History Podcast / Revolutions

** While Charles X was, in most respects, an EvilReactionary trying to restore absolutist rule in France and sweep away the few rights and reforms of the Revolution that had survived the Bourbon Restoration, he was close to his family. In contrast to his brother, Louis XVIII's unshakable conviction that the whole French Revolution had been masterminded by Philippe the Duke of Orleans to seize the throne, Charles embraced Philippe's son Louis Philippe and felt the Bourbon family should stick together.

** Averted in the Russian Revolution season, which seems to be heading this way with Duncan's initially sympathetic portrait of UsefulNotes/{{Tsar|Tsar Autocrats}} UsefulNotes/NicholasII as a smart, kind, loving husband and father. But then Duncan spends many episodes laying out at great length the obstinate incompetence of Nicholas's regime, to the point where he drains away all of the initial sympathy the season might have had for Nicholas. Duncan even says "I shed few tears" for the execution of the entire Romanov family in 1918, while still acknowledging that it was a dumb decision with no benefit for the Soviet government.

* BullyingADragon: Sometimes, sufficiently brutal crackdowns ''can'' work, but if the people are desperate enough and catch the scent of them early enough, they can backfire ''spectacularly''. Special mention to the ultra-royalist, reactionary, absolutist Comte d'Artois. He first managed to provoke the fall of the Bastille that would turn the tide of the French revolution decisively against the royal family when his brother Louis could have at least ''theoretically'' forged an alliance with the Third Estate to save the nation and keep a crown on his head by trying to flood Paris with provincial troops to enforce royal will at gunpoint. Then, decades later, when it was finally ''his'' turn to wear the crown, he proved he'd learned absolutely nothing and did it ''again'', prompting the July Revolution and the end of Bourbon political power in France forever.

* HeadInTheSandManagement: The reactionary ministry of Polignac under Charles X before the July Revolution of 1830 was blunted by the lethargic Polignac's unshakable conviction that God was on his side, and therefore he didn't actually have to do ''anything'' and everything would work out in the end and go his way. His inept mismanagement ensured that the Bourbon response to the crisis was about twelve hours behind where it needed to be and helped ensure the fall of the house of Bourbon forever. Mike even notes the comic irony that a secret society founded by his rivals was literally named something like "Help Yourself and Heaven Will Help You," in contrast to his own.

* PaperTiger: French liberals were convinced that Polignac and Charles X were plotting a devious royalist coup to overthrow the country's charter of government and establish an absolutist monarchy. The two men's well-known absolutism and hatred for the French Revolution and its reforms left those liberals absolutely sure that a hammer blow was coming. But, as it turned out, there was no devious royalist coup. Polignac and his team were mostly content to wait for God to help them out. And when the government did push out a series of decrees that essentially served as the long-awaited coup attempt, the whole enterprise proved to be rather lazy and half-assed, with the government having done none of the preparatory work necessary to actually succeed. As such, the revolutionaries in Paris were able to push out Charles after three days and a (relatively) small amount of bloodshed.

* FatalFlaw: While all the "great idiots of history" who help bring about revolutions in the first place have their fair share of other fatal flaws (Charles I's [[DetrimentalDetermination general stubbornness]], Louis XVI's [[TheDitherer general indecisiveness]], Nicholas II's [[PointyHairedBoss general incompetence]] paired with [[CantTakeCriticism thin-skinned insensitivity to criticism]]), Mike pegs the great common flaw they all share as '''[[CreativeSterility Unimaginativeness]]'''. Where able, capable rulers would be able to use their creativity and imaginations to come up with solutions to the crises and shocks to the system besetting their regimes, implementing compromises and reforms that address these problems while still leaving themselves firmly on top, the "great idiots" can't, and are dragged down by their lack of imagination to their dooms. Mike even describes many other fatal flaws as just manifestations of this fundamental lack of imagination, and points out that it represents the biggest black mark even on great geniuses like Napoleon Bonaparte, who didn't like [[ItWillNeverCatchOn newfangled technologies like steamships]] and couldn't see past the mire of his own racism to ponder the possibilities offered by allying with the L'Overturian Republic rather than crushing it, or Toussaint L'Overture himself, who never could come up with an economic future for Haiti beyond dysfunctional cash crop plantations crewed by forced labor when more just alternatives did exist in his own time.

