480. The French Revolution: The Rights of Man (Part 6)

The Rest Is History

Goalhanger

History

4.6 • 18.6K Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2024

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Liberté, égalité, fraternité!” Alongside violence, the French Revolution is a story of principles and values. It is the ultimate intersection of brutality and Enlightenment idealism, as epitomised by the Fall of the Bastille. So too the creation and implementation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man - a totemic manifesto for the French state, which seemingly embodied a shockingly overt rupture from the past. Not only one of the decisive moments of the French Revolution, the declaration would prove transformative for all world history, and galvanised France as the cradle of of modern nationalism. So, just as the walls of the Bastille were abolished, the words of the document tore down something just as old and once impenetrable: the taint of absolutism, handing sovereignty from the king to the nation. By the 4th of August 1789 this amorphous beast was gripped by a great hysterical, almost paranoid passion, and it was amidst this turmoil that the French Assemblée Constituante voted unanimously to abolish feudalism, in one fell swoop eliminating everything that had come before. What would this consciously manufactured new beginning hold in store for Revolutionary France, or was it merely a bombastic continuation of the past? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the groundbreaking ideas behind the French Revolution, along with the deep history of the ideals its enshrined. So too the stories behind some of its most famous iconography, and the long-term repercussions of this transformative upheaval for the modern world. _______ *The Rest Is History LIVE in the U.S.A.* If you live in the States, we've got some great news: Tom and Dominic will be performing throughout America in November, with shows in San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Boston and New York. *The Rest Is History LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall* Tom and Dominic, accompanied by a live orchestra, take a deep dive into the lives and times of two of history’s greatest composers: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. Tickets on sale now at TheRestIsHistory.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for listening to the rest is history.
0:02.2	For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series and membership
0:07.3	of our much-love chat community, go to the rest is history.com and join the club. That is, the rest is History. is History.
0:15.0	The Rest is History. . . . . . . . The rest is history. The representatives of the French people formed into a national assembly and considering ignorance, forgetfulness or contempt of the
0:37.4	rights of man to be the only causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of governments have resolved to set forth in a solemn
0:48.0	declaration the natural, unalienable and sacred rights of man.
0:55.0	To the end, that this declaration constantly present to all members of the body politic may remind them unceasingly of their rights and their duties.
1:09.2	The duties, are you?
1:10.4	Who saw that coming?
1:11.8	So Tom, that is the preamble to the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen.
1:16.6	I'm now rethinking everything I thought about the French Revolution because Margaret Thatcher in our first episode
1:21.0	told us they forgot about the duties. But didn't I'm in shock only in the
1:25.2	preamble though they didn't include the duties and the the list of rights that follow
1:29.2	that. That is the giveaway isn't it? So people who are wondering what we're talking about,
1:34.0	that is the preamble to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,
1:38.0	one of the landmark documents in all human history.
1:41.0	It was approved by the National Assembly on the 26th of
1:44.0	August 1789 and Tom they had been talking about it for about a month hadn't
1:49.2	they this document that now we all think of is so tremendously important.
1:53.0	Why did they feel they needed it?
1:55.0	Well you say that it's a document that we're all familiar with.
1:58.0	I'm not entirely confident in the English speaking world that that's the case.
	...

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