507. The French Revolution: The Marseillaise, Song of War (Part 5)

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Speaker 2 So that was our producer, Theo Young Smith.

Speaker 2 They were his dulcet tones. He was singing La Marseillaise, the song par excellence of the the French Revolution, or at least the one French Revolutionary song that everybody now remembers.

Speaker 2 So Tom, that was adopted as the official anthem of the French Republic in 1795, but Napoleon didn't like it.

Speaker 3 He didn't. He kind of pushed it back to the margins.
And then

Speaker 3 after the Revolution, after Napoleon, Louis XVI's brothers, Louis XVIII and Charles X, they come back. They obviously hate it, so they ban it completely.

Speaker 3 But the Marseillaise is never forgotten, and it ends up as the national anthem of france

Speaker 2 theo sings it all the time as a proud frenchman would you i mean you are john bull incarnate but would you agree that it's the greatest the most thrilling national anthem ever written i mean the most stirring well i saw you'd written this and this is the sort of slack and lazy thing that people who know only two national anthems say so they know their own and they know one or two others if they're american they say it's the american one if they're British, a particular kind of Britain, they say it's the French national anthem.

Speaker 2 But actually, people who know a lot about national anthems know that the best national anthem by far, so our assistant producer Aaliyah will back me up on this, is the anthem of the German Democratic Republic, Aufer Standen aus Ruerinen, the anthem of East Germany, which was an absolute banger and unquestionably the greatest national anthem.

Speaker 2 ever written.

Speaker 3 Well, Dominic, for those of us who aren't familiar with it, would you like to sing it for us? And perhaps

Speaker 3 you're clearly afraid to pitch it up against Theo's Magnificent singing.

Speaker 2 No, I just don't want to look like an absolute fool.

Speaker 3 I don't think so. Because obviously, as an Englishman, my soul doesn't stir with patriotic fervor when I hear the marseillaise.

Speaker 3 Except in Casablanca, that brilliant scene where they all stand up and the Germans are sat around the piano. Yeah.
And then Humphrey Bogart agrees that they can strike up the Marseilles.

Speaker 3 And it's sung with such fervor that you love that.

Speaker 3 And you are identifying with this and it's very very stirring however i mean it is worth mentioning yeah for those who haven't looked closely at the lyrics that they are incredibly martial yeah the bloody standard yes i mean it's kind of blood everywhere yeah and it is summoning the uh the enfor de la patri the children of the fatherland to action in that first verse that theo sung so beautifully France is menaced by ferocious soldiers who are marching beneath this banner of tyranny, which has been steeped in blood.

Speaker 3 And they're coming to rip out the throats of patriotic Frenchmen's sons and wives. And so this great summons to arms, citizens, form your battalions.
Let's march.

Speaker 3 Let's march and irrigate the soil with a tainted blood. And the tainted blood is the blood of the tyrants and their armies.

Speaker 2 That tells you when it's written. So war has been declared, but it also tells you about the mood of the time.

Speaker 2 So we've talked a fair bit about the sort of paranoia, sense of conspiracy, sense of taint and impurity invading the virtuous body of the French Republic.

Speaker 2 Tell us a little bit more, Tom. I know you've done some digging into this.
How it comes to be written and who by?

Speaker 3 Well, it's written at a time when France is still a monarchy, just about. So it's written on the 25th of April, 1792, and that's five days after France has declared war on Austria.

Speaker 3 And officers in Strasbourg, who are kind of pretty much on the front line,

Speaker 3 there's a dinner, a public dinner. And it's hosted by the mayor of Strasbourg, who's a man called Philippe Dietrich.

Speaker 3 And in one sense, he is the absolute embodiment of the intellectual revolution. Yeah.
The Enlightenment-infused revolution. So he's a Protestant.
He is a distinguished scientist. He's a chemist.

Speaker 3 He's a geologist. He loves his Enlightenment ideals.

Speaker 2 He sounds such a bore.

Speaker 3 And he's a Freemason.

Speaker 2 Yeah, total bore. Go on.

Speaker 3 But what makes it intriguing is that he is simultaneously, he is the epitome of everything that the revolution is opposed to because he is an iron master and an industrialist.

Speaker 2 Now, I do like an iron master. I know you do.

Speaker 3 And his forges are being powered by all the timber and the wood that he's been harvesting and which the poor can no longer use to keep their... you know, their pots boiling.

Speaker 3 And so they're all starving. So

Speaker 3 he's a figure of sinister wealth.

Speaker 3 And he's actually a former aristocrat. So he was the Baron de Dietrich.
So he embraces all the contradictions and ambivalences of the revolution.

