477. The French Revolution: The Revolution Begins (Part 3)

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Human rights did not begin with the French Revolution, and I do not think anyone who knows their religious history or their Greek history would suggest they did. We had 1689, a silent, quiet revolution where Parliament exerted its will over the King. It was not the sort of revolution that France's was. It was done quietly, without the bloodshed. Liberty, egality, fraternity, they forgot obligations and duties, I think.

controversial, isn't it? Incredibly divisive. Divided opinion back in 1989 still divides opinion today. There are lots of historians who would agree with Mrs. Thatcher and lots who would violently disagree.

Violently?

Yeah, violently. Yes. Terroristically, shall we say. I think the French Revolution is the central political event in modern history. Obviously, there are other things that compete, the Russian Revolution, most obviously.

Or the American Revolution, but I agree, neither of those really compare.

No. I think the French Revolution... I'm sure we'll be talking about this in subsequent episodes, but to me, the French Revolution is the paradigmatic example of people trying to reboot a society, to make it again, to make something new. So, it's that, on the one hand. And then, of course, there are other dimensions to it.

In the National Assembly, right? Isn't it?

Exactly. And when you think about all the great writing that's been done on it, even just in Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, one of the most influential books on our perception of history that has ever been written.

Dickens', influenced by Carlyle and his great history of the revolution.

And of all the history books that have been written in our lifetimes, one of the most influential on the way people write history, I think, is Simon Schama's book, Citizens. Some listeners may not agree with Schama's take on the revolution. His take is actually not dissimilar from Margaret Thatcher's, because he very much emphasizes the violence and the costs of the revolution. But the way he did it, the emphasis on narrative and his ability to take unexpected aspects and to take byroads and to make them so richly fascinating and colorful.

Well, that's his great genius as a writer, isn't it? I mean, it's a reflection of the inherent drama and the scale and the sweep of the French Revolution that it has inspired such great writers. So does Hilary Mantel as well. Her first great historical novel was about the French Revolution.

Actually, for me, her best book. Well, one of her best historical books. And what makes it so interesting is not just the high drama, but obviously the questions. Why did it all happen? And even more than that, what does it mean?

Well, Dominic, we've answered that. It's because of the diamond necklace scandal.

Right. So we can stop right now. We've solved it. So what I thought we'd do today is we'd get into the buildup to the revolution, the causes of the revolution. See, I don't think the French Revolution began in July 1789 with the storming of the Bastille.

No, we know when it began. It began in the 11th century, Dominic, but we'll be coming to that.

Right. Very good. So, to be very, very simplistic for a second, if people are only going to listen to six minutes of this podcast and they want to know why the French Revolution happened, I think there are three ingredients. One is there is a financial and a high political crisis. Effectively, France is running out of money.

So contingency, then.

So contingency. And then the third thing, which is much more deterministic, is a kind of cultural moment. And I know you'll be talking about this in a subsequent episode, an obsession with progress, with purity and, above all, with virtue, and an idea that you can turn the world off and back on again and start again with a clean slate and forget about the record of history. And I think it is the combination of those three things that makes it different from the two obvious antecedents, which Mrs. Thatcher mentioned, the Glorious Revolution in Britain in 1688, 89, and then, of course, the revolution in the American colonies.

Although that is important, I think.

It is important, but this is qualitatively different.

Absolutely.

So the question is, why did those three things, how and why did they come together? And for many years, historians looked for big, overarching ideological explanations, but then really, especially from the 1980s onwards, and thanks partly to people like Sharma or Robert Darnton, another brilliant historian, American historian, has written about this period. Historians started to use the French Revolution as the subject to reinvigorate the idea of narrative, to say, actually, events really matter. and the chronology, the series, the chain is enormously important.

And people who've listened to our series on the road to the first world war will recognise the parallels with that.

Yeah. I was thinking about that.

The replacement of the broad, sweeping explanations that are couched in terms of ideology or whatever.

Yeah, exactly.

Or kind of broad Marxist trends and replacing it with the idea of events mattering.

