707. The Terror: An Assassination in Paris (Part 1)
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What events set the stage for the French Revolution and the rise of the Terror?
How long, Frenchman, will you put up with disorder and divisions? O Frenchman, a little longer, and all that will remain of you is the memory of your existence. Already the provinces are marching on Paris. Already half of our empire burns with the fire of discord and civil war. There is still a way to extinguish it. But that way must be swift. Already, the vilest of villains, Mara, whose name alone is the image of all crimes, is falling under the avenging blade, shaking the mountain and making Donton and Rospierre pale, those other brigands seated on this bloody throne. Your peace depends on the execution of the law. I am not undermining it by killing a Mara. Condemned by the universe, he is outside the law.
What court will judge me? Let my last breath be useful to my fellow citizens. Let my head, held aloft in Paris, be a rallying point for all the friends of the law. Let the universe declare that I deserved well of humanity. Frenchman, I have shown you the way. You know your enemies. Rise up. Strike. So a very punchy manifesto there and had a very catchy title, uh, addressed to the French Friends of Law and Peace. And it was found on a young woman who was arrested in Paris on the 13th of July, 1793. And the name of this young woman, Charlotte Corday, 24 years old, strikingly good looking. Everyone commented on this all the time. And of course, her her looks and her youth made her arrest all the more of a sensation because she was charged with the assassination of perhaps the single most controversial man in France.
A radical journalist, a revolutionary firebrand, the supreme champion of terror. Jean Paul Marat And it is one of the most famous episodes in French history, The Murder of Marat, the pretty young woman who uh comes from the provinces, um, talks her way into Marat's apartment, finds him soaking his pustule-ridden body in a bath, pulls out a knife, plunges it deep into his chest. Um, a scene famously painted By Jacques-Louis David, one of the most famous illustrations of the French Revolution ever painted. But Dominic, it's not just an incredibly exciting story in and of itself, is it? It is also the trigger for perhaps the most celebrated, the most notorious passage of the entire revolution, the passage that is known as the terror.
Era.
Yeah, exactly right. I'd say it's one of the most thrilling moments in all world history. Uh I remember doing it at school, just absolutely loving it. The moment in seventeen ninety three, seventeen ninety four, when you just say France descends into the reign of terror. So Loads of people will be familiar with the images of this. The triumph of Madame Guillotine. You've seen it in films, you've seen it in video games and books, whatever. The carts rattling through the streets loaded with prisoners. The old women, the trickators knitting at the foot of the guillotine. They're gonna mob howling for blood as the blade begins to fall. It's something that English writers in particular have always adored. They're turning the melodrama right up to the maximum.
So Dickens in a Tale of Two Cities or Hilary Mantel in a place of greater safety. But in this series We will be looking behind those images to explore exactly what happened and why. And we have an amazing cast of characters. So we'll be talking about the revolutionaries, people like Danton and Robespierre. We've got an amazing episode to come on the execution of Marie Antoinette. And then we have today's protagonist, the man who kicks off the whole story. And he really is an extraordinarily grotesque and And fascinating character with his lovely blisters and his squint and his vehement rhetoric. And that is Jean-Paul Marat. So Marat is actually born in what's now Switzerland in 1743 in a small town. His father was a Sardinian friar who converted to Calvinism.
So as a as a little boy, Mara is something he has in common with a lot of revolutionary figures. He's very ambitious. He said later, At five I wanted to be a schoolmaster, at fifteen a professor, at eighteen an author. And at twenty, a creative genius.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What events set the stage for the French Revolution and the rise of the Terror?
0:11–10:43
2
Who was Jean‑Paul Marat and why did his journalism become so influential?
10:43–20:27
3
How did the economic crisis, war, and the Vendée rebellion fuel revolutionary radicalism?
20:27–30:58
4
What new revolutionary institutions (deputies on mission, tribunals, Committee of Public Safety) were created to enforce the Terror?
30:58–40:55
5
Why did the Girondins and the Montagnards clash, and how did that conflict reshape the Convention?
40:55–51:40
6
How did Charlotte Corday plan and carry out the assassination of Marat?
51:40–1:01:40
7
What were the immediate consequences of Marat’s murder for the revolutionary government and public opinion?
1:01:40–1:11:42
8
Which figures will drive the next phase of the Terror, and what questions remain for the upcoming episode?
1:11:42–1:23:52
Speakers
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