HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2024-04-23T14:34:05.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: How Napoleon (almost) destroyed the French Revolution
items: Robespierre: man of terror
items: How the architects of the 'Terror' after the French Revolution ended up among its victims
items: Napoleon’s chance: why the French Revolution was Bonaparte's big break
items: The French Revolution: Everything you need to know

How Napoleon (almost) destroyed the French Revolution
type: item
date: 2023-07-11T09:50:43.000Z
creator: Marisa Linton
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: When the Corsican general seized power in a coup in 1799, he proclaimed himself a defender of the republican ideals that had come from the revolution. But, as Marisa Linton explains, the would-be emperor did all he could to dismantle them
encoded: On 10 November 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte stormed into the chambers at the Château de Saint-Cloud in the suburbs of Paris and set in train a military coup. “The republic no longer has a government,” he declared to the assembled members of one of France’s two ruling councils. “Together let us save the cause of liberty and equality.” The coup represented an enormous gamble for Bonaparte but it paid off spectacularly: within a matter of days, he had been declared First Consul of his nation. He was now the most powerful figure in France – and hardly anybody had seen it coming. But one man had, and his name was Maximilien Robespierre. When revolutionary France had embarked on a war with its royalist neighbours in April 1792, Robespierre warned of the dangers that would follow. A military leader could, the leading Jacobin revolutionary counselled, take the opportunity to seize political power in Paris, becoming another Julius Caesar, another Oliver Cromwell. Robespierre’s warnings were disregarded, but they proved prescient. The ensuing war would last a generation. It brought to prominence several talented young generals with the potential to become a second Caesar. In the end the man who came out ahead was the young Corsican general who burst into the Château de Saint Cloud in November 1799: Bonaparte. Read more | Napoleonic Wars timeline: the key dates you need to know For many historians, the coup of 1799 signalled the end of one of the great step-changes in European history: the French Revolution. Erupting in 1789, the revolution had shaken the old order based on the authority of king, nobles and clergy to its core. It also brought into being a raft of new political ideals, such as individual liberty, equality before the law, freedom of speech and religious toleration. The revolution was the first of its kind anywhere in the world, and would have an unfathomable impact on modern history. But what would be the fate of these revolutionary ideals under the Napoleonic regim…

https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/02/GettyImages-webready463894983sml-e95de75.jpg
width: 620
height: 413

Robespierre: man of terror
type: item
date: 2021-07-15T06:10:00.000Z
creator: Marisa Linton
subject: General Modern
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
description: Robespierre is often cast as one of the bloodiest figures of the French Revolution. But has he been made a scapegoat for the sins of equally guilty men? Marisa Linton investigates
encoded: On 10 Thermidor, Year II in the new revolutionary calendar – 28 July 1794 to us today – Maximilien Robespierre climbed the steps to the guillotine stationed in Paris’s Place de la Révolution. The watching crowd roared its approval as he staggered across the plinth, was strapped to the plank, and waited for the blade to fall. Within seconds, he was dead. But that wasn’t the end of the bloodletting. Over the following three days, more than 100 of Robespierre’s friends, colleagues and supporters were dispatched – damned as traitors – in the biggest mass-guillotining of the French Revolution. What happened on 28 July 1794 constituted a stunning reversal of fortune. Only 36 hours previously, Robespierre had been one of the most powerful men in France, a dominant figure in the revolution that, from 1789, had swept away the old order. All that changed when Robespierre took his seat at the National Convention – the French Revolutionary Assembly – on 9 Thermidor (27 July). Soon after his arrival, members of his own radical group, the Jacobins, were shouting him down, preventing him from speaking. Moments later, they ordered his arrest. Spectacular as it was, Robespierre’s fall from grace came as no great surprise. In fact, Robespierre saw his death coming. The night before his arrest he spoke at the Jacobin Club, the nerve centre of his support, telling the emotional audience that the speech was his “last will and testament”. He would become a martyr for the revolutionary cause to which he had dedicated his life. His parting words were: “I leave you my memory, and you will defend it.” Yet that memory has been hugely contested. In the 220 years since his death, commentators, especially those on the left, have hailed Robespierre as a heroic, if tragic, figure. To others – probably the great majority – he was the man of terror, a demon whose death was a blessing for the French people. Robespierre’s reputation is bound up indelibly with the ‘Reign of Terror’ that bedevilled Fran…