Speaker 3 And it's not surprising that he should be keen on reinvention, the kind of reinvention that France itself in this period is having to undergo, the process of going from a monarchy to a republic.

Speaker 3 And it's, of course,

Speaker 3 they are on the frontier of a country at war. And so at dinner, the toasts are offered, exactly the kind that you can imagine.

Speaker 3 So to the hat tree, to liberty, to the ruin of tyrants, to the fertilizing of the soil with their blood and the blood of tyrants, all of that. And Dietrich,

Speaker 3 he finds all the words of these toasts stirring.

Speaker 3 And he comments to the table, to the assembled officers, how tragic it is that all the marching songs that the French army have are rife with feudalism and superstition that they derive from the Ancien regime.

Speaker 3 And he wishes that there was a marching song that would be appropriate to the new French army, an army of patriots and citizens.

Speaker 3 And it so happens that at that dinner, there is a captain called Rouget de Lille.

Speaker 3 And he is almost a kind of mini Dietrich. He's a man of science.
He's an engineer. He's a Freemason, but he's also a part-time composer.

Speaker 3 So he spent quite a lot of time in Paris rustling up various forgettable songs that he's trying to kind of flog to theatres and so on.

Speaker 3 But that night, the muse descends on him and he's inspired by Dietrich's suggestion.

Speaker 3 He goes back to his quarters and he spends all night writing a song that he very catchily calls the song of the army of the Rhine.

Speaker 3 And I think that if that, you know, if it had stayed... that had stayed its title, maybe it wouldn't be as successful as it proves to be.
And the next morning, he goes to the Dietrich

Speaker 3 and he gives it to Dietrich himself who's very very taken with it and Dietrich's musical and his wife sits down at the piano plays the chords and Dietrich bellows it out and

Speaker 3 they all say this is amazing this is exactly what we need and so Madame Dietrich scores it for a military band and

Speaker 3 the band strikes up and It's kind of literally a revelation.

Speaker 3 Because to quote David Andres in his wonderful book on the terror he describes it as an almost millennial sense of drama and there is that sense I think in which it's a kind of secular diesere dies ire you know the great medieval account of souls being brought before the throne of god to be judged amid slaughter and chaos and bloodshed and the lamb, the sheep and the goats are separated out.

Speaker 3 And this essentially is what is happening in the drama of what will come to be called the Marseilles.

Speaker 2 Well, Well, it has that apocalyptic sense, right? Yes. That is so common in the political culture at this point, so 1792.

Speaker 2 I read with great relish that the Marseilles, the music is probably not exactly plagiarized, but it's derivative. So there are various antecedents.
There was an Italian composer called Viotti.

Speaker 2 There was an oratorio by somebody called Grizon.

Speaker 2 And Mozart, Mozart piano concerto number 25, apparently has disturbingly similar tongue.

Speaker 3 Well, remember that De Lisle has come to Strasbourg from Paris, where he's been stationed, and he's been hawking his stuff around all the concert halls and theatres.

Speaker 2 He's got a knock-off tune that he's trying to pass off to Dietrich.

Speaker 3 I guess in the way that minor composers, I gather, are often more prone to being influenced by things that they've heard than perhaps the very greatest composers.

Speaker 3 And he's clearly not a very great composer, but it wouldn't be surprising that he might kind of perhaps unconsciously plagiarize certain tunes that he's heard.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, that's how musical composition works.

Speaker 3 But the bottom line is, it starts to kind of go viral because soldiers from Strasbourg, whenever, you know, they, various reasons, they might be going back into the heartlands of France, and they take it with them.

Speaker 3 They start kind of singing it. And one of the soldiers who does this is going to Montpellier in the south of France.
And there, on the 17th of June, a doctor by the name of François Mireux.

Speaker 3 hears it being sung by a soldier who's come from Strasbourg. And he immediately recognizes it as something stirring, as something patriotic.
And he finds himself humming it and then singing it.

Speaker 3 He gets the lyrics. And five days later, he is going to a meeting at the Jacobin headquarters in Marseille.
So he himself is a Jacobin. He's a great enthusiast for the revolution.

Speaker 3 He goes to the Jacobin Club in Marseille and he gives a very fiery speech.

Speaker 3 And brilliantly, he ends it by bursting into song and singing this tremendous song that he's heard from the soldier from Strasbourg.

Speaker 3 And everyone at the club goes, Yeah, this is fantastic, and asks for the words to be written down and to be printed and to be distributed.

Speaker 2 Quick question: How does he know the song? Like, there are multiple, multiple verses.

Speaker 3 How has he learned it? He must have got the lyrics from the soldier, and the soldier must have got the lyrics because they've been printed off in Strasbourg.