* AlasPoorVillain: While it's clear he thinks UsefulNotes/MaximillenRobespierre had well and truly gone off the deep end by the end of the Reign of Terror, Duncan still manages to muster some sympathy for him and his fellow members of the Committee of Public Safety as they all manage to horribly (and not always fatally) injure themselves during the Thermidorian Reaction, then get guillotined without even a show trial, often in agonizing pain and denied all dignity.

* AlasPoorVillain: While it's clear he thinks UsefulNotes/MaximillienRobespierre had well and truly gone off the deep end by the end of the Reign of Terror, Duncan still manages to muster some sympathy for him and his fellow members of the Committee of Public Safety as they all manage to horribly (and not always fatally) injure themselves during the Thermidorian Reaction, then get guillotined without even a show trial, often in agonizing pain and denied all dignity.

** For Charles I and Louis XVI, he ruthlessly lists all the reasons why they ended up executed by their (former) subjects, but also points out that they were neither tyrants nor inherently evil people. It's quite evident that he bemoans their fate, even though he clearly sees it as inevitable given their actions. He does something similar to Louis Philippe, even though he was merely exiled, not executed.

* AlasPoorVillain: While it's clear he thinks Maximillian Robespierre had well and truly gone off the deep end by the end of the Reign of Terror, Duncan still manages to muster some sympathy for him and his fellow members of the Committee of Public Safety as they all manage to horribly (and not always fatally) injure themselves during the Thermidorian Reaction, then get guillotined without even a show trial, often in agonizing pain and denied all dignity.

** The 10th season, dedicated to the Russian Revolution, however deserves special mention and begins with kind of a staggering amount. The season starts with an eight-episode “prologue” focusing on Marx and Engels and, to a lesser extent, Bakunin, (Bakunin being important because he was the intellectual forefather of the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Left faction of whom were the junior-but-still-important partners in the merger of socialist parties that led to the establishment of the one, the only Communist Party of the Soviet Union) then launches into essentially a complete history of Russia (this being the first season where Russia is really in focus). It takes more than 20 episodes to even get to the year 1900. Duncan is not above lampshading this. The earliest "event" in history Duncan (jokingly) invokes also happens in this season, namely when he invokes "Aliens teaching humans agriculture" in his explanation of Marxist theory of modes of production.

** The Swiss Guard show up again in the season on the July Revolution of 1830. Duncan pointed out that because sons tended to follow fathers in the job, the Swiss Guard protecting the king in 1830 were largely descendants of the men who were brutally killed by the crowds during the original French Revolution. They were well aware of what happened back then and wanted nothing to do with a repeat in 1830.

* DoubleMeaningTitle: The tenth season episode "Anarchy in Ukraine" is a rare ''triple''-meaning title: it refers to both the look at the Anarchist movement in Ukraine during the Russian Revolution under Nestor Makhno but also the general societal upheaval and conflicts brought upon Ukraine during the First World War and Russian Civil War. It's also a reference to the famous Sex Pistols song "Anarchy in the UK." It borders on quadruple meaning, having been released on 21 February 2022--literally three days before the Russian invasion (that everyone could see coming from a mile away by that point; Duncan makes it clear the significance wasn't lost on him).

* EmbarrassingNickname: After seeing that Simon Bolivar could, impossibly, outride all of them, the rough-spoken llaneros cowboys bestowed on him the high honor of nicknaming him ''culo de hierro''--"Iron Ass." Whenever Bolivar engages in some feat of riding long distances really fast, Duncan will joke that "They don't call him Iron Ass for nothing!"

* EvenEvilHasStandards: Talleyrand may have been a sleazy, greedy crook whose loyalty to any given master went exactly as far as his own benefit and no further, but he was still a diplomat and believed his job was to ensure peace rather than a favorable position for the next war. When it became obvious that Emperor Napoleon was planning to conquer the world, or at least Europe, and would probably ultimately destroy France in the process of fulfilling his ambitions, Talleyrand started undermining the Emperor behind his back, advising Tsar Alexander II to reject the alliance he was meeting with the tsar to cement and ultimately getting France a seat at the table and surprisingly favorable terms at the Council of Vienna, ''because'' of how many times he'd stabbed Napoleon in the back.

