed to swing north and scramble up the French left wing, which forced du Maurier to pull them back, pivoting the direction of his entire line.


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[Assistant] So now, he had the French lined up running east-west, watching the Allies march past them to the north.


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[Assistant] But that would have cut off his supply and communication lines, and he didn't like the thought of his army being isolated so deep in French territory, especially with about a dysentery sweeping through his camp.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Kellerman showed up the next day to reinforce the French army, and de Mourier put him in charge of the left.


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[Assistant] Kellerman took up this command on September the 20th, just as Brunswick was deciding to wheel his army around in a big flanking maneuver to come in at the French from the west. This led Kellerman to advance his own forces towards some high ground near the small village of Valmy. And that is where the two armies met.


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[Assistant] Now crazily of course, when the two sides faced each other, the allies were the ones standing between the French and Paris, instead of the other way around.


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[Assistant] Which is a bit reminiscent of the early days of the first English Civil War, when the Royalist Army of Charles I kept winding up between the Parliamentary Army and London, even though the Parliamentary Army was supposed to be out there to stop Charles from reaching London.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So in a miserable rain, the allied and French army stared at each other for a little bit at Valmy, and then decided to settle into an artillery duel to see if the other side would run off.


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[Assistant] But as it turns out, at this point in history, the French ran the best artillery schools in Europe. And Kellerman's veteran artillery officers pounded the Allies with more precision than the Allies managed to pound the French.


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[Assistant] But what really surprised the hell out of everyone was that the French troops did not break and run when the shells started falling.


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[Assistant] Indeed, after a little while, it looked like the ultra-professional Prussians were the ones ready to crack.


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[Assistant] Continuing to pour on the artillery, Callerman then started waving his hat, crying Viva La Nacion, and all his troops took up the cheer.


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[Assistant] And for whatever combination of reasons, the rain, the dysentery, the sight of surprisingly solid French infantrymen cheering and singing, Brunswick ordered his men to retreat from the field. And then to the massive shock of just about everyone, he ordered them to march back the way they came,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Away from Paris, back east toward the frontier.


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[Assistant] Brunswick was withdrawing the allied army from France.


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[Assistant] So just like that, the seemingly inevitable sack of Paris was called off.


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[Assistant] It should come as no surprise that even the radical anti-clericals in the capital had no trouble describing the Battle of Valmy as a miracle, and no one doubted it was one of the greatest victories in French history. But of course, it really wasn't.


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[Assistant] We know the allied troops were wracked by dysentery. We know that they expected this to be a cakewalk.


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[Assistant] And indeed it had been, but it also appears they really didn't like all those Frenchmen cheering and singing together while getting blasted with artillery. It was unsettling.


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[Assistant] The commanders also knew that tens of thousands of French reinforcements were on the way.


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[Assistant] Now the utterly outraged French émigrés could not explain it any other way than to assert that Brunswick had been bribed by revolutionary agents who offered him the bourbon family jewels in exchange for retreating. I mean, what other explanation could there be?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now what role or partial role any of these factors played in the decision to withdraw is ultimately speculation. We don't have a good answer. Although the bribery charge does seem paper thin. But then of course there was one other thing. There was Poland.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's right, Poland. While the Prussians and Austrians were preparing to invade France, Catherine the Great moved her armies into Poland, and the Poles had surrendered, probably prematurely.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Prussian king, Frederick William II, did not like the idea of the Russian armies milling around in his now clearly under-defended backyard. So he decided that if the invasion of France was going to take even one minute longer than anticipated, that he needed the hell out of there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it looked like it might now indeed take more than one minute longer. So he wanted his guys the hell out of there.


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[Assistant] So maybe it was for this reason. Maybe it was for all those other reasons.


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[Assistant] The great and miraculous victory at Valmy on September the 20th, 1792 just so happened to coincide with the opening of the next great political phase of the French Revolution.


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[Assistant] Because the very next day, the newly elected National Convention replaced the now defunct Legislative Assembly in the menage of the Tuileries Palace.


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[Assistant] Next week, we will introduce the convention which will become the battleground within which and over which those worst excesses of the French Revolution will now play out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But, next week is going to be insanely busy for me on the home front, so next week's episode might be a bit shorter than usual.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But my plan is at a minimum to get the national convention off the ground.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Finally, I'm going to end with an enormous and heartfelt thank you to all of you who supported the fundraiser. It was a huge success. We sold 2,060 shirts, 1,590 copies of the five-sided cross, and a good number of books from the History of Rome library.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now no one bit at the pick a revolution any revolution, but I've got an idea about that for next time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the big bulk t-shirt order is now being processed. I'm not sure of the exact timeline of when everything will be approved, printed, and then start shipping, but if you've been waiting patiently for your shirt, you will hopefully be getting an email confirmation about shipping soon. Thank you all very, very much. I'm not going anywhere.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm Wilbur Soot, or Soot if you're American, and I run Soot House.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You'd be surprised. You'd be surprised. I'm called Suit almost always. Wilber Suit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then you, you sat me down over Christmas and were like, sort out the money first, get that, get that in writing. You don't want this to come.