Speaker 2 Oh, they've been printed, okay.

Speaker 3 So, I assume that that's how it's been propagated.

Speaker 1 Amira is

Speaker 3 a hot Jacobin.

Speaker 3 We talked about how this great summons went out from the capital to enthusiasts for the revolution out in the provinces to come and celebrate the Fête de la Fédération, which has begun to be celebrated annually on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on the 14th of July on the Champs de Mars in Paris.

Speaker 3 And so the people who come from the provinces to Paris to supplement...

Speaker 3 the guards that are available to the revolutionary authorities in Paris come to be called fédérés and miret has already enrolled enrolled himself as a Fédéré by this point.

Speaker 3 And he is part of a band of about 500 volunteers who've been recruited in the south and who are going to leave from Marseille and go to Paris to join the other Fédéré from across France.

Speaker 3 And Miraud is appointed to the general staff of this contingent of Federae who are going to march north. And they duly leave on the 2nd of July.
They are armed to the teeth.

Speaker 3 They are dragging artillery with them, heading off to Paris. And as they march, they sing this song.
And

Speaker 3 the name that had been given to the song by De Lille, the song of the Army of the Rhine, is obviously not suitable to a contingent of men coming from the south of France.

Speaker 3 So they change it to the even more catchily named the war song of the armies on the borders. And it's great.
And they march through from Marseille up towards Paris.

Speaker 3 And everywhere they go, people absolutely love the song. And by the time they come to Paris, I think that news of the song has preceded them.

Speaker 3 And so they march into the city and the sound of their singing is electrifying for a city that is already on edge, excited, nervous, in a kind of apocalyptic mood, fearing the worst, hoping for the best.

Speaker 3 And it just strikes this incredible chord.

Speaker 3 And it's a reminder of the fact that at this point, with France poised between monarchy and a republic, there is a need for anthems, for new anthems that can channel identity in a way that previous anthems hadn't.

Speaker 3 So if you think of the British national anthem, it's God save the king. It's focused on the monarchy.
But if you're going to get rid of a monarchy, you need new songs, new tunes.

Speaker 2 But you know what's interesting about it, though, it's not entirely uncontested because in the next few months, there are lots of people who don't like the Marseillaise and who you actually use it as a stick to beat other people with.

Speaker 2 So I read in Peter McPhee's Great History of the French Revolution that as the tension, the feud between the Girondins and the Jacobin became more intense, the Girondin actually had a parody of the Marseille's that they used as a kind of, they distributed that later that year as a Christmas carol.

Speaker 2 by a guy called Antoine-Joseph Gorsas. And it began, forward, children of anarchy, the shameful day is upon us.
The people, blinded by their rage, raise the bloody knife.

Speaker 2 So it actually turns all that stuff about blood on its head and makes it a song about anarchy and basically tarring the Jacobin as these sort of blood-crazed fiends.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think that an anxiety about the sanguinary quality of the lyrics has never entirely gone away.

Speaker 3 There are still occasional proposals in France to this day that the lyrics perhaps should be rewritten to be

Speaker 3 slightly less carnivorous. But conversely, it's the fact that it is so aggressive.

Speaker 3 that means that people who are caught up in the excitement of this new stage of the revolution, the second revolution, as you called it in previous episodes. That's exactly what you want.

Speaker 3 You want something that is no holds barred. And this song that comes to be called the Marseilles, after these people from Marseille, the Marseille,

Speaker 3 clearly, I mean, it's absolutely what people on the more radical fringes of the revolution want.

Speaker 3 And I think that

Speaker 3 it's not just the lyrics. It's not just the tune.
It's also the fact of who is singing it. So they're not professional soldiers.

Speaker 3 They're not people who you would expect under normal circumstances to be singing a marching song. These are citizens who are answering the summons of their country in its hour of need.

Speaker 3 And of course, they are also implicitly Republican. You know, there is no mention of kings, of crowns, of monarchy in the lyrics whatsoever.

Speaker 3 And on the 14th of July, you know, the date of the Féde de la Fédération, this great celebration of the fall of the Bastille and the coming of the revolution, they have a position of honor on the Champs de Mars.

Speaker 3 And the name that is given to this great open space is redolent with a sense of antiquity. The Champs de Mars in Latin is Campus Martius.

Speaker 3 And the Campus Martius in ancient Rome is where citizens would assemble to go to war as citizens. to defend their country in its hour of need.

Speaker 3 And the fact that the Marseille are singing this song of

Speaker 3 kind of violent enthusiasm for civic values, it's giving to what might seem terrifyingly novel a kind of antique sheem because it's giving it a Roman quality.

Speaker 3 So Simon Sharma writing about the Marseilles, he says of it that it's a great swelling anthem of patriotic communion.

