[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A few years later though, the royal couple had a second son, who would also come to a miserable end at the hands of the evil revolutionaries. And then in 1786, a second daughter, who would not live to see her first birthday.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now through all of this, Marie Antoinette continued to spend money, buy property, push for her own favorites to be given offices and pensions and gifts, and her standing with the French public was not good at all. She was just too frivolous and extravagant and out of touch, and she took a constant beating in the press.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But up until the diamond necklace affair which we're about to talk about. She may have been the object of scorn and mockery, but it wasn't like she was hated.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And what's hilarious is that the thing that really got her hated was something that she had nothing at all to do with.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was meant to be a gift for his mistress, Madame du Barry.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the piece was so complex that it was not completed by the time the king died and Madame du Barry was kindly asked by the royal family to take a hike.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The jewelers, now out the money they fronted to put the thing together, tried to sell it to Marie Antoinette in 1778, but she said no. It wasn't her style, and she wasn't too keen on Madame du Barry herself, so why would she want to wear her jewelry?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After failing to sell the piece abroad, the jewelers again tried the queen in 1781, and again she said no.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so far so good. There's a fancy necklace. The queen doesn't want it. Simple. But here's where it starts to get complicated.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At some point in 1784, she and her husband, an army officer who was also passing himself off as a noble, set their sights on fleecing the rich and hapless, and hopefully pronounced correctly, Cardinal de Rohan.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Rohan was one of those wealthy aristocrats who made up the top level of the first estate, and he had once upon a time been ambassador to Austria.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was well known around town, though, that Rohan, A, wanted a new position in the government, and B, was currently being iced out by the Queen, who did not approve of Rohan reporting on her activities to her mother, while the Cardinal was serving as ambassador to Austria.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So our con woman Jean takes up with the good cardinal, and convinces him that she's developed an intimate friendship with the Queen.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Jean agreed to start delivering flattering notes from the cardinal to the queen, and then return with the queen's replies. Replies that were, of course, forged.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] These forged replies were apparently affection enough in tone that Rohan started thinking maybe he and the Queen had like something special.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So he begs Jean to arrange a meeting. No problem, says Jean, and goes off, and I'm not making this up, to hire a prostitute who looked like the Queen.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On a moonlit night in the gardens of Versailles, Rohan and the fake prostitute queen met and promised to put all their bad blood behind them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now of course, while this is going on, Jeanne is routinely taking money from Rohan to invest in the Queen's charity work, which is a nice running scam, but then along comes the jewelers with the huge diamond necklace they can't sell. They have just found out that Jeanne has got the Queen's ear, and they offer her a commission if she can get it sold.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So in January 1785, Jean forges a request from the Queen to have Rohan buy it for her. It would be too unseemly for me to go buy it myself, you see.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Jumping at the chance to serve the queen, the cardinal arranges with the jewelers to buy the thing for two million livre, to be paid off in four installments. He then takes the necklace and hands it off to the queen's valet, who is of course just some guy in cahout with Jean and her husband.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Rohan is now absolutely giddy with the fine work he's done, not even suspecting for a moment that the husband has just taken the necklace up to London where he will strip it and start selling the diamonds off one by one.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Eventually though, Rohan started to get nervous, and maybe a little suspicious, when he noticed that the Queen had not yet worn the necklace, and still hadn't sent any of the money to pay off the jeweler by the time the first installment came due in August 1785.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When the payment deadline arrives, and Jean reveals to Rohan that there's no money coming, the angry jeweler goes directly to the queen. And the queen says something along the lines of, I don't know anything about this, and why are we still talking about this necklace?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the king and queen drag in Rohan for an audience and demand an explanation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He tells them everything, and shows the Forge purchase order, which sends King Louis into convulsions because it's obviously a forgery. It was signed Marie Antoinette of France, and as Rohan full well knew, the royalty only ever signed with their given names.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Harminally pissed off. The King has Gohan thrown in the Bastille.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And from there, the whole plot unraveled, and everyone connected is hauled into court. Jean, the prostitute lookalike, the forger, the husband in abstentia since he's still up in London,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The trials were a sensation, one of those trials of the century that come along every few years. But in a crazy twist, the public chose to sympathize with the defendants.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Cardinal Rohan had been duped simply because he was too honest and eager. The prostitute was an innocent girl sucked into a sordid world.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Even Jean was painted as a sympathetic noblewoman down on her luck who had been driven by poverty to make bad choices.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Everyone, it seemed, was given a pass, except the queen, who somehow came off as a vindictive harpy who had purposefully set the whole thing in motion to destroy Rohan, abscond with some pretty necklace, while all the while engaging in some fairly graphically depicted sexual manipulations.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the actual judges appear to have picked through all of this well enough. Jeanne and her husband were convicted, the forger was exiled, Cardinal de Rojan was acquitted, and the Queen was found completely innocent.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But in the all-important court of public opinion, the Diamond Necklace affair was devastating to the queens, and by extension, the entire monarchy's reputation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And what was really damning was just how easy it was to believe that she was this rotten, manipulative shrew who was all too eager to destroy anyone who stood between her and some shiny things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was a devastating public relations nightmare, from which she would not recover.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Especially because over the next few years, she would not have an opportunity to recover.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Things were about to go from bad to worse for the ASEAN regime.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The journey is different from country to country because I grew up in Germany. So first thing you would want to do is either inform in Germany your insurance, in the US you want to inform a therapist.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They give you a referral letter to a therapist that actually has a say in the matter.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like they know what they're talking about and they can, in the end, refer you to an endocrinologist.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, that that happens all the time. Really? That's a struggle for so many people. It's just because those people obviously are biased in their own.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Wait, sometimes they'd be like, you are never gonna be a pretty girl.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So why should I make you do that? So of course not, I gotta give you that fucking letter so you can get your titty skittles.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just, just shitty, but that happens, and in America you thankfully have the choice to just...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Go to your next therapist, who then eventually gives you the letter, if he's okay with that shit. In Germany, you're stuck with that asshole. And you have to convince them over here sometimes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it, like, the healthcare system in Germany is so deteriorated, it is fucking garbage.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now I would actually argue you go to the Arabs because people from the middle east are wild.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, we don't see them, but they do that all in, like, in the back room. They do that for private contracts and shit like this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By someone named Mohammed or something. It's wild. Really? You won't believe it. Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes. I would say so. Like, I am somewhat afraid, but no. Fuck, fuck no.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, that's why we have a fappening every month.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well then, again, installed already, sent me photoshops, edits of your face getting cum soaked.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, well, we lost all our powers, so we had to take it back somehow. Yeah, you know, after I feel defeated.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's just a thing, it's like, you're getting nuked twice, and now you're getting off to fucking aliens raping your asshole. Oh, is that, is that what it is? Is it the radiation, you think? Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, look at Japan history. It's like they get Duke and then like all the Godzilla movies come out. And it was just a logical step to go from Godzilla to Godzilla stick to making it veiny, long and wrapped around a schoolgirl's leg.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And at the same time, I can also make stupid jokes, because that's my audience. That's fucking great.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, uhm, I guess, like how it works is, companies ask you to shoot for them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then you have like a small contract with...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] evilangel, groobie, shemail.xxx, and what all their names are. And that is basically what that is. If you do your own content, which I do sometimes, uhm, everything is like free range, I can do whatever the fuck I want.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But, uh, yeaah, when I'm working for the company, I gotta keep some shit to myself, obviously. Not that I have the need to say that shit, just getting that out of the way right now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Thank god, no, because I can't count the times how many times I fucking shit on my mom. Because she's a fucking cunt. I love you, mom, if you're listening to this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, uhm, what happened is, I did porn and then one time my dad and my brother went to a sex shop for some obscure reason I'd never asked and they see my face on a DVD getting plastered in the ass. That's the way you find that shit out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Did you hear about a pornstar from Florida whose parents managed her career?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I, I forgot it, like, those names are all generic as fuck, so, just call it Christian.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, but yeaah, that's wild. Yeaah, that's weird.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then once in a while my mom comes out of nowhere. That's basically the one time in a month she calls me and be like, you looked so pretty. And I was like, what do you mean? Oh God, please don't tell me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, she, some dude tried to dos me, uh, dox me, and he sent my mom, uh, porn clips. So she watched me fuck and she complained about it later, but she told me how pretty I was. I mean, at the same time I was kinda disgusted, at the same other time I was like, okay, at least I got dad going for me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, of course I heard that, but that is such an echo chamber bullshit thing to say. Like-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My wife also, she's just like, okay, I wake up, wash my face and she's out of the house. Meanwhile, I have to wake up, wash my face, do my makeup, otherwise I look like shit. Some people just go through life without effort and just look fine and others have to work for it. It's just, that's how it is. No, no greeting about that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, but you gotta see it like this. All these companies have a huge media and analyst team behind them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can't tell me they didn't think about that. They knew that shit is offensive. They don't care. They just put it out and generate a shit ton of traffic around a controversy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the thing is, if you just take hormones and do nothing, you be the same lazy shit you've always been, you eat your fucking fast food and so on, you will just get fat, but the fat goes into places that they have not been before. So you will get more fat in your ass, more fat in your thighs, and of course titties.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For me personally, that's also different for person to person. I can't build muscle mass for shit anymore because I basically nuked my testosterone out of orbit into nothing. It is barely detectable in my blood work.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So it makes it super hard for me to actually gain muscle mass, but getting my body into shape is not that hard. So I work out every second day for like half an hour and that's it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, once, like, first of all, that happens sometimes. It's not a lot of shit, it's just like, we call them backbookers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nothing wrong with that. Yeah. This is just like a brown watery stain, that's all it is. But, I usually don't eat anything eight hours prior.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, then of course animas, which are kinda mandatory otherwise. It's like, it's not gonna be fun for anyone. Do you ask things like shit? Wait, wait, you have to do animas?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, it's recommended because, like, you wanna do everyone a favor. You wanna do yourself a favor? You don't wanna shit all over the bed. You don't wanna shit on a dude's dick.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's not also a set requirement, it's just something that you should do. It's a courtesy. Yeah, it's a courtesy of your partner in the scene.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or the cameraman even, because he has to get in there, close and personal, if you shit on his face. That's not fun.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I had to, okay, so imagine this, I just came into a hotel room and there's two girls fucking each other while I'm waiting for my thing to happen. Yeah. And it is his hotel room because he booked it and he's gonna sleep in that bed. And it's just one of the girls takes a dump on that pillow.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because she didn't enema enough or did eat something beforehand.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After the second time I did get fucked because like, now my legs can't do that all day.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because it's also, you have to consider, it's, like, you are getting 20 minutes of porn, but it's about 3 hours of filming.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So we are constantly at it, just meat-slapping the whole fucking time. Like little breaks. It's fucking wild.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is 90% and it is upsetting to the core. Like once in a while I'm like, yeah, I totally could get a fucking nut out right now. But at the same time, that's, that's like $50 I throw away.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And subconsciously is always work, because you constantly see yourself in that twisted image of like, oh yea, you have always to be perfect while you do it. You lay in bed or you sit on a toilet and you're just like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I don't dig it right now because I look stupid probably, so I'm just stopping. Oh yeah!


