Male Narrator: At the height of the 18th century the most glorious kingdom in Europe would
face a mighty foe – the power of its own people.
One man would rise to inspire the nation to cast aside a reluctant King and a hated Queen.
And a new Republic would be born in blood.
The blood of the French Revolution.
1794, Francis Conciergerie prison.
An impenetrable fortress on the banks of the Seine River.
Dank, rat-infested.
It is known as deaths antechamber.
Inside the voice of a young nation is about to be silenced.
As his hair is shorn and his neck laid bare for the blade of the guillotine, Maximilien
Robespierre prepares to pay for the cataclysm left in his wake.
[explosion] The explosion of events that became the French Revolution.
Man: French Revolution is this extraordinary moment when people began to believe that you
could actually recreate almost everything in a society that you could not only change
the politics, the institutions, but you could change human nature itself through political
action.
Man: The French Revolution really does constitute the crossroads of the modern world where everything
begins to turn in a different direction.
Narrator: The Revolution saw a feudal land turn its back on aristocratic tradition and
chart a violent new course for the future.
It would shake the very foundation of Europe and its impact would be felt across the seas.
Man: The French Revolution is the most important event in Western history.
There are developments that can rival it like the Industrial Revolution, like capitalism,
but if you mean an event, I can't think of anything more important.
Man: It was the Revolution that upset things the most.
I mean, again, when you consider that it got rid of the Catholic Church.
It got rid of Christianity.
It got rid of the nobility.
It got rid of the King.
It got rid of all these things.
Narrator: The French Revolution would bring bread to the poor, democracy to France, and
would establish a whole new order of society.
But progress would come at a price.
Man: It was really a moment of extraordinary hope, extraordinary ambition, and then it
turned into this most horrific tragedy.
Narrator: Now broken and defeated, Robespierre, not two days before, stood atop his world
presiding over the greatest and bloodiest revolution Europe had ever known.
So true to its ideals, he was called the incorruptible.
So powerful, his slightest utterance could cloak an entire city in fear.
A master orator, Robespierre's words were his weapon.
Now silenced by a bullet to the jaw he awaits the same swift and brutal end he has brought
down upon so many others.
The Revolution is about to eat its own.
♪ ♪ No one could have foreseen the turbulent times ahead.
On one spring day in 1770, the Chateau of Versailles fills to its gilded rafters with
the glittering crowds of the Royal Court.
Completed in 1682, Versailles was the crowning masterpiece of King Louis the 14th.
To put some distance between himself and his subjects, Louis the 14th transplanted the
capital of France to this small town twelve miles west of Paris where he had built the
most magnificent palace in all of Europe.
For nearly 100 years, it has been the seat of the nation's unwavering monarchy.
And today it is host to a very important wedding.
King Louis the 15th's grandson, Prince Louis Capet, next in line for the throne, is about
to take a bride.
Just 15-years-old on the eve of his wedding, Louis Capat is bashful and hesitant with few
of the characteristics expected of a future king, much less a husband.
Man: Louie was this pudgy, shy, painfully inadequate 15-year-old with absolutely no
social graces at all.
Louie the 15th's mistress Madame du Barry called him a fat, ill-bred boy.
Basically he was just a schlub.
Man: It was very hard for Louie to come to decisions.
He dithered incessantly.
He was always ready to be persuaded by the last person he had talked to.
Again, those are usually not considered good leadership qualities.
Narrator: Louie's marriage is a political union between Austria's royal family, the
Habsburgs, and his own, the Bourbons.
The wedding symbolizes the end of an ancient rivalry and the beginning of new regional
ties.
The young bride-to-be arrives in France a wide-eyed and pretty fourteen-year-old girl…
….Marie Antoinette.
Man: Marie Antoinette is an archduchess of Austria.
She's the youngest daughter of the empress Maria Theresa and she comes to France as part
of a marriage deal which represents a great reversal of alliances whereby for the first
time in living memory France and Austria become allies rather than enemies.
Narrator: Marie comes to France as a political gesture, but as a teenager, she has little
interest in political affairs.
Man: Well, when Marie Antoinette came to Versailles she was very young.
She didn't know a great deal about the country she was coming to.
She didn't know about the customs.
She didn't know about the court.
She was certainly a headstrong girl; a very lively girl, but she was still a girl.
[female interpreter] When Marie Antoinette comes to Versailles, she is just a teenager.
She is blonde with blue eyes.
She is pretty and she likes being attractive to people.
And she comes with the intention of winning over her husband and her new family.
[thunder crashes] Narrator: On the night of the wedding, there is an ominous storm.
But inside, the grandeur of the ceremony lights up the palace as the newlyweds make their
way to the Royal bedroom.
♪ ♪ In an age-old ceremony, to encourage the conception of an heir, the King's couriers
are present as the awkward young couple is revealed in the marriage bed for the first
time.
[crowd clapping] The crowd is delighted and expectations are high, but once the curtains
are drawn it's clear that an heir will not be so easily produced.
Man: Louis was not only not interested in ruling, Louis wasn't particularly interested
in loving either.
And he paid her no attention on the first nights or even further into their marriage.
Narrator: Many years will pass before the marriage is finally consummated.
The lack of an heir will soon spark gossip all across the kingdom that will continue
to plague the couple for years to come.
The grand wedding gala continues for days, but outside the gates of Versailles, there
is hardly cause for celebration.
Years of mismanagement by the monarchy have left the French people deprived and hungry.
Nearly a decade earlier, King Louis the 15th lost the Seven Years War battling Great Britain
over territory in North America.
The ill-fated conflict all but bankrupted France of money and prestige leaving the country's
coffers drain even as its population is growing bigger everyday.
With diseases like the plague a distant memory, fewer people are dying, but more and more
of them are hungry.
Man: France grew from 20 million to 26 million in the 18th century after having rung only
1 million in the preceding two centuries.
That put tremendous strain on what was there and so there was a lot of anxiety.
Narrator: Four years after the royal wedding, Prince Louis's grandfather loses his final
battle with smallpox.
Louis the 15th dies a defeated and unpopular king and leaves behind a country on the brink
of chaos.
In a lavish ceremony, young Prince Louis inherits the throne and is crowned King Louis the 16th.
Despite his insistence on a grandiose coronation, Louis is all too aware that he is woefully
unprepared for the job.
Man: Louis the 16th, the moment his grandfather dies and it suddenly is clear that he's king,
he doesn't know what to do.
He feels as if the world is falling in upon him.
So, although he's been educated in the full expectation of becoming king, he doesn't feel
ready for it.
♪ ♪ Narrator: For a kingdom in crisis, Louis the 16th is the worst man to have on
the watch.
The twenty-year-old king prays, 'protect us Lord for we reign too young.'
♪ ♪ Ensconced in their royal apartments in Versailles, Louis and Marie begin their
promising new lives as young monarchs while only 12 miles away, in the city of Paris,
another new era is dawning.
One that is on a collision course with the monarchy itself.
It is a dangerous new age of ideas: The Age of Enlightenment.
[majestic music] As the royal carriage approaches the esteemed Louis-le-Grand College, crowds
gather for a glimpse of grandeur.
It is a day to welcome the newly crowned king, Louis the 16th, and his lovely Austrian wife
to the city of Paris.
And at the head of the welcome party, is a promising young law student, Maximilien Robespierre.
Man: When Robespierre was a school boy, the king visited the college and Robespierre gave
a Latin address to the king.
