Tom Holland
speaker
53,183 appearances
201 recordings
9 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 4d ago
Tom Holland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 92 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 11.
Appearances
to the great man back in 1790.
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Actually, when Robespierre wasn't really a great man, he kind of talent spotted him at a very early age.
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And Saint-Just had written to Robespierre, I do not know you, but you are a great man.
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You are not merely the deputy of a province, you are the deputy of the Republic and of mankind.
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And you can imagine,
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how this goes down with Robespierre.
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He thinks this is brilliant.
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Yeah, of course.
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So he and Saint-Just become very close.
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But I think Saint-Just is actually much more intellectually formidable than Robespierre.
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And he becomes the great ideologue.
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of the revolution at its most violent.
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And he will come to be given this nickname, the Archangel of Terror, which I think brilliantly conveys the sense of glamour that comes to attach itself to him.
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And Saint-Just is the model for almost the kind of the Byronic terrorist that haunts the pages of Dostoevsky or people like that.
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The sense that there is a poetry in terror that risks consuming the world.
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But I think also in the 19th and then into the 20th century, what gives him this glamour is the sense that he, more than perhaps anybody else involved in the revolution, is a precursor of communist revolution.
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Yes, completely.
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He's an avatar of what is to come.
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So Robespierre had these two very, very charismatic allies, and they obviously provide him with political support on the committee.
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Robespierre has his own sense of destiny and of self-assurance.
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Showing 501–520 of 53,183 · page 26 of 2660
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