Peter McPhee on the French Revolution: Robespierre, the King's Trial, and the Terror

Jeff Kellick

11 minutes ago

3 min read

Interview Episode for Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 14i

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwUyqrzP3hM

Who Decides When the Emergency Ends? Peter McPhee on the French Revolution

In 1793, France gave sweeping emergency powers to a few committees. Historian Peter McPhee explains why, and why ending them became a deadly question.

This is the interview episode for Week 15 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, "The Fork in the Road": Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Two Enlightenments. Tuesday's episode ended on the levy of February 1793 and the revolt in the Vendée: "they have killed our king, chased away our priests, and now they want to take our bodies."

Peter McPhee is Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne, where he was the first provost, and a Member of the Order of Australia. His books include Liberty or Death: The French Revolution and Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life, both from Yale University Press, and most recently An Environmental History of France: Making the Landscape, 1770–2020.

We begin in the spring of 1789, with the cahiers de doléances, the books of grievances that communities across France drew up for the Estates-General. McPhee argues that what ordinary people asked for (a representative assembly, an end to privilege by birth, careers open to talent, and an end to the lords' dues in the countryside) had, one way or another, been won by about 1795. The controversy, in his account, is the cost. Once France went to war in 1792, "matters of opinion become matters of life and death."

From there: how much Rousseau actually mattered, the cult of the Supreme Being as Robespierre's attempt at a civic religion, the trial of Louis XVI, and the question of the hour. Did gathering power into the Committee of Public Safety make the killing easier to choose, or did the war? McPhee puts the weight on the war, with one exception: the conviction of 1789 that a far better world could be made. He also reminds us that "the Terror" is a name given only after Robespierre fell. At the time, people spoke of revolutionary government.

He explains how historians count the dead of 1793 and 1794 and which deaths trouble him most, how the enslaved of the French Caribbean forced the abolition of slavery in 1794, and why the tension between liberty and equality, which the Revolution never resolved, has never gone away. The closing sets the Declaration of 1793, with its rights to public relief and instruction, beside the declarations of 1776 and 1789.

Did it leave people more free, or more governed? This week the standing question went to our guest, and Peter McPhee answered with one word: both.

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00:00 Cold open: Danton asks for a court

0:01:15 Introduction: the week and two threads

0:03:28 Meet Peter McPhee

0:05:25 The cahiers: what ordinary French people asked for

0:11:04 The Estates-General: when did they know it was a revolution?

0:12:50 The libertarian case and the two declarations, 1789 and 1793

0:16:50 How much did Rousseau matter?

0:20:29 Robespierre and the cult of the Supreme Being

0:27:17 The committees or the war?

0:30:41 "Except for this": the conviction of 1789