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is strange and it's definitely something you have to practice. And practicing that is fucking awful. Imagine you're standing in front of a mirror and you have to whack it now. And constantly keep an eye on your expressions and so on so you can practice.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's usually not a dynamic thing that just happens. No, usually take a break filming and then just whack off. And then just because before we came, we just let the camera roll and just catch with it. But the funny thing is you're in this weird position where you're surrounded by people and lights.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you need to be comfortable to cum everybody that's on the caveman face again.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's not how we see it, because like, mentally we're all there, you know? It's just, we do dumb shit that probably, I assume, normal chicks don't do, like, normal patient marks. But at the same time, we're both coming from the place, we're doing that girly shit together.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, it's a chick and you can fuckin' do some actual shit around the house. How cool is that? I know, right? It's like, I can, I can weld, I can fucking do electrics, I can do all that shit. What the fuck? Ah! It's fucking perfect.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Honestly, Yedis the fetus. Yedis the fetus dude, get it out of here. Just get, get just rid of it if you feel like it. Yeah. Like, fuck it. Like, I don't have a, uh, a uterus and all that bullshit. And I don't need to worry about it. And every woman should be in that position at some point.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We were sitting in a room and there were two girls going at it. Cis girls, that is. And one just whips out the condom and takes a dump in it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, and I'm sitting there on the couch, I can see through two doors what the fuck they're doing. And then suddenly this rancid smell creeps through the fucking door.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I'm just like, okay, what am I supposed to do here?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then the Russian dude just talks to my girlfriend back there and is like, Oh, he wants you to do the same. Can you do that? Fuck no.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, almost, just like, I was stressing out over this so much.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So like, look at this. I am camera shy, unless I have a dick in my mouth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't, I got rid of all of those, but I can't tell you this much. I was a hunky dude, like I was muscular because I used to play soccer in a school team.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, I got rid of all those, like, I don't even have yearbook pictures because I always skip photo day. Because one day I knew, it's like, I'm gonna pull through with the shit that I have in my head. And I don't want any evidence left of what it's made.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's like, it's so expensive and second, it's like, what, a 50-50 chance that it comes out okay?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, the process gets better every year, and I have some friends, theirs look, you can't tell. Like, by feel and by looks, they look perfect.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, actually there is, uhm, a question many people ask, but the thing is, that is a muscle, like any other muscle, and unless you actually break it, like, rip it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, wait, I have bad dragons. I don't know how white they are. I think they're eight or h- bigger. Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And there will, like, I don't basically need to abide 90% of the time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When did you- when did you transition? I started taking hormones with 21. 22. 22. Oh, okay. How old are you now?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I, I, I don't, uhm, understand how that still happens. Just, I, at this point I believe we should have wiped out these genetics, just breed the pristine Asians. Yeah. But now I, we got into German tab, uh, topics with, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I don't have qualms about these things. I know, you seem pretty chill, you're like a...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, it's the same way as like, some white dude walks up to you and calls you the n-word. What the fuck? That's not cool.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Thanks to Forkshan we can't use it anymore. Why? What's wrong with that?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, that bitch is everything I ever want to be.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I know, right? Like, not, not because, like, beauty ideals or whatever, she's pretty as fuck, but she is so smart, business-wise.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] She can, she can put any price tag on it. If it's like $50,000, people will buy that shit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, I looked through the internet, there is one picture of her where she has a nipple slip, and that's it. Like, that is her whole unique starting point. She wants that perfect, she is that perfect being that is untouchable.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So why should she give away that what makes her unique? Know what I mean? Yeah. It is like a weird cult status.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's like these, uh, televangelists that are perfect on camera every time as soon as they step out of the spotlight they're like these fucking coke dab assholes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, and that is like, that is a huge thing in porn, Twitter or social media in general. Like everybody thinks those pornsters, they only exist for your pleasure.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But as soon as someone is like, yeah, I've been smoking and drinking with my body, some people will get upset.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, I hate people send me death threats.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Even though it's all over my social media, I talk about my wife the whole fucking time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then there's like, they're gonna find your head in a mailbox, they're gonna rape your body, and so it's like, okay cool. That happens. It's wild.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, there was this, uh, I think, I forgot which website she was streaming on, either Twitch or Mixer or whatever, and for months and months you made a shit ton of money. And then some...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Dude stalked her and took a picture with her of her boyfriend. And she lost all her patrons. Like 90% of them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know, it's like this personal level because you can actually engage with people like that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, there are people that are like that, but on the other hand, there are fans I personally appreciate the fuck out of. Yeah. Like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's this army of thousands of faceless...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People just walking in my sphere and I don't give a fuck about them. And there's these like 10, 20 people that'll be like


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That you can assort a face to or a name that just sticks, because they're always there, they're always supportive, and when they critique you or tell you something, you fucking do it, or you wanna do it, because