Speaker 3 Nothing like the Marseillais had ever been written that comes so near to expressing the comradeship of citizens in arms arms, and nothing ever will.

Speaker 3 But I think that for classically informed enthusiasts of the revolution, actually there is a sense that perhaps when they're listening to it, they're listening to the kind of song that might have inspired the Romans or the Spartans to go to battle in shared citizenship.

Speaker 2 So I wondered if the Romans would make an appearance. They have.

Speaker 2 Let's come back after the break to find out more about Rome in the French Revolution.

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Speaker 2 Welcome back to The Rest is History. We are talking about the Marseillaise, which Tom obviously thinks is an absolute banger of an anthem.
I was a bit more skeptical, wasn't I, Tom? You were.

Speaker 2 But you've now turned to a very exciting dimension of this story, which is the Romans.

Speaker 2 So let's dig into this idea a little bit, because I think it's been such an interesting theme running through the first series we did on the French Revolution and this series that we're doing at the moment, which is about the interesting kind of paradox that on the one hand, the revolutionaries think that they're beginning the world again.

Speaker 2 And that's what makes it different from the American War of Independence or from the English Civil War or whatever. That there's a real sense that you can kind of reboot history and reboot France.

Speaker 2 And yet at the same time, they're also very consciously role-playing as ancient Romans, as Roman Republicans. You know, the tennis court oath modeled on the oath of the Horati.

Speaker 2 I know you're going to talk about David's paintings. So this is an idea that has run through 18th century culture generally, hasn't it? The Enlightenment culture, a fascination with Rome.

Speaker 2 I mean, Gibbon's decline and fall of the Roman Empire, a great example of this. But it's not.
all Rome, right?

Speaker 2 So there are particular aspects of Roman culture and particular time periods that fascinate them.

Speaker 3 It's not Christian Rome.

Speaker 3 And I think a huge part of the appeal of Rome is that the revolutionaries and indeed people in the Enlightenment identify with is the sense that this offers a glimpse of a pre-Christian order.

Speaker 3 Well, hence Gibbon, right? So Gibbon is casting the Christian period as a dark age, that modernity becomes modern by going back to antiquity, to the pre-Christian world. So that's very important.

Speaker 3 And particularly for the revolution as it becomes more and more anti-clerical and indeed anti-Christian. But it's also not the Rome of the Caesars.

Speaker 3 It's the Rome of the Republic and specifically the early Republic that is founded in the wake of the expulsion of the kings.

Speaker 3 And the French revolutionaries kind of admiring that period of Roman history are obviously following in the footsteps of the American revolutionaries who had cast their expulsion of a king as something redolent of, you know, the spirit of Brutus and Horatius.

Speaker 3 And it's telling, I think, that even in the very earliest days of the revolution, long before anyone is really considering getting rid of the monarchy, you do have radicals.

Speaker 3 Des Moulin would be a classic example. He's doing this all the time, who are comparing themselves to Brutus.
And

Speaker 3 there are two Brutuses in the history of the Republic. There is the Brutus who leads the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the Republic.

Speaker 3 But there is also, of course, the Brutus, who is descended from the first Brutus, who murders Julius Caesar. And Julius Caesar is a product of the Republic, who aspires to overthrow the Republic.

Speaker 2 The Napoleon.

Speaker 3 So Napoleon, yes, but also all these shadowy figures that true revolutionaries are anxious about hiding behind the, you know, the mask of patriotism.

Speaker 3 So, you know, if you're playing Marat or Robespierre or whoever, denouncing frauds, counter-revolutionaries, you can do so.

Speaker 3 as a Brutus, as a patriot committed to the defense of your country against a tyrant.

Speaker 2 What was the thing we talked about the other day? Cicero. It was Cicero who exposed the Catiline conspiracy.
Is that right? That's the big thing that Cicero.

Speaker 2 And they're obsessed with Cicero, aren't they? Haven't they all studied Cicero's speeches and things at school, Des Milan? And actually, you mentioned Robespierre. So I found this quote.

Speaker 2 There's a woman called Rosalie Julien, who's a Jacomin sympathiser, and her diaries and letters are always cited by all historians of the revolution.

Speaker 2 She wrote of Robespierre, you'd enjoy this, Tom, that he is, quote, a man who was devoted to the public with the generosity of the greatest men of antiquity. This Robespierre is a real Roman.

Speaker 3 I mean, there could be no higher praise. You've talked of Cicero and Timothy Tackett in his great book on the coming of the terror.

