Original subtitles

Royal history is at the heart of the stories we tell about the past.

We often think it's definitive.

Kings and queens, dates and facts.

All unchanging and fixed.

But it's not like that at all.

History is a cacophony of voices,

all of them competing to tell their own version of the story.

And, when revolution's in the air...

...that competition gets really intense.

In this series, I'm lifting the lid

on three of royal history's most extraordinary periods.

We think of the Georgian era as genteel and ordered,

but have fibs distracted us from a country in turmoil?

BOOM!

Was the Russian Revolution really a victory

for Lenin and the Bolsheviks?

And in this programme, the French Revolution.

When the people rebelled against Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI

and triumphantly created a new republic.

Vive la revolution!

It's a stirring story,

but it's full of distortions, exaggerations

and some whopping great fibs.

Was Marie Antoinette really the cause of all the trouble?

Let them eat cake!

Who was the driving force behind this people's revolt?

It's surprising that the revolution was started

by people who were bourgeois.

And was the revolutionary Robespierre

really a bloodthirsty villain?

He tried to get the death penalty abofished

because he said it was barbaric.

The French Revolution was the moment the people rose up

and took down the monarchy.

It was the start of a new age, of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Or at least, so the story goes.

In the late 18th century, France was a feudal state.

And King Louis XVI held absolute power.

But new ideas about democracy

were leading to revolts across the world.

And the French Revolution would be the biggest of them all.

Its bloody climax began on 21st January, 1793,

when the king faced the guillotine.

The king's hands were tied behind his back.

His long hair was cut to expose his neck.

He was placed face down on a board, like this,

and then, the rope was released

and that blade came whizzing down.

Afterwards, the guards took his head out of that basket

and waved it in the air so the crowd could see.

And they shouted out, "Vive la Republique!"

There were thousands of witnesses,

but people can't even agree on the king's final moments.

A Republican newspaper reported that he cried out in fear,

"l am lost!"

But his priest recalled that he went to his death bravely.

So someone was already telling fibs.

And the fibs about the French Revolution have just kept coming.

Today, there's just this small plaque

to mark the end of a French dynasty

that had lasted for 900 years.

The French Revolution has gone down in history

as the model for all future revolutions.

But there are many competing versions of events,

depending on your politics and your nationality.

For some, it was the birth of the modern world.

For others, the end of civilisation.

So, what's the real story of the French Revolution?

And how did it get started?

France, in the late 1780s, was a tinderbox of dissatisfaction.

Cold winters and two disastrous harvests

had left the peasants starving.

The country was bankrupt, taxes were high.

And one member of the royal family was getting the blame.

DRAMATIC INSTRUMENTAL

The queen of France was Marie Antoinette.

An Austrian princess, she'd been married at the age of 14

to the French crown prince to forge a political alliance.

She was notorious for her love of shoes and dresses

and extravagant parties.

Marie Antoinette came in for much more criticism than the king.

At the time, Thomas Jefferson was the American ambassador in Paris, and he wrote,

"Had there been no queen, there would have been no Revolution".

And that judgment has stuck.

BIRDSONG

Marie Antoinette is supposed to have come up with

one of the most famous phrases in history.

She addressed her starving people, who'd run out of bread, and said,

"Let them eat cake!"

"Let them eat cake" is still taught to almost every schoolchild in the world.

The line's used to prove the queen's indifference to her subjects.

And it's seen as a catalyst for the whole uprising.

But it's a great, big, revolutionary fib.

For a start, the phrase in French is,

"Qu'ils mangent de la brioche".

Meaning brioche, a kind of an eggy bun.

But "Let them eat a kind of eggy bun"

isn't quite so catchy in translation.

But there's a more fundamental cake fib than that.

There's absolutely no evidence Marie Antoinette ever said those words.

No documents, no eyewitness reports, no nothing!

The phrase had been reported coming from the mouth of another French queen,

the wife of Louis XIV, a century earlier.

It wasn't until 50 years after Marie Antoinette's death

that the phrase was first written down and ascribed to her.