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That is the shit that sells. Because they know there are those people consuming it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, like, that is, okay, this is, I am interesting phenomenon because no one watches my stuff where I am bottom.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, for the last few months I tried to do interesting, new shit. No one cares. Yesterday I uploaded a fucking cock worship video. People are all over it. I don't know. It's just, I'm stuck with this shit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, like not everybody is on the same page with me there, but I think it's, yeah, of course, because there's always these people's like, no, you can't let that shit slide. But okay. For example, I lived with her parents for 18 years and then I started doing this shit. Of course, from today, from yesterday to today, they won't be.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Onboard with that change, right away. Yeaah. Know what I mean?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it's like, okay, I can let it slide, but I gonna correct you only so many times and then I am fed up and then I gonna get mad. But some people are like immediately 0 to 100 pissed off at the guy who said, yeah, have a good day, man.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oi, what's up my dudes? Immediately, bots to the world's angry, fucking reeing around, but that's just me. Like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, like, but honestly, until I was like 14, 15, like, you know, you're like in recess, you're standing around and then some kid pulls out his phone or whatever they have and then just show you a video where a trans person gets nailed just to troll you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's how I found out that shit exists. And then I clicked with me and it's like, okay, that's the shit I need. Holy fuck.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's just, I don't know. For the normal eye, it does make a fucking difference. But for the dick connoisseur...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a whole word between a lady dick and some hunky man dick.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Trans people have been around for, I don't know how fucking long, it's been centuries even.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But, we're just starting now to get in a, on a social level, like, this education out, that I, we exist, we kinda don't want to be murdered just because we are the way we are, we are not a fetish piece.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah. Okay. I'mma say it now. I, Miss Vex, speak for all trans people on the behalf of not being murdered for being trans. Okay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, there was the same time when trans people had that resurgence, but there was just-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, the society was like, okay, we're ready for gay people slowly, not fully. We still hate those. But trans people, no, that's just wild. We can't have that. And now we're slowly like 2013, 12 people start coming forward and be like, yeah, we could, we could fucking have discussion about that now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You have to beep out every... I just said...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Of course! But you know, the whole time you slapped that word out there, and I bet you, as soon as this mix circles this podcast, there's some people who are gonna report it for that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I guarantee you. That's their midlife crisis. Instead of getting Harley, they're back into fucking World of Warcraft. Midlife crisis.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Basically the same thing and it's... I see no difference besides the people.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, that is wild. That's kinda why I wanna stay in Michigan. I can't buy a house here for $30,000.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I was just like, okay, I can fuck with that, I can make $30,000 easy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, it is, like, and then you consider, like, all these properties will get more expensive over the years. Well, that's what people thought until...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Big cities are always like an exception from that, but if you think, okay, you have a house with coastal view on Lake Michigan.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For 40,000, 30,000 packs. Dead properties only get more volatile over the time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, uhm, I noticed that, like, I tried to make this whole girlfriend experience stuff. Mhm. People don't care. People only wanna see my dick.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's fucking sad. And then they're surprised when a shit post on Twitter. Yeah, it's, it's the fucking best.


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[Assistant] That's when you go to Pornhub and look at the analytics, they just skip from, okay, here's the blowjob, here's the shitty fuck, and here's the fucking cumshot.


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[Assistant] Totally fair. I'm a degenerate, but that just comes with the profession because you can't get off to normal porn anymore.


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[Assistant] Oh yea. You know how that shit is made. You know they fucking eat a sandwich in the middle of this. It's like of course I only get off to fucking tentacles raping a 12 year old.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I, I used to set the f-word for ages until my wife, or, I was like, she currently tries to condition me to not say retard.


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[Assistant] But yeah, she gets so mad now if I say that because just damn, it is in my system. I can't get it out.


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[Assistant] It's funny because people- I tried to test my waters. I tried to test my waters with that. Yeah. And just like, change a little bit, so I say fuck tart. She's okay with that. But not Retard. For some reason. Yeah, but not Retard.


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[Assistant] At some point they're gonna come after the word idiot, because that was back then described to describe people with an IQ of 50.


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[Assistant] Like we talked about it in the beginning, but now that I think about it, I still can't get away with it because I'm white.


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[Assistant] Uh, that is against tier- YouTube tiers, but I can give you the Twitter, that is s- uh, at miss underscore vex, that's uh, v-e-x-x.


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[Assistant] That's against chance of service of YouTube, Twitch and all that shit.


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[Assistant] Like, I got my European word of warcraft account banned because it promoted my Pornhub site back then.


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[Assistant] It's like what do you do if you're a minority with high suicide rates and you take away your only place of solace?


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[Assistant] Let's make our comprehensive list. No murder, no pushing to suicide, no T-word, uh.


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[Assistant] Yeah, but that's just how it works. Bad infrastructure and global warming, they do that to you.


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[Assistant] This week's episode is brought to you by Lynda.com.


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[Assistant] Lynda.com is the online learning platform with over 3,000 on-demand video courses to help you strengthen your business, technology, and creative skills. For a free 10-day trial, visit Lynda.com slash Revolutions. That's L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash Revolutions.


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[Assistant] Lynda.com is for problem solvers, for the curious, for people who want to make things happen. Maybe you want to master Excel, learn new negotiation tactics, build a website, or boost your Photoshop skills. Go to Lynda.com and feed your curious mind.


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[Assistant] I can hardly recommend all their audio and video software tutorials, but I am about to start plowing my way through Linda's extensive library of business skills tutorials. You know, accounting fundamentals, finance fundamentals, income tax fundamentals. It's about time I started taking this stuff seriously.


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[Assistant] With Alinda.com membership, you can watch and learn from top experts, stream thousands of video courses on demand, and learn at your own schedule. The courses are structured so you can watch them from start to finish, or consume them in bite-sized pieces.


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[Assistant] You can browse each course's transcript to follow along or search for an answer and skip to that point in the video.


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[Assistant] Take notes as you go and refer to them later. You can download tutorials and watch them on the go, including access on your iOS or Android device. You can create and save playlists of courses you want to watch to customize your learning path or share it with friends and colleagues or other team members.


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[Assistant] Your Lynda.com membership will give you unlimited access to training on hundreds of topics, all for one flat rate.


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[Assistant] Whether you're looking to become an industry expert, you're passionate about a hobby, or you just want to learn something new, I want you to visit lynda.com slash revolutions to sign up for your free 10 day trial. That is lynda.com slash r-e-v-o-l-u-t-i-o-n-s.


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[Assistant] So as we discussed three episodes back, probably the biggest reason the French finally started to pull back from the Reign of Terror was the run of military successes in the first half of 1794. It was hard to convince everyone that all this emergency murder was necessary because emergency, emergency, when there wasn't really any emergency.


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[Assistant] Well, the French armies just kept rolling through the second half of 1794, and that military success was the backdrop against which last week's political swing to the right unfolded. Things were in fact going so well that by the time I'm done talking about it all today, the following things will have happened.


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[Assistant] One, the Prussians will be asking for terms of peace. Two, the Austrians will have pulled their armies back across the Rhine. Three, the French will be occupying the entirety of the Netherlands. And four, the British will have gathered up all their stuff and sailed away for home.


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[Assistant] These victories will not only shut down Flanders as the main center of the war, a distinction soon to be foisted upon Italy, but it will also greatly stabilize the French domestic economy. Because from here on out, every time France occupies a new territory, the people and resources of that territory will be exploited to serve the needs of France.


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[Assistant] This was 180 degrees from all the lofty rhetoric about exporting the rights of man that had been laid out back when the war started in 1792, but it also turned out to be very lucrative and made France very, very strong.


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[Assistant] So when we last left the war up in Belgium, General Jourdan had just won the battle of Fleurus in June 1794, and by won, I mean was left in control of the field when the Austrians decided to withdraw from an otherwise inconclusive engagement.


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[Assistant] After Flourish, the Austrian and British components of the Allied army split up, with the Austrians headed east towards Cologne and the British headed north up into the United Provinces.


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[Assistant] Jourdan followed the Austrians as they pulled back towards the Rhine, while General Pichigrew, he was one of those commoner generals promoted by Saint-Just and who was now commander of the Army of the North, headed up to take control of the Belgian ports along the English Channel. After Pichigrew locked down the Belgian ports, he turned his attention north.


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[Assistant] Now though General du Maurier had been forced to abandon his invasion of the United Provinces back in the spring of 1793, the French still dreamed of bringing the Netherlands into the French orbit. And with the British on the run, that dream now seemed eminently attainable.


