All of the questions that I've been exploring in recent lectures come to a head in the middle of 1794. That's to say, when is the Revolution safe? When is the territory of the Republic safe from invasion and counter revolution? When can all of the emergency measures be wound down? When can suspects be released from prison? When can the Constitution of 1793, be put in to effect? And underpinning all of that is that question of, what is the goal of the Revolution anyway? What is it that Republicans are fighting for? Is it simply the military safety of the Republic? Or, is it the creation of a different type of society in general? It comes to a head, because in June 1794, the last of the foreign troops is expelled from the territory of the French Republic, and defeated, just over the border in the small village now in Belgium, of Fleurus on the 26th of June. You can see the flat lands in which that battle is fought, and the use that the French troops made of a hot air balloon, as a way of watching over what the enemy was up to. But it's a crucial military victory that comes in the midst of many others on the borders of France. And it poses the question most acutely about, when it is safe to wind down emergency government? When is the peace being achieved, after all, that is a core objective of everything that Republicans have been have been fighting for. And, it exposes, most critically, that great dilemma that I explored in my previous lecture, and, that is the acceleration in the number of executions, particularly political executions in Paris, after the Law of the 22nd Prairial. Just a fortnight after that law is passed, the republic is ostensibly safe, from foreign invasion, and yet the executions continue at an horrific rate in Paris in particular. There is also the question of the evidence that is mounting of atrocities, having been committed in various parts of the country as counter-revolution has been suppressed. And nowhere more so than in the Western city of Nantes where as the Vendéan rebels are repressed, some of the measures that are put in place to punish those who are caught are truly horrific. The critical question becomes in June, July 1794, how the committee of public safety, and the Convention in general, are going to respond, to military victory, to the achievement of military goals, to increasing evidence of atrocities having been committed? What is now to be the way forward? It's a desperate moment, for Robespierre in particular, because shortly after the Festival of the Supreme Being, and the passage of the law of the 22nd imperial, he falls ill. It's one of six or eight periods of ever longer illness that Robespierre suffers from during the revolution. That time he's absent from public life for about six weeks, from the middle of June 1794, through to the 26th of July, the day of the 8th of Thermidor, where he goes to the Convention, to make a long awaited speech, to the members of the Convention, where everybody's expecting that he, as a key spokesperson for the committee of public safety, a much esteemed, admired and respected man, as well as feared, who is seen in many ways to be the spokesperson of the committee of public safety, is expected to map out some way forward, some way many people hope towards peace and constitutional government. Instead on the 8th of Thermidor, the 26th of July, he delivers a long two hour speech a rambling speech where he makes vague accusations hardly names anybody, there are people in the Convention he says who should be brought to trial, because of excesses that they've committed. But when people yell out at him, from the benches of the Convention, who are you talking about, name names, he refuses to, and simply falls back on saying, well, you know who you are, the guilty people know in their consciences who they are. And he really leaves all of those who've got reasons to feel threatened or to feel guilty, people like Carrier, he gives them no option but to organise for his overthrow. And the next day when he rises to speak in the Convention, he's attacked on all sides. Someone who's sitting in the galleries, captures brilliantly I think with this rapid sketch that they do, the moment at which Robespierre realizes, I'm not even going to be able to be allowed to speak, and explain the way forward, what we should now do. He's howled down as a dictator. People in the National Convention who've admired him, supported him lionised him, across the years now turn on him in an extraordinary display of anger. He's prevented from speaking, and he and his allies, his closest allies are effectively charged and sent to the Revolutionary Tribunal. The problem is that no one in the prisons of Paris will accept them, and they end up holding up at the town hall of Paris, and calling for support, which is not forthcoming from the streets of Paris. Finally some Gendarme break in, Robespierre is pictured here being shot, some historians would argue that he tried to commit suicide rather than being shot, but certainly has his lower jaw blown away, and the following day, he and his supporters, ultimately about 90 of them in Paris are taken to the guillotine, and put to death. Very rapidly, after the execution of Robespierre and his associates, an extraordinary process of scapegoating occurs. Where all of those people who might have felt that they were excesses during the terror, or even that they themselves were personally responsible found a way of saying, it's Robespierre, this dictator, this tyrant, he's to blame for anything that we did that went beyond what was strictly necessary. That even though Robespierre, in fact, gives very few orders during the year of the Committee of Public Safety, it's very convenient to blame him and his close allies for all of those things that people might feel uncomfortable about. And this year of the Terror, as it is immediately dubbed, by hindsight, has always been the most controversial, period of the French Revolution, and one which historians disagree about, even today. Often our responses to that extraordinary year, are a function of the times in which we live. Have a look, for example, at the attitude of this man, the french historian, a very anti-revolutionary historian Pierre Chaunu, writing in 1983, at a time where there is mounting criticism, within the Soviet block, particularly Poland, towards the Soviet Union and its authoritarian controls. Chaunu says this about the period of the Terror: the Jacobin period can only appear today as the first act, the foundation stone of a long and bloody series stretching from 1792 to our own times, from Franco-French genocide in the Catholic west, the Vendée, to the Soviet gulag, to the destruction caused by the Chinese cultural revolution, to the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. In other words, for Chaunu, writing in the context of debate about authoritarian, or totalitarian rule, he sees the period of the terror being the first act, that ultimately will lead through the Soviet Union and China, to the atrocities of genocide in Cambodia. You might notice in passing that he refers to the repression of the Vendée as a genocide, which the vast majority of historians would completely disagree with, in that there really is no evidence that republican troops tried to exterminate people simply because they were living in the West of France. A very different context informed the view of Robert Palmer, a distinguished American historian, in his book Twelve Who Ruled about the Committee of Public Safety: Robespierre in demanding virtue, wrote Palmer, was not simply yearning for a vague abstraction found in books, but demanding something that the Revolution sadly needed. Had he been able to compromise a little more with reality, had he been more free of the flaws which he saw in others, he might have accomplished more in the end. As we read through the catalogue of charges which Robespierre announced that revolutionary government wish to see in France, we sense a certain similarity to what we might have read in the morning paper. Maximilien with all his faults, which were many, was one of the half dozen major prophets of Democracy. Think about what, Palmer is referring to here when he says a certain similarity to what we might have read in the morning paper. He wrote those words in 1941, at the most critical moment of the Second World War for the democracies, with the destruction of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the genuine fear that people have across the democratic world that the Second World War may well be lost to the forces of Nazism and it's allies. And in that situation writes Palmer, I can understand what Robespierre was on about and why he kept talking about the need for sacrifice, virtue, and if necessary repression of counter-revolution. But the period of the terror, the year two, remains a period of extraordinary controversy, a period that is constantly rethought, re-debated by students of the French Revolution.