Speaker 3 I mean, he quotes this amazing statistic that in speeches and newspapers during the revolution, Cicero would be cited 10 times more frequently than the contemporary philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Speaker 3 So you think of all the books and articles and essays that have been written about the influence of Rousseau on the revolution, but Cicero is being quoted 10 times more.

Speaker 2 Yeah, i love that its influence is obviously in one sense elite well yeah i was about to ask that most people don't go to school for a long period of time and they don't study classics to most people in france it's just a mad babble i think it's kind of in the way that people might quote

Speaker 3 darwin or freud or marx today without having read any of them you have a vague sense we would never do that tom it has been known that people might drop these names without having read them right it's that kind of thing but I think it's also, it becomes kind of the mood, music, it becomes actually the colouring, literally the colouring, because this sense of what it is to be a Roman is fostered above all, I think, by someone that you've already mentioned, the great artist Jacques-Louis David, who is a painter who's obsessed by Rome.

Speaker 3 And his paintings are austere

Speaker 3 and self-consciously impregnated with a sense of the nobility of the early age of the Roman Republic.

Speaker 3 And again and again, his canvases are illustrating men who are prepared to devote their lives to their country, maybe even to sacrifice their own children in its cause, who put patriotism above all else.

Speaker 3 And David is painting these even before the revolution breaks out.

Speaker 3 So when the revolution happens and people look at his paintings, it's as though David has already been illustrating for the revolutionaries what they're doing before before they had even begun to do it.

Speaker 2 We've talked a little bit in this series, not enough for our American listeners. We've talked about the influence of the American experiment.
So how much is this?

Speaker 2 Because in America, people are already using that Roman model.

Speaker 2 Because really, if you've separated from Britain and you're going to be a Protestant republic on the shores of the Atlantic, doing something that's never been done before, you've only got one historical analogy to grope for, which is the kind of classical world.

Speaker 2 So they're doing it in America. Are people in France, do you think,

Speaker 2 actively copying that? Are they informed by that?

Speaker 3 There clearly are people in France who are very, very influenced by what is happening in America. Lafayette, your friend, would be an obvious example.

Speaker 2 Big admirer of Lafayette. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Jefferson is ambassador in that period. Franklin had been a constant presence in Paris in the years before.
the revolution.

Speaker 3 And there are certainly overt revolutionaries who are influenced by the example of the Americans. But so too are, you know, even people, say, in the train of Marie Antoinette.

Speaker 3 So the Princesse de L'Ond Ball, who we'll be coming to in our next episode, she was a great admirer of Franklin.

Speaker 3 And she saw no contradiction between serving Marie Antoinette and being very close to her and admiring the founding fathers of America and the example of the American Republic.

Speaker 3 I think in David's case, there are huge shenanigans in his youth about whether he's going to get a scholarship to go to Rome and kind of feeling that he should have had it, but he's always being kind of frustrated in the chance to go.

Speaker 3 And so when he finally arrives there, it's the chance to roam the eternal city is all the more precious to him. I don't think that America stands between David and his imaginings of early Rome.

Speaker 3 And I think that the look that you get in his paintings, which is kind of austere and lacking in any sense of kind of flummery and self-consciously antiquarian, I think this is his own.

Speaker 3 And under the revolution, he brings this style to public display because people recognize that he's brilliant at, you know, the visuals.

Speaker 3 And, you know, as with so much else, in a revolutionary situation, people need a new look.

Speaker 2 They need

Speaker 3 expressions of the revolution's identity that aren't drawing on what is being repudiated and rejected.

Speaker 3 And so he's the person who, for instance, is coordinating these great festivals that are being held on the Champs de Mars on Bastille Day.

Speaker 3 And of course, David entirely recognises the Roman connotations of this, the Roman echoes of it.

Speaker 3 He's organizing the, when Voltaire's remains are brought to the Pontillon, you know, and the Pantheon is a great temple in Rome built by Hadrian. Oh, is it not?

Speaker 3 Well, it's kind of originally built by Grippa and then rebuilt by Hadrian. Yeah.
But it's a very kind of Roman-looking building. So again, it's a kind of classical ceremony.

Speaker 3 And the Pantheon had originally been intended to be a church. So it's this, again, this idea of replacing Christianity with something that is Roman and revolutionary simultaneously.

Speaker 3 And Lynn Hunt, who's written a lot about this, is brilliant on all this. I mean, she says there is no government without rituals and without symbols.

Speaker 3 You need rituals, you need symbols, and therefore you need people who are able to create and invent it.

Speaker 2 Sorry, you said replacing Christianity, but they're not overtly thinking about replacing Christianity at this point, surely.

Speaker 2 There is an anti-clerical tinge to it, but they're not thinking, you know, we are going to wipe away every last taint of...