So he actually spoke to Louis the 16th when he was a teenager.
Narrator: As Robespierre respectfully delivers his Latin soliloquy, the King hardly notices
the boy.
But years later, their fates will again intertwine under very different, much darker circumstances.
Man: It was one of these rituals that take place in every school and yet of course it
was charged with irony because here you have the young Robespierre reading this discourse
in honor of the man he would later kill.
Narrator: For now, the welcome is warm and the flattery sincere.
The visit from the Royals may have won the hearts of the people, but their minds are
leaning increasingly in an entirely different direction.
Since the Middle Ages, European society had been broken into three distinct classes dictated
by birth.
There was a great divide between the wealth of the nobility and the clergy and the poverty
of the peasants.
Then, at the blossoming of the 18th century, reason and science began to challenge this
age-old tradition.
Swept up on a current of innovation and new literature, Paris now radiates as the philosophical
center of the world.
The city pulses with a great flourishing of knowledge.
A shining beacon of possibility.
It is the Age of Enlightenment.
Man: The Enlightenment is a movement which says don't trust authority.
Don't trust anything that you've been told by anybody else at all.
Think it out for yourself.
Test it for yourself.
Woman: In old regime Europe, you were told what to think.
You were given information from above by your rulers, by your priests.
And so the idea that you could map out all of human knowledge and then have access to
it was revolutionary.
Narrator: In elite salons across Paris, aristocrats gathered to discuss Enlightenment authors
in the burgeoning Age of Reason.
Voltaire.
Rousseau.
Fresh voices who championed liberty, control of one's own destiny and above all equality.
The passion for this new literature is highest among the upper-class, But as Enlightenment
ideas take root at all levels of society, the drive for equality will begin to threaten
the aristocratic way of life.
Woman: What makes it dangerous is it means you will eventually question why are aristocrats
the ones with privilege and can't we change the world to make it a better place?
Isn't progress possible?
All of that will eventually undermine the idea that monarchy is natural.
Aristocracy is natural and hierarchy is natural.
Narrator: To see enlightenment ideals in action, one need only look across the Atlantic where
the Americans are fighting for freedom from France's old nemesis Great Britain.
Young King Louis wants revenge for his grandfather's defeats and he sees an opportunity in the
American War of Independence.
Louis commits to the cause a total of 2,000 million livre enough to feed and house 7 million
French citizens for a year.
His investment would mark the beginning of financial collapse for France.
Man: America bankrupts France in effect, because the debt which the French monarchy incurs
in order to fight the American War of Independence turns out to be absolutely crucial in the
financial situation of the French monarchy because the French monarchy cannot pay those
debts.
♪ ♪ Narrator: While Louis sends money and troops across the Atlantic, Marie is busy
incurring debts of her own.
Life at Versailles is a never-ending routine of archaic ritual and formality.
There are ceremonies for the waking of the king and queen; for dressing; for dining;
for retiring to bed.
To keep herself amused amidst the ritual drudgery, Marie Antoinette presides over a parade of
increasingly outrageous fashions.
Man: Marie was obsessed with fashion especially these towering hairdos that were several feet
high, that took hours and hours in the construction and fit all sorts of ornaments and fruits.
And to many people, they seemed like an obscenity.
They came to represent all that was wrong with her and with Versailles and that culture.
Narrator: Marie occupies herself with court gossip, gambling, and the staging of plays.
As her expenses accumulate, Marie earns the nickname Madame Deficit.
Man: Marie is given the name Madame Deficit as the country is in economic chaos.
And she continues to spend as if nothing's happened, on dresses and jewels and shoes
and she was the Imelda Marcos of her day.
♪ ♪ Narrator: Of all the debts Marie incurs, the greatest is what she owes her country,
an heir to the throne.
In the seven years since their marriage, Louis and Marie have yet to produce a child.
Marie finds herself in an increasingly humiliating position.
Man: The job of the queen is to produce a male heir.
It's absolutely essential for there to be a son.
And during that time, the people criticize, people are dissatisfied, people say, the king
should have never married this Austrian archduchess and now she can't even produce an heir to
the throne.
Narrator: Marie is desperate.
Louis appetite for food is unquestioned, but sex is clearly not on the menu. [female interpreter]
Maria Theresa, the mother to Marie Antoinette questions, if a girl as gorgeous as my daughter
cannot get him going, then what is going on?
Woman: Louis the 16th and his young wife were not able to conceive for seven years.
This cast a pall on the beginning of his reign and because his hobby as a locksmith was well
known, there were all sorts of salacious songs circulating to the effect that the locksmith
was having a hard time finding the keyhole.
Narrator: Louis's disinterest in sex is seen as a lack of bravado as a king.
Finally, after years of frustration and pressure from the court, Louis is diagnosed with a
treatable condition called phimosis.
Man: Louis had a deformity that made arousal extremely painful, therefore, there was no
consummation until there was a surgical procedure that could correct this, but he was scared
to death to have it.
And it took years for him to agree to have it.
And when he finally did….
voila! [baby crying] Narrator: After a simple surgery, the couple is able to have their
first child – Marie Thérèse.
But there is no easy fix for the years of damage to Marie's image.
Since the early 1780's, libelle has circulated throughout the country.
Pornographic satire of the king and queen, obscene pamphlets mock Louis's impotence and
portray Marie as a promiscuous harlot and a debauched and decadent court.
The people's view of the monarchy sours as conditions in the countryside worsen.
♪ ♪ After a succession of bad harvests, deregulation has raised the cost of flour
leading to a shortage of the very heart of the French diet, bread.
But the hardships naturally stop at the gates of Versailles.
As the royals continue to live in extravagance, complaints are committed to paper.
One charge is leveled directly at the Royal Court.
Man: Do you know why there are so many needy people?
It is because your luxurious existence devours in one day the substance of a thousand men.
Narrator: The man behind this charge?
The same young man who just a few years earlier regaled the king and queen after their coronation,
Maximilien Robespierre.
In Robespierre, the people will soon gain a voice calling for liberty, equality, for
revolution.
Versailles in the late 1700's is an oasis of extravagance surrounded by a land in despair.
And with an uncertain King at the helm, France is charting a course for disaster.
After 19 years of marriage, Louis has sired four children.
Yet, as a king, he remains impotent.
In an attempt to demonstrate leadership, Louis dabbles in financial reforms.
But his misguided interfering burdens the poor with heavy taxes while the nobility pay
hardly at all.
With the economy in ruins and the people restless, it seems as if even the heavens are angry
smiting France with the most bitterly cold winter in 90 years.
Man: If ever God intervened to make a situation worse, the summer of 1788 and the spring of
1789 is a moment when that happens.
By the summer of 1788, you already have a burgeoning political crisis and it's developing
against a background of very serious food shortage.
Narrator: For the people of France in the 18th century, flour is the essence of life
itself.
Bread, the measure of existence.
Woman: Most ordinary people in France ate at least two pounds a day of bread.
Bread was all-important.
Its price was immediately felt by everyone.
If the price doubled, you were in big trouble.
Narrator: Under Louis's financial mismanagement, the cost of flour skyrockets.
Sparse food supplies are hoarded.
The cost of a loaf of bread soon equals a month's earnings.
[people shouting] Hunger turns to raids.
Riots break out across France.
Homes are robbed.
[glass breaking] Bakeries are raided.
And shopkeepers suspected of stockpiling bread are lynched on the spot.