* FateWorseThanDeath: Life as a slave in the sugar cane fields of Haiti was absolutely horrifying, even by the standards of, well, slavery. Part of the reason the slave revolt gained so much steam was that there's only so effective the threat of death can be when one's life is already a living death, and when the voodoo religion promised that death freed one's soul to return to Africa.

** He also points out that the French Revolution [[CouldHaveAvoidedThisPlot could have avoided going out of control]] entirely 1) Had they not put into effect the Civil Constitution of the Clergy which proved effective propaganda for the counter-revolution. He pointed out the Vendee uprising would not have occurred had this been cancelled or even modified to remove its most odious bits (like the requirement for priests to swear loyalty to the Nation above even the Pope instead of, say, having them simply swear to not preach against the Nation) 2) Had the Girondins not fomented war in 1791-92, at a time when there was no threat to France from external powers. Without War, there would have been no ReignOfTerror and no Napoleon Bonaparte.

* FullCircleRevolution: Well, obviously, but perhaps the most tragic and emphasized example is Haiti. Through multiple revolutions that killed huge chunks of the population, and even literal genocide, the lot of the black former slaves who had fought so bravely to attain their freedom just didn't change much. From the whips and drivers of the big whites to the clubs and foremen of the Loverturian Republic and Dessaline's empire, the cultivators were still forced to work on plantations for meager rewards under draconian labor laws. Ironically, despite everything, it's also Haiti Mike refers to in the final season as the one exception when people try to argue that each of the revolutions wasn't ''really'' a revolution, and his refutation of the idea that none of the revolutions covered failed to accomplish positive change better than non-revolutionary incrementalism: would ''you'' tell a Haitian slave, worked to death, that battling for their freedom wasn't necessary because thirty years down the road, long after they're stone-dead from depreciation, emancipation ''might'' come? He also points out that even in cases where it ''looks'' like the revolution has come full circle, a lot of the time big changes have still rattled through social and political structures of society; the king may be back in power but the fact that the ''last'' king died at the hands of his own people irrevocably changes the way all future kings rule.

* GrandFinale: The series ended on Christmas Day 2022 with an episode entitled "Adieu Mes Amis," a grand farewell that amounted to a complete history of the origins of ''Revolutions,'' a heartfelt goodbye and a preview of Duncan's next project.
* HatesEveryoneEqually: Boves, the caudillo of the Legion of Hell, hated the Spanish almost as much as he hated the native criollos. When he took cities after crushing Bolivar's army, he killed ''everyone'' white, regardless of which side of the conflict they were on.

** He discusses the legends of Oliver Cromwell's brutal Irish campaigns, autocratic government, and various campaigns against the "sin and vice" of having a good time. While Oliver's Irish campaigns ''were'' pretty awful, they weren't notably worse than the ongoing Irish war that happened before and after he fought there. While Cromwell ''did'' repeatedly dismiss parliaments he never stopped calling for them, and Mike puts much more blame on the parliaments' attempts to establish an aristocratic rule and refusing to play ball with Cromwell's various constitutions. The "rule of the generals" didn't last long and Cromwell wasn't particularly happy with it. And while, yes, radical Puritans did literally try to ban Christmas, and Cromwell was certainly an extremely religious Puritan, he spent a lot of his political career arguing ''against'' these sorts of extreme Puritanism.
** He's particularly fascinated by the different judgment Lafayette receives in the US (where he is widely regarded as a hero and a military genius) and France (where he is widely regarded as an inept moderate who badly misjudged his own ability and popularity at best and a traitor who sold out the heroic July revolutionaries to conservative elements at worst). Duncan tends towards the American view of Lafayette and is happy to see some French opinions on him shift (he's even written a book about Lafayette and his role in the various revolutions).

