Premium Episode 107: Conspiracy Theories in Revolutionary & Napoleonic France w Everett Rummage smpl
A new perspective on the storming of the Bastille. Conspiracies weaponized by savvy political advisors. A series of beheadings. Pamphlets filled with cartoons of people farting on the king. Everett Rummage of the Age of Napoleon Podcast has written an episode that might help you contextualize recent history.
↓↓↓↓ SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH SO YOU DON'T MISS THE SECOND WEEKLY EPISODE ↓↓↓↓
www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Follow Everett Rummage: http://twitter.com/trillburne
Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: http://qanonanonymous.com
Episode music by Hasufel (http://hasufel.bandcamp.com), Pontus Berghe & GRKZGL (http://soundcloud.com/grkzgl)
It's the sign of a Saint-Barthélemy for the patriots!
Tonight, even the battalions, Swiss and German, will leave the Champ-de-Mars to slaughter us!
We have only one resource.
Les armes!
Aux armes!
Aux armes!
Tout Paris doit prendre les armes!
Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 107 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Conspiracy Theories in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Everett Rummage, Julian Fields, and Travis Fiume.
Let them eat Jake!
It's what I've always said when the unwashed crowds gather neath the palace window.
Complaining that bread prices are just too damn high.
I lecture them with the wisdom of my God-appointed brain, untouched by syphilis and crowned with a beautiful powdered wig.
And yet Jake remains uneaten, sitting across from me.
This week our guest is Everett Rumage from the Age of Napoleon podcast.
He has written a segment on conspiracy theories in revolutionary and Napoleonic France, in an era where bona fide conspiracies rocked the nation regularly.
Did a pamphlet exist on Fraise-le-Dryp?
Or were most of the stories just about royals doing poos on each other?
And what of the French Gitmo?
La Bastille.
We're going to learn more with our special guest, Everett Romage, whose name is reminiscent of an alcoholic English scientist crossing a jungle that will certainly kill him.
Some of you probably already know Everett for his great tweets under the pseudonym Trillburn, or even The Discord Lover.
Welcome to the podcast, Mr. Romage!
Thank you very much!
Theories of the conspiracy at the age of the French Revolution and Napoleon.
Conspiracy theories thrive in times of uncertainty and upheaval.
The period of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte were no exception.
Before we delve into the conspiracy theories of revolutionary and Napoleonic France, it is worth mentioning that this was a golden age for actual conspiracies.
During this era, words like émigré and terrorist entered wide usage for the first time.
Coups and counter-coups became a regular feature of revolutionary politics.
One of the most famous leaders of the early stages of the Revolution, the Comte de Mirabeau, turned out to be an agent provocateur in the pay of the king.
The suicide car bomb was invented for an assassination attempt on Napoleon on Christmas Eve 1800.
It's a good story.
They actually built it in an old abandoned monastery, and they built a prototype.
And when they blew it up, the guys who built it were so terrified, they just ran out of the monastery.
And so they didn't actually do the proper... Because they were so scared by their own creation, they didn't actually do the proper investigation.
Did it go off right?
Would it have killed Napoleon?
Anyway, before his execution, it had come to light that Louis XVI had been working in secret with France's enemies to ensure his own country's defeat on the battlefield.
These are just a few examples.
One big reason people in this era seemed convinced they were surrounded by secret plots is that there really was a lot of secret plotting going on.
So basically, yeah, not a mirror for our age at all.
On top of these real conspiracies, there were imagined ones, produced by the anxiety of changing times.
During this period, European states mobilized their people and their economies for total war in unprecedented ways.
The abstract forces of politics, finance, and international trade became far more powerful, and encroached on spheres of life where they had never been present before.
Many people found this experience disruptive and alienating, and some naturally looked for someone to blame.
This is also the period when we see something like modern public opinion emerging in Western countries for the first time.
It is still too early to talk about something like mass media as we know it, but there was an active print culture which held real influence.
Particularly in big cities with relatively literate populations, like London and Paris.
You could almost compare the press in the 18th century to the internet today.
People who read it, or listened to someone else reading it out loud, had access to far more information and news than previous generations.
However, a lot of that information was bad, a mix of polemic, entertainment, and gossip, which privileged sensationalism over accuracy.
Worse, societies and political systems had no real way to deal with this new class of informed, or misinformed, Members of the public.
Just one moment before you go on.
Did you just mention that people would read the kind of, like, pamphlets or even the news out loud so that non-literate people would go and listen to somebody?
Oh yeah, that was actually, like, probably people in Paris who knew, like, you know, what was going on in the world.
Probably more of them, it was from hearing someone else than from reading it themselves.
Because of illiteracy and just because, you know, with the level of technology, these pamphlets, they're not producing very many of them.
So they're changing hands, people are gathering around to hear them read out loud, that kind of thing.
So yeah, you guys are, you guys would have been right in the zeitgeist.
So there were podcasters back then.
Exactly.
They were like local, you would have your local regional podcaster, he would read Wikipedia for you, and he would make a podcast episode.
One important phenomenon of this era was a process historians call desacralization, in which something formerly considered sacred, the monarchy, was rendered profane and ordinary.
In past centuries, European monarchs were viewed with great reference, not quite as gods, but so favored by God that they were nearly superhuman.
To take one example, well into the 18th century, it was believed that the touch of a king could cure certain diseases.
By the time of the French Revolution, this image of divine monarchy was fading away.
Kings, queens, and emperors were increasingly seen as more or less normal people who just happened to be born into lives of power and privilege.
Print culture was a major driver of this process.
In early eras of history, people only really had contact with their monarchs through public displays of state power.
But by the mid-18th century, it was relatively easy for someone in Paris to find a newspaper or a pamphlet full of court gossip, or even speculation about the king's private life, or the sex lives of the royal family.
Satirical songs, stories, and cartoons were very popular, and their favorite targets were the royals and their relatives and friends.
For whatever reason, people farting or shitting on each other seems to have been the most popular motif in these caricatures.
Eh oui, que veux-tu, on aime la merde.
I'm not kidding you guys.
I would guess probably 40% of the ones I've seen have someone farting or shitting on each other.
That's right, because that's it.
You very literally just want to see someone throw shit at the king.
And so you're like, ah, what if the queen was propelling it from her asshole on top of it all?
Yeah, it's just the most basic, like, you know, that impulse that we all have to see, you know, someone with an authority get shat on.
And, you know, these guys were the pioneers of it.
So that's what they've depicted.
Obviously, none of these pamphlets were very politically important in and of themselves.
But over the course of decades, they helped erode the mystique of the monarchy.
Quite simply, it's hard to think of the king as a nearly divine figure when you know all about his sexual affairs and drunken debauchery, and have had a good chuckle at the idea of someone farting on him.
Without this shift in public attitudes, it never would have been possible for people to rise up and directly challenge the monarchy.
So to sum up, this was an era of unprecedented ideological and geopolitical turbulence, rife with real conspiracies.
It was also an era of profound social and political change, exactly the type of phenomena people are tempted to explain with conspiracism.
And the emerging popular press provided the perfect conduit for conspiracy theories to reach a wide audience.
If you were deliberately working to create a perfect environment to foster the growth of conspiracy theories, these are exactly the type of conditions you would want to create.
You have been listening to a sample of a premium episode of QAnon Anonymous.
We don't run any advertising on the show, and we'd like to keep it that way.
For five bucks a month, you'll get access to this episode, a new one each week, and our entire library of premium episodes.
So head on over to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe.