With the economy in shambles, the bank's forced Louis to hire a finance minister, Jacques
Necker.
An enlightened thinker, Necker is popular with the people in a way that Louis can only
envy.
Man: Jacques Necker was undoubtedly the most popular minister throughout the spring of
(17)89 because he's taken the line publicly in his writings that the government's duty
is to make sure that there is enough bread and grain for everybody.
Narrator: The nation in fiscal crisis, Necker urges Louis to call a meeting of the traditional
representative body of the kingdom, the Estates General.
It is the first time the representatives have been called together in a hundred seventy-five
years.
Man: France was politically organized in something called the Estates.
The First Estate was the clergy.
The Second Estate was the nobility.
And the Third Estate was everyone else.
And by contemporary reckoning, the first two Estates occupied 3% of the population and
the third estate 97% of the population.
Man: A lot of people felt it was very unfair for this Third Estate which was most of the
population to only have one-third of the deputies.
They felt it was very unfair that this should be a three chamber Parliament where two chambers,
the nobility and the clergy, could always out vote the commoners.
Narrator: May 4, 1789, a skilled young lawyer and politician arrives at Versailles.
Maximilien Robespierre comes to stand before the Estates General as a deputy to fight for
a fair voice for the people he represents, the Third Estate.
An orphan from the provinces, Robespierre had risen to academic prominence on a prestigious
scholarship becoming an eloquent speaker.
Prim appearance with never a hair nor a phrase out of place.
Back home in the small town of Arras, the Enlightenment ideas he had absorbed in the
salons of Paris found a powerful voice as he became a hometown lawyer for the downtrodden.
Man: By the time he went back and started to practice as a lawyer he was reading very
widely in the Enlightenment and Robespierre was someone when he was practicing law in
Arras tried to actually bring the ideas of the Enlightenment into the cases he was fighting.
Narrator: At the Estates General, Robespierre and his colleagues are demanding that the
nobility and clergy pay taxes.
But Louis feels increasingly threatened by the growing radicalism of the Third Estate.
Then, on June 20th, after a six-week deadlock, the deputies arrived to find that they are
being silenced.
Woman: On June 20th, when the deputies come to their meeting and find the doors locked,
they suspect a plot.
They move next door to what we call a tennis court, which was really a handball court,
and gather together and swear they will not stop meeting until they have a new constitution.
Narrator: The deputies declare themselves a new National Assembly, the true representatives
of the people of France.
Man: The Tennis Court Oath is one of these great symbolic moments in the history of the
French Revolution.
You had these people assembled in this great open space of the tennis court, raising their
arms in this quasi Roman salute and for the National Assembly this was a moment when they've
realized something of their power and their dignity and saw that they really could defy
France's king.
Narrator: In one revolutionary stand of defiance, the National Assembly is born.
It will be a communion of voices from around the country, a Parliamentary body and acting
the people's will.
But resting power from the king would not be so easy as signing a simple proclamation.
Man: All of these early victories that take place at Versailles are largely paper victories
and they have no teeth to back them up.
And the fear that happens takes over the deputies at Versailles as we approach mid-July is that
the king is gathering his forces to disperse them.
To overthrow them.
Narrator: By early July, 30,000 of the King's troops are taking positions around Paris.
To defend themselves, the people form a new National Guard.
Rioters raid Paris's armors and make away with over 28,000 muzzles.
The only thing missing is gunpowder and the people know just where to get it.
In the center of Paris there looms a massive stone dungeon notorious as a symbol of feudal
rule, the Bastille.
The prison houses the city's stores of gunpowder and is legendary as a den of torture and unspeakable
deaths.
Man: The Bastille had been the great symbol of royal despotism; the great symbol of the
kings of France running beyond the just limits of their own power; a symbol of horror for
the people of France.
Narrator: Amidst the rioting, there is a stunning outrage.
Louis fires his finance minister, the people's beloved Jacques Necker, seen as too sympathetic
to the masses.
Hours after Necker is fired, word reaches Paris that their man on the inside has been
ousted.
There is nothing left but revolt.
On July 14th crowds band together identify themselves with a small cockade.
Red and blue for the colors of Paris, separated by white, the color of the House of Bourbon.
The tricolore is born.
From the feverish crowd a voice cries out to the Bastille.
Woman: Attacking the Bastille means that the people of Paris are saying you cannot get
rid of the new National Assembly.
The people are acting, they're arming themselves and they're basically saying we take the side
of the Revolution.
Narrator: At the sight of the approaching mob, the governor of the Bastille, Bernard
de Launay , attempts to lock down the prison.
He mounts a hopeless defense.
And the marauders storm the fortress and tear into the guards with knives and pikes.
Finally, de Launay surrenders, but the enraged mob engulfs him, dragging him through the
streets.
The jeering horde kicks and stabs at him until he shouts, "Let me die!"
The crowd eagerly obliges.
He is stabbed and shot.
And a Revolutionary tradition is born.
His severed head is paraded on a pike.
Woman: The deputies in the National Assembly do not immediately condemn this act of violence.
In fact, they accept it.
And it was this acceptance of popular violence that in some people's view created a pattern
that was to have catastrophic consequences for the unfolding of the revolution.
Narrator: With the smoke still clearing over the Bastille, Louis the 16th returns from
a hunting trip.
In his diary under the date July, 14, 1789, he writes… ….nothing.
A reference to his unsuccessful hunt.
An aide interrupts and breaks the news of the riots and the fall of the Bastille.
Louis the 16th asks, "Is it a revolt?"
"No, sire," he replies, "it is a Revolution."
[men shouting] Victory at the Bastille unleashes the irrepressible torrent of Revolution.
The people had defied their king and won.
There would be no turning back.
As a symbol of the defeat of tyranny, the people, men, women and children dig in with
bare hands and tear the Bastille apart brick by feudal brick.
They are beginning to dismantle the past itself.
Man: The French went about the process of tearing down the Bastille as quickly as they
could.
In the absence of powerful explosives, this was done very painstakingly but with a tremendous
amount of vigor.
And the bricks were given away, sold, as emblems of the demolition, of despotism.
Narrator: The energy of the streets invigorates the National Assembly.
A charter is panned within days called the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Under this daring new document, archaic class distinctions are to be abolished and all men
considered truly equal.
Man: The Declaration of the Rights of Man was a declaration promulgated by the National
Assembly which said, in its text, that the sovereignty belongs to the people, belongs
to the nation.
The King is nowhere mentioned in this document, therefore, by issuing this document, the Assembly
was effectively seizing power for itself.
Narrator: With the new National Assembly as their voice, the citizens of France set out
to change the very fabric of their world.
They demand a constitutional monarchy.
Equal rights for all men and justice under reasonable laws.
To provide a greater voice for the call of Revolution, Robespierre demands increased
freedom for the press long muzzled under the old regime.
♪ ♪ The resulting Free Press is spearheaded by L'Ami du peuple, The People's Friend.
A fiery newspaper full of vitriolic rants and provocation, it is the braindchild of
a former doctor, Jean-Paul Marat.
After a string of unsuccessful careers, Marat found himself living in poverty, for a time,
finding shelter in the sewers of Paris.
It was there he contracted a painful skin disease that now leaves him confined for long
periods to a medicinal bath.
A bitter and failed Marat finds in the Revolution the perfect outlet for his venom.
Woman: Jean-Paul Marat was just one of these professional malcontents.