And even then, they said it was a rumour that wasn't true.

But politicians and historians around the world

were still trying to explain the cause of the Revolution.

Their narratives needed a royal scapegoat.

And by the 20th century, the myth had become a fixture.

This is an American history primer from 1918.

And they've put it like this -

"When at last the court, overwhelmed with debts,

"had so far crushed the people with taxes

"that they had no bread to eat,

"Marie Antoinette cried out,

"If they have no bread, let them eat cake".

The words have been put into her mouth

to show how thoughtless and out of touch she was.

But worse than that, they've been used to justify

the bloody events that followed.

Even before the Revolution, many of her subjects hated the queen.

And not just because she was a woman.

Being Austrian, she was seen as the enemy.

She wasted money on clothes and outrageous hairstyles.

She was too frivolous to be a proper queen.

But in 1787, Marie Antoinette fought back

by cultivating a more responsible image.

Mathieu, what's happening in this picture?

This is a portrait of Marie Antoinette with her children.

And it's very important because it is a political representation

of the new queen of France.

Because at first, she was considered as a selfish woman.

So with this portrait, she decided to be represented

as a queen of France. Mm-hm.

Marie Antoinette was also looking for other creative ways

to improve her PR.

Marie Antoinette loved children.

And she took some orphans at court,

she paid for their education.

And she did that partly through sincere feeling

and partly, it must have helped her image, as a selfish person?

Mm...l think both.

Oh. Both. She, er...

I think she was very sincere when she paid for these children

and probably, she had on her mind, er...

the image she had all around the public.

Her critics nicknamed her Madame Deficit,

and said she'd bankrupted France.

But this was another fib.

France had built up huge debts

during the American War of Independence,

when they'd supported the rebels against the British Crown.

The war had ended just four years earlier,

and the French still couldn't balance the books.

France supports the independence war of America,

and it costed about 1.5 billions.

And the budget of France was about 600 millions a year.

So that is to say, about two and a half more

than an annual budget of France.

Oh, wow! So it...it's very important.

And the Americans, after 1783,

they decided not to reimburse the France people.

So we have the revenue of France... Yes.

...we have the clothes of Marie Antoinette... Yes.

...but then we have the cost of the war to help America up here somewhere.

Yes. France did not recover from this deficit.

So maybe it's, um...

It explains the Revolution.

So it wasn't so much Marie Antoinette's extravagance

that bankrupted France,

it was France's support for the American War of Independence.

Thomas Jefferson neglected to mention that a key cause

of the French Revolution was the birth of the United States.

The French Revolution is also widely believed to have been sparked

by a peasants' revolt.

In this version of the story,

the starving poor rose up to overthrow Louis XVI.

But this image of class war is also a myth.

So what really happened?

In May 1789, the king called a meeting at Versailles

to try to resolve the financial crisis.

1,200 delegates represented three groups, or estates.

The first was the priests and bishops.

The second, the titled aristocracy.

And finally, the third estate were the commoners.

But the three estates were at loggerheads.

Finally, the commoners split off to set up their own meeting.

The one place that was big enough for them all to get inside

was the indoor royal tennis court,

just around the corner from the palace over there.

So this is where they came.

And the king had no idea what was going on.

RACQUETS HIT BALL

APPLAUSE

15-0 to the commoners.

This assembly of commoners was the spark that ignited the Revolution.

RACQUETS HIT BALL

On 20th June, 1789, they all agreed

that France should have a fairer form of government

that represented the people.

The king's powers should be limited,

although the monarchy wouldn't be abofished.

Deuce.

And this agreement became known as the Tennis Court Oath.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

They took the oath partly out of idealism

and partly because they wanted fairer taxes.

Either way, it was a revolutionary act.

So here we have them, nearly 500 excitable revolutionaries.

Bang in the middle, Monsieur Bailly,

the astronomer who was in charge of the occasion.

Over to the right, we have a small-town lawyer.

But he would turn out to be the most controversial revolutionary of them all -

Maximilien Robespierre.

