How the French Revolution Collapsed Into Terror
The Rest Is History ·How the French Revolution collapsed into Terror: the first of The Rest Is History's series on the Reign of Terror, built around Jean-Paul Marat, the failed scientist turned bloodthirsty pamphleteer of L'Ami du Peuple. Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland trace his rise from provincial quack medicine and humiliation by the French Academy to his election to the National Convention, framing him - following Keith Michael Baker's new biography - as the first modern populist, whose conspiracy-soaked rhetoric prepared the ground for massacres he then justified. The episode then assembles the crises of 1793: hyperinflation and bread riots, a war France started and was losing, the Vendee rising, and General Dumouriez's defection to the Austrians, which seemed to prove that traitors were everywhere. Out of that panic the institutions of the Terror are improvised week by week - the Revolutionary Tribunal, deputies on mission, watch committees and the Committee of Public Safety - with no master plan, as Saturn prepares to devour its children. The Girondins' attempt to impeach Marat ends in his triumphant acquittal and their own destruction in the insurrection of 31 May - 2 June 1793. In Normandy, the young Charlotte Corday, reading Plutarch and appalled by the bloodshed, resolves to strike the tyrant: on 13 July 1793 she stabs Marat in his medicinal bath. The murder changes everything and solves nothing. Interrogators refuse to believe a woman acted alone; Corday is guillotined on 17 July, dying with startling composure, while Marat becomes a martyr with an explicitly Christian cult - relics, a sacred heart, cities renamed in his honor. Seventeen days after Danton is dropped from the Committee of Public Safety, Robespierre joins it: the Terror proper is about to begin.