And unfortunately Revolutions do offer opportunity to professional malcontents.
Marat took all of that bile, all of that resentment and funneled it in to a newspaper that became
extraordinarily successful.
L'Ami du peuple.
Man: Marat was a man possessed of extraordinary anger.
You just have to read the pages of his newspaper, The Friend of the People, to see this.
In every issue he displays a complete paranoid mentality.
He sees plots everywhere.
Everybody is plotting against the Revolution and the answer is very simple for them.
The answer is blood.
The answer is heads.
Narrator: Marat loathes the monarchies relentless extravagance. even as poverty grips France.
And needs only the slightest rumor to lambaste the king and queen in his newspaper.
On October 2, 1789, his anger boils over.
Word reaches Paris that the king has thrown a party at Versailles.
That the decadent Royals threw the new tricolour flag, symbol of the Revolution, to the ground
and trampled it under foot.
Marat is enraged.
He reports the insult in his paper.
Just as a new threat breaks, the king has again ordered troops to move into positions
around Paris.
[horse whinnies] With the coup at the Bastille's still smoldering in the minds of the people,
Marat frantically urges them to take action.
[voice-over] People of Paris, it's time to open your eyes.
Shake yourselves out of your torpor.
Wake up.
Once more, wake up!
Narrator: October 5th, dawn breaks to the furious ringing of bells.
[bells tolling] Women gather new City Hall to protest the shortage of bread and now fear
of the approaching royal troops mixes with anger as news of the king's offensive party
circulates through the crowd.
Soon thousands are marching to Versailles pikes and guns in hand.
The women are taking their complaints to the king.
Woman: The core of the crowd was made up of the famous poissarde, the fearsome fish ladies
of the central markets who were known for their brawny build and their fearlessness.
They were equipped with large knives for scaling fish.
They were hugely muscular because they carted boxes.
You didn't want to tangle with these ladies.
Man: These are women of the poor quarters.
These are poor women which are affected by the increased price of bread, by the scarcity
of products, who suddenly begin to realize that they must act.
It is quite extraordinary how these ordinary women, probably most of them couldn't even
write their name, suddenly act as the protagonists of this historical process.
Narrator: Inside the palace, word of the approaching crowd and angry women reaches the queen's
chambers.
Legend has it that it is at this moment that Marie Antoinette utters the most famous line
she never said.
Woman: Marie Antoinette did not say "let them eat cake."
That is a myth.
Marie Antoinette, unfortunately, probably never even noticed the poor people of her
country long enough to make such a statement.
Narrator: As the mob of women gathers outside the gates, Louis understands that the revolution
can no longer be ignored.
It is being brought to his front door.
He agrees to sign the Declaration of the Rights of Man yet the crowd continues to grow throughout
the night.
By morning, 20,000 people are camped outside the Royal palace.
To close the centuries of distance between the king and his subjects, the angry mass
demands that the king and queen move to Paris.
Indecisive as ever, Louis is weak to respond.
His hesitation would provoke a fury in the crowd and put the lives of the royal family
in grave danger Man: When they don't get instant compliance with what they want, it really
looks as if they're going to massacre the queen.
Narrator: A wave of women break into the Royal palace screaming for the blood of the queen.
They massacre the guards, decapitate and impale their heads on pikes.
Man: They were like banshees screaming throughout the palace, "Give me her entrails.
Give me her head.
I want a leg.
I want an arm."
I think that if they had grown so frenzied that if they had encountered her, they probably
would have torn her to pieces.
Narrator: Terrified for her life, Marie escapes to Louis's apartments only moments before
the women break into her chambers and tear her bed to shreds.
The king and queen are now at the mercy of the
mob.
What the mob wants is a little attention from their king.
Man: The only way the women can be pacified is for the Royal family to agree to go to
Paris because once they're there in Paris, then they can ultimately be made to do what
the people of Paris wanted.
Narrator: They march 60,000 strong leaving Versailles with carts and wagons, overflowing
with flour from the king's storehouses, flanking the Royal carriage all the way to Paris.
[female interpreter] The king and queen were forced to go back to Paris with the heads
of their guards who had been massacred in the Chateau.
Their heads had been cut off.
This is really a completely, unbridled violence.
The heads were then made up with makeup and paraded at the head of the cortege with the
king and queen following.
Narrator: The king and queen must make their new home in the Tuileries Palace.
They will never see Versailles again.
Man: Once the Royal family moves to Paris, they are the prisoners of Paris.
They know it.
Everybody else knows it.
There are great limits to what they can do or even dream of doing.
They are the prisoners of the capital city.
There's no doubt.
Narrator: Versailles is abandoned and the Assembly moves to Paris.
Power is now with the people.
France will have democracy, new laws and a remarkable and unforgiving form of justice
will make its debut on the revolutionary stage… …the guillotine.
♪ ♪ May 1791, nearly two years have passed since the Royal family and the National Assembly
have moved to Paris.
Robespierre appears frequently at the Assembly and at the Jacobin Club, a debating society
named for the former Jacobin monastery where they gather.
Now, words are the very core of the Revolution and Robespierre speaks with an unfailing moral
compass.
His true north is always the people.
He soon earns the nickname 'The Incorruptible.'
France is now a constitutional monarchy.
The king forced to share power with the revolutionaries in the assembly, but it seems Louis's share
is growing smaller by the day as he is forced to sign law after law diminishing his own
authority and that of the other great feudal regime the Catholic Church.
Louis decides the time has come to escape the confines of the New Republic and mount
a campaign to reclaim his kingdom.
Woman: Louis had decided by 1791 that he needed to regain control of his country.
And he knew he could only do that with the help of a foreign army.
So the idea was to make a break from the Tuileries Palace and to head for the nearest border.
Narrator: June 21, 1791, the king and queen disguise themselves as servants and by cover
of darkness, slip out from under the watchful eye of Paris.
They make an ill-planned run for freedom.
It is long past midnight when the royal family arrives in the small town of Varenne, some
100 miles east of Paris.
They are close to the border of Austria.
Safety just a few miles away.
But their dash to freedom will go no further.
[bell dings] [footsteps] Rumors of the Royal's journey have preceded them to Varenne.
A town official stops the carriage demanding their passports.
The official suspicions are confirmed.
It is the signature of the king himself.
The townsmen is overcome at the sight of his king.
But revolutionary guards nearby show no reverence for the fleeing Royal's.
Woman: He keeps hoping that people will recognize him and there will be a kind of rebellion
in his favor.
And much to his horror and surprise they are not ecstatic to recognize him.
They see him as escaping and basically he's arrested and taken back to Paris.
Woman: The idea that the monarch had tried to abandon his people was psychologically
catastrophic.
That event really broke the bond between Louis and his subjects.
Now they had not only a king who was superfluous, they had a king who was obviously a traitor
as well.
Narrator: With the Royal family official turncoats to the Revolution, power shifts from Louis,
now a prisoner king, to the revolutionaries at the Assembly.
At the very heart of the young revolutionary government is Robespierre.
He shines at the podium calling for liberty, equality and fraternity.
He demands universal suffrage and an end to slavery in the French West Indies.
And most passionately he rails against the death penalty because in the New Age of Enlightenment,
Robespierre wants to discard all remnants of the medieval past.
Europe had inherited a maqam repertoire of execution techniques from the Dark Ages.
Unremittingly cruel deaths by drawing and quartering, hanging, drowning and burning
at the stake.