Robespierre would go down in history

with the blood of the king and queen on his hands.

And over to the left, we have a doctor.

His name was Dr Joseph Guillotin.

What jumps out at me is just how nattily dressed

they all are in their smart suits.

They're not peasants, they're not workers,

they're definitely members of the bourgeoisie.

Which is a reminder that this revolution was led

by the upper middle classes.

RACQUETS HIT BALL

Advantage bourgeoisie.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

They swore never to separate

until the constitution is established.

It's a wonderful, idealistic moment

that happened here, in the tennis court.

Yes, it is. It's quite exhilarating

that the deputies who assembled here on 20th June,

who had all these ideas about, "How could we make our country better?

"How can we reform France? How can we give France a constitution?"

Which is what the...Tennis Court Oath was all about.

But it's certainly true that the actual unity was, I would say, skin-deep.

Tell me about some of the different factions that began to form.

You have the monarchists, who tried to create

almost like a British-style constitution,

But then you have radicals, like Robespierre,

who want something more democratic.

One of the surprising things about all these people in the tennis court to me,

is that they're all pretty bourgeois, aren't they?

Yes. The third estate was a collection of mostly middle-class people.

Lawyers, government office- holders,

financiers and people with property.

These revolutionaries were much wealthier than we usually imagine.

Soon, aristocrats would join them, too.

The Marquis de Lafayette

had fought against the British in the American Revolution.

Now, with the help of his American friend, Thomas Jefferson,

he began drafting a Declaration of the Rights of Man.

The draft that Lafayette presented to the National Assembly

on 11th July, 1789, was the fruit of this collaborative work.

So in many ways, Jefferson helped to shape what became

the founding principles of the Revolution of 1789.

So, the French had helped the Americans have their revolution against the British... Yes.

And then it's nice to think of Jefferson and Lafayette,

with their American experience, returning the favour

and helping the French have their own revolution. Absolutely.

The Tennis Court Oath unleashed a political earthquake.

Just a month later, bread riots started on the streets of Paris.

This is a well-known part of the city - Bastille.

SIREN WAILS

Many protests in Paris start here

in memory of the events of 14th July, 1789,

when the people attacked the Bastille fortress.

The Storming of the Bastille

is usually seen as the Revolution made real.

DISGRUNTLED SHOUTS

A huge crowd of workers waving banners

marched upon the city's most famous prison.

100 of them got killed in the attack,

becoming martyrs of the Revolution.

In Britain, a magazine reported

that all the poor and unhappy state prisoners,

many of whom had languished for years in execrable abode,

were released.

Nobody would ever forget the 14th ofjuly.

MUSIC: La Marseillaise

Every year, the French commemorate it as Bastille Day -

the National Day of Republican France.

The Bastille prison is long gone.

An opera house now stands there.

The Storming of the Bastille is remembered as THE defining moment,

when all the political prisoners were set free

and the monarchy swept away.

But how much of this is true?

Munro, we are metres away from the site of the Bastille, aren't we?

Where was it exactly?

Now, a lot of people got the idea it was packed full of revolutionaries

who all got freed at this moment.

A libertine.

How did the revolutionaries present their work in storming the Bastille?

After the fall of the Bastille, what was next for the monarchy?

YELLING

The idea that the fall of the Bastille went hand in hand

with the end of the monarchy is another fib.

In fact, over the next three years,

the king retained a key constitutional role.

But as Bastille Day later turned into a Republican celebration,

this initial support of the monarchy was soon forgotten.

Even so, the French national flag

contains a clue about the king's role in this early period.

The revolutionaries replaced the royal fleur-de-lis

with the red, white and blue Tricolour.

The flag of the people...or was it?

So, what about these colours of the French flag?

The red and the blue were the colours of Paris.

And you might be thinking, well, the white,

that must be the colour of liberty.

Far from it.

White was the ancient colour of the Bourbon royal family.

So the flag represented a compromise

between the king and the revolutionaries.

And that's how, after the fall of the Bastille,

they persuaded him to wear in his hat the tri-coloured cockade,

as a sign that he was...all right with the changes so far.

