Tag: Counter Revolution
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Law of 14 Frimaire
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So, welcome back to our regularly scheduled program. I hope you enjoyed the supplementals while I was away. The tours, as usual, were fantastic, and I’ve got a little collection of pictures up at revolutionspodcast.com so you can get an idea of just how much fun we had and just…
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Philippe Egalite
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. As I mentioned back in Episode 3.25, the Duke d’Orléans, the renegade Prince of the Blood who was now styling himself Philippe Egalite deserves more attention than I have been able to give him. Since he is about to get his head chopped off, I figured that now would be…
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Saturn’s Children
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. On March 13, 1793, a few days after the first aborted attempt by the Enragé agitators to purge the National Convention of the Girondin delegates, one of those Girondins, stood up to deliver a prophetic verdict on the direction of the Revolution. Now, so far in the show, I have…
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The Geography of Terror
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. Last time we brought ourselves right up to the beginning of the Reign of Terror, which is about to descend on France. But though the Terror played out as a bloody game of sadistic revolutionary partisanship in Paris, the bulk of its victims were not major political figures, but rather…
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The Committee of Public Safety
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. As the array of political and military disasters that erupted on all fronts in mid 1793 threatened to consume revolutionary France, the now Mountain-dominated National Convention decided that they were absolutely not going to go down without a fight. The Federalists would be crushed, the rebels in the Vendée exterminated,…
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The Man of Blood Part Deux
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. When we left off last time, the Enragés had just successfully expelled the Girondins from the National Convention, which capped off a very chaotic spring of 1793. Today, we are going to push our way into the very chaotic summer of 1793, because, believe me, the summer is going to…
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The Purge of the Girondins
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. As we’ve seen over the last two episodes, the Spring of 1793 brought no good news for the revolutionaries running the young French Republic in Paris. Its armies were getting beat out on the frontiers, its provinces were starting to rise up in armed revolt. And as if that was…
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Provincial Revolt
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. Last time, we headed off to the warfront to follow the rapid advance and then equally rapid retreat of the French armies, culminating with the betrayal and emigration of General Dumouriez in April 1793. This, as you can imagine, was all a distressing development for the delegates of the National…
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Advance and Retreat
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. As I mentioned at the beginning of last week’s episode, the reason the National Convention was able to spend so much time focused on the King’s trial was that out on the frontiers, the French armies were not just successfully holding off the Allies, they were positively steamrolling the Allies. …
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The Trial of Louis XVI
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. When the National Convention convened in September 1792, it was ostensibly meeting for one single purpose: write a new constitution for France. But writing that constitution was absolutely not the first priority for the Convention delegates when they arrived. No, the first priority was deciding what to do about the…