Man: Well, under the old regime, there was a whole panoply of very gruesome punishments
and decapitation was punishment reserved for the nobility and one of the things that the
revolution wanted from the start was to have everybody equal in death.
They wanted symbolically to have the same punishment available for anyone.
Narrator: Despite Robespierre's opposition, a new killing machine takes center stage in
Paris.
Physician inventor, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, devises a ruthless beheading machine.
Turning old-fashioned decapitation into a humanitarian experience.
Dr. Guillotin describes his new device to the Assembly.
Man: The mechanism falls like thunder.
The head flies off.
Blood spurts.
The man is no more.
Narrator: Always a supporter of bloodshed, the journalist Marat prints an enthusiastic
rant in his paper announcing the device's new name… ….guillotine.
It will soon earn a nickname, The National Razor.
Man: The French revolutionaries believe in humane values.
They believe that unnecessary suffering should not be caused.
And what they like about the guillotine is that it is quick, it's efficient and as far
as we can tell, although no one has returned to tell the tale, it's painless.
Narrator: The guillotine will silence the Revolution's internal enemies, anyone suspected
of plotting to return Louis to the throne.
But it's the enemies surrounding France that most preoccupy the Assembly.
There is a fear that members of the extended Royal family, who fled to Austria, will launch
an armed counter-revolution.
The Assembly calls for a preemptive attack.
A Declaration of War on Austria.
But Robespierre argues against it.
Man: Robespierre is one of the lonely voices who is opposing war because he thinks the
enemy will win.
Robespierre is afraid that the country isn't ready, hasn't got an army that would be able
to defeat the enemy.
The enemy might therefore come in and destroy the Revolution.
Narrator: Robespierre loses the debate.
In April 1792, the Assembly declares war on Austria against a country ruled by Marie Antoinette's
own family.
A nationalist fervor grows.
If Austria defeats the Revolutionary army, Louis will undoubtedly reclaim his throne.
And Marie is suspected of aiding the enemy by corresponding with her relatives in Austria
giving away French troop movements with a stroke of her pen.
All the while, the king and queen feign adherence to the Revolution.
Man: Louis and Marie Antoinette are playing a double game.
They are seeming to go along with the Revolution many times at the same time as they are conspiring
against it.
They are trying to survive.
If you want to be generous, they're survivors, but if you want to be looking at it from the
revolutionary point of view is they're liars.
[explosion] Narrator: With the French army already suffering huge losses on the border,
word reaches Paris that Austria's ally, Prussia, has joined the invasion.
The enemy troops are mobilized under the command of the Duke of Brunswick, a Prussian general.
Tension pervades the streets of Paris.
And then the newspapers print a letter from the Duke of Brunswick, a manifesto threatening
the destruction of Paris if any harm comes to their Royal majesties, the king and queen.
The misguided threat wildly backfires.
August 10, 1792 27,000 armed citizens fueled by indignant rage head to the Tuileries Palace
and fall upon the king's guards in a savage attack.
By the end of the day, over 800 from both sides are dead.
The king flees to safety in the Assembly, but the monarchy is no more.
Louis is officially stripped of his title.
The French Republic is born.
[people cheering] The blade of the guillotine is christened with the blood of Louie's remaining
guards and Robespierre, once a staunch opponent of the death penalty, has had a change of
heart.
The birth of the New Republic can only begin with the death of a king.
Dr. Guillotine's chilling new device hangs over Paris like a warning, the penalty for
defying Revolutionary law and order.
Freshly christened with the blood of the king's guards, it will soon put an end to the king
himself.
By August 1792, with the king deposed and the Royal family secluded in the temple prison,
Robespierre and his Jacobin's are locked in a battle with the moderates of the Assembly,
the Girondin, for control of the national government.
And on the streets of Paris, a new political movement takes hold.
As a symbol of their rejection of aristocratic tradition, ordinary citizens refuse to wear
the knee breeches or culotte of the aristocrats.
They call themselves the Sansculotte, those without knee pants.
Man: The Sansculotte considered themselves the true people of France.
They were not the poorest of the poor.
They tended to be fairly well-off, artisans, shopkeepers, people like that.
But they were people who at least claim to work with their hands.
Not wearing the breeches, not wearing the culotte for the Sansculotte was simply symbolism
of being not an aristocrat.
Being an ordinary man of people.
Narrator: The Sansculotte seize control of Paris's city government.
While the Jacobin's and Girondin's steer the rest of the country from the National Assembly
now called The Convention.
The Convention struggles with the command of the beleaguered French Army which is swiftly
losing ground to Austria and Prussia.
[multiple gunshots] While fighting back incursions at the border, the Revolutionary Government
cracks down on enemies withing.
Royalists traitors who might deliver Paris into the hands of the invaders.
More than a thousand people are arrested and herded into prison.
Priests, journalists, ordinary men and women.
Robespierre concentrates on the internal crisis, but his friend, the Minister of Justice , George
Danton, motivates men young and old to join the war on the frontier.
He is gregarious and loud.
Everything that Robespierre is not.
Soon, Danton's name is heard throughout Paris.
Man: Danton is a bigger than life character.
A man full of life; full of bombast; tremendous drinker; and the barter who though he's from
the educated classes himself, is a guy who, unlike Robespierre can physically identify
with the working people in a way that Robespierre simply cannot.
Narrator: As the enemy closes in, Danton's fiery rhetoric mobilizes the people, inspiring
many to take to the battlefront.
Man: At one of the moments of greatest peril for the Revolution, the Austrian and Prussian
armies are invading, he gets up in front of the people of Paris and shouts, "il nous l'audace,
encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace et la Patrie sera sauvée!"
"Boldness, more boldness, forever boldness and the father land is saved."
He's really one of the people who manages to rally the country against the invader.
It's an extraordinary moment.
Narrator: With so many able-bodied men leaving for the front, Paris is left defenseless.
Its jails bursting with political prisoners.
An unsettling fear floods the city.
The growing mass of prisoners may be impossible to contain.
Marat puts out a bloodthirsty call for revolutionary citizens to descend upon the prisons and slaughter
all inside.
Man: The foreign armies were advancing on Paris.
Had they linked up in Paris, with these bitter enemies of the Revolutions in the prisoners,
of course, then the results would have been fairly horrific from the standpoint of the
people.
Narrator: In the first week of September, disastrous news arrives from the front.
Prussia has taken Verdun, a town on the road to Paris.
The enemy is now just miles away.
The feared, gripping Paris explodes.
[glass shattering] The Sansculotte break into the prisons and unleash a furious assault
on the city's inmates.
They will leave no traitor alive.
Man: And the Sansculotte went to the prisons, particularly the prisons where refractory
priests were being held; where nobles were being held; where political prisoners were
being held; and they started carrying out their own impromptu trials that were very
short and that very often simply ended with slaughter.
Narrator: Women are raped and brutalized.
Priests disemboweled.
Aristocrats hacked to pieces.
In a primeval slaughter, more than 1600 are left dead in a matter of days.
When word of the September massacre spreads throughout Europe, enemies of the Revolution
are sickened.
Across the English Channel, the London Times gives voice to the revulsion.
[voice-over] Are these "the Rights of Man?"
Is this the liberty of human nature?
The most savage four footed tyrants that range unexplored Africa rise superior to these two-legged
Parisian animals.
Narrator: The Revolution has taken an inalterable turn.
