Episode 500: A Whiff of Grapeshot

The French Republic has survived invasion and rebellion, but it was exhausted. The Convention that had once trembled before Robespierre, now scrambled to dismantle the machinery of terror he had built. And so on the twenty fourth of August seventeen ninety four, the Convention decided to reorganize the government, deliberately fracturing and spreading out power. Sixteen different committees would now replace the all powerful Committee of Public Safety, hopefully making it impossible

for one person to dominate. It was, as the deputy boiset de Angelias explained, a republic of committees lest tyranny reappear. The next few weeks saw the steady erosion of Jacobin control. On August twenty ninth, a new group emerged in the streets, the Muskdins. They were young, fashionable, middle class Parisians, smelling of musk and armed with canes. Eager to avenge the terror, they prowled the cafes where Jacobins once gathered, shouting down

with the drinkers of blood, as so often happens. Unfortunately with a revolution, when one party falls, the next simply steps up to take its place, behaving in the exact same way, but with an eye for retribution, and so the wheel of the French relution continued to span them. Now. Meanwhile, the French armies were suddenly on the frontier's triumphant. On August the thirtieth, General Pugeout retook Conde Lees Gate, and so for the first time since seventeen ninety two, there

were no foreign troops on French soil. But victory again could not disguise the domestic collapse. If the reason for all the terror and for all the suspicion was fear of a monarchist plot within France, and because of these foreign armies that were perched everywhere around Paris. You would again think the expulsion of foreign troops would end those concerns, but they simply don't. And so on August the thirty first, Paris itself, for the first time was placed under direct

federal government control. It's the first time that you don't just have a Parisian mayor in charge. This is an acknowledgment that revolutionary sections of citizens, once the beating heart of radical democracy, had suddenly become a liability to the survival of France. The people, it turned out, needed to be controlled. Maybe Louis was right about something. Oh I'm sorry, maybe citizen Cape had been right about something. In a faint spirit of preservation continued to stir among the deputies.

On September the one, the Musee des Monuments Francais, was founded to save cathedrals, tombs and relics of the old monarchy from the mobs. Suddenly somebody realized, Hey, we might actually want all that stuff someday. Best not let it be tossed on an old Savonarola style pyre. This was an extraordinary reversal. Of course, the same revolution that had melted down bells and smashed the images of saints now

began to regret its own vandalism. The Abbe Gregorie coined the word bandalisme on September the thirteenth, warning that to destroy is not to purify, to respect art, it's not to betray liberty. Religion, once a weapon of the terror, was now suppressed in a new and different way. Instead, on September the eighteenth, the state would simply stop paying constitutional priests and stop paying for the maintenance of church properties, the Deputies declaring no more salaries for superstition. So the

Convention wasn't necessarily interested in restoring old Catholic faith. In restoring the old Church was actually just turning its back on religion in general, abandoning Catholicism and any form of Christianity or religion to that matter, to the private sphere. A week later, the ashes of the murdered Jacobin journalist Jean Paul Morant were carried into the Pantheon, which was

the final sort of echo of revolutionary canonization. Unfortunately, within months, those exact same ashes would once again be taken out for Paul Maraut just wanted to rest in peace. I'm guessing. By October the atmosphere had become once again thick with words of retribution and recommation. Paris sections once the voices of the san Culos were now riven by shouting matches between those who had supported the terror or at least acknowledged it, and those who now wanted to punish those

who they felt had been complicit in it. The Convention, however, wasn't having it this time, and struck first, and so on October the third, the leaders of armed san Culos bands who were demanding punishment for the terror were simply all rounded up and arrested. The theory that if you just cut all the heads off all the snakes, maybe you could put the genie back in its box. Probably not, And while France's internal conflicts deepened, its armies actually continued

to do shockingly well. Fell On October the sixth and on October the twenty seconds, the Convention created a school to train engineers and artillery officers, and it would soon produce the very men who would serve under Napoleon. You see, France had actually hit on something pretty powerful with the leve am Moss. What it turned out was that we were entering into an age where sheer manpower counted for a lot. We weren't in the age of knights and

professional fighting men anymore. Yes, of course it helped to have professional officers, but it turned out with a little rudimentary training and drill, most people could learn how to fire a rifle, and since we were in an age where that was the main way of fighting, if you could enroll more men into your army than other countries,