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, as we'll see when we do the next episode, hostility towards those priests who have refused to swear the oath of allegiance to the revolution.

Speaker 3 Well, it's on the verge of becoming literally murderous. Yes.

Speaker 3 And you talked yesterday about how legislation is brought in in the wake of the Tuileries, forbidding even those priests who have sworn the oath to wear. clerical garb in public.

Speaker 3 And so it's part of the climate of ideas, I think, that hostility to the priesthood inevitably spills into hostility towards Christianity itself.

Speaker 3 And the association of Christianity with reaction and superstition, throne and altar, it will come to be called, is becoming a very, very powerful motivating factor.

Speaker 3 And as the monarchy starts to totter,

Speaker 3 so also does the church. It was initially the church that had sanctioned the anointing of kings, that had enshrined the monarchy as a kind of God-given gift from the Almighty.

Speaker 3 And so to contemplate destroying the monarchy is also to question the influence that the church has had and Christianity has had on centuries and centuries of French history.

Speaker 3 And so it becomes part of what is to be rejected. And I think this is what is going on at this period.

Speaker 3 And so by rejecting the Auxilian regime, rejecting Christianity, ancient Rome is the obvious place that you turn to.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So there are lots of people who still can't read.

Speaker 2 So David's paintings, or reproductions of them, I guess, engravings and so on, must be very important in diffusing this kind of classical aesthetic.

Speaker 2 But I read in your notes that there are also kind of souvenirs and things that people can buy. So brooches and stuff.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 So you can buy brooches, which are stamped with the head of Brutus, and you can get pins in the form of the fasches.

Speaker 3 And the fasjays are the rods that the lictors, who are the bodyguards of elected magistrates in the Roman Republic, would carry in front and before the magistrate as he walked through the forum or whatever.

Speaker 2 So people are literally dressing up as fascists.

Speaker 3 Right. So for us, fast jeans have this kind of sinister connotation because they give the name to fascism.

Speaker 3 But you can see in the seats of government in Washington, D.C., the fastes are there.

Speaker 3 They're an inheritance from the American Revolution and the establishment of a Roman-type republic there in exactly the way that the fastes are being used in the streets of revolutionary Paris.

Speaker 3 And maybe that is an example of kind of an American influence, but again, I I suspect not.

Speaker 3 I think it's part of the same impulse that both American and French revolutionaries are reaching for this classical heritage, because it's just kind of part of the air of what educated revolutionaries are breathing.

Speaker 2 Now, let's talk now about how people look, because obviously in some of these David paintings, he actually has people dressed. in Roman style.

Speaker 2 So they looks like they might be wearing togas or whatever. And obviously people aren't walking the streets of Paris.

Speaker 2 I mean, they'd look ludicrous, even by French revolutionary standards, but they are wearing Roman style hats, aren't they?

Speaker 3 They are. Just before we come to the Roman style hats, I think Davi does actually struggle bringing the visuals of ancient Rome to the heroic moments of the revolution.

Speaker 3 So you mentioned this great painting that he's attempting to do of the oath in the tennis court, the moment when the third estate emancipates itself from feudalism and superstition, but he never finishes it.

Speaker 3 And I think he's kind of struggling struggling to show the third estate as Roman. He can't quite decide how to do it.

Speaker 2 Is that not also the problem that while he's painting it, people who were previously good people have since been either cancelled or executed?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So it's like photographs in the Russian Revolution where people next to Stalin suddenly banish. So that is a problem.

Speaker 3 But one aspect of classical dress, which you alluded to, which is a tremendous success, becomes the kind of the emblematic symbol, the republic, is the Bonnet Rouge, the red hat, the red bonnet, the red cap.

Speaker 3 And it derives from a soft cap called by the Romans the Pileus, which was given to slaves when they were set free.

Speaker 3 And it was used by the Brutus who assassinated Caesar. He stamped it on his coins after Caesar's assassination.

Speaker 3 to illustrate the fact that Rome, which had been enslaved by Caesar, had now been set free by the Tyrannicides.

Speaker 3 And it's conflated with a cap that had been worn by a people called the Phrygians who lived in what is now Turkey.

Speaker 3 So it's also known as the Phrygian cap. And it's adopted by the revolutionaries pretty much from the start.

Speaker 3 I mean, certainly by 1790, they are saying this is, you know, this is the perfect symbol of liberty.