Even Robespierre understands that things have gone to far.
That the people cannot manage the Revolution on their own.
They need guidance, an iron hand.
And with the power of his words, the incorruptible rises to the forefront as the man who will
guide the Revolution.
Robespierre had once pushed for a Constitutional Monarchy.
Now he believes there is no longer room for the king.
A momentous decision is made.
France will put its own king on trial.
With the verdict a forgone conclusion, the only debate left is punishment.
The Moderates, the Girondin, call for sparing Louis's life which isolates them in the convention.
Man: The Girondin really crystallized as a faction in the Convention over the debate
over the king because while they certainly wanted a republic, they were less sure that
the king should actually have to die.
Narrator: But the Girondin are outnumbered by the Jacobin call for blood.
Man: Why did the Jacobin's want to kill the king?
I think they wanted to kill the king because as Robespierre brilliantly said, you have
to kill the king so the Revolution can live.
If the king is right, then the Revolution is wrong.
Man: In any system there had ever been, there's only on penalty for treason and that is death.
So, in this sense, if the king is guilty of betraying the country in a time of war then
the argument is that he must suffer the death of a traitor.
[gavel bangs] Narrator: On January 20, 1793, Louis the 16th is declared guilty.
The sentence is read.
The king must die.
That evening Louis is briefly reunited with his family.
Calm in the face of their tears, he promises to return the next morning to say a final
goodbye.
He will not.
He cannot bear his family's anguish and must not weaken on the way to the guillotine.
[crowd shouting] The next morning a closed carriage brings Louis to the scaffold.
And he stoically makes his way to the blade.
♪ ♪ He attempts to give a speech.
[voice-over] I trust that my death will be for the happiness of my people, but I grieve
for France and I fear that she may suffer the anger of the Lord.
Narrator: But the guards drown him out with the drum roll.
At 10:22am, the man who once was king is no more.
[crowd cheering] In the temple prison Marie hears the cannons fire heralding the death
of her husband.
She collapses in despair.
[people laughing] The king's blood is spilt.
The revolutionaries victorious.
But the enemies of the Revolution will soon claim a victory of their own.
Their target?
The man who was calling for so many heads to roll, Jean-Paul Marat.
♪ ♪ The execution of Louis the 16th marks ultimate victory for the revolutionaries.
A pivotal moment when a young nation, French Republic, is literally born in blood.
By the end of 1792, the radical Jacobin's, believing the young Revolution is in danger
of being sabotaged by traitors, are steering the Revolution with more and more violent
means.
But the Girodin, representing the people of the French countryside, want to slow the ascending
violence for fear it will lead to Civil War.
Their most vocal opponent, Jean-Paul Marat, strikes back at the Girodin with furious tirades
in his newspaper naming those he believes are plotting against the Revolution.
Marat who once called for the execution of 200 now demands 200,000 heads fall.
Man: When you look at Marat's journalism it's got one basic principle which has been more
extreme than anybody else and called for people to be killed.
If you look at Marat's journalism all the time, he'd say, if only we chopped off a few
heads then things will be all right.
And when things aren't all right if only chop up a few more heads things will be all right.
Suddenly people in Paris being to massacre people and Marat is the first to claim credit
for that.
Narrator: But the radical movement hasn't taken hold everywhere.
People outside of Paris are furious at the spiraling brutality of the Jacobin's and call
for an end to the bloodline.
And the message reaches the lovely Charlotte Corday, an unassuming yet determined young
woman from the provinces.
Man: Charlotte Corday is an average person in the city of Caen.
She's appalled by the killing that's going on there and she perhaps rightly considers
Marat one of the chief authors of that.
He's been instrumental on the radical side of the Revolution.
His [speaking French] is still calling for heads.
Narrator: July 13, 1793, Charlotte Corday arrives in Paris.
She knows that the friend of the people has an open-door policy at his home where he can
be found at nearly any hour soaking in his medicinal bath.
Corday comes on the pretense that she carries a list of traitors, those collaborating with
foreign armies to put an end to the Revolution.
Marat asks for the list promising Corday that the traitors will be guillotined the next
day.
Man: Having given him that, she then produces a poignard, a little stiletto and stabs him
in the chest.
[suspensful music] Narrator: The so called 'friend of the people' dies instantly.
The angry voice of his newspaper silenced.
Man: When the Revolution turns bloodthirsty, it's very easy to say it was his fault.
And that, of course, is what those who hated him or feared him did say.
And that's one of the reasons why Charlotte Corday actually murders him in 1793 because
she regards him as responsible for many of the bloody atrocities that have actually occurred.
Narrator: Corday makes no attempt to escape.
At her trial, she is unrepentant.
[male voice-over] What did you expect to achieve in assassinating Marat?
[Charlotte voice-over] Peace.
Now that he's dead, peace will return to my country.
Narrator: Charlotte Corday is swiftly executed and her dream of peace dies along with her.
She has killed Marat, the man, but she has created Marat the legend.
His death most famously depicted by the Revolutionary painter Jacques-Louis David.
Man: He became a martyr.
He became a kind of almost religious figure.
You had people offering a prayer that went heart of Jesus; heart of Marat.
You had these scenes at his funeral where the bathtub in which he was murdered was sort
of put up on the altar almost as if it was a kind of crucifix.
Woman: If you look at David's painting of Marat's death, Marat's body is draped in precisely
the same way as the body of Christ is depicted in classic representations of the Pietá,
the descent from the cross.
So clearly there's an identification of Marat with Christ, with Marat representing the new
kind of god of the Radical Republic.
Narrator: Robespierre is envious of the adoration lavished upon Marat, but ever the pragmatist
he turns his attention to pressing matters at hand.
Because though Marat is dead, there are still others calling for blood….
royal blood.
The Conciergerie, deaths dark antechamber, eight months after the execution of her husband
and just days after the killing of Charlotte Corday, Marie Antoinette is jailed here in
a hideous cell utterly alone.
Man: One of the worst things that happens to Marie after the execution of Louis is her
children are ripped away from her.
Her children were the most important thing to her and she knew that her son was going
to be subjected to terrible abuse to make him forget that he was ever royal by these
revolutionaries.
And it turns out she was right.
It only took a couple years after that her son died of terrible neglect and abuse.
Narrator: The once vain Marie Antoinette is 38-years-old, but the Revolution has aged
her beyond her years.
[speaking French] [interpreter] Marie Antoinette had been a very pretty woman, elegant until
the Revolution.
From 1788-89 she got thinner.
Her hair went white.
She abandoned all her coquetry and her pretty things.
She became emaciated.
When she arrived for her trial, she was unrecognizable.
Narrator: On October 15, Marie is put on trial.
accused of high treason and depleting the national treasure.
[overlapping voices] The little evidence offered is salacious and vengeful rumor.
A final charge is added to the list.
She is accused of incest with her son.
At this, Marie stands to defend herself.
[Marie voice-over] I appeal to the conscience and feelings of every mother present to declare
if there be one amongst you who does not shudder at the idea of such horrors.
[speaking French] [interpreter] And at that moment there was a change in the mood because
all the women felt they were implicated and they realized they had gone too far with these
accusations.
Narrator: In a moment of public sympathy, Marie hopes she will be deported to Austria.
But her hopes are dashed when the sentence is handed down.
She is to meet the same fate as her husband.
Man: Marie Antoinette was, in a sense, doomed from the start.
She was the symbol of this Austrian alliance that had proved disastrous for France.