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[Assistant] I mean, we're still more friends. It used to be a spoken issue, but now it's just an unspoken agreement, I think.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, the phrase too many cooks is that. Yeah. No, it's, it's cause, it's cause my internet service provider decided I didn't deserve internet anymore.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They don't know how to edit, or upload, or... Uh, yeaah.


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[Assistant] Yeah, and he's, he's funny, he's good, he's got a good sense of humour.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] See, the funny thing is actually, that's how it began. It was originally three of us. Really?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, it was me, George, and Jack. That was the very first video. And we didn't, it wasn't like, we didn't say, oh, let's make a YouTube channel. Uh, basically, because I'm like hella autismo, I used to just record all of our stuff and just edit together these sort of collage montages over the span of each month. Yeah. We call it the meme mashup.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So there's one for every month for the past two years, and they were edited on my spare time, unlisted, I just put them up and they were just videos of us playing video games and-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I- I'm the editor man, that's my- that's my thing. Man, if I'm not editing, what am I doing? I just turn up and- No, you would edit- Occasionally.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think it's more along the lines of we're not really trying to output like tons of videos at once. And I can deal with the editing. I mean, I always get, we have at least one video a week, at least usually. It's just recently it's slowed down.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh no, quantity, YouTube fucking loves quantity too. If I could do quantity, I would, I would run away with that. Have you seen the YouTube channels that get one, one video a day? Right. They're like, rolling in it. They get so many, so much money, so much views. Yeah, I'd do that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Comedic editing. Someone's been watching every frame of painting recently, so. And uh, I have.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, he was a virgin, and he killed. Uh, and he, in 2014, in Elavista, uh, he's like the, he's like the son of like the producer of like, fucking, what's it?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, uh, he had like this whole video series, he made like this vlog about how angry he was, and Mumkey Jones sort of ripped into that and got his channel taken down. In one fell swoop, three strikes instantly.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was also just this, it was the fact he just exuded this kind of stay away from me energy. Yeah. You know, like there's that bit, there's this one video where he's walking in the park, right? And he's like, and he comes and he's like talking to himself. He's saying like, I don't get it. Why am I the supreme gentleman? Not in the eyes of these women.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, it's, it's like, well I mean, I think it's Liam Neeson's performance, The Cell's Taken, I don't think it's the idea. Like, there are loads of films that are so cliché, but like, they, that I would argue are brilliant films, you know, like uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like even, uh, what I mean, let's go Star Wars. Like everyone's seen Star Wars, everyone knows Star Wars. It's literally just a, you can watch like a million western films and a million like old Japanese samurai films. They're all the plot. It's just, that's the plot. It's a western samurai set in space. And now Lucas is a multi-billionaire or whatever. Super billionaire. Super billionaire. Is that the scientific term? Yeaah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I have this ongoing theory that almost everything that's taken off recently in like, well the three things I can think that have taken off suddenly are literally to do with social media marketing disguised as accidental marketing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So like, I don't know, there must be a name for it, I don't do, I don't know enough about advertising and stuff, but like, uh, so do you remember in 2013, 2012, there was like the whole clown phenomenon? People dressed up as clowns, like chased people down. It's weird that the new IT movie was announced like months later, don't you think? Like, and then it all happened.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's what they say. I think it's the other way around, though. I think that they went, right, how do we PR our scary clown movie? Let's make a real problem of scary clowns, you know?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then, and then you got Lil Nas with his Old Town Road. Yeah. Right? I, I remember.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I heard it from George, as he showed it to me, when it was at 20,000 views, you know, the official videos on like, however many millions now. He showed me it was on 20,000, and he was like, he told me, oh, it's about a man who shags his horse. And I was like, oh, okay, if I listen to it. And I was like, oh, this kind of like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I quite like this, lowkey. This is quite good. And so I was like, I figured out the cause for it and looked on all the guitar and there was no cause or anything. And I was like, oh cool. Uh, that's a good thing. And then for no reason on the same day, like 30 TikTok, like things came out and a TikTok challenge came out around this song. And then suddenly little maps is now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Transgender movement has done a lot better than modern day transgender movements, unfortunately.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I did, I saw the clip you released before you released the actual podcast.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My question is like, who gives a fuck? Like I genuinely, I genuinely didn't like, I still don't understand people who are like, anti-trans.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, as like a, you know, an adult overtaking that they want to change gender. You know, who cares? Who cares? Like, I don't want to, but I don't get like, you know, it's like even less of an issue. Like, I think it should be less of an issue for like, right-wing Christian sort of like people.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I remember when I was, when I was a kid, it was like, when like, saying gay was like the coolest thing in school. I remember, uh, if ever you used the word homophobe, the response was, um, I'm not scared of them, I just don't like them. It was always like, it was always the response. And now as I've gotten older, I've been like, no, they're definitely just scared of them. Like, what other reason is there? Like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's just fear, it's fear. It's like, oh, uh, I'm looking at this man, he likes men, and I'm, you know, I'm thinking a bit about my feelings, and I'm not very comfortable with it, you know, I don't, you know, maybe I'm, maybe I like him a little bit, you know, so I'm gonna dislike him, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We've had messages telling to delete your videos from our channel. Really? Yeah, cause of your edgy humor. Why is that?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, I know, it was like, it was to the extent of like, the person, I don't know if you know this, but the person you've had on your show, uhm, has said this and this, and I was just...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, there was nothing, we were ridiculing, although we have got death threats for that as well. That's a fun story actually, I should tell you about. Not for you though, you haven't got any death threats.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, no, no. Oh yea, what I was going to say is, do you remember I invited you to come on a second edition of it? Yea. And then you were busy or something, I don't remember. But, uh, I ended up, we ended up doing it on our own.