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[Assistant] At the end of August, Pichigrew got the Army of the North moving.


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[Assistant] The British were at this point still in pretty decent fighting shape, but they were getting awfully discouraged. As we'll discuss in a minute, the Allied coalition was fracturing, and the British could not convince the Austrians to come help them block the French invasion.


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[Assistant] Stopping the French from occupying the United Provinces may have been the reason the British had gotten into the war, but what did Austria care about that?


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[Assistant] They were already abandoning their half of the low country, so what did it matter what the French did with the other half?


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[Assistant] On September the 5th, Pichigrew ordered 10,000 men up to go occupy the town of Boxtel, and a contingent of British were sent down to block them.


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[Assistant] The ensuing little battle was not a major engagement in itself, but the British commander made a tactical blunder and retreated when he really should have advanced. This defeat at Boxtel was not so much a military setback as it was emotionally demoralizing for the British troops, and it lent an air of inevitability to French victory.


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[Assistant] Pretty soon the British were retreating still further into Dutch territory.


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[Assistant] No help was coming from the Austrians, and while the orders from home still said, keep up the fight, the officers on the ground were like, okay, but for how long? This isn't going very well.


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[Assistant] At that same moment, a General Jourdan was approaching the Austrian position along Lorraine, and he was about to meet with similar success.


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[Assistant] The Austrian army was still camped on the west side of the river, and both sides were now fielding huge armies, Jordan commanding over 100,000 men while the Austrians had over 80,000.


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[Assistant] On September the 18th, the two sides met on a plateau near the town of Spremont, and though the French took heavy losses, they managed to keep pushing until the Austrians withdrew.


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[Assistant] Now Austria had already given up on the interior of their now clearly former province of the Austrian Netherlands, but now they gave up any pretence to holding the west bank of the Rhine. They retreated across the river, abandoning the little string of principalities on the French side of the river, including the major free city of Cologne.


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[Assistant] So the question then becomes, why were the Austrians so willing to pull back?


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[Assistant] None of these battles were really decisive. And had they wanted to, they could have dug in and fought it out.


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[Assistant] But while we're asking that question, we might as well also ask where is Prussia in all of this? Why have they just been completely idle along their front for like a year now?


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[Assistant] The answer to both questions turns out to be the same. And as it is so often in the history of the French Revolution, the answer is


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[Assistant] Because apparently, if you really want to understand the French Revolution, what you really need to do is study the history of Poland.


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[Assistant] So, what the hell is going on in Poland that's so important?


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[Assistant] Well, I'll tell you. Polish patriots have gone into revolt against Russian hegemony.


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[Assistant] Now the last time we checked in on Poland was back in episode 3.27, Advance and Retreat. That was when Catherine the Great had invaded Poland after winding up her war with the Turks.


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[Assistant] When the Russians came in, Prussia started massing troops along the Polish border, but instead of fighting, the two great powers agreed to the Second Polish Partition in January 1793 that left Poland a territorial rump of its former self and politically dominated by Russia.


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[Assistant] Polish patriots, who could not stand the humiliating terms under which their government now labored, spent the next year talking amongst themselves about how to reverse their fortunes.


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[Assistant] Many of these guys were senior military officers, and central among them was Tadeusz Kosciuszko.


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[Assistant] Now unfortunately, I do not have time right now to go in-depth on Kosciuszko, but I probably should have by now.


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[Assistant] After all, he had first risen to prominence after volunteering for service in the Continental Army during the American War of Independence.


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[Assistant] He quickly became THE master engineer of the Continental Forces. He was the one who fortified Bemis Heights during the all-important battles at Saratoga. He was the one who built West Point. Then he transferred down to the Southern Theater where he was one of Nathaniel Green's key lieutenants in the campaigns against Cornwallis and Tarleton.


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[Assistant] After the American War, he returned to Poland, where he had been fighting a losing battle to keep the great powers from gobbling up his homeland. If I have time, I'll do a supplemental on him, because Kosciuszko is, in fact, awesome.


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[Assistant] But getting back to it, one of the things Russia had been up to since the second partition was systematically dismantling the Polish army, and over the winter of 1793-1794, they made their final move, demanding that that army be reduced from 35,000 to 50,000 to just 15,000.


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[Assistant] Now this was intolerable to the Polish patriot officers because they were planning on eventually using that army to expel the Russians.


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[Assistant] With the demobilization order, they had to act now.


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[Assistant] So in March 1794, Kosciuszko announced a general insurrection from his base in Krakow.


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[Assistant] The Poles whipped a Russian force sent against them on April the 4th, and then they moved on to the capital of Warsaw.


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[Assistant] The Polish Patriot advance was helped by a spontaneous uprising in the capital that saw the residents of Warsaw slaughter at least half the 5,000-man Russian garrison.


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[Assistant] And he was attempting to duplicate the mass national mobilization that was just getting underway over in France.


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[Assistant] The unrest caused by Kachusko's uprising, which is what this is all called, and the opportunities it presented were the main reason the Prussians and Austrians became so distracted from the war with France in the summer of 1794.


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[Assistant] With Catherine's blessing, the Prussians moved into Poland, and then also with Catherine's blessing, but unbeknownst to the Prussians, the Austrians sent in a force of their own.


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[Assistant] With the military and political gravity of the eastern powers now revolving around Poland, Prussia went from calculated inaction against the French to actively sending out peace feelers to Paris in October 1794.


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[Assistant] Peace feelers that would eventually result in Prussia withdrawing from the anti-French coalition in the spring of 1795.


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[Assistant] Now unfortunately for our Polish friends, the combined weight of their three territory-hungry neighbors was too much for them.


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[Assistant] In October, the army Kosciuszko led was defeated by the Russians, and Kosciuszko himself was captured.


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[Assistant] And famously, just before he was captured, Kuczusko allegedly said, this is the end of Poland.


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[Assistant] An apocryphal or not, he was right. This is the end of Poland.


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[Assistant] On November the 4th, the Russians beat the last major Polish force outside of Warsaw. And when the Russians entered the capital, they did so with an eye on revenging the massacre of their garrison.


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[Assistant] The Russian troops were let off the leash to loot, pillage, and kill as they saw fit.


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[Assistant] It is estimated that upwards of 20,000 Poles were killed in the indiscriminate massacre that followed. In case you're looking for a further perspective on the reign of terror, as many Poles died in a single day as were executed by the guillotine over the course of an entire year of the terror.


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[Assistant] With the Poles beaten militarily, it was left for the occupying powers to decide what to do next. It took a while to work out, but the decision was, let's just divvy up the rest of Poland.


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[Assistant] The Prussians, Austrians, and Russians met for a diplomatic summit in October 1795 to haggle over their respective territorial claims, and then in January 1797, the haggling took a while, they finally signed the Third Polish Partition, which obliterated Poland from the maps of Europe for 123 years.


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[Assistant] While the eastern powers turned their attention to Poland, the British were left to carry on a frustrated defense of the united provinces all by their lonesome as the winter of 1794 set in.


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[Assistant] Now under normal circumstances, winter would have brought an end to the campaign for the year.


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[Assistant] What that meant was that practically every river in Northern Europe froze solid.


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[Assistant] Recognizing the opportunity, General Pichigrew told his guys, hey look, winter is so bad, let's just keep on fighting, which I'm sure that they were all thrilled to hear, but they were now able to march across frozen rivers wherever they felt like it. And so the French were able to push almost unopposed north towards Amsterdam.


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[Assistant] As they moved, the French enjoyed the rather unique privilege of being genuinely greeted as liberators.


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[Assistant] By the end of the 18th century, the Dutch Republic was in reality a dynastic oligarchy run by the House of Orange and, in practical terms, little more than a satellite of the British government.


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[Assistant] In Amsterdam, a citizen uprising expelled the Orange's government just as the French army appeared on the horizon, and the new patriot city leaders welcomed in the French with open arms.


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[Assistant] A few days after capturing the capital, Pichigrew learned that up at the port of Den Helder, a Dutch fleet of 14 ships had been immobilized when the harbor they were anchored in froze.