* IGaveMyWord: Whether out of aristocratic honor or something deeper, Duncan describes Simon Bolivar as considering his oaths SeriousBusiness:

** Most famously, during a visit to Rome he and his friends stood on the hill the Plebians had once retreated to to force concessions from the Patricians and swore they would fight to liberate America from Spanish rule or die, and no matter how many times he failed and had to run for his life, Bolivar never stopped coming back to fight again, never considered fleeing and abandoning his dream. This is one of two contenders for Bolívar's most consequential promise/oath.
** When Alexandre Pétion, at that point leader of the Republic of Haiti, gave him no-strings-attached supplies and ships to reignite his revolution on the mainland, asking in return only that Bolivar swear he would abolish slavery when he won, Bolivar burned political capital for the rest of his career ensuring that liberty and equality would be genuine concerns for every country he liberated, building nationalism without (at least ideologically, if not practically) racial supremacy. Note that Bolívar's record on race before meeting Pétion was hardly spotless; the Second Republic failed ''because'' he prioritized the white slave-owning class's interests over the common people's. This is the other contender for being Bolívr's most consequential promise/oath, as it really did shape the future of South American society in a fundamental way.
** Duncan also presents the possibility that Bolivar swore a similar oath never to repeat his mistake after a bunch of royalist prisoners were freed in a plot that helped doom the Republican army, suggesting a later prisoner massacre was the result of attempting to keep it.

* MagnificentBastard:[[invoked]] Duncan's opinion of Talleyrand (whom he considers highly fascinating), which he highlights both in the main narrative and in the supplemental episode dedicated to him. Duncan points out Talleyrand's rampant corruption (which, Duncan notes, basically started the Quasi War between France and the United States) and his willingness to sell out/betray almost any master he served as well and lists the number of different regimes Talleyrand thrived under.

* NoSympathy: Mike often tries to take a broad view of even reviled historical figures, trying to assess the good with the bad, no matter how slim, or to understand the historical forces that drove them. A notable and pointed aversion is "Papa Doc" Duvalier, the brutal 20th Century dictator of Haiti, whom he describes as accomplishing absolutely nothing except brutalizing and terrorizing his people with the most corrupt and venal motives imaginable.
* OddFriendship: Nobody expected the aristocratic Simon Bolivar and the illiterate cowboy Paez to get along, but when they met, Bolivar did manage to impress the llaneros with his [[ModestRoyalty modesty]], willingness to play their cowboy games, and even his ability to excel at several of them, even riding longer and harder than the hardy cowboys. While Paez remained a free-spirit who only ever took Bolivar's orders under advisement for the rest of the wars of independence, he quashed any attempts to get him to overthrow Bolivar and take the title of supreme commander for himself, and did respect Simon Bolivar personally.

** When Tsar Nicholas makes a final attempt to resist abdication in the wake of heavy resistance and rioting at St. Petersburg by claiming he doesn't have faith the Duma will be able to appoint competent ministers to run the country - which, keep in mind, the entire ''reason'' St. Petersburg was in revolt was ''because'' Nicholas had spent the past ten years appointing nothing but incompetent ministers who were only good as yes-men able to soothe Nicholas and Alexandra's egos, and thus unable to attend to the needs of the populace - Duncan is so flabbergasted with disbelief he spends several minutes passionately ranting about how this was a situation Nicholas had bungled his way into and that he was, put bluntly, 'So ready to be done with this guy'.

** As to Louis Phillipe himself: during the 1848 season, Duncan does paint the portrait of a lazy, torpid, apathetic and disconnected king presiding over a mediocre and corrupt regime. But when Louis, during the uprising against his regime, was faced with the reality that his only way to stay on the throne was to massacre his people, he flatly refused, and instead peacefully abdicated. Duncan acknowledges this as a legitimately admirable decision. He points out that the republican government that replaced him had no such qualms about using force to assert their own authority when push came to shove.

* PregnantBadass: Episode 16 of season 5 is devoted to Simon Bolivar's grueling trek through the mountains in the middle of winter. Duncan halts the narrative to bring up a woman who accompanied the army despite being nine months' pregnant, gave birth in the middle of the trek, and then kept up the pace baby-in-tow like it was nothing. In a show full of examples of daring revolutionary bravado, Duncan names it the single most badass moment he ever heard of.