MUSIC: La Marseillaise

The idea that the Revolution was truly egalitarian is also a fib.

We tend to think

that the revolutionaries rallied to the cry of liberty,

equality and fraternity right from the start.

But the revolutionaries had lots of other stirring slogans.

There was, "Union, strength, virtue".

There was, "Strength, equality, justice".

There was even, "Liberty, security, property".

That doesn't sound very revolutionary at all.

And finally, there was Robespierre's version.

"Liberty, equality, fraternity."

It came up in a military context,

and it didn't catch on more generally for ages.

It wasn't until 1848

that "Liberte, egalite, fraternite"

became the official motto of France.

And shorthand for revolution everywhere.

So, how egalitarian was the 1789 Revolution?

Only wealthier people over the age of 25

would be allowed to vote for the deputies in the National Assembly.

Just 15% of the population.

And, of course, we're talking about men.

That's what fraternity is all about.

Ooh! Here's a lady at last! I've been looking for her.

What had the French women been up to all this time?

Three months after the storming of the Bastille,

in October, 1789,

10,000 market women from Paris marched on Versailles.

Angered by the cost of bread, they wanted the king to act.

It was a brave, revolutionary confrontation right on his doorstep.

But it's been largely overshadowed

by the more famous storming of the Bastille.

In France at this time, there was a fantastic feminist

called Olympe de Gouges.

Here she is. And she responded

to the writings of Jefferson and Lafayette on the rights of man

with a little something of her own,

called a Declaration of the Rights of Women.

"Oh, women, women," she wrote.

"When will you cease to be blind?

"What advantage have YOU realised from the Revolution?"

As time went on, the Revolution's claims to equality

rang increasingly hollow.

FORMAL DANCE MUSIC

Over the next three years, the National Assembly

engaged in a diplomatic two-step with the king.

Royal power shifted backwards and forwards.

The radicals, the jacobins, wanted rid of the monarchy.

But most of the Assembly was moderate,

and hoped to continue working with the king.

The king remained relatively popular for two more years.

He was the guest of honour at a party held in 1790

to commemorate the fall of the Bastille.

This lingering affection for the king got written out of history.

Meanwhile, the queen was growing ever more unpopular.

And that's thanks to some very nasty propaganda.

Charles-Eloi Vial at the National Library of France

has investigated how dangerous libels about her

were gathering momentum.

Charles-Eloi, what are you looking at?

And do you have other, worse images of her?

Do you think here we have some negative feelings towards the king,

but we can't criticise the king, we will turn to his wife?

And do you have another image of her private life?

He comes in!

So we have the wife, the lover and the husband.

What was the motivation for the people producing

and selling these images?

Louis' uneasy dance with the National Assembly

was grinding to a halt.

The propaganda against his wife didn't help.

The revolutionaries were confiscating church lands,

and this enraged the king.

And as they thrashed out a new constitution,

the Assembly was constantly eroding the king's power.

The king took drastic action.

Around midnight on June 20th, 1791,

the royal family sneaked out of their palace.

They were in disguise as an ordinary bourgeois family.

A prearranged carriage was waiting for them.

They got in, they travelled out of Paris.

It looked like they'd escaped from the revolutionaries!

They must have breathed the biggest sigh of relief.

The carriage trundled east from Paris along the back roads.

Some claimed they were deserting France altogether.

Others that they intended to rule

from the safety of a royal palace near the border.

Either way, within 24 hours,

they were approaching the Austrian-occupied Netherlands.

But when they reached the town of Varennes,

everything went wrong.

Arretez-vous!

Local officials wanted to know who was travelling.

And the postmaster thought, "Hang on, I've seen that face before".

He recognised the king

because he'd seen pictures of him on money.

Sacre nom...

The whole gamble had failed.

The king, Marie Antoinette and the children

were all taken back to Paris in disgrace.

Confidence in the king was shattered,

and he was suspended from power.

But then, that astronomer, Jean Bailly,

a monarchist supporter among the revolutionaries,

told a whopping fib.