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[Assistant] Pichigrew ordered a detachment of his army to go take a look, and on January the 23rd, the French cavalry launched a surprise attack across the ice and captured not only the 14 Dutch ships, but the 850 heavy guns they held between them.


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[Assistant] And they say that this is the only time in military history that a fleet has been captured by a cavalry charge.


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[Assistant] With the French totally ascendant in the Netherlands, the British just kept retreating until they were out of the United Provinces completely and camped in Hanoverian territory.


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[Assistant] Then they sat around waiting for the British government to recognize what the British army probably already did, and that was that continuing to try to wage a land war against the French was folly.


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[Assistant] So come the spring of 1795, Prime Minister William Pitt ordered the British army to evacuate the continent.


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[Assistant] The British were not abandoning the war with revolutionary France, but having already failed to achieve their one strategic objective on land, keep the United Provinces out of French hands, they decided to focus their attention on the sea, where the British navy was likely to have far more success than the British army had had.


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[Assistant] As it turned out, the British really had lost their one strategic objective on the continent, and the Netherlands would remain in the French orbit until the fall of Napoleon.


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[Assistant] The day the French entered Amsterdam, patriot Dutch leaders proclaimed themselves to be the Batavian Republic.


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[Assistant] The Batavian bit coming from a Dutch nationalist tradition that traced its ethnic roots back to the famous Batavii who had inhabited the region back in Roman times and who had provided the emperors with some of their best and most reliable troops.


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[Assistant] But though the Dutch were pretty excited about being liberated, they quickly discovered that freedom and independence were not what the French had in mind for them.


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[Assistant] Paris was not even remotely interested in exporting the revolution in the name of freedom and liberty and national self-determination. It was interested in creating client states that would exist to serve the military and economic needs of France.


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[Assistant] And this run of victories in 1794 that culminated with the permanent occupation of the entire Netherlands and all those wealthy Rhine principalities, that had a lot to do with stabilizing the domestic economy of France at the expense of all those occupied territories.


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[Assistant] So with that in mind, let's pivot away from the war to talk about that domestic economy, which had been doing meh okay for most of 1794, but which was trending in a bad direction by the end of the year, when it was then clobbered by one of the worst winters of the century.


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[Assistant] Now one of the leading indicators of the health and stability of the economy was the value of the au seigneur.


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[Assistant] After all hell had broken loose in the spring of 1793, the value of the Asenya had plunged down to 22% face value, as the convention had tried to print its way into the resources it needed to prosecute the wars on all fronts.


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[Assistant] The collapse of the Asenya was actually one of the reasons the convention had been so willing to invest power in a strong executive committee. And one of the signature accomplishments of the Committee of Public Safety have been to strengthen and stabilize the value of the paper currency.


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[Assistant] Once the committee really took over in August 1793, the value of the au seigneur started to inch back up.


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[Assistant] And this process was given a forced nudge when the general maximum was declared in September.


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[Assistant] The price controls and the takeover of the economic supply chain started to re-strengthen the value of the au-sin-yon.


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[Assistant] Then, over the winter of 1793-1794, the committee stumbled into an inflation control measure quite by accident when they demanded a forced loan from the rich.


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[Assistant] And acted on a sliding scale determined by your total wealth. The loan was supposed to help generate revenue.


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[Assistant] But the government accepted, and really had to accept, Asenya as a valid form of payment, and accepted it face value.


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[Assistant] So naturally, everyone paid their forced loans with virtually worthless piles of Asenya.


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[Assistant] But though the forced loan didn't necessarily generate the real revenue that it was supposed to.


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[Assistant] The simple fact of all those auctions being taken out of circulation raised the market value of the auctions still floating around out there.


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[Assistant] Soon enough, the notes were once again trading at nearly 50% face value, which was, you know, pretty good.


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[Assistant] But the longer the general maximum was in effect, the harder it became to enforce, and the more heavy-handed that enforcement had to become. And by heavy-handed, I mean the terror.


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[Assistant] Outside the war zones of the federalist cities in the Vendee, violation of the maximum was the source of most denunciations, and the source of most of the, dare I say, non-political executions.


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[Assistant] Now the Committee of Public Safety was not insensible to complaints that one standard list of prices for the whole country made no sense, and in February 1794 they issued a revised price list, one that took into account regional differences and factored in transportation costs


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[Assistant] But still, for the first half of 1794, the choice for farmers and traders, merchants and wholesalers, whatever.


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[Assistant] Sell your goods and services at ruinous rates, or get your head chopped off.


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[Assistant] But when the terror was abandoned after Termidor, the whip hand keeping everyone in economic line was removed, and predictably the real market for goods was disengaged from the official market for goods.


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[Assistant] Now we would normally call this, like, the black market.


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[Assistant] But what do you call it when everything is now available only on the black market? That's just the market.


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[Assistant] As the maximum broke down, the value of the Asenya plunged back down to 20% face value by the end of 1794.


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[Assistant] Now, ironically enough, just as the people of Paris were starting to suspect that the general maximum was broken and unenforceable, the National Convention was voting to extend it for another year.


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[Assistant] Now they did this simply to shore up their political left flank. This was about the same time they put Marat in the pantheon.


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[Assistant] But then their agents and spies inside the capital reported that the people of Paris were beginning to believe that the maximum was doing more harm than good.


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[Assistant] Nothing was available at the list price, and there was no real mechanism to enforce compliance.


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[Assistant] To many convention delegates, this admission was music to their ears. For them, the General Maximum had always been a terrible economic idea that was decreed only as a political expedient to stop Paris from rising up in revolt.


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[Assistant] But if the word was now that the people of Paris were themselves sick of the maximum, well, by God, let's get ourselves back on the free market.


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[Assistant] They ordered an investigation of the continued efficacy of the maximum, and that report came back a resounding, it's not working, let's get rid of it.


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[Assistant] So on December the 24th, 1794, the National Convention repealed the general maximum. Let the free market have its day.


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[Assistant] But as was the luck of all French free market enthusiasts during the revolutionary period, they abolished the maximum just as Europe was headed into one of its worst winters on record.


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[Assistant] Now the harvest of 1794 had been fine, I mean not good by any stretch of the imagination, and the French had been forced to import grain from North America.


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[Assistant] That shipment of grain had in fact been at the center of a pretty major naval battle between the British and French in June, as the British tried to stop the convoy from reaching France. That battle was technically won by the British, but the fighting had tied them up long enough that the convoy made it through, so really, the French won that one.


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[Assistant] Now even with this shipment added to a not terrible harvest, two things conspired to make the winter of 1794-1795 just terrible for the average French consumer.


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[Assistant] Three quarters of a million men under arms is a lot of mouths to feed, so you can just take all that right off the top.


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[Assistant] Then the winter froze all the rivers. This not only ground the internal transportation system to a halt, but it also shut down all the mills. You need running water to work the mills, and no running water means that even if you have a stockpile of grain, you can't turn it into anything edible.


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[Assistant] So just as the maximum was being lifted, the supply of everything plummeted, and the price of everything skyrocketed.


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[Assistant] Prices were now well beyond what the poor Parisians, for example, could afford. In January 1795, people were literally dropping dead of starvation in the streets.


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[Assistant] To compensate for this, the convention ramped up printing of oceania so that people could go buy food, but this led to predictable inflation, compounded by the fact that there was not even a hint of a bluff that the currency was backed by anything.


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[Assistant] Remember, the Asenya had started out as a claim on a part of the wealth and property expropriated from the church after all its lands were nationalized.


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[Assistant] Over the years, the various French national governments had tried to keep up with the number of Aucaignan out in circulation, usually by targeting and seizing emigrate property.


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[Assistant] But at this moment, in the early months of 1795, there was nothing new to stake the Austrian onto, and everyone knew it.


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[Assistant] As the paper flew off the presses hyperinflation took hold.


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[Assistant] It would never recover from this crippling lack of faith and its value. The auceigneur was effectively dead.


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[Assistant] Now this economic crisis in Paris was of course met with unrest in the streets.


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[Assistant] But this time, there was a genuine clash of interests out there, and the staunchly Termidorian convention was willing to back anyone who would help them beat down the radical left.