Contingency, mattering, exactly, exactly. But you ended last time, you did that brilliant episode about the diamond necklace scandal, and your point that all the discussion about Marie Antoinette, the sort of the semi-pornographic, or I mean, the literally pornographic pamphlets and the abuse of her, that it reflected an idea that if, as it were, the body of the queen or the king were diseased, that reflected a disease in the body politic. And that's how we ended. But we didn't say why the body politic was diseased. So what is wrong with France?

He's not a monster.

No, he's not a monster at all. He became king when he was 19 years old in 1774.. And actually that's, you might say, a young man, but actually that's quite old for a French king.

Yeah, because usually they're toddlers, aren't they, when they come to the throne.

His grandfather, Louis XV, had been five. His predecessor, Louis XIV, had been four when he became king. So actually, Louis is not badly placed and he's been prepared for it. His kingdom, as we discussed before, the biggest kingdom in continental Europe, 28 million people, the world's second largest economic power really, after Britain, the only European country that has both the serious Navy and a serious army. Britain, for example, only really has a Navy.

It is. And also much more kind of regionally distinct. Places like Brittany are very distinctive. And you saw that when we were talking about the Cardinal de Rohan, that he has a sense of his distinctiveness because he is Breton. Yeah, absolutely.

The funny thing about Louis XVI, Louis XVI would not have been able to understand most of his subjects because they wouldn't have spoken what he would recognize as French. They would have spoken dialects of French, or they'd have spoken Flemish or Occitan, or Breton or German, all of these kinds of things. So Louis has been brought up to be king. We think of him as an absolute monarch. And he had copied out, as a teenager, a text to tell him that French kings had received from God himself the greatest and most absolute power over other men that has ever been entrusted to one man.

Because he does have a famous exchange, doesn't he? Is it 1787?? Where he basically, someone in the parliament was saying, this is illegal. Yeah. And Louis famously says, it's legal, because I say it is.

Because France does have other institutions and constitutional conventions, and they are so complicated that nobody really understands them. So his grandfather, Louis XV, in the 1750s had said, France is such a kind of multi-layered, complicated machine. I'd like to get all this written down on paper so I can make sense of it. And he'd commissioned constitutional scholars to make a compilation of documents. And they came back to him eventually, and they just said, we're going to give up.

You compared it to a machine. And we talked about how Louis XVI is a great one for tinkering in a workshop. Do you think that this is a frustration to him? That he, as someone who obviously likes contraptions and working out how things function, that the state kind of defies his ability to do that?

I think absolutely. Because I think Louis, like other people of his generation, is a product of the mid-18th century. You know, he comes from a different world from Louis XIV. He's an Enlightenment man to some degree. And that doesn't mean he's sitting there reading Voltaire, but it means he's in that context.

Things can be solved. Things can be sorted.

Yeah, the historian Jeremy Popkin, who wrote a very good general history of the French Revolution called A New World Begins, he says, in that, you know, Louis had been brought up to respect reason, as so many people were. He likes the idea of solving problems, Tom, that there is a logical, rational answer to things. He's also been brought up, by the way, to respect what he sees as the rights of his citizens. I know you're going to be talking a lot about rights in a subsequent episode. And Louis had written down in his kind of exercise book as a boy, that the rights of his citizens were life, honour, liberty, and property.

Lavoisier, who will end up losing his head, won't he, in the revolution?

Exactly. The great chemist. Both Sharma and Robert Darnton, in their books about this, emphasise hot air balloons. Ballooning is the AI of the day. It's something that people are talking about.

And that's very enlightenment, isn't it?

It's totally enlightenment.

So Benjamin Franklin is a great hero in Paris, and he's a great one for these kind of experiments.

Absolutely, yeah. Because, of course, the whole American republic is an experiment, isn't it? So America comes to be identified both with nature, and the kind of beauties and simplicity of nature, but also with this idea of kind of progress, of modernity.

And to what extent? is the existence of the American republic a kind of standing encouragement to people in France to think, yeah, we could rebuild in that way?

