Tag: Politics
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The Retrospective
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So welcome to our one final look back at the French Revolution before we finally move on. What I’m looking to do here, as much for myself as for you guys, is to walk back through everything that we’ve covered, to pull out what I consider to be the really…
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The Empire
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. Over the winter of 1804 and 1805, Emperor Napoleon I knew that come the spring, he was going to have to march out to prove to the world that he deserved the imperial crown he had just bestowed upon himself. And when the inevitable War of the Third Coalition started…
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The Consulate
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So a funny thing happened on my way to the finish line. On Friday morning my hard drive crashed. I didn’t lose any files, but I did lose an incredibly necessary day of work while my computer was being fixed. As a consequence, I had to abandon the dream of…
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There Is Your Man
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So we have somehow, amazingly, come to the end of the French Revolution. We’ve been at this together for 14 months, more than 50 episodes and over 250,000 words of transcript. But today, the Directory will be overthrown and Napoleon Bonaparte will come to power. There are lots of places…
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The Coup of Prairial
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So this week marks the penultimate episode of our cycle on the French Revolution. It will take us through to the autumn of 1799 and set up the looming coup of Brumaire, that, out of some necessity, I am marking as the end of the line. After next week’s episode…
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The Second Coalition
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. We spent all of last week with Napoleon in Egypt. This week we are going to double back and follow the developments in Europe while Napoleon’s army was trapped in the east. And as we will see in a moment, it was largely because Napoleon had gone east that things…
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The Egyptian Expedition
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So, as promised, this week we are going to spend the entire episode covering Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt. We are going to stick with him for a whole year, all the way through August 1799 when Bonaparte decides that for the good of France, he must abandon his army…
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The Coup of Floreal
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So we left off last time with a circuit of all of France’s new allies, all those sister republics who were thrilled, just thrilled, to be joining the French revolutionary project of liberating mankind. And by that, I of course, mean getting rung dry. Today, we’ll take a look at…
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The Directorial Terror
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. We left off last time with the coup of Fructidor, which created the Second Directory, and the Treaty of Campo Formio, which ended hostilities between France and Austria. Today, we will cover the fallout from these two watershed events. The Directory will spend the next six months trying to stabilize…
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The Coup of Fructidor
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So we left off last time with the Fall of Mantua in Italy in February, 1797. This week, I want to pick up right where we left off, push the Italian campaign through to the preliminaries at Leoben before hopping back to France to cover the elections of year V,…