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[Assistant] Thus, the Muscatine youth continued to roam the streets of Paris with impunity.


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[Assistant] They pushed their way into theaters and closed down plays they didn't like. If the fightin' dandies spotted someone wearing a red Liberty cap, they beat them up with their constitutions. They even went so far as to target and attack anyone caught singing La Marseillaise, which the Muscatines denounced as a mere jack of an anthem.


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[Assistant] They also went round to all the de-Christianized churches and started de-de-Christianizing them.


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[Assistant] Many of the more active decristianizers were also acolytes of Jean-Paul Marat. And so, when they went into the churches and removed the Christian icons, crucifixes and that sort of thing, they put busts of Marat up in their place.


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[Assistant] The Muscadans made a regular sport of smashing busts of Marat.


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[Assistant] This all culminated in February 1795, when, under pressure from the Muscatans, the convention voted to remove Marat from the Pantheon, where his remains had been interred for just five months.


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[Assistant] That was all the time that Marah ever spent in the pantheon.


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[Assistant] The beleaguered leftists, populists, sans-culottes, and ex-jacobins attempted to rally, and the kernel of another popular movement got going in January, when an obscure lawyer named Francois Noel Babouf started anonymously publishing a paper called The Tribune of the People.


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[Assistant] The Tribune of the People helped launch the slogan we'll deal with more deeply next week, Bread and the Constitution of 1793. But the tide had really turned against the left.


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[Assistant] Government censors swarmed on the Tribune of the People and shut it down before it could really get going, and Babouf was arrested.


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[Assistant] But for him, this was only the beginning of his radical career, and he will soon return under his more famous name, Grakis Babuf, the Tribune of the People.


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[Assistant] The increasingly conservative bent of the revolution was seen most especially in the realm of religion, as all that de-dechristianization attested.


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[Assistant] Now the Termidorian leaders had no intention of trying to rebuild the ASEAN regime Catholic Church. They had neither the time, the inclination, or the resources.


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[Assistant] But they also wanted to reverse the turn against Christianity, which had done so much to gin up domestic unrest.


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[Assistant] Now Robespierre may have mocked the cult of reason harder than anyone, but he had suggested replacing it with the megalomaniacal cult of the supreme being. The Terminoreans wanted no part of any of that stuff.


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[Assistant] So they hit on a brilliant idea that was both utterly revolutionary in itself and let the French go back to being Catholics if they wanted to.


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[Assistant] On September the 18th, 1794, the convention officially suspended all payments earmarked for religious institutions.


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[Assistant] This included the entire apparatus of the civic church.


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[Assistant] With one line crossed out in the budget, the Terminorian Convention cast aside the national church that had been so polarizing since the very first civic oaths had been decreed way back in 1789.


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[Assistant] But as they were zeroing out the religious budget, they also declared freedom of worship.


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[Assistant] So, you can believe whatever you want, we're just not going to pay for it anymore.


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[Assistant] This de facto separation of church and state was followed up on February the 21st, 1795 with the decree to formally separate the church from the state, something that had never even been contemplated by anyone before.


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[Assistant] Religion was just not something the Terminorian Convention wanted to argue with you about.


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[Assistant] Now the Catholic Church was not allowed as of yet to just re-inhabit their old churches. Those were all public property.


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[Assistant] But what you did in your own home was now your own business.


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[Assistant] Nowhere was the impact of the decrees on religious freedom more deeply felt than in the one day.


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[Assistant] Hard hit by the Reign of Terror and the Infernal Columns, the population of the Vande was staggering.


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[Assistant] But much to the chagrin of the authorities in Paris, guerrilla resistance continued to plague the Republican forces trying to stamp out the last embers of a resistance.


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[Assistant] Now all the major cities and all the major roads were controlled by the Republicans, but loosely affiliated peasant guerrillas just refused to give it up.


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[Assistant] Then, the convention was hit by very disturbing news from Brittany.


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[Assistant] Brittany was every bit as ticked off at Paris as the Vendée was, and the Bretons had been further stirred up when the Catholic and Royal Army had made their play at Granville.


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[Assistant] Soon, a general popular uprising got going, and its active members were called the Schwan.


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[Assistant] But the Shu'an were never as well armed, nor as well led as their neighbors to the south.


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[Assistant] But still, something like 22,000 people had joined the movement by the summer of 1794, which was enough to make the Termidorian Convention want to drastically change their approach in the region.


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[Assistant] Clearly, vicious, bloody, heavy-handed tactics had failed to bring peace to the West. Maybe we should try something else?


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[Assistant] So just as religious freedom was being decreed in September, General Lazar Hoche was dispatched to the Vendée to try to negotiate his way to victory, not with the stick, but with the carrot.


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[Assistant] Upon his arrival in the region, he set about granting amnesty to rebels, and releasing prisoners, and saying that the Terminorian Convention was ready to talk.


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[Assistant] On December 1st, the convention formally offered amnesty to all rebels who laid down their arms by January 1st.


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[Assistant] Naturally, Vande was skeptical about anything Paris said. But the decree about religious freedom was a huge signal that this might all be real.


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[Assistant] Religion had been the key issue that had gotten the uprising going in the first place. And the convention was now saying, we don't care about who you worship with or how you worship. That's just not a thing for us anymore.


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[Assistant] Then later in December, the convention sent another clear signal that they were serious, when Jean-Baptiste Carrier was finally brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal.


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[Assistant] The investigation into his conduct at Nott had come back with a resounding, let's put the bastard on trial. And so at the end of November, they did.


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[Assistant] Now at his trial, Carrier was defiant. He denied having taken any part in these contemptible deeds, and then said he was only following orders, and that if he was guilty, then the whole convention was guilty. Quote, right down to the president's bell, unquote. The Revolutionary Tribunal did not agree. They convicted Carrier and sentenced him to death.


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[Assistant] On December the 16th, he became one of those last few victims of the guillotine.


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[Assistant] When word got back to the Vendée that the butcher of Nantes had just gotten his head chopped off, well, maybe the convention really was serious about coming to terms. And indeed they were.


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[Assistant] Hosh's pitch turned out to be extremely generous and basically conceded every point that had driven the Vendee into rebellion in the first place.


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[Assistant] Freedom of worship was already confirmed, but he also offered exemption from the draft, which had been the flashpoint that had gotten everything going.


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[Assistant] He also offered compensation for any destroyed or seized property.


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[Assistant] His basic position was look, if you lay down your arms, we'll give you everything you want.


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[Assistant] The only demand that he could not grant was returning the king to the throne. But other than that, let's just end this thing, okay?


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[Assistant] And this was very nearly the beginning of the end of the war in the Vendée.


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[Assistant] But unfortunately for everyone involved, we're not there quite yet.


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[Assistant] As we will see next week, the more intransigent rebel leaders were delighted to be drawing out negotiations because it lulled the Republicans into a false sense of security.


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[Assistant] As the Republicans were so lulled, the rebels negotiated with British contacts and French émigré leaders based in London to land a royalist army in the West to bring the entire region back into full revolt, with the aim of getting that final unmeetable demand.


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[Assistant] Placing the young, and still incarcerated, Louis XVII on the throne.


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[Assistant] But as we will see next week, all those hopes will be dashed by the disastrous Keybrone Bay expedition in June.


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[Assistant] But before we get into that comedy of errors though, we will need to head back to Paris to follow the inevitable confrontation between the left and the right in Paris.


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[Assistant] A confrontation that will turn into a decisive defeat of the left, but also convince the convention that if the political situation was ever going to be stabilized, that France needed a new, new constitution.


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[Assistant] This week's episode is brought to you by Audible. Audible is the internet's leading provider of audio entertainment with over 150,000 titles to choose from. When you're done with this episode, go to audiblepodcast.com forward slash revolutions. That again, audiblepodcast.com forward slash revolutions.


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[Assistant] When you go 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 anytime 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] This week, I'm going to go back and recommend for a second time, The Black Count by Tim Reiss, a narrative history of the Haitian-born general Thomas Alexandre Dumas.


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[Assistant] I really thought I was gonna have a chance to get into him, but he's been just off to the left of the main narrative and I just don't have the time to spare.