She was, along with her husband, a laughing stock because of the apparent sexual failure
of their marriage and she was a symbol of court culture at a time when people were coming
to see the Court culture itself as something completely corrupt and terrible for the country.
So for all these reasons she was hated like no queen of France had ever been hated before.
She was loathed.
She was reviled.
Narrator: From her cell, Marie writes a final letter bidding farewell to her children and
family, promising to be brave.
Her long gray hair is cut in preparation for the blade.
Her hands are tightly bound.
As she is escorted from the prison gates, she expects a carriage.
Instead, there awaits a common criminals cart.
Man: She hopes when she's taken off to execution that she's going to get the same treatment
that the king got.
Meaning she would be in an enclosed carriage so that the crowd couldn't get her.
But they just put her in an open wagon where people would shout all sorts of things, horrible
things.
Horrible threats at her.
[vocalizing] Narrator: The shadow of the sovereign she once was, Marie Antoinette maintains a
queenly dignity as she is paraded through the streets of Paris.
[bell tolling] [vocalizing] [bell tolling continues] [vocalizing continues] Her name
and the charges against her are read out.
[bell tolling continues] [vocalizing continues] The last Queen of France is dead.
Several days later, following countless more executions, a member of the National Convention
notes the pointless waste of life as one after another of his colleagues are lost to the
guillotine.
The Revolution is like Saturn devouring its own children who says, [Danton sniffs] "Revolutions,
my friend, cannot be made with rosewater."
The bloodshed has only just begun.
♪ ♪ September 1793, four years into the Revolution and France is being torn apart.
There is violent insurrection in the provinces and huge losses in the faltering war against
Europe.
In one blistering defeat, the British Navy takes the port city of Toulon.
Europe is eating away at France's borders.
Man: France, the single largest country in Western Europe.
It's the most populous country in Western Europe.
It has been the great military power.
And, of course, when it entered into the Revolution a lot of its traditional enemies and also
a lot of its traditional allies, like a-ha, this is our chance to not to carve a piece
off of the actual territory of France, but certainly to enrich ourselves at its expense
and to weaken it permanently.
Man: France is isolated in the whole of Europe.
It's being blockaded by Britain.
It's being attacked and invaded by Austria and by Prussia.
The people of Paris are seized by a fear that the victory, the counter-revolution, will
lead to a bloodbath.
Narrator: Danton and Robespierre, the star orators of the Convention, realize that they
must boldly strike out to save the Revolution.
They convinced their colleagues to institute a menacing new form of martial law.
[voice-over] It is time for all Frenchman to enjoy sacred equality.
It is time to impose this equality by signal acts of justice upon traitors and conspirators.
Make terror the order of the day.
Narrator: Thus beings a new chapter in the Revolution.
A period of violent repression called the terror.
In a remarkable reversal, the Revolutionaries suspend the new constitution. and all the
rights it was to guarantee.
Police spies scatter throughout the country.
Anyone suspected of counter revolutionary activity is rounded up, quickly tried and
sent to the national razor.
Woman: The reign of terror was conceived as an emergency government.
What they understood by terror was striking terror into the hearts of the enemies of the
Republic so that they would be either scared straight as it were or arrested and disposed
of.
Narrator: The slightest suspicion can send anyone to the scaffold.
Politicians who say a kind word of the defunct monarchy.
Anyone who uses the formal monsieur or madam.
instead of the new form of address: citizen.
The air is fraught with paranoia.
Neighbors denounce neighbors.
The incessant rolling of the death carts rattles through the streets of Paris.
Woman: Execution is absolutely hanging over people's heads in the sense that we know in
Paris there are police spies And there are quite a few police spies everywhere standing
in bread lines, listening to what the women are saying, and turning them in if they don't
like what they hear.
You could be turned in not just for complaining about the high price of bread, but you could
be turned in supposedly even for not being enthusiastic enough about where things were
going and the successes of the Revolution.
So, just about anything that would stand out for commentary could get you into trouble.
Narrator: The Convention sets up a Revolutionary tribunal expediting trials and executions
with ruthless efficiency.
To consolidate power, they form a twelve man council and call it the Committee of Public
Safety.
Man: Ultimately power had to be delegated to a smaller group and that group became the
Committee of Public Safety.
Ultimately it became twelve people who really ruled France as a kind of collective dictatorship.
Narrator: With his masterful words and revolutionary vision, Robespierre soon emerges as the committee's
fiercest guiding voice.
And that voice is calling for more blood.
Man: One of the paradoxes in Robespierre's political life is that he very early on is
a passionate proponent of the death penalty.
And, of course, this is thrown back in his face later when he becomes an equally passionate
proponent of terror and the guillotine.
He never particularly responds to that except to say, 'Well, times have changed.'
Narrator: The Revolution has hardened Robespierre.
Once an impassioned supporter of a free press, he now reinstates censorship, a vestige of
the old regime.
And with the church already under attack, Robespierre stands idly by as one of the most
radical revolutionaries, Jacques-René Hébert proposes a new agenda, dechristianization.
Man: When the crisis of the war, an internal rebellion is at its height, people begin to
say the root of all the problem is priests, is religion.
And what we've got to do if we're ever going to be safe against the enemies of Revolution
is destroy the power of the Catholic Church.
Superstition, fanaticism, that's what religion is all about and therefore what we have to
do is stamp out this whole thing entirely.
Narrator: Streets carrying the word 'Saint' are renamed.
Religious icons are destroyed and replaced with tributes to the new Saint, Marat.
Man: If the church came to seem simply the enemy to the radical revolutionaries, churches
and cathedrals are simply stripped of their altars.
The stained glass is smashed.
Statues are smashed.
The wealth of the church is to simply cart it off.
Of course, for European opinion, this was something even more shocking than the death
of the King.
Narrator: Not even then Christian calendar is spared.
Years are numbered no longer from the birth of Christ, but from September 1792, the overthrow
of the monarchy.
It is now year one.
Months are renamed according to the seasons.
July becomes Thermidor.
April: Floréal.
Months are broken into three weeks of ten days each.
Man: The Revolutionary calendar was certainly designed as a kind of weapon against Christianity,
against Christian belief.
Of course by having a 10-day week, you'd no longer have Sundays so people wouldn't even
know what day Sunday was anymore.
That's what they hoped.
Narrator: The Terror spreads across France.
Insurrections are put down with a vicious, unrelenting cruelty.
In the city of Lyon, where counter-revolutionaries are gaining ground, the Committee of Public
Safety sets a brutal example.
[overlapping voices] Hundreds of rebels are tied up, marched into fields and mowed down
all mass.
[cannon fires] [bodies fall] A region called the Vendée, in the west of France, has also
become a counter revolutionary stronghold.
Rebels and priests are tied together and packed onto boats that are then mercilessly sunk.
Up to a hundred thousand people are killed in the Vendée alone.
In Paris, the blade falls at an ever more frantic pace.
But the French armies are finally seeing victories on the frontier.
Under a brilliant young commander named Napoleon Bonaparte, the French Army sends the British
Navy into a demoralizing retreat at Toulon.
The Revolution is on the rise.
Robespierre is at the height of his power.
He has taken on the enemies of the Revolution, ensured its success through Terror.
Man: For time, the Terror was very effective as a means of getting the country together,
getting the government together and fighting what was after all a war on several fronts.
On the Eastern front.
On the Northern front.
Against external enemies.