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, okay. Fair enough. I wasn't, I wasn't pissed. I was just, you know, maybe I took the piss out of you a little bit, only because I saw you getting angry about it and that's why I quite enjoyed it. But anyway, uhm, we, we made this video on, on, because I found this forum, they all left Reddit. Their Reddit, Reddit had enough. Reddit had enough of the incels. And so they all headed onto incels.me. I think it was cool. Yeah. Awesome. They had their own website.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I was like, and I went on it, and I'll be honest with you, I don't know if it's changed now, I haven't been on it since, but the people on there, it was like, as nice as you can get.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like they weren't, like not all of them were like, hating women and stuff. They were all talking about ways to improve themselves and stuff. You know, they were all discussing like, ah, you know, why they were calling themselves the problem. And I was thinking, oh gosh, I feel really bad.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that's where the video entirely came from, but anyway, a bit time later I was googling Soothouse because I'm a self-centred prick. And uhm, I sorted by noo. And lo and behold there was a forum on incels.me. And they were, they were pissed. They were pissed dude, like I'm talking death threats?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm talking like, attempts to dox us, they all thought we were like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like northerners, like Scottish, which was quite funny.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But yeah, it was, it was mad. It was crazy, I thought. I'd never had that before, like, like that amount of hatred for me, even though bear in mind the video, I thought, didn't, we didn't mock them. Like we had a disclaimer at the beginning saying, hey, this video isn't making fun of people that can't find, you know, a relationship. Why not? Get in there, dude.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You also gotta bear in mind that part of your draw for your audience is based primarily on the fact that you don't do what many gaming channels do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like your, uh, what I've noticed, I don't know if this is mansplaining, but what I've noticed about your channel is that like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All of your, like, thumbnails are all like... They're almost like graphic design pieces. All of them, like, they're all like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, they all have a theme and a colour scheme and a style and things. None of- I would- if I didn't know who you were, I would not click a single one of them. No offence, dude. They're not- there's nothing in there that makes me go, oh, you know, saucy, drama, clickbait, gotta click that, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You, uh, you put out these videos that are consistently of a high quality, but yet, they're not pandering in any way. I think that's where we lie differently. I panda to fuck.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] God, acoustic guitar, it's so- it gets- it- it's just- people hate you dude, like it's-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Are you eating? Sorry. Yea, I was just having a bit of chocolate.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I've got, I've got two personal channels. I've got Wilberset and Wilberset Live, which is my gaming one.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I've got a funny story about this if you want as well. If we want to talk about clickbait.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We can if you want, yea man, that'd be great. In fact, I've invited you for DayZ.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, man. But uhm, I, what was it? Yeah, so I made this channel because there was a- I did- Do you know Jschlat, YouTuber? No.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You will do. He's- I guarantee you he's gonna be the next, like, big thing. Like, he's gonna be the next big.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I just, literally just went Wilbur Live. There we go, brilliant. Name, done, hit go.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then I uhm, I just quickly, I, I got my mate who's, cause obviously I'm on an editing course, I have a few mates who are editors, I just said to them, look, I'm just gonna send you all this VOD, just cut it down to like four ten minute videos and send them back to me and I'll keep you like a hundred quid or whatever. And he went, yeah sure, and he gave them back to me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I uploaded them and I just titled them like, five by five challenge in Minecraft, you know, woah. And then put a picture of me looking shocked and, you know, a Minecraft block, whatever. I left the channel, didn't look at it, uh, at all, just didn't touch it, didn't plug it, just left it there. Uh, it's been, like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] About uhm, two weeks later, three weeks later, it had 300,000 views and 20,000 subscribers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No plugging into- It's mental, like, if you just title shit, especially with the whole- I did time it with the whole Minecraft booming. Yeah. But like, it's all about-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Your titles dude, and your thumbnail. It's like, I know that's like a cliche of YouTube, but it's like changed?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The titles and thumbnails used to be like, they have to be concise, they have to be part of a series so that people will click more, and they have to have a thumbnail which is like, which differentiates it from the pack. That's not the case anymore. The thumbnail needs to be shocked face with a very bright background with contrasting colours.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the title needs to have, needs to be split into three parts. You need to have a shouty bit at the beginning. So in my case, that was five by five challenge.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A second bit, which is what you're doing, in Minecraft, and then a third bit, which is like, you know, if you can have it at two bits, that's great as well, but, it's like, it's a formula, it's a bloody formula, and it works, and I don't... I feel like I'm talking a fucking...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, yeah, I know of him. Didn't he like, do something shady and then disappear into the night?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know what I mean? Keemstar's been going after people in my community recently, actually. He's been, he's been, what, you know about I'm Alex?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But yeaah, so, uh, I'm Alex, do you know about the whole Slazo allegations and things?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, Slazo is a Reddit reading channel. Ah. And I should probably, I, I, I, I'm, the reason I have, I feel like I can, I can talk about this, cause I was also on the end of this issue, because I, you'll, you'll see. So. Cause he's also a.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, but I, I, I did, I, I, I jumped the gun in a way, right? So, uhm, Slazo, uh, he's a Reddit reading channel and he's like 19. He's like a kid. He was like 17 when he started his channel, I think. He's like, literally when he got big, he was like 17, right? But he's 19 now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Came out on Twitter, with a big ol' twitlonger, basically describing how Slazo had like, raped her, had touched her inappropriately, constantly had like, driven her to like, these horrible lengths, despite the fact she was only 14 and had never had a boyfriend before.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And these allegations were like damning. She had the receipts, she had the screenshots and everything, right? She had the rape receipts?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And uhm, I read these and I was shocked because I've worked with Slazo. I mean, I'm his outro music in a lot of his videos. I sung his little theme song, right? Yeah. So I've worked with Slazo a lot. And I see these allegations and I see all these big YouTubers like, uh, KingAnnie, ImAlex, Quiet and stuff, and Weast and things, all jumping on