It's a good question. I think people are fascinated by the American experiment. They're curious to see how it works out. People like Benjamin Franklin are very popular in France. But that said, if America didn't exist, the French Revolution would still have happened.

Would still have happened, sure. Yeah.

So I don't think it's a direct inspiration, but I think there's a commonality of language between the French and American revolutions.

And just going on from that, the crown support for the American Revolution obviously will play a key part in its ultimate bankruptcy. Yeah. But is there also a sense that the fact that a monarch is going to the assistance of rebels against another monarch, an example of someone sitting on a tree, sitting on a branch and soaring off the branch?

Yeah, I think it is. I mean, there are people in the French regime who are very nervous about the idea of doing this.

For that reason? Yeah.

Well, they're more worried about the finances.

But I just wondered whether there was a kind of, you know, an ideological anxiety about it as well. Because Louis XVI seems not particularly to have been worried about that.

I don't think they're thinking about the American republic so closely as that, to be honest with you. Right. I think they're more interested in giving Britain a bloody nose. Anyway, so all this excitement about change means you have two things. You have a trend, a sense of possibility.

Right. Because we were talking about that in the context of the pornographic abuse of Marie Antoinette.

Exactly. Robert Danton's book, The Revolutionary Temper, is absolutely wonderful on all this, on the coffee houses, on people swapping ideas. People would read pamphlets out on street corners. People would gather to listen to it. There's a new term, which we're very familiar with, created in 1750 to describe this, opinion public, public opinion.

Well, but not entirely, because Marie Antoinette, who is his generation, I mean, she's part of that. I mean, she is the great embodiment of that in a way.

It's definitely younger people who embrace that, but of course it percolates out. So Marie Antoinette is absolutely a classic example of somebody who absorbs this cult of sensibility, you know, nature, simplicity, all of these things, intense feeling, tenderness, friendship, family.

And also the idea that if you obey the impulses of your emotions,

that will lead you to truth. Yeah.

So it's kind of bizarre, isn't it? That simultaneously it's an age of reason, but it's also an age of intense feeling.

So those things are intention.

Well, there is a tension there, but there seems to be an assumption that there isn't.

Well, I think there was a slight generational issue. So I think if you were born in 1740, let's say, you grow up in an age that is polite, witty, ironic, sceptical. Voltaire, you know, Voltaire is very sceptical. They love poking fun. There's always a kind of wry smile at the corner of your mouth, that kind of attitude.

Living your truth, yeah.

And tears, crying is really important to these people and is important in the revolution. Tears are seen as a sign of authenticity and honesty. So people are always breaking down in tears in the revolutionary story. And the idea that underpins all of this is the idea of virtue. And I was thinking when I was writing the notes, how virtue in the French revolution is the diversity of its day.

You say virtue. I mean, you might more properly say virtus, which is the Latin word from which the French word comes and actually has the sense of manliness as well. And I think one of the dimensions of the French revolution, which we will be exploring over the course of this series and the subsequent series on it, is the way in which, actually, the Egalité bros.

are quite sexist. Yeah, of course.

It is a very, very chauvinist movement, I think, the French revolution.

Yeah, I think so. So the man who embodies all this more than anybody else, by the way, I think, is Maximilien Robespierre. And we'll come to him later on. He absolutely drinks deeply of all this stuff. So it's a very politicized world and very passionate, but it is also, I think it's worth emphasizing, even before the revolution, a violent world.

Yeah.

But you mentioned, well, we talked about tax and finance. So money is at the absolute center of it. And we should get into some of the money.

Follow the money.

Follow the money. Exactly. We should follow the money. So all early modern monarchies suffered massive money problems. I mean, it's the story of the English Civil War.

And for France, the fact that Britain has emerged as a rival power and a larger economy, I mean, is really unsettling, because France has not had to face that before. France has always been the largest power. It has. Economically speaking. And so that imposes massive strains, doesn't it?

Massive.

And you were talking about the Navy. The Royal Navy is the key to British power. And so the French have to have a Navy. But as you say, I mean, it's just an unbelievable strain.

