Tom Holland

speaker

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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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 93 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 11.

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

And so before we carry the story on from the death of Marat or the turbulent events that will be following that, matched

Let's just have a quick look at Robespierre's backstory because we haven't given it yet in the course of our various series on the French Revolution. matched

Maybe see what clues we can find there. matched

Love a clue. matched

Brilliant. matched

Robespierre was born on the 6th of May 1758 in Arras, which is a town on France's borders with Holland. matched

It's very prosperous, it's very pious, and it's unbelievably boring. matched

And Roger Pierre's early life is marked by kind of repeated tragedies and petty humiliations. matched

And reading about them kind of remind me of 19th century novels that always feature these kind of things, Madame Bovary or something like that, where there are small scale tragedies, but obviously incredibly personally felt if you are the person experiencing matched

there? matched

Yes. matched

So in that context, I mean, let's look at his parents. matched

So his father was a lawyer who was very unstable and very downwardly mobile. matched

And he had got Robespierre's mother, who was the unmarried daughter of a brewer, so considerably lower class to a lawyer. matched

He got her pregnant and matched

It was a shotgun wedding and Maximilien was born four months after his parents' wedding. matched

His parents go on to have three more children, so a brother for Maximilien, Augustin, and two sisters, Charlotte and Henriette. matched

And then father is an increasingly absent presence. matched

His downward spiral continues. matched

their mother is a continuous presence and all her children clearly adored her. matched

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