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[Assistant] So I just come, and I put a message saying, thank you for shedding light on all this, just know that we're all here and we will support you, right? And that's all, I just left it at that, that's all I said. I didn't, like, I didn't try and attack Slaz or anything, cause I was just like, it's not about him, it's about her.


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[Assistant] And yes, thinking back on it now, I really should have just messaged Lazo first. I have the capacity to. I have him on Twitter. I can DM him. But I didn't. I decided to publicly, you know. And that was my mistake. That was the issue, right? And you can probably agree, I was a bit stupid there. I should have, I should have...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Taking a step back and ask Slazo, like, what's this about? Instead of publicly going on and essentially damning him, right, for what he did.


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[Assistant] Her month passes and Slazo comes out with a video where he essentially says how she'd lied. And he says how, yes, he was a bit of a bad boyfriend, but he never raped her, and he has proof that he never raped her, and he describes how she basically lied about all this.


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[Assistant] And suddenly, it's all flipped on it's head like, oh shit.


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[Assistant] Uh, Slazo's not a bad guy, he's not cancelled anymore, he's back, and you get, and so, but the damage has been done, Slazo's no longer gaining subs, he went down from almost having 900k to he now has like just under 700k, I think, or something stupid like that, and he's gained back a bit of his subs, but they're just, it's just not increasing anymore, because the algorithm's just saying that he's dropped and they're not gonna plug him anymore. Yeah.


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[Assistant] So, I deleted my response to Shea because I left it for a bit because I wanted to see what Shea had to say in case Shea then comes out with like, you know, I don't know, what would be fucking, what would, what would Trump slash like a video.


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[Assistant] Uh, come out and like say anything too big, but I deleted my thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I apologized and I just left it and I said, right, I'm not getting involved with this, it's not me anymore.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Here's where the issue arises, though. I'm Alex, KingAnnie, and weest, all those people have just, have, have stuck with their guns. Which is fair enough to them, if they know something I don't, fair enough. But they've stuck to their guns. And now all these screenshots are coming out of like, them discussing how they're gonna release Shae's pictures, like how they're gonna stop Slazo, and things, and it's,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know man, I obviously I'm not gonna make another statement on it but it seems really shady and Keemstar's now just bullying.


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[Assistant] Yeah, but like, I'm, I'm reserving my judgement. Because like I said, I don't know Slazo personally, and I definitely don't know his ex-girlfriend personally. But apparently King Annie and I'm Alex and stuff do.


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[Assistant] So I'm not getting involved, I'm, I'm, I'm distancing myself from this whole thing, I shouldn't have got involved in the first place, it was stupid, I'm distancing myself, you know. Keemstar's on the fucking warpath right now, he made a, he made a, he brought back his baited podcast just to shit on I'm Alex for an hour and a half.


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[Assistant] Yeaah. Poor guy though. Apparently from what I've- from what he- his statement, he's like, he's getting himself fixed up. What's weird though, is uh- Triggered one from rape allegations.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was it a big deal or was it just like, you know, a sheriff just doing his job?