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[Assistant] But just so you know, he was on the Italian campaigns. He single-handedly fought off a company of Austrians trying to take a bridge. He was the commander of cavalry during the Egyptian campaigns that I'm about to tell you about.


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[Assistant] And then he winds up captured, thrown in prison, and when he finally gets back to France, he's all shunned by his former comrade, because he was not a fan of Napoleon Bonaparte's endless self-aggrandizement. His is an amazing story.


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


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[Assistant] We are going to stick with him for a whole year, all the way through August 1799, when Bonaparte decides that for the good of France, he must abandon his army and sail home to take control of the disintegrating situation back in Europe that we will discuss in detail next week.


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[Assistant] And oh, by the way, what I really mean is that we're going to stick with Bonaparte through August 1799 when he decides that for the good of his own damn self he must abandon his army, because by then their situation would not just be deteriorating, it would be utterly hopeless, and Bonaparte knew if he stuck around, that would be the end of him.


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[Assistant] So we left off in June 1798, with Bonaparte's massive fleet sailing from Malta to Alexandria, having somehow managed to slip by Admiral Nelson's little squadron without being detected.


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[Assistant] The French soldiers now knew that they were headed to Egypt, and were likely licking their chops at the possibilities that lay before them. They were nearly 40,000 strong, well supported by a large fleet, led by the best general in France, and sailing towards a land of ancient wealth that was likely to be easily conquered.


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[Assistant] Personally, I would have been stoked to have been assigned to this expedition, but oh, how everyone would come to regret it.


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[Assistant] As the fleet approached Alexandria, Bonaparte ensured that his men would approach the coming campaign not merely with the utmost military skill, but also with the utmost political skill.


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[Assistant] This was not just going to be a smash and grab job. Bonaparte wanted to establish a permanent French occupation.


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[Assistant] So he absolutely forbade any kind of looting or pillaging that might antagonize the natives and further ordered that every man was to go out of his way to show respect and deference to Islam.


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[Assistant] A major part of Bonaparte's political strategy was to ingratiate himself with the local imams, that is, the Muslim religious leaders. He couldn't have undisciplined soldiers out there ruining things by desecrating mosques or like spitting on the high priests.


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[Assistant] The other big component of Bonaparte's political strategy though was to paint the French expedition as an army of liberation. An army of liberation?


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[Assistant] How were a bunch of French Republicans going to sell themselves as liberators in Egypt?


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[Assistant] Now the word Mammalook just meant slave, and oddly enough, that's what they were. Slaves. But a very special kind of slave. Warrior slaves.


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[Assistant] Purchased as children and raised into an elite warrior caste, the Mamluks acted as standing armies or permanent bodyguards for rulers across the Muslim world.


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[Assistant] And in some cases, their power and prestige became so great that these warrior slaves were able to push aside the nominal rulers and wield power directly, as was the case in Egypt.


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[Assistant] The Mamluks wound up seizing Egypt way back in 1250, setting up what's called the Mamluk Sultanate that ruled an independent Egypt until 1517.


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[Assistant] At that point, they were conquered by the Ottoman Turks and the independent Sultanate was dissolved.


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[Assistant] But once inside the greater Ottoman Empire, the Mamluks in Egypt carved out a great deal of autonomy for themselves. And by the time Napoleon arrived, Egypt was once again basically a self-governing unit.


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[Assistant] ...ruled by two Mammalook leaders who shared power with each other.


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[Assistant] One guy named Murad Bey who ran the military, and his partner, Ibrahim Bey, who handled civilian administration.


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[Assistant] And just so you know, no, they are not brothers, they just means governor inside the Ottoman Empire.


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[Assistant] But the thing to keep in mind here is that the Mamluks are foreigners. They are purchased into service from places like the Caucasus or the Balkans, and they are not native Egyptians.


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[Assistant] So when the French landed in July 1798, Bonaparte circulated a proclamation to the native Egyptians that said the French were here to rid them of the tyrant Mamluks. And then, that's what he set out to do.


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[Assistant] So he rushed 5,000 men ashore and then ran them ahead that very first night right up under the walls of the city. So when the Alexandrians woke up the next morning, they found the French at the gates and their defensive arrangements not yet complete.


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[Assistant] The soldiers garrisoning Alexandria ditched out the back door, and the French entered the city.


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[Assistant] With the port captured, Monopart then landed the rest of his army without incident.


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[Assistant] But the real target was the Mamluk capital Cairo, located a couple hundred miles up the Nile into the Egyptian interior.


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[Assistant] So, without ever really even pausing to catch his breath, Boneapart broke his army up into two and sent them marching towards Cairo from two directions.


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[Assistant] The division led by Bonaparte hugged the coastline and then turned and followed the Nile due south along the west bank of the river.


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[Assistant] The other division plunged southeast out of Alexandria headed straight across the desert, and this was not the route you wanted to get sent on. Not only was it the hottest and driest part of the year, but the French column was harassed the entire way by Bedouin raiders. Pity the Frenchmen who strayed from the pack.


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[Assistant] The guys coming up the Nile were accompanied by a small flotilla of gunboats, but obviously the rest of the fleet couldn't just sail up the Nile, so while he marched into the interior,


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[Assistant] Bonaparte told the French Admiral to anchor at Aboukir Bay, about 20 miles northeast of Alexandria, and to stay put.


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[Assistant] But only to stay put if the fleet was absolutely free of any potential danger. If there was even a hint of trouble, they were to sail all the way to Corfu, an island off the west coast of Greece in the Ionian Sea, so like basically all the way back to Italy.


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[Assistant] The army would be able to take care of itself for a while. But it was imperative in the long run that the French fleet remain intact. The worst possible thing that could happen would be for the fleet to be destroyed by the British. And that, I believe, is what they call foreshadowing.


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[Assistant] The Mamluk military commander, Murad Bey, made his first little stand against the French coming up the Nile, outside the town of Shubrakit on July the 13th.


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[Assistant] And though the French outnumbered them 23,000 to 14,000, the Mamluks had a massive cavalry advantage. And not only that, heavy cavalry was the particular speciality of the Mamluks.


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[Assistant] But this was a new world, and it was a new world that Napoleon was helping to create right there on the spot.


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[Assistant] To counter the Mameloupe cavalry, Bonaparte formed his divisions into rectangular formations, somewhat imprecisely dubbed divisional squares.


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[Assistant] These rectangles were six men deep and hollow at the center, which is where all the baggage and supplies and senior officers went.


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[Assistant] Artillery was then positioned at each corner, and everyone was told to hold their ground and fire at the charging cavalry as soon as they came into range.


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[Assistant] As it turned out, the divisional square was virtually impregnable.


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[Assistant] And in terms of Napoleon's contributions to modern military tactics, the divisional square is right up there with the attack on the rear and the strategy of the central position.


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[Assistant] Once Murid Bey realized that his cavalry charges were getting all his men killed and were doing exactly zero damage to the French, he retreated further up the Nile.


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[Assistant] The French army coming up the Nile linked with the army coming out of the desert, and they all made the final push towards Cairo together.


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[Assistant] Now Old Cairo was located on the east side of the river. So Murid Bay massed 25,000 men on the west side of the river to prevent the French from crossing.


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[Assistant] Inside Cairo, Ibrahim Bey was waiting with reinforcements, but he could not get those reinforcements across the river in time to join the fight.


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[Assistant] On July the 21st, the two armies met outside the fortress city of Mbabe.


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[Assistant] But about nine miles off in the distance, the Pyramids of Giza were visible. And so after the battle was won, Bonaparte decided that the Battle of the Pyramids sounded way cooler than the Battle of Mbabe, or the Battle of Cairo, which is why we call it the Battle of the Pyramids.


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[Assistant] The battle itself was basically just a repeat of Shubert Kit on a larger scale.


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[Assistant] The French formed into five massive divisional squares and repelled every cavalry charge thrown against them.


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[Assistant] The Mamluk army lost a literally uncounted number of men.


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[Assistant] Napoleon would write home that the number was 20,000, which is, you know, insane, but thousands and thousands and thousands at least, and most of them elite cavalry.