He claimed that the king and his family had been kidnapped.

Forced to leave Paris against their will.

Amazingly, the fib was accepted.

On 15th July, 1791,

the National Assembly reinstated the king,

who finally approved the new constitution.

This was seen as a revolutionary new dawn.

The Assembly wanted people to embrace a whole new way of living,

based on enlightenment and progress.

They were getting excited about all the latest developments

in science, in philosophy

and in technology, including flight.

The story of the French Revolution

is usually all about anarchy and destruction.

The storming of the Bastille and the cutting off of heads.

But this is only half the story.

The revolutionaries were also keen to bring rationality,

order and progress to the world.

One scientist was inspired to fly a hot-air balloon,

only recently invented,

all the way from Paris to a little town 15 miles away.

He took along piles of copies of the brand-new constitution.

La Constitution de la France nouvelle!

Tres importante.

And, of course, being French, he took some refreshments, too.

Some freshly-baked bread for you, monsieur.

A picnic of roast chicken.

And, inevitably, une bouteille du vin.

Bon voyage!

FLAME ROARS

Liftoff!

Vive la revolution!

As he floated off, this revolutionary aeronaut

scattered the constitution across the countryside.

Vive la revolution!

He was spreading the word that a new France had been born.

The popular story of the Revolution often ignores

this love of new technology, like the balloon.

But in fact, the revolutionaries

frequently pushed the boundaries of science.

In the old regime, weights and measures were an inexact affair.

Measurements were based on the length of the king's own foot.

And units of distance differed wildly across France.

But now, all measures would be standardised,

using the scientific precision of the new metric system.

The perfect metre would be exactly one ten-millionth

of the distance from the pole to the equator.

A kilogram based on the mass of a specific volume of water.

With everything neatly divisible by ten.

Few people today remember

that this building block of modern science was laid during this period.

There seemed no end to the revolutionary ingenuity.

They even tidied up time by decimalising it.

The day was now going to be split into ten hours,

as this revolutionary clock shows.

You can see one to ten on the clock face there.

And each minute was going to contain 100 seconds.

Ten-hour clocks didn't stand the test of time,

but one innovation would never be forgotten.

The guillotine is presented in history

as a deliberately brutal killing machine

created for the blood lust of the radicals.

But that's a fib.

In fact, the revolutionaries intended to make capital punishment

more egalitarian and humane.

Until then, noblemen were beheaded with a sword,

while commoners were usually hanged.

Dr Joseph Guillotin proposed an enlightened alternative.

Joseph Guillotin said that it was virtually painless.

That all you'd feel was a little coolness on the back of the neck.

One of its first victims

would turn out to be the most famous of them all.

By August 1792, the National Assembly was afraid

the king would become a figurehead for counter-revolutionaries.

The delegates voted to get rid of the monarchy.

The king was imprisoned,

but it still wasn't clear what would happen to him.

Today, we often assume that it was a foregone conclusion

that the king would be guillotined.

But his execution wasn't inevitable.

By now, the jacobin revolutionaries had split into two main factions.

The moderates were the Girondins. There they are.

And they wanted to keep the king alive.

On the other side, though, we have the more radical Montagnards,

led by Robespierre.

And they wanted to execute him.

The two sides were battling over poor old Louis,

trapped in the middle.

Eventually, a compromise was reached.

The king would be given a proper trial,

with proper lawyers to defend him.

The charges against the king included his crime of fleeing Paris

and of treason - for causing the blood of Frenchmen to flow.

He was found guilty by a huge majority of the National Assembly.

95% of the 700 delegates against him.

But the vote over his punishment -

banishment, imprisonment or the guillotine -

was much closer.

The death penalty, to be carried out immediately,

was passed by a close margin of just 6%.

Louis XVI almost survived the French Revolution.

The king's execution marked the beginning of the Terror.

The Terror is rarely remembered by those who celebrate the French Revolution.

But the enemies of the Revolution point to it

as a powerful counter-argument.

Many early victims of the Terror were aristocrats...