It is. So. France has been running up massive debts since the 1720s and doesn't have a national bank. Britain has a national bank with France. for various reasons, doesn't.

And France had had a kind of traumatic experience with a slightly dodgy Scottish financier, hadn't it?

John Law. Yeah. John Law. Exactly. The beginning of the 18th century.

It's a kind of tulip mania bust.

There'd been a massive stock market bust and that basically turned them off finance. So they distrust the idea of a national bank.

You know, that is when the word millionaire is coined because so many people become so rich and then they lose it all.

Is that so? Interesting. By the 1760s, so even before the American war, France has already got very, very big debts. It's 2 billion livres in debt and it's basically spending 60% of its budget servicing that debt. So in interest payments.

It's the existence of the British Parliament that is able to raise money. Is this something that, in the build up to the French Revolution, people are looking at enviously and saying, why don't we have a system like this? Yes.

As we will see, loads of people basically want France to have. a lot of the revolutionaries at the beginning, basically want to turn France into Britain. They want a more liberal economy and they want a representative institution or vote tax increases and they think, bang, that'll magically fix all our problems.

And so that's the Estates General. Exactly.

That's their dream. So France is raising tax through a lot of very strange, antiquated things. They've got a property tax that a lot of towns don't pay. They've got a very lucrative tax on salt. But again, that means there's loads of smuggling and they have internal customs duties.

And the kind of thing that a workman in his workshop, like Louis XVI, would want to fix.

Exactly. So here's the thing. Why don't they fix it? Louis, when he comes in at the age of 19,, he's tempted by the idea of fixing it. But the issue is that whenever he comes up against opposition, he almost always backs down.

So, Dominic, your case might be that the problem with Louis isn't that he is too despotic, but that he's not despotic enough.

Well, do you know who he should have been, Tom? You did a very, very lovely version of her. If he'd been Margaret Thatcher, I mean, I say this not entirely frivolously, if he'd been a charismatic and sufficiently adept statesman, that he could take a bit of unpopularity and he could persuade the people he needed, and he could show concrete results, and he'd stuck to his guns, he might've been a much, much more effective king of France. But, as it is, what he will do is he will always gesture in the direction of change and then back down when he gets into trouble. So, as Sharma says, and I quote, he wanted to be loved.

Because the Caribbean is so rich. Yeah, that's why.

they really have joined the war. They want to get Jamaica, places like that.

But that requires them to inflict a defeat on Britain, more total than the ultimate defeat is.

So, although the British lose 13 North American colonies, they keep lots of the rest of North America. They don't lose any of the Caribbean, which was their main priority. And so actually, the French have basically run up huge debts and they've got nothing to show for it. And Simon Schama says, without much exaggeration, it can be said that it was the cost of the war that brought on the terminal crisis.

of the French monarchy. Well, should we get to the terminal crisis?

Yes. So let's fast forward, just before we come to the break, let's fast forward three years to the year of the diamond necklace trial. So now we're in 1786.. The finance minister now is a guy called Charles-Alexandre de Calonne. He's very rich, he's very urbane, he's very sort of witty.

Bankers.

And in August 1786, Calonne goes to see Louis XVI and he says, I've got a bit of a bombshell for you. We are looking into the financial abyss. He says, our annual deficit every year is 80 million livres and half of all our revenue is now being spent on paying the interest on our existing loans. And he says, what is worse? Necker's short-term loans that he took out to pay for the war in America are about to fall due and we don't have any money to pay them back.

And it's a source of aspiration, isn't it? Yeah. For people, because it is possible to enter the clergy or to gain patents of nobility. So it's a kind of incentive to stick with the system.

It is. And also, people don't like the idea of a uniform system like a machine. They say that is what would destroy liberty. Liberty lies in difference and in quirks and eccentricities and traditions. And a government that tries to erase that and just to put the stamp of royal authority and say everybody must pay is a despotic government.

So these are the ones that the Parlement of Paris, that the Cardinal de Rohe, opted to be tried by, rather than the king, in the previous episode.