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[Assistant] Uhm, the other two. There's four? There's four? That's one of my, one of my things. I, yeaah, I love American presence. McKinley. That's like one of my. McKinley was one, yes. And...


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[Assistant] He's got a great name. Everyone's favourite lasagna loving cat. Carfield?


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[Assistant] Uh, I think he was at a railroad. He was at a railway. James A. Garfield. Uh, I can tell you right here.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, he was just on a platform waiting to get his train.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Here, here we go. So uhm, he was shot by Charles Gouteau, who was a disgruntled office seeker. Is how he's described.


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[Assistant] And he said he concealed himself by the ladies waiting room at the 6th Street station of Baltimore and Pontemac Road.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, let's be honest though, if I, if I'm, okay, just put yourself in, put yourself in these shoes for me, Sam, right? You're, you're, you're a young girl. You're about, you're about 17, 18 years old, right? Okay. And you're on the way, you're on the way to school. Yeah. Okay.


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[Assistant] And for some reason your school's making you wear these little skirts and stuff, right? Yeah. And you're on your, you're, and you want to get on the train, right? But obviously you're in the middle of Tokyo, right? It's a huge population and quite a small city, right? In fact, it's one of the biggest populations, right? The trains are going to be packed no matter what time you get on.


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[Assistant] Push it on, and let the door close. At least be there with someone, you know, of your own gender. You know, your own sex.


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[Assistant] I'm having to keep going, my duolingo is shouting at me, but I can still keep going. Your what is? My duolingo is shouting at me. The fuck is that? Duolingo. The app. I don't know what that is, what is it? It's a language learning app. It's the one with the green bird. Oh, I've never seen that one. Green owl.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Who watches GIFs though? Do you actually watch GIFs and pictures for your porn usage then?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well good, I'm proud of you Sam, I'm proud that you've, honestly I don't think I have, aside from VR porn, which I had for a while, I don't have a porn folder, I've never had a porn folder. I guess I'm just from that, I'm that age, I'm that age difference, I'm like 6 years younger than you, and that's like the age difference there.


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[Assistant] Wildly looking around the room like a, like a possessed cat or something. Just spinning your head around the room with his headset on.


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[Assistant] I think I'm pro the British porn ban. I'm all in favour of it.


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[Assistant] This isn't gonna be very funny. This isn't gonna be a bit, but it's not, it's not anything gross, but essentially the reason I, I, I just think it's bad. I think it's, I think the porn is a bad, has a bad effect on your mind. Not in like a long term way, not if you're an adult.


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[Assistant] You know, me and you, we could probably, you know, we could sit in all day and look at porn. Nothing's gonna happen, you know, we're not gonna, you know, a week later we could walk out of our house and like, you know, reintegrate with society. You know, it's like, there's not anything weird, but like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My, I, I know for a fact that like my dad and like my, even my older brother and things, when they, their first instance of seeing porn would have been like, you know, the creepy friend who's got a box in the woods. Yeah. You know, that's their first, and they, and they opens the magazine, it's like, oh, there's porn, and then they're like, what the fuck, you know, that would be their first instance of porn.


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[Assistant] My first instance of porn was about half their age. I was like seven on the internet and it's just fucking full up pop-up ad of hardcore pornography.


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[Assistant] As an adult now, as I'm- I would be perfectly happy with them making an opt-in system so that kids don't have to have what I had, which was at the age of seven years old having to look at some fucking person being shat on, you know? It's like...


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[Assistant] I think that's a good thing. I don't think, I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all.


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[Assistant] I could name people I know who have been like, you know.


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[Assistant] Who, when they were growing up, would stunt it, like, m- like...


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[Assistant] You know, by the amount of porn they were able to get access to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I assume you're also like 90% of Americans where you've also been circumcised, so you've lost like, a lot of your sensitivity, is that the case?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, it wasn't the- I didn't have a ton of foreskin, mate. It was an accident and emergency procedure.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then killed himself when he was like 35, didn't he?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, he, um, he, he re- he lives his life as a girl, and then like, and then like, defying all known ideas of like, gender identity. When he got older he was just like, you know, I am actually a guy. Yeah. You know? He was like, no, I wanna be a guy, and then changed back.


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[Assistant] Why don't- I don't think it is tight at all, there's just no foreskin there. I'm just imagining rubbing like a dry hand up and down like the tip of my- That's so sensitive! That's so weird!


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[Assistant] Yeah. It's just the same as cleaning a vagina, mate. Oh, no, no, I don't


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[Assistant] Audible is the internet's leading provider of audio entertainment with over 150,000 titles to choose from.