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[Assistant] Murred Bay fled with the remnants of his army deep into the Upper Nile.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, his partner, Ibrahim Bey, abandoned Cairo and fled northeast.


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[Assistant] Bonaparte then set off in pursuit of Ibrahim Bey, caught up with him, and after a quick battle sent the remaining Mamluks running clear out of Egypt and up into Syria.


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[Assistant] And this effectively ended 500 years of Mamluk rule in Egypt.


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[Assistant] But little does he know that just a week and a half later, all of his fancy plans are going to get blown to smithereens.


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[Assistant] But he disagreed with Bonaparte's assessment that the army could live without the navy. And when he surveyed the scene, he decided that he could anchor his fleet in such a way that he would be able to repel any British attack.


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[Assistant] The critical point was that he thought that his line, which was arrayed northwest to southeast, was anchored to the northwestern shoals so tightly that the British could only approach from the east, which was not only at the strongest part of the French fleet, but against the prevailing winds. This, however, is not how it is going to go.


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[Assistant] On August the 1st, 1798, Admiral Nelson arrived in Alexandria with a fleet that was basically the same size as the French. He had 1374 gunships of the line, and a fourth-rate, which is a ship of the line with 50 guns.


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[Assistant] But of course, when he got to Alexandria, all he found was some light ships and a few transports. The main fleet was gone.


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[Assistant] But his ship scouted around, and one of them finally, finally, finally spotted the French fleet they had all been looking for for two and a half months.


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[Assistant] Nelson's fleet arrived at Abaquir Bay at about 6pm on August 1st.


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[Assistant] Now the French Admiral sighted them, but assumed it was too late for an attack, and that he would have the night to make preparations for a battle in the morning.


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[Assistant] But instead, Nelson just charged right in.


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[Assistant] Focusing all his attention on the northwest side of the French line. That supposedly impregnable northwest side of the line.


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[Assistant] The British were able to double and triple team the targeted French ships while their brethren arrayed down to the southeast struggled against the winds to join the fight. And then came the real thing.


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[Assistant] One of the British captains recognized that there was a navigable gap between the French line and the western shoals.


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[Assistant] And on his own initiative he sailed through, soon followed by three more ships.


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[Assistant] The French were now surprised, surrounded and getting blasted from all sides. The French Admiral was mortally wounded in the initial attack by a cannon blast.


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[Assistant] The French attempted valiantly to hold out, but their morale was crushed when a fire broke out on the deck of the Orient, the great flagship of the French fleet.


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[Assistant] It sunk to the bottom, and as treasure hunters know well, it took with it a huge load of Maltese gold that has never been recovered.


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[Assistant] Apparently, fighting stopped everywhere for about 10 minutes as a result of this massive explosion.


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[Assistant] But when the fighting resumed, it practically turned into a mere mop up operation for the British.


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[Assistant] With half the French fleet already destroyed or captured, the other half tried to make good their escape, but the British were right on top of them and trapped them inside the bay.


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[Assistant] It was a spectacular victory for Admiral Nelson and a crushing defeat for the French.


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[Assistant] So Bonaparte was on his way back to Cairo from his pursuit of Ibrahim Bey when the messengers arrived with news of the disastrous loss of the fleet.


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[Assistant] But though this must have been a knife to the gut, Bonaparte affected a cocky posture.


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[Assistant] Basically, eh, no big deal. We'll stay, do what we came here to do, and when we leave, I guess we'll just have to conquer our way home. I mean, Caesar did it. That was the, uh, Vinny Vidivici campaign.


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[Assistant] But in private, he had to have known how much the loss of the fleet wrecked everything.


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[Assistant] And on top of everything else, the British victory at the now so-called Battle of the Nile convinced the Ottoman Empire to join a new anti-French coalition, the Second Coalition, which we'll talk about next week. But Bonaparte continued to proceed as if it was all good.


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[Assistant] The first step would be a reorganization of the Egyptian political system, now that the French were in charge. Well, maybe not a complete reorganization.


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[Assistant] What Bonaparte wanted to do was graft a new top level administration on top of the existing system.


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[Assistant] So he appointed new Devans to run various districts in prominent city.


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[Assistant] These divans, which is a word meaning a member of the Ottoman Privy Council, were natives, but personally selected by Bonaparte to tie their loyalty not just to the French, but to him personally.


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[Assistant] He hoped eventually to create semi-representative ruling councils that would advise each devan, but the plans never got that far.


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[Assistant] And then as I mentioned, he considered the buy-in from local Muslim leaders to be critical. And so he bent over backwards to flatter and cultivate them as allies.


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[Assistant] He gave them all kinds of favors and gifts and special perks. His letters are filled with professions of respect and admiration for Islam.


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[Assistant] And when the Prophet Muhammad's birthday came around on August the 21st, Napoleon personally led a huge celebration in Cairo.


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[Assistant] Aside from his political operations, Bonaparte also cut loose with an array of modernization projects, spearheaded by all the science and engineering nerds attached to the expedition.


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[Assistant] So the French arrival in Egypt is occasionally pointed to as the beginning of quote-unquote modern Egypt because of all the new stuff the French introduced.


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[Assistant] And the French also brought in the first printing press and launched the first newspapers. Mostly as organs of pro-French propaganda, but still, this is a pretty big deal.


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[Assistant] The French science nerds then formed themselves into a society called the Egyptian Institute, with a headquarters in Cairo, where they would house, catalog, and analyze all the material they planned to go out and study.


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[Assistant] And these guys were interested in everything. Archaeology, anthropology, botany, zoology, geology, hydraulics, linguistics, you name it, they were into it.


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[Assistant] And eventually, their accumulated artifacts, data, observations, drawings, notes, were all compiled into a series of volumes that were called the Description of Egypt.


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[Assistant] Now the series did not start publication until 1809.


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[Assistant] And the Egyptian Institute, by the by, disbanded in 1801 after the final French surrender, but it was revived in 1836 as a little coalition of French, English, and German academics, and it still exists in Cairo today.


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[Assistant] It used to house something like 200,000 super rare manuscripts, many of them gathered by Napoleon's original crew.


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[Assistant] Until it was burned down by an errant Molotov cocktail during the Egyptian uprising in 2011. Protesters and soldiers apparently both rushed inside to save what they could, but they only managed to pull out 30-40,000 documents. Sigh.


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[Assistant] Oh, also, Isis just blew up the Temple of Bolsheim in Palmyra the other day. Double sigh.


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[Assistant] Now just to jump ahead a little bit while we're on the topic, by far the biggest discovery by the French expedition was the Rosetta Stone, which was discovered in April 1799 by an engineering officer assisting in the re-fortification of the port city of Rosetta.


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[Assistant] He basically unearthed this large slab of black rock covered in ancient scribbles and said, hm, this looks important, I think I'll go tell one of the science nerds. And yes, it turned out to be pretty important.


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[Assistant] The Rosetta Stone is a decree that was carved in 196 BC during the reign of the Hellenistic king Ptolemy V. It was written in three different languages.


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[Assistant] Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Pictograms that no one yet understood.


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[Assistant] Demonic Egyptian, a rarely used and little understood left to right reading phonetic script, and then Ancient Greek, which everyone understood.


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[Assistant] Members of the Egyptian Institute guessed, correctly as it turned out, that it was the same passage written in three languages, and that because they all knew Greek, that this might be the key to cracking the hieroglyphs. And it was.


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[Assistant] Though it would be another twenty years before they were finally deciphered, and most of the credit going to the Englishman Thomas Young and the Frenchman Jean-Francois Champollion, but now we're straying away from the story. They found the Rosetta Stone. Now we can read hieroglyphs. It was a big deal. Anyway.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Despite Napoleon's cultivation of the Muslim leaders, they were paying more attention to his deeds than his words.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And to them, all of these French modernization efforts looked mostly like cultural imperialism by atheist Europeans trying to wipe out traditional Islamic culture.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But even if they didn't think that, they couldn't help but notice the vast array of new taxes being imposed by the French, and I doubt they would have taken much solace in the knowledge that the French weren't doing anything different to Muslims in Egypt than they were doing to, say, Catholics in Belgium.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The local religious leaders were helped along in their brewing hatred of the French by contact with the British and Ottoman Turks.