They're courts. They're high courts, basically. Yeah. And around them, so the Parlement in Paris employs hundreds of people, clerks and stuff. It's got its own kind of quarter of the city.

And does the physical separation of the king in Versailles from the Parlement, say in Paris, that presumably is enhancing that sense of separation between the monarchy and the sense the Parliament will have, that they are defending the people's rights?

I think so, Tom. I think absolutely. I think it's a real problem actually for Louis XVI. Geography. The fact that Versailles is 12 miles from Paris, he never leaves Versailles or barely ever leaves Versailles.

And this idea of an assembly of notables, this is again, something with ancient precedence that is being taken out of the lumber box of antiquated traditions.

Yeah, it is exactly. And Louis says to Callon, I'm not sure about this. I mean, this is a very big step. It's like try to bypass the institutions to get this money. And Callon says, trust me, if you do this, you will go down in history as the man whose courage and foresight solved the financial problems of the French monarchy forever.

Well, cliffhangers don't come more cliffhanging than that. Let's take a break. And when we come back, we will see how the doom spiral gets set in train.

So, basically, Callon has brought together all the bigwigs in the kingdom, princes, archbishops,

So he is asking turkeys to vote for Christmas, basically.

He is, but he's saying that this is in the interest of France. Come on, we've got to do this. We don't want to keep losing to the British. Number two, he says, we're going to lift some of these mad, antiquated regulations. Let's have the same, you pay the same duty wherever you are in France.

So it's not going to work. in other words.

Yeah. And the notables just hate it. They hate it because they don't like the, obviously paying the land tax. They don't like his plan for the assemblies because they say, he says, well, obviously you'd sit with the commons in your province. Together in one assembly, they don't like that at all.

It's like the Aztecs bringing out the owl.

Right, that's the ultimate recourse. We, you know, you need more representation. Basically, we don't want to carry the can for the tax increases. You have to get a bigger body to do it. Callon is really furious about this.

And so they complain to Louis about him.

So they complain to Louis, and Louis, as always, the way Louis sacks him. Sorry, mate, you've got to go.

People don't like, the notables don't like it.

The notables don't like it. As Sharma says, in Citizens, by taking his case to the public, Callon had made politics a matter of national attention. Once Pandora's box had been opened in this way, it proved impossible to close the lid. After Callon, anything was possible.

We love a Pandora's box.

I like the fact that Sharma's gone for Pandora's box there.

So the Pandora's box has been opened and the storm clouds of revolutionary gathering.

Definitely they are. So the debate has started, a public debate. People are talking about this in cafes, on street corners and things. And, as amazing as it may sound to many listeners, most people take the notable side, the side of the very privileged people who don't want to pay more taxes. So Robert Darnton quotes journalists of the day.

But they're kind of riding a crocodile, right?

They are. Oh, totally. Yeah. The notables are in for a shock. Bit of a shock.

He's a magnificent figure, isn't he? Because he's one of those kind of classic, late 18th century French bishops who don't really believe in God.

Yeah, exactly. But that's the thing.

Any of that, nonsense.

There was talk of making him Archbishop of Paris. And Louis had apparently said, surely, as Archbishop, he should believe in God, shouldn't he? Isn't that right? And Brienne also, entertainingly, there's a lot of skin disease in this series.

There really is, isn't there?

So Brienne, I read, he suffered from a skin disease that left his face, quote, a mass of peeling, scabs and tissue. And yet he was thought of as a personable and congenial man. So that says a lot for his personality.

It does. Well, so we've had Louis XV, who died with his face covered in pustules. And we're going to be meeting Marat, aren't we?

Yeah. And well, Mirabeau, the ugliest man in France.

Mirabeau, yes, yes. His face, well, yes. So, lots of figures with pustules. If you like, with unpleasant skin complaints. Yeah.

So Brienne had been an opposition figure. And he had said, like a lot of the notables, I think Callan's stuff about the deficit is balderdash. I don't think there really is a deficit.

Let's have a look in the books and just check.

There'll be loads of money. And he looks at the books, he says, oh my God. Well, it's true. Callan wasn't telling the truth about the deficit, because he wasn't. It's worse.