Speaker 3 So as early as August 1790, proposals are being made in revolutionary and patriotic journals that, say, you know, cocks on church steeples should be pulled down down and replaced with the bonnet rouge that would look absolutely ridiculous that would look ludicrous and in the cordelier club which is the most radical of all the jacobin clubs the rule is that no one can address the assembled delegates without putting on a bonnet rouge and so in case you forget one yeah on the table there are lots of bonnet rouge so if you have to step up you can pick one up and put it on your head i think that's absolutely ridiculous but anyway well yes and so there are people who think it's ridiculous and one of them actually is rospierre because in spring 1792 a motion is brought before the jacobin club that all jacobins should wear the bonnet rouge all the time right and robespierre who you know who loves a wig he loves a powdered wig yeah he doesn't want to go around with a bonnet rouge on his perfectly coffee wig and so he says it's ridiculous a cockade is fine we don't need to go the full revolutionary bonnet would they have to wear them in bed i don't know i mean it's kind of a can of worms isn't it a can of worms it retains its reputation as the emblem

Speaker 3 but I suppose, unlike the cockade, which is kind of like a rosette, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like a political rosette.

Speaker 3 A cockade is kind of more obvious as a marker of political loyalty. But the Bonnet Rouge, if you were wearing the Bonnet Rouge, you were really kind of saying, this is what I am.

Speaker 3 This is what I'm about. And so, in a way, the emblematic moment of the second revolution is when the people break into the Tuilerie and they corner Louis.

Speaker 3 and you know they make him drink a toast to the republic but before he does that they make him wear the Bonnet Rouge, the red hat.

Speaker 2 It's interesting, isn't it, how hats have this kind of political meaning? You would think that there aren't equivalents today, but of course there are.

Speaker 2 It was very controversial because people would often use pictures of, when they wanted to be disobliging about Jeremy Corbyn, they would have pictures of him wearing a kind of, you know, I don't know, a Maoist hat or whatever it is he used to wear or a kind of Russian star hat.

Speaker 2 And hats do. I mean, think about top hats or bowler hats.
Top hats do actually have an oddly charged kind of political significance. And this is the greatest example of that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and it's recognized by contemporaries. So a contemporary observer is quoted by Aileen Ribeiro in her book on fashion in the French Revolution.
So this is a contemporary writing in 1792.

Speaker 3 The sight of a woollen Bonnet Rouge fills the sans coulotte with joy and let no one mock him for it. His enthusiasm is both praiseworthy and well-founded.

Speaker 3 He has been told that in Greece and Rome, this woollen cap was the symbol of freedom and the rallying sign for all those who hated despotism.

Speaker 3 With this in mind, his first desire is to become the owner of a Bonnet Rouge. And

Speaker 3 what is fascinating, I think, about that passage is the reference to sans quelotte, because it suggests how a symbol that is drawn from classical antiquity, which presupposes a certain degree of education.

Speaker 3 To be classically educated is essentially to be educated.

Speaker 3 is being paired with a style of dress that is emblematic of the slums, of those who don't have the kind of classical education that the elites are expected to have.

Speaker 3 And of course, we talked about the word san collotte, about how to be san collotte, the collotte of the knee breeches that have become associated with the rich and particularly with the aristocrats.

Speaker 3 This is to look working class. So rather than collotte, you wear loose baggy trousers, the pantalon, you wear wooden clogs and you wear a short jacket, which in French is le camagnole.

Speaker 3 And this, I learn from Eileen Ribeiro, derived from camagniola near Turin, which was home of Italians who had then settled in Marseille. So in other words, it's a particularly Marseille's look.

Speaker 3 Like the song. And again, it suggests the way in which the Marseille

Speaker 5 are

Speaker 3 kind of perfect standard-bearers for this new revolutionary spirit.

Speaker 2 Yeah, a rough, tough port city where people, I guess, are seen as maybe as incarnating a different kind of France, but also a purer, more authentic France, perhaps. Yes.

Speaker 2 So the sansculotte, we talked about them a little bit last time. They are the kind of urban working class radicals, aren't they, of Paris? They're not the very poorest.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so they're not just the working class. They're artisans, but they're also revolutionary artisans.
Yeah. So they have a class-based identity, but they also have an ideological identity.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 And I think that what is fascinating about this period is that just as you are getting the working masses, the quilote, affecting a classical look that derives from the education of the elite,

Speaker 3 so also are you starting to get elites who are dressing like the masses. And this is such a suggestive kind of cross-fertilization.

Speaker 2 And the key aspect of this is effectively trousers. Yeah.

Speaker 2 If you're trying to pass yourself off as more proletarian than you are, then you could change your name or something or drop the d or whatever. But the best thing to do is put on a pair of trousers.

Speaker 2 That's the street look.

