The French Revolution might be recalled as a time of fraternity, but Michael Portillo and The Things We Forgot To Remember discovered a more violent side to the story

MAN IN THE STREET, Paris
So this was originally Place Louis XV, and it had that big statue of Louis XV right in the middle, a big proper statue, like we said during the Revolution, they took this big copper statue, they melted it down and actually made coin out of it, made…

MICHAEL PORTILLO
According to an old joke, when Mao Tse Tung was asked what had been the consequences of the French Revolution, he replied that it was too early to tell.

I want to go a stage further in this programme and ask whether two centuries after that bloody revolution we’ve yet sorted out even what actually happened, let alone what it led to.

I’m standing in the heart of Paris, in la Place de la Concorde, surrounded by tourists who have probably not come here to remember the fact that in this vast square the guillotine was erected claiming the heads of, amongst many others, King Louis the Sixteenth and his wife Marie Antoinette. Think about the French Revolution, think about the accounts by British writers Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens in his novel A Tale of Two Cities...

MUSIC IN

...and you’ll inevitably think of Paris and the reign of terror.

MUSIC OUT

READING
Along the Paris streets the death carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrels carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
Pitting his voice, as I am against the traffic noise here in the centre of Paris, is William Doyle, Professor of History, in the University of Bristol.

These images we have of the tumbrils rolling forward with the victims for the guillotine these are quite accurate impressions are they not?

WILLIAM DOYLE
They are accurate impressions of a particular time in the Revolution, but they certainly don’t encapsulate all that it was about, and they only take place generally up to four years after the Revolution begins, so there’s a lot going on before the tumbrils start to roll.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
Why was it then that this impression of what happened here at la Place de la Concorde became so riveted in the minds, I think not just of English people but of people looking at the French Revolution in general?

WILLIAM DOYLE
Well it’s very spectacular. Paris was the centre of civilisation of the whole of Europe, and people were very shocked to start with that it could degenerate into such vengeful chaos, as it appeared from the outside. Then you have to look at the sort of people who are victims, Kings, Queens, Nobles, spectacular glitterati of the later eighteenth century, and people were particularly shocked to see them executed in this way, which was actually a very spectacular way of executing anybody, because when the head comes off blood spurts for feet out from the neck of the victim, and it’s well recorded that people found themselves paddling in blood.

MUSIC IN

READING
In Paris thick as brown leaves in autumn rustle and travel the suspects, shaken down by revolutionary committees, they’re swept thitherward as into their storehouse to be consumed. La Guillotine ne va pas mal, the guillotine goes not ill.

MUSIC OUT

MICHAEL PORTILLO
Here in Paris, how many people - approximately - lost their heads to the guillotine?

WILLIAM DOYLE
We are looking at about 1,500 in Paris, but the thing that we overlook about the terror all the time is its greatest impact was away from Paris in the provinces.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
So if it were our ambition to find the bloodiest part of the French Revolution, if it’s not Paris, where would we look for that?

WILLIAM DOYLE
There’s no doubt at all that it is in the Vendee, the area along the Atlantic Coast, inland from the coast, south of Nantes, north of La Rochelle; this is the area where large numbers of the peasantry rebel against the Revolution in favour of the King and the Church, they would like to have those restored.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
The French Revolution was not a single event, but a series of violent and chaotic occurrences. Power transferred to an assembly in Paris called the Convention, within which factions known as Girondins and Jacobins wrestled for control. In late 1793 France’s leaders, and particularly the dominant figure Robespierre, unleashed the so called reign of terror...

MUSIC IN

But in this programme I am looking at what happened in the Vendee, and according to Alan Forrest, of the University of York, the uprising in that province, which came at a time when France was at war with its neighbours, posed such a strategic threat that any political authority in the capital would have felt compelled to crush it.

ALAN FOREST
By the summer of 1793 France is engaged in a war on virtually all its fronts, so an uprising in the West would appear at that time not just to be a particularly serious deflection for its troops, but a deflection of troops - who otherwise should be fighting for the motherland on the frontier - to put down a peasant insurrection at home. That creates very bad blood and is I think one of the reasons for the anger within the Army and the acceptance of extremely vicious measures of repression.

    next > Page 1 of 5