Well, I mean, it's amazing that he can go hunting because he's, by this point, got incredibly obese.

Yeah.

So you pity the horse that has to carry him. Yeah. He's getting very fat.

He is very fat, but it's a sad fact, Tom, not a jolly fat.

Oh, definitely. He's not a jolly man. No. He's a sad fat man.

He's a sad, fat man, because I think he can see that this is going to be really difficult.

Because what options does he have? I mean, every option is bad.

So Brienne and Louis get together and they, what are we going to do? They have two options. One is they could just do what everyone says and call this a states general. But the issue with that is, once you open that box, one of Simon Sharma's boxes, where's it going to lead? Will they demand more power?

But the thing that's amazing about this is that it's in defence of nobles and clergy not paying tax.

Yeah, it is.

All this kind of language that will be used in the revolution that consumes both the church and the nobility, is first being used to defend the privileges of the church and the nobility.

It is bonkers, isn't it? And I think there's two things there. One is that there's a degree of self-interest, obviously. The idea that all the nobility are like this sort of Dickensian vicomtes who are like whipping their peasants and forcing themselves on poor women and stuff. A lot of these people are actually quite liberal.

And we talked about one of them in the previous episode, Philippe, the Duke of Orléans, whose Palais Royal in the centre of Paris, is the great centre of free speech, of the pamphlets and will be the centre for the Jacobin.

Yeah, exactly. So there are people who genuinely, it's partly self-interest, but there are people, I mean, let's not pretend that there aren't people who genuinely believe this and really do think that making a huge fuss about these taxes is a great way to get what they want in the long run. Which is basically the British system, the system that had been advocated by the great enlightenment writer Montesquieu. Let's have that in France, separation of powers, a proper legislature, prime ministers, all of that kind of stuff. Anyway, Brienne is outraged that the parliament has rejected his plan.

you got the settings wrong.

You got the settings wrong because you'd think, whoa, this is the French revolution. Because there is rioting by the clerks, people who are giving out royal edicts are attacked by the crowd and two of them almost beaten to death. A suspected police agent is beaten to death by the crowd. And the government eventually has to send in infantry units to secure the streets of the capital. And they end up shutting down loads of clubs and societies.

I mean, is it more than a tinderbox? Has it already slipped royal control?

I think to some degree it has slipped royal control, actually. And I think from 1787 all the way through to 1789, it's a question of trying to regain royal control. And there are troops on the streets pretty much all the time.

There is the queen being forbidden by the king to go into Paris.

Exactly. So. that's against this backdrop, isn't it? The hostility to Marie Antoinette. So the months pass very uneasily.

Yeah. I mean, it's not surprising, is it? Because we talked about how France is a much more geographically diffuse country than, say, Britain. Well, actually, I mean, it's a bit like Scotland defending its distinctiveness against London. That what makes you distinctive is incredibly important to you.

Imagine the government trying to scrap the courts in Scotland and saying, let's have just one British court. I mean, imagine that, how controversial it would be.

Or the church or whatever.

Exactly. This brings us to the city where the French Revolution begins.

And it's an unexpected place, isn't it? It is.

So I don't think the French Revolution begins in 1789.. I think it begins in 1788.. And I think it begins in Grenoble.

So justify that, Dominic.

So Grenoble, city in the foothills of the Alps, southeastern France. It calls itself the cradle of the revolution. That's how Grenoble brands itself to this day. It's a very ordinary place, which you might think makes it a weird place for the revolution to have begun. But no, the ordinariness is the point.

Kind of people you get on Twitter.

Yeah, exactly that. People who spend all day sitting behind their computers, firing off angry messages. They owe their livelihoods to that court. If it is downgraded or removed, you know, they will lose that.

I saw that. And they took a stuffed eagle.

Stuffed eagle.

That's terrible. Yeah. I suppose, I mean, I suppose you can't, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

Well, of course, as famously, as has been remarked on this podcast, they do not actually make the omelette. Right.