Speaker 3 yeah so the girondin ministry so that's brisson and his allies who were appointed as louis' ministers in march 1792 you know they they don't last long louis sacks them in a disastrous move but while they're in office they are known as the sansculotte ministry yeah so these very very educated men are

Speaker 3 being given the name of the sansculotte and the most amazing example of this kind of class-based cross-dressing is the former duke of orléans the cousin of louis xi himself, the man who had sponsored the kind of the early radicalism in the Palais Royale in the center of Paris, one of the richest, best-bred men in the whole kingdom, royal to his, you know, right the way in his blood.

Speaker 3 And he has taken on the name Philippe égalité, you know, Philippe equality.

Speaker 2 He, I have to say, I'm just going to say it right now. He's one of the worst men in history.
He's a terrible man.

Speaker 3 Well, he behaves very badly to his cousin.

Speaker 3 But in the summer of 1792, so while the massacre at the Tuileries kicking off, while the monarchy is in the process of collapse, Philippe Egalité, the former CI devant Duke of Orléans, is spotted by Madame Tassaur, the person who will set up the waxworks in London in due course.

Speaker 3 And she has a hilarious description of him.

Speaker 3 She says, he was wearing a short jacket, pantaloons, and a round hat, with a handkerchief worn sailor fashion, loose around the neck, with the ends long and hanging down, the shirt collar seen above, the hair cut short without powder.

Speaker 3 So, no Rospierre powder for Philippe Egalite, and shoes tied with strings. So, essentially, it's kind of quite 60s.

Speaker 3 It's becoming cool for the upper classes and the elites to dress in a kind of a demotic manner.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's the Theo of 1792, isn't he?

Speaker 3 Exactly. Except that, of course, Theo doesn't dress like a Roman.
This is the thing.

Speaker 3 It's simultaneously plebeian, working class, revolutionary, and Roman, because that detail, the hair cuts short without powder.

Speaker 3 Madame de Sord's description, she specifies that this is a particular style, and it's called the Titus style.

Speaker 3 And the name derives from the role of Titus in a play by Voltaire that he'd written several decades before. And this had been restaged in May 1791.

Speaker 3 It's a great celebration of kind of Republican liberty and so on, and had been played by France's greatest actor. And the name of this play is Brutus.

Speaker 3 So this style of hair is simultaneously, it's what you wear in the slums, in the working class areas of Paris, but it's also what you wear if you want to affect a Roman look.

Speaker 3 And so this, I think, is why the Marseillaise has the impact that it does, because it comes at exactly this moment when the Roman and the working class are fusing in the broad culture of revolutionary Paris.

Speaker 3 And they are arriving in their carmagnule, you know, these jackets that are kind of emblematic of the working classes.

Speaker 3 When they come to Paris, the first areas that they go through are those that are very self-consciously working class,

Speaker 3 particularly the area around where the Bastille had stood. But they're singing a song that proclaims civic and martial virtue in a way that Romans might have done.

Speaker 3 And of course, as we said, they're then assembling on the Champs de Mars, the Campus Martius.

Speaker 3 And you said how the Girondin, due course, will be intimidated by it and put off by it and parody it even at the time of course there are plenty of people in paris who were terrified by this display say royalists in particular so there's an officer in the royal guards who sees them the marseille coming into paris singing this song and he writes that they are 500 fanatics three quarters of them drunk followed by the dregs of the people But of course, Dominic, there writes a man who is on the wrong side of history.

Speaker 2 So the wrong side of history, Tom. So there you've got an unnamed officer in the Royal Guards, a man of sense and discretion.
He and I on the wrong side of history.

Speaker 2 Tom, you're on the right side of history, aren't you? Do Gooda with Theo, our producer. You're dressed in your street garb.
Oh, you know, I love her Roman, Dominic.

Speaker 2 I look at you now in your street garb with your Roman haircut, shocking scenes. So everybody knows where we stand.

Speaker 2 So our plan was originally to get to the execution of the king, and we've obviously completely failed to do that because there was just too much drama.

Speaker 2 So what we're going to do is we're going to bring down the curtain on season two of the French Revolution.

Speaker 2 But the good news is that we will be back in the spring with season three and that will be more exciting than ever.

Speaker 2 We will get into the September massacres, to the fall of the monarchy, to the rapidly changing fortunes on the battlefield. and most excitingly to the trial and execution of Louis XVI.

Speaker 2 But next week we will be changing focus completely because we will be in America in 1968 for the fall of Lyndon Johnson, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and in the long run, the great comeback of Richard Nixon.

Speaker 2 And the good news for members of the Rest is History Club: you will get access to the entire America in 1968 series, all six episodes on Monday.

Speaker 2 And of course, if you want to join the Restus History Club and sign up, you just have to go to the restishistory.com. So, on that bombshell, merci tom,

Speaker 2 that was magnificent and abianto, everybody. Au voir!

Speaker 3 Abianto.