you did have a dramatic advantage. France, by pure accident, figured that out during the Revolution, and now what we see happening militarily are the creation of these academies to train the officers who can actually effectively use that machine. It's that machine. It's going to be used by Napoleon. But Napoleon would not have existed were it not for the levee en mass, which really just changed the dynamics of military fighting, and that's going to carry through all

the way through the world wars. Now, the Jacobin Club was still kicking around at this point, but by November it was pretty clear the writing was on the wall. On November the ninth and the eleventh, citizens in Paris physically began attacking the Jacobin Club smashing its benches and destroying its chandeliers. One newspaper observed coldly, quote the club that once ruled France has been routed by Dandy's and Styx. And so on November the twelfth, the Convention suspended the

Jacobin Club itself. Its closure quite frankly, symbolized what was real the death of revolutionary radicalism. Really, the radicalism of the French Revolution was now a thing of the past. Everyone was ready for some return to normalcy and for affairs to start to balance them out. And of course they're going to. They're going to, just in a way that no one in the French Revolution could have recognized at that specific moment. Now, internationally, problems did start to

crop up for France. The Treaty of London, which was signed on November the nineteenth, bound Britain and the United States, who we're going to get back to here pretty soon to suppress French privateers. This essentially ed British control over the seas and continued to isolate France from its colonies. The winter of seventeen ninety four seventeen ninety five was one of exhaustion politically and hunger physically. The maximum the law of fixing price ceilings on grain was actually repealed

on December the twenty fourth, Merry Christmas. Everyone one deputy said, let liberty govern the markets. Kind of sounds like Scrooge, doesn't he But liberty was cold comfort. Bread prices doubled overnight, and the Asignan, the paper currency of France, simply collapsed. The Convention tried its best to patch its legitimacy together. On December the eighth, seventy three of the surviving Girondins, those moderates who had been purged by the Jacobins in

seventeen ninety three, were invited back. It was a symbolic healing, but one that enraged the radicals, and the reckoning didn't wait too much longer. Jean Baptiste Carrier, the monstrous representative who had drowned thousands in knods during the Terror, was tried and executed on December the sixteenth, and so the Revolution at last had begun to eat its executioners. By early seventeen ninety five, France had simply replaced one terror with another. This is now the so called White Terror.

If you're reading history books, The first White Terror began as former Jacobins were hunted by royalists and moderates. Murders flared up cross France from Lyon, Nimes and the Run Valley. Then the Convention's tone changed. On February the fifth, The Monitor, one of those key newspapers and pamphlet producers in Paris, condemned the incitement to blood of Marat and his allies, And so days later, about I'd say two and a half months after they went in, Marat's remains were once

again removed from the pantheon. At the same time, France's oldest wound, its war against Catholic peasants in the Vendet, was finally being healed. On February seventeenth, the Convention declared a general amnesty and freedom of religion was restored. The hope was to just patch France together so that it could ideally defend itself against its external enemies. One representative, speaking a few days later, declared, let us be just

and tolerant, let each man worship in peace. It was the first official proclamation of la cite, the secular principle that will later come to define France. But peace in the countryside didn't fill stomachs in Paris, the Asignant had fallen to eighty percent of its value. By March nineteen, food riots broke out in Paris, one observer noting people gnaw bones like dogs. The Convention lashed out. On March the twenty first. It passed a death penalty for anyone

leading uprisings. The old Jacobin prosecutors Beret Colo eBay. They were all arrested and later deported to French Guinea. In April, the misery boiled over. On April, the first Sansculos invaded the Convention demanding bread, demanding some way to feed their family. It was a ghost of what had happened back in seventeen ninety two, but this time was different. This time, the National Guard did not join the radicals. Instead, they turned on the insurrection and crushed it. Paris placed under

siege and the radicals sent into exile, now abroad. Meanwhile, diplomacy triumph for armies couldn't. On April the fifth, France signed a peace treaty with Prussia at Basil, securing the left bank of the Rhyme. While that was going on, the Convention restored the rights of those that had rents branded as outlaws, an effort to just kind of put the wounds back together. The same month, the last Jacobin prosecutor,