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[Assistant] When you're done with this episode, go to audiblepodcast.com forward slash revolutions. That again, audiblepodcast.com forward slash revolutions.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By going to that address, you qualify for a free book download when you sign up for a 30-day trial membership. There is no obligation to continue the service, and you can cancel any time and keep the free book. You can also keep going with one of the monthly subscription options and get great deals on all future audiobook purchases.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now this time, I'm gonna hop back a revolution because I just discovered that the TV series Turn, which tells the story of the spy ring George Washington organized to extract intelligence from the British occupying New York, is currently available for streaming online, so I can finally watch it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The series is based on Washington's Spies, the story of America's first spy ring by Alexander Rose, which has gotten excellent reviews for revealing a little known but very important component of the war Washington was running after major combat operations died down following the Battle of Monmouth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So when you're done with this episode, go to audiblepodcast.com forward slash revolutions so that they know who sent you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As the array of political and military disasters that erupted on all fronts in mid 1793 threatened to consume revolutionary France, the now mountain-dominated National Convention decided that they were absolutely not going to go down without a fight.


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[Assistant] Federalists would be crushed, the rebels in the Vaudet exterminated, the old regimes of Europe would be conquered by the armies of France, by aim for nothing less than total victory on all fronts.


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[Assistant] It was simultaneously being converted into an authoritarian dictatorship. A dictatorship run through the newly reorganized Committee of Public Safety.


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[Assistant] The Committee of Public Safety had been established back in March as a direct response to the terrible news coming down from Belgium and then out of Vendée. And as I mentioned, the dominant figure of the first few months of the committee's existence was Georges Danton, who had become, of late, a voice of moderation.


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[Assistant] But as the bad news from all fronts continued to flood in, the delegates left in the national convention after the purge of the Girondins were now open to the argument that moderation very possibly meant death.


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[Assistant] Instead, the turn away from moderation was in the direction of, let's call it uncompromising patriotic commitment that would tolerate challenges from neither the right nor the left.


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[Assistant] The coming Jacobin Reign of Terror, a far more colourful way of putting it than uncompromising patriotic commitment, would be directed as much against the populace on the left as against crypto-royalists on the right.


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[Assistant] As we've seen, ever since the insurrection of August the 10th and the September massacres, Danton had been projecting an image of himself as a pragmatic and level-headed statesman, rather than as a fire-breathing agitator.


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[Assistant] His patriotism had already been called into question after he publicly supported the treasonous General du Maurier, and after the insurrection of May the 31st, June 2nd, suspicions about his commitment to the revolutionary cause only grew.


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[Assistant] Rather than promoting vindictive reprisals against the federalist insurrectionaries, Donton counseled leniency. Bring them back into the fold with the carrot, not the stick.


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[Assistant] His answer to the collapse of the armies in Belgium was to try to open negotiations with the Prussians to try to dislodge them from the allied coalition.


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[Assistant] Danton's apparent willingness to bargain with the revolution's enemies rather than crush them sparked a political backlash.


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[Assistant] When the monthly elections for the Committee of Public Safety came round again on July the 10th, Don Thon, ostensibly its most powerful member, was not re-elected, nor were any of his allies.


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[Assistant] And though Danton would remain a powerful force for months to come, this is really the moment when he and the old Kordal Yi inner circle, once the most extreme leading edge of the revolution, will begin their tragic march to the guillotine.


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[Assistant] The new Committee of Public Safety that started to take shape on July the 10th, promised to be more vigorous in its approach to everything.


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[Assistant] Their mission was nothing less than the salvation of France and the revolution, and they would work tirelessly and without remorse until that mission was complete.


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[Assistant] As young Saint Juste said, those who would make revolution in the world, those who want to do good in this world, must sleep only in the tomb.


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[Assistant] You can accuse the Committee of Public Safety of a lot of things, but you cannot accuse them of being lazy.


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[Assistant] After the election of July the 10th, remove moderate voices from the committee. A series of supplemental appointments over the next few months brought the total number of committee members up to 12. And it was these 12 men who would turn the Committee of Public Safety into the engine of terror that continues to haunt the Western imagination.


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[Assistant] Each of the twelve is interesting and important in his own way. But it would be silly to sit here and rattle them off to you one by one, because by the time I got to guy number twelve, you wouldn't be able to remember who guy number one was.


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[Assistant] So what I'll do right now is highlight a few of the really important members, and then, in the episodes to come, introduce the others as they enter and exit the stage.


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[Assistant] So for now, let's first of all remember that Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, all of 26 years old, had already been appointed to the committee back in June to work on the Constitution of 1793, and he was elected to an official spot on July the 10th.


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[Assistant] The most famous member of the committee, though, was not elected on July the 10th. And that was, of course, Saint-Just's mentor, the indomitable leader of the mountain, Maximilien Ropes-Pierre.


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[Assistant] Robespierre, oddly enough, continued to cast a skeptical eye on the committee he was destined to dominate, and he was not persuaded to take a seat until July the 27th.


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[Assistant] Once he showed up though, Robespierre would become the committee's voice inside the convention, defending its conduct and its further consolidation of power.


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[Assistant] And in short order, Robespierre would emerge as the anchor of the political wing of the committee. The wing most concerned with rooting out and destroying the enemies of the revolution. And this would eventually lead Robespierre to put the committee, and by extension all of France, under his personal control.