GettyImages-113448824-c552cb0.jpg
width: 4500
height: 3931

How the architects of the 'Terror' after the French Revolution ended up among its victims
type: item
date: 2021-07-13T07:05:00.000Z
creator: Marisa Linton
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Marisa Linton reveals how the architects of the bloodletting that swept Paris after the French Revolution ended up among its victims...
encoded: In his prison cell, during the long hours before dawn, Camille Desmoulins, radical revolutionary and deputy to the National Convention, wrote a last letter to his wife, Lucile, in which he struggled to comprehend the sudden turn of events that had brought him to that terrible place. It was the spring of 1794, the height of the revolutionary terror, and the prisons were crowded with thousands of people who had fallen foul of the sinister Law of Suspects. But Desmoulins was in a different category to most prisoners – for he personally knew his accusers, the men who had signed his arrest. Several of them had been his friends, among them Maximilien Robespierre, known to Desmoulins since their schooldays. For five years Desmoulins himself had been at the forefront of the revolution, and now the revolution itself had turned on him. “My dear Lolotte,” he wrote, his tears staining the paper, “I, whom men who called themselves my friend, who call themselves republicans, have thrown into a cell, in solitary confinement, as though I were a conspirator!” The revolutionary government had its reasons for his arrest – complicated, unedifying, tortuously political reasons. The previous winter, Desmoulins, a talented but reckless journalist, had begun to write a new newspaper, Le Vieux Cordelier, in which he put pressure on the already jittery government. Desmoulins not only called for a policy of clemency to wind down the Terror, but challenged the authority of the two committees that led the revolutionary government – the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. The committees had already organised the arrest, trial and execution of a group of extreme radicals, the Cordeliers, self-appointed spokesmen for the militant working people of Paris, the sans-culottes. In context: The French Revolution turns sour By the spring of 1794, the French Revolution had been raging for nearly five years. The revolutionaries of 1789 had set up a constitutional monarchy with…

GettyImages-520717155-326ac2f.jpg
width: 5433
height: 4324

Napoleon’s chance: why the French Revolution was Bonaparte's big break
type: item
date: 2021-05-03T06:01:16.000Z
creator: Marisa Linton
subject: Georgian
subject: Period
description: The ending of privilege in France gave the young Napoleon the opportunity to shine in his military career, says Marisa Linton, but what really allowed him to rise to the top was his astute exploitation of the political instability and years of war that followed the French Revolution
encoded: The French Revolution of 1789 brought down the centuries-old regime of absolute monarchy and privileged nobility. In its place the revolutionaries founded a new regime based on principles of individual liberty, equal rights, and popular sovereignty. Yet the ensuing 10 years of political instability would be exploited by Bonaparte to seize power in a militarist regime which was, in some ways, more autocratic than that of Louis XVI and, in terms of the millions of casualties of the Napoleonic Wars, much more lethal. The Revolution smashed the stranglehold of hereditary privilege and venality, hitherto endemic in all parts of old regime society. Many young men profited from the ending of privilege to forge careers in the higher ranks of the army. Napoleon Bonaparte was one of them. Although his family were minor nobility, they were also Corsican, and of Italian origin (France had conquered Corsica in 1769), the kind of people who, before the Revolution, were looked down upon as foreigners and outsiders. The disastrous decision of the revolutionary leaders to go to war against the European powers opposed to the Revolution set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the revolutionary government becoming ever more dependent on the armies and their generals. Tensions were inflamed by the émigrés – French opponents of the Revolution who had fled abroad and agitated for the foreign powers to invade France and overturn the Revolution. The move to war was spearheaded by Jacques-Pierre Brissot, leader of the ‘Girondin’ revolutionaries, who declared that France must wage “a crusade for universal liberty”, exporting the Revolution abroad. Brissot assumed that the people of western Europe would welcome French soldiers bringing ‘liberty’. Brissot was opposed by a very different revolutionary, Maximilien Robespierre. The Revolution, Robespierre warned, could not and should not be spread by invading armies at the point of bayonets. He gave the prescient warning: “No one welcom…

GettyImages-850991274-65f54db.jpg
width: 600
height: 413

The French Revolution: Everything you need to know
type: item
date: 2020-10-18T11:15:30.000Z
creator: Marisa Linton
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
description: Marisa Linton responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about the dramatic events that engulfed France in the late 18th century
encoded: In the latest of our series tackling the big questions on major historical topics, historian Marisa Linton responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about the dramatic events that engulfed France in the late 18th century. Topics discussed include the causes of the revolution, the role of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and the bloodshed of the Terror. Listen to more episodes in our ‘Everything you wanted to know’ podcast series Find more articles about the French Revolution

Podcast-Marisa-Linton-Web-L-02032c7.jpg
width: 620
height: 413