Also, a Civil War in the Vendée which is the bloodiest of all.
Also, a Civil War against the supporters of the Girondins and other Revolutionaries who
had turned against the government in Paris.
Narrator: The Terror has achieved its goals, but it does not stop.
And it will not stop until it devours the very man who unleashed it: Maximilien Robespierre.
With the blood of the Terror, Maximilien Robespierre has rescued the Revolution.
An invigorated army is repelling attacks at the border and internal dissent has been all
but crushed.
At the height of his success, Robespierre dreams up a loftier goal yet, to use more
Terror to mold a new kind of society, a Republic of Virtue.
Man: By virtue he means civic virtue.
It's an active principle for Robespierre.
For example, you cannot be a virtuous citizen by simply obeying the laws and keeping your
head down.
You must actively be involved in the work of the state and that includes, for Robespierre,
destroying the enemies of the state.
Narrator: On February 5, 1794, Robespierre gives a speech outlining his philosophy.
[voice-over] Terror without virtue is disastrous.
But virtue without terror is powerless.
Man: He associates terror with virtue.
Terror at that moment becomes, in his thinking, an instrument by which you create.
Virtue.
Narrator: But others disagree.
For Danton the Revolution is heading down the wrong path.
He and his followers, the Dantonists, believe it is time to bring the Terror to a halt.
It has served its purpose and is in danger of feeding the revolutionaries into their
own fire.
Woman: By the spring of 1794, things are beginning to go better.
The food situation is no longer so bad and the war effort is going better and Danton
is basically saying we need to get a new footing for the government.
We need to move to a kind of normalization.
Robespierre believes it's too soon.
Danton will start organizing a group to argue that we should end the Terror.
Robespierre will see this as a direct threat to the government.
He will not see it as just a difference of opinion about the direction of policy.
He will see it as potential treason.
Narrator: And in Robespierre's Republic of Virtue there is only one response to treason.
The Datonists are rounded up and quickly sentenced to death.
Robespierre has sent thousands to the scaffold, but is uneasy with the blood of execution.
He will not attend the beheadings of his former friends and allies.
As he steps up to the blade, Danton shouts, [voice-over] 'My only regret is that I'm going
before that rat, Robespierre!'
Narrator: With the Dantonists out of the way, Robespierre launches France into an even bloodier
more horrifying period, The Great Terror.
Man: The Great Terror is the name given to the last phase of the Terror in the spring
of 1794 into the summer of 1794.
It's the period at which the tempo of executions really starts to increase in which the atmosphere
of paranoia particularly in Paris, but really across the country starts to increase exponentially.
You can track the number of executions until it's up to almost 800 per month in Paris.
Towards the end even more.
Paris's executioner is busier than ever.
But on June 6, 1794, the role of the carts comes to a halt.
The guillotine hangs silent.
Robespierre has declared a new religious holiday, The Festival of the Supreme Being.
He wants to replace the old Catholic God with a new one, The Goddess of Reason.
Man: One thing about Robespierre is that he never supported these atheist policies.
He believed that people needed a divinity to believe in and he helped sponsor this cult
that was called the Cult of the Supreme Being with this extraordinary tableau in Paris.
And I believe it was June of 1794, which had choirs of people dressed in white singing.
You had this kind of paper mache mountain that was built in the center of Paris and
then at the critical moment of the ceremony you had Robespierre himself sort of emerging
on the top of this mountain, clad in a toga and marching down.
And I think at this moment, a lot of people felt, 'All right.
Who does he really think he is?
Does he think he's God here?
Does he think he's the King?'
Narrator: As the Great Terror spirals on, Robespierre's colleagues see the Festival
of the Supreme Being as his departure from the realm of reality.
Man: There are those who think that Robespierre really has reached so extreme and so unreasonable
a position that they can't turn back.
That his fanaticism has somehow overtaken him and there are those who think he's just
gone nuts.
Narrator: Once again Robespierre's suspicions turned to those closest at hand.
On June 27, now the ninth of Thermidor, he appears before the Convention and delivers
a speech of threats.
It is the last speech he will ever give.
Woman: Robespierre makes a tactical error.
He comes in and announces that he has a new list of enemies of the Republic, but he won't
give the list.
Therefore, everyone is afraid they might be on the list and when he comes back the next
day to give the list, he is arrested before he can speak.
Narrator: An unexpected chorus of voices shouts Robespierre down.
He is stunned into silence.
The deputies declare him an outlaw and immediately remove him from the convention.
Robespierre and several of his associates are taken to City Hall where they remain under
watch for the night.
Shots ring out in the early morning.
Guard's race to the second floor.
They fling the doors open to a grisly scene.
One of Robespierre's allies has thrown himself from the window.
Another has taken a pistol to his head.
And Robespierre is found semi-conscious with a bullet wound to the face.
His jaw shattered on an apparent suicide attempt.
Robespierre spends his last hours on the table of the Committee of Public Safety in the very
room where he had piloted the Terror to its hideously, bloody peak.
As he is ridiculed and insulted by his former colleagues, Robespierre is unable to respond.
The Grand Master of Oratory has been silenced.
In the Conciergerie, where the last Queen of France had preceded him, Robespierre is
prepared for the national razor.
His cellmate, the Revolutionary Saint-Just points to a painting of the Rights of Man
and declares, ' At least we did that.'
Robespierre had spearheaded a Revolution and changed the face of France.
He had reordered society and engineered a bloody and tyrannical system to ensure its
success.
But he was destined to be one of its final victims.
Man: It turns out that there is a great deal of enthusiasm for ending the Terror.
Nobody can figure out how to do it.
And what turns out to be the case is that the only thing that will end the Terror and
apparently the only thing they can all agree upon is the fall of Robespierre.
[people cheering] Narrator: On July 27, 1794, the guillotine comes down on the incorruptible
and the last blood of the Terror is shed.
The Terror dies with Robespierre, but the Revolution does not.
The Rights of Man, democracy, the New Republic, the accomplishments of the Revolution would
far outlive any of the revolutionaries themselves.
France would enter a period of uncertainty frozen between fear of another Terror, or
worse yet, a return to the oppressive monarchy that preceded it.
Five stagnant years would pass before power once again consolidated in the hands of a
single man, Napoleon Bonaparte.
Historians disagree over the end of the Revolution.
Some believe it died with the rise of Napoleon.
Others maintain that the Revolution lived on into the 19th century and beyond.
Woman: The Revolution was the first and enduring model of a people taking its destiny in its
own hands.
The idea that the subjects of the oldest, the most established, the most glorious monarchy
in Europe could decide to completely rewrite their history was something that had extraordinary
resonance.
Narrator: The Revolution tore apart the old feudal fabric of Europe and forever changed
the course of Western civilization.
Woman: The question raised by the French Revolution is how much violence is justified in achieving
a better society?
Do people have the right to overthrow what they see as an unjust system to replace it
with what they are convinced in their hearts is a more just system?
How much violence is justified in doing that?
We still face this question today.
Narrator: As Robespierre and his colleagues were driving their county into the future,
many of them must have wondered what the final outcome would be.
More than 200 years after the birth of the French Republic, the ghost of Robespierre
hangs over Revolutions from Russia to Vietnam; China to Latin America.
The French experiments with democracy have inspired models all over the world wherever
tyranny takes root the cry for justice is eternal.
For liberty, equality, fraternity.
For Revoltuion. ♪ ♪.