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[Assistant] But in the midst of the crisis of mid 1793, the political wing of the committee was emphatically not the most important wing of the committee.


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[Assistant] Because though consolidating national political power was a key objective, the really, really key objective was the objective that would ultimately make the consolidation of national power possible. And that was winning the war.


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[Assistant] So on August the 14th, two more men were appointed to the committee who would anchor what I'll call the military wing.


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[Assistant] And of those two men, one of them deserves special attention because he is going to go down in history as the great organizer of victory. The man who almost single-handedly turned the fortunes of war around and kept revolutionary France from being defeated by all her enemies right then and there in 1793. Lazare Carnot.


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[Assistant] So though the ideological terror unleashed by Robespierre and the political wink is more famous,


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[Assistant] Had Carnot and the military wing not succeeded, and wildly succeeded as it would turn out, the political wing never would have had the power or the legitimacy to do what it did.


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[Assistant] Lazar Carnot had been born up in Burgundy in 1753, and from an early age he showed a great aptitude in math and science.


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[Assistant] He went off to study at a military college specifically focused on artillery and engineering where he established a reputation as one of the brightest minds of his generation.


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[Assistant] But unfortunately, Carnot was a commoner entering the ranks of the army of the Ancien Regime, which as you might recall from way back when, was currently in the process of making it even harder for non-nobles to rise to senior positions.


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[Assistant] So despite his obvious abilities, Carnot was commissioned as a lieutenant, soon promoted to captain, and from there left to languish, despite the fact that in his spare time he was actually making genuine advances to theoretical and practical physics, and publishing papers that were very well received by the scientific community.


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[Assistant] So for obvious reasons, Carnot was sympathetic to the revolution when it broke out. And though he was not, and never would be, a politician per se, he had spent a lot of time thinking about the kinds of reforms that, oh, let's say the army could use if it was going to survive in the modern world.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now try as I might, I cannot find a source that will tell me what Carnot thought about the warmongering of Brousseau and the Girondins, whether he supported them or thought the whole thing crazy. And if anybody out there has any idea, please drop me a line.


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[Assistant] After the king was overthrown in August 1792, Carnot was dispatched to the army of the Rhine to ensure that the officer corps there was prepared to fight for the new regime.


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[Assistant] Then he was elected into the national convention, but was basically absent from Paris the whole time.


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[Assistant] Being dispatched first down to the Pyrenees to set up a defensive line to block any advance by the Spanish, a line that unfortunately did not hold after he left. And then when things started going badly up in Belgium, he was one of those representatives on mission sent up to hold the line.


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[Assistant] Now Carnot was, to be sure, in favor of aggressive action, and he was one of the ones pushing the generals to fight and not retreat.


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[Assistant] Bokarno was far more of a military technocrat than some raging ideologue, and after witnessing first-hand the setbacks that followed DuMaurier's defection,


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[Assistant] Carnot came away convinced that the army was not suffering from a lack of ideological commitment, so much as a lack of manpower, proper organization, training, material.


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[Assistant] And he started sketching plans to completely transform the French armies.


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[Assistant] When he was recalled from the front lines and appointed to the Committee of Public Safety on August the 14th and told, hey man, go win the war, he already had a pretty good idea of exactly what needed to be done.


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[Assistant] So it did not take long for a new committee member, Carnot, to roll out his great project, and on August the 23rd, the Committee of Public Safety decreed, and the national convention supported, the justly famous L'avet en masse, the simultaneous mobilization of the entire nation to arms.


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[Assistant] The Levee en masse bluntly demanded that the citizens of France recognize an absolute and universal obligation to serve in the military.


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[Assistant] From here on out, every citizen was a potential soldier.


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[Assistant] The first round of conscriptions specifically targeted all unmarried men ages 18 to 25, and more specifically, those unmarried young men in regions that were currently threatened by either foreign attack or local federalist insurrection.


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[Assistant] The idea was to simply raise so many men so fast that they would overwhelm the revolution's enemies.


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[Assistant] Now before I really started picking my way through the minutia of the French Revolution, I knew that the lave en masse was a big deal. But I never realized just how truly audacious it was.


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[Assistant] So to go back to that same well looking not just for more water, but for all the water? Well that's pretty crazy. But it worked.


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[Assistant] So, you're probably wondering why the Levee en masse wound up working given the oh-so recent wave of anti-draft riots back in the spring.


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[Assistant] The answer is, first of all, as successful as the Levee en masse turned out to be, quickly raising 300,000 and eventually leading to somewhere between 750 and 800,000 Frenchmen under arms by the end of the year, there was a lot of draft dodging everywhere.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And let's just say for example that the marriage rates in France mysteriously skyrocketed in September 1793, just as commissioners were coming around looking for unmarried men to ship off to the front lines.


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[Assistant] But those that did submit were doing so under very different circumstances than when the Levee of 300,000 was going around.