...and soon included the scapegoat for the Revolution,

Marie Antoinette.

One accusation was especially outrageous.

That the queen had sexually abused her eight-year-old son.

Do you think that this charge of incest

grew out of the earlier pornography

and the pamphlets against her?

Would you describe this as a true trial,

or more of a show trial?

This is the exact spot occupied by the prison cell

in which Marie Antoinette spent the final 75 clays of her life.

She was 37 when she died, with two young children.

She wrote a very moving final letter to her sister-in-law.

She wrote, "l embrace you with all my heart,

"as well as those poor, dear children.

"My God, it is heartbreaking to leave them forever."

History's come up with wildly different ideas

about the significance of the queen's execution.

For the revolutionaries, killing Marie Antoinette

kept the fire of revolution burning brightly.

But for critics of the Revolution,

it revealed their ultimate cruelty.

Maximilien Robespierre is usually remembered as

the fanatical monster who unleashed the Terror.

For most of the revolutionary years,

he lived in this house in the centre of Paris.

He was fastidious.

A stickler for detail.

The hard-working Robespierre

was totally dedicated to the Revolution.

He became known as "The lncorruptible".

He's gone down in history as a cruel tyrant.

As a despot.

But what's the real version?

This is the main law court in Paris,

where the Terror was launched.

Now, Marisa, a lot of people think of Robespierre

as a cruel, reptilian sort of a person.

But you think differently, don't you?

Yes. This is a complete misunderstanding of who he was.

What were his redeeming features

that I might be surprised to hear that he had?

He was a very idealistic man.

He was very humanitarian,

which might surprise you, but it certainly is the case. Mm.

He was opposed to the death penalty.

Right up until May, 1791,

he tried to get the death penalty abofished

because he said it was barbaric and it didn't stop crime.

He was very strongly in favour of equality of rights.

So they'd had this Declaration of the Rights Of Man and Citizen, which is all very fine,

but he said, "lf you don't actually put this into practice,

"if you don't give everybody..." Well, every man.

"If you don't give every man a vote,

"then that's not really equality, is it?"

This included the Jews.

The Jews were the biggest religious minority in France at that time,

and lots of people didn't want to give the Jews political rights.

Robespierre certainly was one of those who argued for that.

But by 1793, many revolutionaries feared

that the young republic was going to be crushed.

France was riven by civil war and foreign armies were on the march.

To save the Revolution, Robespierre became more extreme.

He and the radicals now felt justified

in eliminating all opposition.

A ruthless legal machine went into action.

This is the room where the Revolutionary Tribunal met.

Where so many trials were held of famous people.

Just here, in this space? Right here.

So this is where so many came at the moment of crisis,

before their... before their execution.

Gives you a shiver.

The Terror was used to destroy opposition

and frighten citizens into submission.

In Paris alone, up to 3,000 people were sentenced to death.

Nobody was safe.

That astronomer from the tennis court got the chop.

Olympe de Gouges was guillotined for her feminist beliefs.

There's a persistent story that Dr Guillotin himself

was the victim of his own invention.

But that's too good to be true. It's just a story.

It comes from this satirical cartoon,

which shows Robespierre guillotining Dr Guillotin

because he was literally the only man left living in Paris.

There's no doubt that Robespierre played a key role in the Terror.

But he was part of a system of revolutionary committees

and tribunals, with many enthusiastic supporters.

In the end, Robespierre himself would fall foul of the tribunal.

In the summer of 1794, he was accused by fellow revolutionaries

of being a dictator.

He and his allies were sentenced to death,

and quickly guillotined.

Do you think that Robespierre has the reputation that he deserves from history?

Robespierre was made into a scapegoat after his execution

for all the things that had happened in France

during the period of terror.

Once he was dead, yes, it became very convenient to say

that this had all been Robespierre, it had all been one man.

They invent this notion of him being the mastermind behind the Terror.

Like a sort of spider in the centre of a web

who'd been the one person who'd thought of all these things.

And this is... this is nonsense.

We often think of the Revolution as being confined to France itself.

