War has a deep impact upon every layer
of the French revolution, yes that's certainly the case.
But it doesn't explain everything.
And it doesn't explain, I think, some of the
levels of fear that the revolutionary leaders were suffering from.
And this is what I call the politician's terror, when they turn on one another.
And this bears only a marginal relation, really, to the war.
Because, the people, they seem to be more
afraid of, are their colleagues,
rather than, you know, the enemy, the
British, or the Prussians, or what have you.
It's actually their own, their own sort of
fellow revolutionaries who seem to be against them.
And they link in their minds the betrayal of friends
and colleagues with developments abroad.
So that they're people who are the,
become the enemies within France, the enemy within,
they're supposed to be involved in a conspiracy
with the foreign invaders.
So it's linked.
But it's something else, it takes on life of its
own, and fear is a very, very powerful emotion.
And you can't see a sort of neat link there necessarily between those fears and
what is happening as a consequence of the
war. There are other impulses that are very important.
You know, it's long been said, you know,
why didn't the terror end immediately after the Battle
of Fleurus that's 26th of June, which showed
that the, the French forces were winning military victories.
Why then did terror continue for another month after that?
A month in which many people died, the height
of what they called the great terror in Paris.
And that really has a lot to do with fear, fear of
prison plots, fear of assassination all sorts of things were going on there.
>> And to use one of the words that's in the subtitle
of your book Choosing Terror how do you know that someone is authentic?
How do you know, when someone says I am a patriot, I'm a revolutionary, how can you
be sure finally, that they're telling the truth or are they part of some conspiracy?
Are they dissimulating?
And, I was struck by the link then, with your earlier book about virtue,
which is such a, a powerful term, isn't it right through the
18th century and into the French Revolution because these are men and
some women who in public life who proclaim that in some sense
they are the embodiment of virtue and are creating a society of virtue.
But how can you tell that they're authentic?
And that seems to me to be the great dilemma.
>> Yeah, it, it's really a problem.
We don't use the term virtue now, so perhaps it seems a bit odd.
But when people are talking about politics
now, they still talk about morality, corruption,