The Fall of Robespierre

24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris

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The Fall of Robespierre

By: Colin Jones

Narrated by: Sasha Higgins

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About this listen

The day of 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794) is universally acknowledged as a major turning-point in the history of the French Revolution. At 12:00 midnight, Maximilien Robespierre, the most prominent member of the Committee of Public Safety which had for more than a year directed the Reign of Terror, was planning to destroy one of the most dangerous plots that the Revolution had faced.

By 12:00 midnight at the close of the day, following a day of uncertainty, surprises, upsets and reverses, his world had been turned upside down. He was an outlaw, on the run, and himself wanted for conspiracy against the Republic. He felt that his whole life and his Revolutionary career were drawing to an end. As indeed they were. He shot himself shortly afterwards. Half-dead, the guillotine finished him off in grisly fashion the next day.

The Fall of Robespierre provides an hour-by-hour analysis of these twenty-four hours.

18th Century

Europe

France

Military

Modern

French Revolution

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I was expecting the granularity to be overwhelming, but instead this ended up one of the easiest-to-follow books about the French Revolution I've read. The only other with as clear a narrative among the chaos is probably Hillary Mantel's novel A Place of Greater Safety.

Of course, being focused on a single chaotic day a few years into the Revolution means a good amount of background knowledge is necessary, but there's enough context given here to remind and navigate. It could even be a blessing - the tight focus, set after many of the other major players have already been guillotined, makes it much easier to keep track of who's who, why they're important, and what their (frequently shifting) motivations might have been.

There's enough here for a repeat visit to be warranted, and enough to make me want to take a broader view again. The revolutionary-Napoleonic era remains endlessly fascinating, and this kind of micro history, Annales School style, could well be more revealing than the more traditional macro political or Great Man approaches. After all, how did an entire society shift so rapidly towards support for the Terror?

That, by the way, is this book's central argument - and it's fairly convincingly made: The fall of Robespierre wasn't about opposition to the Terror at all, no matter how much the narrative was retrofitted to claim this, and to blame him almost exclusively for the mass murders. From the minute-by-minute evidence of the day, there were few grander designs intended on the day.

Except perhaps by Talleyrand - a figure who, like Robespierre, gets more intriguing and confusing the more I learn about him. I need to find a good biography.

The narrator mostly does a good job - though the persistent mispronunciation of a small number of (mostly English) words does jar a bit. Especially "batt-ill-ee-on" for battalion and "try-kull-er" for tricolour, which are both used a *lot*.

The detail surprisingly makes this easier to follow