But at the time, France's neighbouring nations

were terrified that revolutionary ideas

would spread across the whole of Europe.

And by 1793, France was caught up

in a violent, counter-revolutionary war.

The monarchies of Austria and Prussia were the main antagonists.

Before long, Spain, Portugal,

Holland, Sardinia and Naples

were all piling in against the Revolution.

Across the Channel, Britain had a complex attitude to the French Revolution.

In the early clays, British radicals had seen it

as a beacon of hope for political progress.

The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham was terribly excited.

"Now is the time", he argued,

"to give the vote to both men and women in Britain!"

Meanwhile, William Wordsworth was getting excited in poetry!

"Bliss it was," he wrote, "in that dawn to be alive!

"But to be young was very heaven!"

Obviously, the supporters of King George Ill were much less keen.

And as the news of the Terror filtered through,

enthusiasm turned to horror and condemnation.

The execution of Louis XVI was the final straw for King George.

And in 1793, Britain joined the European Coalition,

dedicated to restoring the French monarchy.

A Royal Navy force sailed to the port of Toulon in southern France.

They were supporting a group of French royalists

who were fighting against the revolutionary army.

But the expedition failed, largely because of the brilliance

of a young Republican artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte.

He was known as the Little Corporal.

And he wasn't actually that little.

He was five foot seven, a fairly average height.

But we think of him as little because British propaganda

always made out that he was super-small.

He did very well at Toulon,

and Europe would be hearing a lot more about this chap.

The French Revolution is usually assumed to have brought

autocratic rule in France to an end.

But is that really true?

In 1789, France had an absolute monarch, that was Louis,

and then, monarchy was ended with the Revolution.

But just ten years later, by 1799,

France was once again under the control of just one man.

It was the hero of the Siege of Toulon - Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleon's goal was to conquer much of the world

and turn it into a vast empire.

He would soon be the most powerful man in Europe.

This painting shows him and his wife, Josephine,

being crowned Emperor and Empress of France.

In what ways was Napoleon Bonaparte like a king?

For most people at the time, most observers,

it was pretty clear that a rather monarchical form of government

had been restored in France.

He's made First Consul for life,

the right to nominate his own successor.

And you don't get more kingly than that.

But Napoleon's imperial goals were eventually thwarted.

And in 1814, after the allies deposed him,

something astonishing happened.

They put a Bourbon king back on the French throne.

The monarchy had returned!

When you look at the executions of Louis XVI

and Marie Antoinette,

things like the fall of the Bastille, the reign of terror,

it's pretty hard to imagine that in 1814,

the Bourbons will be restored

and France will be a monarchy again under them.

It happens largely because the allies want it to.

Louis XVIII, Louis XVI's younger brother, returns as king.

This Bourbon dynasty lasted for 15 years.

But it's often written out of the story,

because yet more French revolutions were on the way.

Most people, particularly British people,

assumed that 1789 had somehow settled it,

but there were revolutions in 1830,

in 1848, in 1871.

Every revolution is followed by a restoration,

or the potential of a restoration.

It seems like it's two steps forward and one step back each time.

But the events of 1789 are still remembered as the real French Revolution.

Its story and imagery have echoed around the world.

And this is largely thanks to a young German radical, Karl Marx.

In 1843, Marx moved to Paris.

He would hang out in the cafes along this very bit of street

with his best friend, Engels.

They believed that consuming alcohol

was a necessary response to capitalism.

Marx had this scientific theory of history,

in which he thought he could see patterns emerging.

And he wrote that, "the revolutionary movement, which began in 1789,

"gave rise to the communist idea.

"This idea, consistently developed,

"is the idea of a New World Order."

So Marx's theory is rooted in a radical version

of the story of the French Revolution.

And the result would be the promise of a world revolution

and the birth of communism.

Mike, do you see the French Revolution as the granddaddy of revolutions?

The leaders of the Russian Revolution

appropriated the symbolism of the French one.

Workers marching through the streets.

Riots and street battles.

And the storming of significant state buildings.