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[Assistant] Back in February, the French armies on the frontier were still ascendant, and the call to arms was premised on an abstract need to reinforce the army.


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[Assistant] But by the fall of 1793, everything had gone to hell. Foreign armies were camped inside French territory. The federalist cities were calling for civil war. The Vaudet was on fire.


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[Assistant] Representatives on mission and local commissioners could plausibly argue that if you didn't step up and do your duty, that revolutionary France will be crushed, and with it, any hope that you might have of not just going back to being some oppressed peasant resettled to the yoke of a restored aristocracy.


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[Assistant] But the levée en masse was really successful because it was not just about raising troops. It was about putting everyone and everything to work to win the war.


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[Assistant] And this was described in the opening of the decree announcing the lave.


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[Assistant] All Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the services of the armies.


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[Assistant] The old men shall betake themselves to the public squares in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach hatred of kings and the unity of the republic.


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[Assistant] What all of that meant was that just as the Allies were anticipating the imminent collapse of France, France was instead transforming itself into a massive war machine.


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[Assistant] Even before the Levee had a chance to start making a difference, things actually started to look not quite so dire.


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[Assistant] When that little Girondin-led brigade of Norman Federalists tried to rally further support by marching towards Paris in July, they were broken and dispersed the moment they made contact with a National Guard brigade sent to stop them.


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[Assistant] By the middle of August, Bordeaux was pulling back from its lofty dreams of everyone getting together and marching on the Capitol.


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[Assistant] And was hunkering down to brace for reprisals from Paris.


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[Assistant] In the East, both Lyon and Marseille were themselves facing the prospect of fighting regular army troops who were now redirected from their bases along the Alpine border to come down and retake the rebel cities.


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[Assistant] And we'll come back to Lyon next week, since they're gonna hold out until October, and the subsequent reprisals visited upon the city will form an integral part of the opening of the Reign of Terror.


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[Assistant] But Marseille is about to capitulate, so let's take care of that right now.


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[Assistant] Marseille was of course already suffering from an allied blockade. That was part of the reason they had gone into revolt in the first place.


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[Assistant] But with regular troops now on the way, the federalist leaders inside the city decided that the only way to survive was to open negotiations with the British to hand Marseille over to the Allies in exchange for provisions and protection.


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[Assistant] But when word of these negotiations leaked, it sparked a backlash, as most of the citizens who had supported the revolt against Paris were emphatic that they did not do it just to hand the keys to the city over to the British.


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[Assistant] After a series of street clashes, the most extreme Federalists were run out of the city, and Marseilles surrendered to the approaching regular troops on August the 25th.


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[Assistant] But though this was welcome news in Paris, the explosive news that followed right on its heels really, really wasn't.


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[Assistant] And that news precipitated yet another insurrection in the Capitol.


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[Assistant] What had happened is that those hardcore federalists who fled Marseilles made their way over to Toulon, which just so happened to be the home base of the French navy in the Mediterranean.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With the capture of Marseille no longer an option, the British turned to the people of Toulon and made them the same deal that they had just offered to Marseille. Let us sail in, and we'll protect you.


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[Assistant] This proposal caused just as much heated controversy as it had Marseille.


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[Assistant] But with the hardcore federalists from Marseilles now turning up with stories of vicious atrocities committed by the Jacobin-controlled regular troops, stories that for the moment were a bit overblown, the citizens of Toulon opted for what appeared to be the lesser of two evils.


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[Assistant] On August the 27th, they invited the British to sail into the harbor.


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[Assistant] Thus allowing the Allies to capture the French naval yards without firing a shot.


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[Assistant] When word reached Paris of the betrayal of Toulon on September the 2nd, it fed into another round of angry unrest already rising in the capital that soon culminated with yet another popular insurrection on September the 5th. An insurrection that would mark the beginning of the reign of terror.


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[Assistant] In many ways, the insurrection of September the 5th looks a lot like the insurrections of May 31st, June the 2nd.


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[Assistant] And the insurrection of September the 5th does not represent yet another stage in the process of increasing radicalization that has been ongoing since the Estates General first met way back in May 1789.


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[Assistant] Now this is not the end of uncompromising patriotic commitment, not by a long shot.


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[Assistant] But this is the end of the ever-increasing political and economic radicalization of the revolution.


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[Assistant] That is not really how it looks on the surface, though. And there's a lot of political sleight of hand going on here. So, let's get into it.


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[Assistant] To understand the insurrection of September the 5th, we must first understand the role played by Jacques Hebert.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hebert, you probably don't remember, was one of the two men arrested by the Commission of Twelve back in May. Arrests that helped trigger the purge of the Girondins.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hebert was a left-wing journalist who had been publishing a popular newspaper since 1790.


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[Assistant] He had started out advocating liberal, noble-esque constitutional royalism, but like so many others,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The flight to Varennes turned Hebert against the monarchy and in favor of making France a republic.