Tom Holland

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53,930 appearances 202 recordings 9 series first heard Sep 2024 last heard yesterday

Tom Holland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Rest Is History · 708. The Terror: The Reign of Robespierre (Part 2) · 23 Sep 2026 podcast

She's

not entirely wrong, to be fair. matched

Well, I mean, I suppose we did chop off the head of a king, but I think she's talking about the Glorious Revolution and there was a lack of guillotining in that. matched

And so you said that in this series, we're going to be looking at the reality behind the myth. matched

And for British listeners, the myth is this notion of the revolution being all about terror. matched

Yeah. matched

And so listeners may be thinking, this idea of terror, is this just a kind of Francophobic, British, something that they've imagined, something perhaps made up by Carlyle, one of his rhetorical flourishes, one of his melodramatic flourishes? matched

But actually, it's not at all, because the idea of terror being the order of the day, it originates with the revolutionaries themselves, matched

So that phrase that Carlisle quotes, let terror be the order of the day, matched

He is quoting a slogan that was publicly pronounced by a man called Bertrand Barère, who was one of the 12 men who sat on the Committee of Public Safety, which we talked about yesterday, this kind of proto-dictatorial institution that had been set up on the 6th of April, 1793. matched

And it was never enshrined as a kind of official policy. matched

It was never an official motion of the National Convention, which in effect was the government of revolutionary France, but it didn't need to be adopted as an official policy. matched

And Barré proclaimed it on the 5th of September, 1793, so some two months after the murder of Marat, which we were talking about in the previous episode. matched

And Barré was offering this policy of terror matched

as a way of dealing with all the multiple interlocking crises that we heard about in that first episode. matched

So war, counter-revolution, civil war, economic collapse, the collapse of the revolutionaries themselves into bloodthirsty faction fighting. matched

And Barre's matched

goal in saying, let terror be the order of the day, was to institutionalize repression against the perceived enemies of the revolution and thereby to save it. matched

What this meant in practice was to reframe what had hitherto been ad hoc violence, violence that emerged from the streets matched

for example. matched

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