Fouco team Mel, faced his own tribunal. His defense, familiar to any of those who followed the Nuremberg Trials, that he had only followed orders, fell on deaf ears. He was guillotined on May the seventh, along with his jurors. The Zankulos rose up one last time between May twentieth and twenty fourth, seventeen ninety five. Armed with pikes and the old tricolor banners, they stormed the Convention one last

time for fun, you guys. They murdered the deputy Ferraud and paraded his severed head on a pike all the way through the streets. His head was famously saluted in silence, a stoic gexture of defiance that would become iconic. Over the next four days, the army, under the command of General Maneux, retook Paris street by street. Hundreds of san Culo resurgence were executed or simply deported. On May thirty first, the revolutionary tribunal itself was finally abolished, and the revolution's

radical phase was finally and truly dead. On June eighth, the ten year old Louis the seventeenth died in the Temple prison, likely of tuberculosis, where he had been held since the death of his father. His uncle in exile, the Comte de Provence, now proclaimed himself Louis the eighteenth, to the name I want to remember. The following weeks after the death of Louis the seventeenth saw renewed Royalist insurrections.

The Vende, upon getting news of his death, once again rose in June, joined by Emmigrey's landed by the British on the Normandy coast. This lasted all the way from June twenty sixth through July the twenty first. Eventually, French generals crushed them, executing seven hundred and forty eight emigres by firing squad With that Notwithstanding peace was slowly spreading, Spain made peace at Basil on July the twenty second, seating all of saant demand to France. Only Austria and

England remained hostile. By August, the Convention had moved on to constitutional reform. The Constitution of Year three, adopted on August the twenty second, established the Directory and for those who know your French Revolution history, You know we have now come on to our penultimate scene, the final scene, of course, being Napoleon. The Directory was a cautious five man executive board by a bicameral legislature. It would be,

for all practical purposes ineffective. On September the twenty third, though, a national referendum approved the Directory, and it came into existence even as the ink dried on the new constitution. Though danger returned. Royalists, furious that two thirds of the new legislature would be drawn from the old Convention rose

in Paris on October the fifth, seventeen ninety five. Paul Barross, charged with the defense of the Convention, turned to a young general recently released from suspicion, Napoleon Bonaparte, a man we now should definitely take a moment to introduce. Somewhere. On a warm August morning in seventeen sixty nine, in a small town on Corsica called Isaacio, a baby cried out into a world at war. The French had actually only conquered Corsica months earlier, extinguishing its brief independence under

the patriot Pascual Payole. The child's name was Napoleon de Bonaparte, the son of Carlo Bonaparte, a minor loyal of noble lineage, and Letitia Romonio, a strong, austere woman whose will would mirror that of her son, Napoleon. She would later say, was born when the Canon thundered, and indeed the island's mountains still echoed with gunfire when the future emperor entered the world. Napoleon's earliest loyalties were not to France but

to Corsica. He grew up in a stone house overlooking the Gulf of Ayachio, speaking Corsican an Italian much more fluently than French. His father, Carlo, ambitious and pragmatic, had switched allegiance to the new French rulers to preserve the family's fortunes. This act earned him a small pension and the opportunity to send his sons to France for education. So inten seventeen seventy nine, at just ten years old, Napoleon left Corsica for the mainland. He would never feel

entirely at home there. In fact, Napoleon would later write, I was a foreigner, and I was made to feel it. His schoolmates at Brienne a royal military academy, mocked his accent and provincial manners. Yet the boy absorbed knowledge like a sponge. Reserved, solitary, and fiercely intelligent. He spent hours reading Plutarch's lives, memorizing the campaigns of Alexander and Caesar. He once wrote in a school essay that he longed to be quote the sword and mind of a free people.

At Brienne, his teachers saw flashes of greatness. One described him as a silent and thoughtful youth who seeks to understand rather than to please. In seventeen eighty four, at fifteen, Napoleon won admission to the Ecole Militaire in Paris, one of France's most prestigious academies. There the transformation from Bonaparte to Bonaparte began. He studied artillery, the branch of the army most open to talent rather than birth, and graduated

in just one year, qualifying as a second lieutenant. He was seventeen, small and dark, with a thick Corsican accent and an iron sense of purpose. Nothing probably would have come of him other than moving up the ranks steadily. But then came the Revolution, when the French revolution erupted in seventeen eighty nine. Napoleon was twenty years old. His letters from the time show a mix of idealism and calculation. He wrote to his brother Joseph, the people are awakening,

if only Corsica had such men. Returning to the island, he found Corsica once again in revolt, this time against France. The old patriot Paoli, once Napoleon's hero, now led the rebellion. Torn between island and empire, Napoleon sided with the revolution and against Paoli. It was a choice that would define his life. He would abandon local loyalties for the dream that was France. In seventeen ninety three, that decision turned fatal.