The crowds even sang the Marseillaise.

Lenin admired the most radical French revolutionaries.

He had statues of Robespierre erected in Moscow and St Petersburg.

Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks described themselves as

"Glorious Jacobins".

The parts of the French Revolution that particularly appealed to Lenin

were the revolutionary tribunal and state-sponsored terror.

In 1918, Lenin said that "Class struggle is inconceivable

"without severest destruction and terror".

The French Revolution has been adopted as a model for action against oppression,

especially in France.

From the Paris riots of May 1968

to the recent Gilet jaunes demonstrations

against the Macron government's reforms.

But people aren't always honest about the Revolution's legacy

of violence, dictatorship and bloodshed.

Modern France has a complicated relationship

with the French Revolution.

This extraordinary building - it's a sculpture -

was opened in 1989 to commemorate 200 years since the Revolution.

And it's called the Grand Arch of Fraternity,

in reference to revolutionary ideals.

President Macron likes to refer to these ideals.

In 2018, he celebrated France's fraternity with the United States

in their Congress.

Our two nations are rooted in the same soil,

grounded in the same ideals,

of the American and French revolutions.

We have worked together for the universal ideals of liberty,

tolerance and equal rights.

APPLAUSE

But, along with many of his compatriots,

Macron rarely mentions the Terror of 1793.

You know, it seems to me that the French have almost airbrushed

the more horrific aspects of their revolution

out of their national story.

And who can blame them?

Why would you concentrate on the bits that make your nation look bad?

An example of this is that there are surprisingly few statues of Robespierre,

the most influential revolutionary of them all.

There is one in Paris, but it's really small

and it's tucked away in an insignificant little square.

It's almost like Robespierre has become a state secret.

While the French often gloss over the Terror,

the British remember a very different version of the story.

In Britain, a die-hard monarchy,

we've a long tradition of using the Terror as a warning

against ideologues who take things too far.

And that perhaps explains the popularity of Charles Dickens'

revolutionary novel, A Tale of Two Cities.

It's about what happens when the brutality of revolution gets out of hand.

As he writes, "Liberty, equality,

"fraternity or death.

"The last much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!"

With Madame Tussaud's waxworks,

the Terror became a national obsession.

In the early 1880s, she escaped from France

and set up her museum in London.

She exhibited wax heads of executed victims of the Terror,

including Marie Antoinette.

Madame Tussaud even claimed to have the original guillotine blade.

Britain would never forget the Terror.

Americans have yet another perspective on the French Revolution,

somewhere in between that of the French and the British.

They're big fans of Lafayette, the moderate revolutionary

who'd helped the Americans win their own independence.

I love this idea that the Americans

had a better revolution than the French did.

ETHEREAL SINGING

There are still some people in France

who will never allow the Terror to be written out of history.

The Cathedral of Saint-Denis is the resting place

for most of the kings and queens of France,

including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

And every year, on the anniversary of the king's execution,

a small group of royalists,

some wearing Bourbon white, gather here.

They love the queen!

Marie Antoinette's reputation is finally being reappraised.

Instead of seeing her as the hate figure

whose careless words caused the Revolution,

many now view her with more sympathy.

This exhibition in Paris is a celebration of her life and of her image.

Fashion people really love her.

Here's John Galliano referencing her style for Dior.

It seems that fashion just can't get enough

of the tragic glamour of the doomed queen.

The Revolution is a stirring national myth for Republican France.

It's a powerful story

that continues to be told and retold all over the world.

Complete with exaggeration, manipulation and fibs.

From the exciting fall of the Bastille

to the tragic execution of Marie Antoinette,

everybody has their favourite parts of the French Revolution

that they like to pick out to tell their own version of the story.

And the fib that poor Marie Antoinette said, "Let them eat cake"

is going to be almost impossible to erase from history.

Next time, George IV and Regency Britain.

Was the king as foolish as his caricatures suggest?

Who really won the Battle of Waterloo?

And was the United Kingdom as united as we think?

In some ways, it was the most astounding piece of propaganda

in the 19th century.