So, so, basically there is an intra elite attempt to kind of grab the levers of power. But essentially, that fight between the kind of rival sections of the elite has been overtaken by a mass uprising. Yeah, it has.

And actually Simon Sharma is absolutely brilliant on this. It's one of the many, many fantastic insights in his book. And we shouldn't make this the Sharma fan cast, but he points out the judges are carried aloft by the crowd, the parliament judges. But he says it's not clear at this point. They're not the leaders of the riot.

Right. And this is something that will happen again and again. So, I mean, looking ahead, it's an experience that the royal family will soon be experiencing. Yeah.

And some of the older judges are very anxious about this and end up actually leaving the city. They don't want to be associated with this. But there's a younger generation who are enthused and actually seeing the disorder and the collapse of royal authority, a chance to lead, to profit. And the classic example of this is a guy who I think you can argue is the first true French revolutionary leader. So he's a young judge from Grenoble and he's called Jean-Joseph Meunier.

And he's a lawyer.

They're all lawyers.

They're all young lawyers.

And he's really ambitious. They're basically like Athelstan members, Tom. They're young lawyers of the Restless History Club, French revolutionaries and waiting. So he has bought the office of a royal judge and he has actually become a very, very, he's on the lowest possible rank of the nobility.

And isn't that always the way? Classically, in a revolution, it's not the poor, it's always the upwardly mobile who haven't got quite upwardly mobile enough.

Exactly. And he sees this as a chance to jump up the ladder and to turn the ladder into his ladder. So he convenes a huge meeting on the 21st of July, 1788 outside Grenoble at the Chateau de Vizelle. The Chateau de Vizelle, if you go there today, it is the world's only museum of the French revolution. And there's a reason for that, because, you can argue, again, this is one of the absolute places where the French revolution began.

Well, particularly if you, the Grenoble Tourist Board,

if you're the Grenoble Tourist Board, exactly. And at this meeting, he says, listen, we want free elections. We want the Estates General of Dauphiné, each province to have its own Estates General. And when that meets, the third estate, the Commons, should have the same numbers as the other two estates, the Lords and the Clergy, put together. And they should all sit in one chamber, not multiple chambers like they have in Britain, Lords and Commons, all one chamber, so that the Commons can dominate.

Because there's a kind of incipiently totalitarian quality to saying that you are the embodiment of the nation.

Definitely there is Tom.

Because if you are the embodiment of the nation, your enemies therefore aren't. And, by definition, of traitors.

Yeah, I totally agree with you. Now, of course, you can say there's a great irony here that actually even Mounier and his friends have not really understood what happened in Grenoble that riotous day. They think because they've been chaired aloft by the crowd, they think they're going to control it. And they are, of course, dead, wrong. And some of these people are going to end up dead, literally dead.

Well, and also, I mean, it's very contrary to the way that the constitution has evolved in Britain, where the whole point of the relationship of the monarchy to the House of Lords and the House of Commons has evolved over time and is rooted in the deep past. And so, therefore, you can already see that Britain is starting to fade as a model for the more radical proponents of a new constitution.

But also what is so interesting is it is also different from the American constitution makers, because the American constitution makers are slightly trapped within the British mindset. So there, it's about the separation of powers. They want to insure against a kind of mob democracy. They want to insure against somebody having too much power. Their constitution is hedged about with kind of nuances and qualifications.

What could possibly go wrong?

And then, against this background, a massive development. On the 16th of August, Brienne announces they have run out of money. They have been surviving all this time on loans, but the Royal Treasury is virtually empty. From now on, people will be paid in IOUs, in paper money, which they don't really believe exists.

Which they hate, don't they?

In other words, France is bankrupt.

Well, Dominic, what a cliffhanger. So, in the next episode, the Estates General will be meeting, the revolution will be beginning, or, if you accept that it's already begun in Grenoble, it will be continuing. And if you just can't wait to find out what happens, you can hear it right now by joining the Restless History Club at therestlesshistory.com. Alternatively, the next episode will be coming very soon. Either way, we'll see you then.

Bye-bye.