Paoli's followers expelled the Buonapartes from Corsica. Napoleon's brother would later recall, we were hunted like beasts. The family fled to the French mainland, destitute refugees. Yet, in that very same year, seventeen ninety three, fate offered Napoleon a dramatic chance to rise. Now, France was at war in that year with just about every monarchy in Europe. The southern port of Toulon had fallen into Royalist hands and welcomed the British fleet. The Revolutionary army besieged the city, but

it lacked skilled officers. Enter stage left one in Bonaparte, arriving with his artillery company. He quickly transformed with the siege. He surveyed the terrain, identified key positions, and proposed a daring plan. Sea is the forts commanding the harbor, and the British should be forced to withdraw. His superiors hesitated, but his energy was irresistible. Under his direction, cannon batteries pounded the enemy. He shouted to his men over and over again, fire faster and aim at the masts. The

sea is our enemy's road. On December seventeenth, seventeen ninety three, the French army stormed Toulon. Bonaparte was wounded in the thigh by a bayonet, but he refused to leave the field. When the smoke cleared, the tricolor flew over the city and the British had fled. That just twenty four Napoleon was promoted to brigadier general. One observer wrote he had the head of a caesar and the eyes of a fanatic.

For a brief moment, Napoleon was a rising star of the revolution, he was sent to organize the defense of the Mediterranean coast and drafted plans for a campaign into Italy, but the political tide soon turned. In July seventeen ninety four, Robespierre fell from power. Napoleon, who had associated with the Jacobin government, suddenly found himself suspect. I have seen men fall like trees in a storm, he wrote, bitterly. Arrested for a short time, he was released but left without command.

In early seventeen ninety five, he languished in Paris, poor, unemployed, restless. He lived in a small apartment on the Rue de Capone, spending hours in cafes arguing politics and military strategy. In a letter later on, he would confess, I have no place, no resources, no prospects, and I shall end my days in obscure, no glory. But he petitioned the war ministry for an Italian command, citing his previous plans for an offensive.

The army went unanswered. In the meantime, he was offered a post in the Army of the West, fighting Royalist insurgents in the Vende. He refused it, calling it quote a war against Frenchmen, not enemies. That refusal might have

ended Napoleon's career had not. History intervened again. On the twenty sixth of October, there was a major royalist uprising within Paris itself called into action really unexpectedly the afternoon of October the twenty sixth, on the Rue Saint Honore, Napoleon immediately loaded the canon that he had with grape shot and fired directly into the charging royalist mob. A whiff of grape shot, as Tom Carlisle later called it, saved the republic. Napoleon's cool brutality earned him the title

Commander of the Army of the Interior. And just like that, Napoleon, who had been on the outside looking in, was back baby. And we'll see the consequences now. After Napoleon put down the uprising, elections followed on October the thirty first. The first five directors took office. It was a cautious oligarchy, weary of direct democracy and wary of kings. Didn't really change anything, though. The crisis of the economy continued. The

Asignat collapsed to three percent of its nominal value. A forced loan of six hundred million francs was decreed on December the tenth, for the first time in year, France had a stable government, but the people remained cynical. Now December the thirty first, seventeen ninety five, an armistice was signed on the Rhine with Austria and Great Britain, making the guns fall silent for the first time. Released in seventeen ninety three, in this fragile piece, though one figure

continued to prepare for war. Napoleon Bonaparte, now twenty six, restless and brilliant, spent the winter mapping a campaign into northern Italy, a theater that had been neglected by older generals. The Republic is like a volcano, he wrote to one of the five Directors, But I will ride its fire. As we will see next time. In the spring of seventeen ninety six, Napoleon will be in command of the Army of Italy, and he will lead the nation finally out of the French Revolution, an inn to empire