* FatalFlaw: While all the "great idiots of history" who help bring about revolutions in the first place have their fair share of other fatal flaws (Charles I's [[DetrimentalDetermination general stubbornness]], Louis XVI's [[TheDitherer general indecisiveness]], Nicholas II's [[PointyHairedBoss general incompetence]] paired with [[CantTakeCriticism thin-skinned insensitivity to criticism]]), Mike pegs the great common flaw they all share as '''[[CreativeSterility Unimaginativeness]]'''. Where able, capable rulers would be able to use their creativity and imaginations to come up with solutions to the crises and shocks to the system besetting their regimes, implementing compromises and reforms that address these problems while still leaving themselves firmly on top, the "great idiots" can't, and are dragged down by their lack of imagination to their dooms. Mike even describes many other fatal flaws as just manifestations of this fundamental lack of imagination, and points out that it represents the biggest black mark even on great geniuses like Napoleon Bonaparte, who didn't like [[ItWillNeverCatchOn newfangled technologies like steamships]] and couldn't see past the mire of his own racism to imagine the possibilities offered by allying with the L'Overturian Republic rather than crushing it, or Toussaint L'Overture himself, who never could see an economic future for Haiti beyond dysfunctional cash crop plantations crewed by forced labor.

* FatalFlaw: While all the "great idiots of history" who help bring about revolutions in the first place have their fair share of other fatal flaws (Charles I's [[DetrimentalDetermination general stubbornness]], Louis XVI's [[TheDitherer general indecisiveness]], Nicholas II's [[PointyHairedBoss general incompetence]]), Mike pegs the great common flaw they all share as '''[[CreativeSterility Unimaginativeness]]'''. Where able, capable rulers would be able to use their creativity and imaginations to come up with solutions to the crises and shocks to the system besetting their regimes, implementing compromises and reforms that address these problems while still leaving themselves firmly on top, the "great idiots" can't, and are dragged down by their lack of imagination to their dooms. Mike even describes many other fatal flaws as just manifestations of this fundamental lack of imagination, and points out that it represents the biggest black mark even on great geniuses like Napoleon Bonaparte, who didn't like [[ItWillNeverCatchOn newfangled technologies like steamships]] and couldn't see past the mire of his own racism to imagine the possibilities offered by allying with the L'Overturian Republic rather than crushing it, or Toussaint L'Overture himself, who never could see an economic future for Haiti beyond dysfunctional cash crop plantations crewed by forced labor.

* FatalFlaw: While all the "great idiots of history" who help bring about revolutions in the first place have their fair share of other fatal flaws (Charles I's [[DetrimentalDetermination general stubbornness]], Louis XVI's [[TheDitherer general indecisiveness]], Nicholas II's [[PointyHairedBoss general incompetence]]), Mike pegs the great common flaw they all share as '''[[CreativeSterility Unimaginativeness]]'''. Where able, capable rulers would be able to use their creativity and imaginations to come up with solutions to the crises and shocks to the system besetting their regimes, implementing compromises and reforms that address these problems while still leaving themselves firmly on top, the "great idiots" can't, and are dragged down by their lack of imagination to their dooms. Mike even describes many other fatal flaws as just manifestations of this fundamental lack of imagination, and points out that it represents the biggest black mark even on great geniuses like Napoleon Bonaparte, who didn't like [[ItWillNeverCatchOn newfangled technologies like steamships]], or Toussaint L'Overture, who never could see an economic future for Haiti beyond dysfunctional cash crop plantations crewed by forced labor.

** This is how Duncan portrays the future czar Nicholas II when describing his childhood education. Nicholas was a good student with a great memory and spoke four languages fluently. Unfortunately, while Nicholas was good at learning and retaining things, he didn't have the abstract reasoning ability or critical thinking skills to go from knowing specific things to coming up with his own ideas based off those things. And it's not like the tutors or family members surrounding young Nicholas were interested in helping him hone those skills.

* HorribleJudgeOfCharacter: Charles I Stuart starts the ball rolling on the English revolution (and therefore on all the revolutions that followed, which each took at least some inspiration from one another and therefore ''from'' that first English revolution) because of his close friendship with the Duke of Buckingham, a corrupt and stupid blunderer that Parliament wanted to impeach and take away from the levers of power for a wide array of stupid reasons. Charles refused, kicking off the continual enmity between himself and his Parliaments that would only grow and continue even after Buckingham got himself killed in a [[UndignifiedDeath squabble with a common soldier]].

** While Charles X was, in most respects, an EvilReactionary trying to restore absolutist rule in France and sweep away the few rights and reforms of the Revolution that had survived the Bourbon Restoration, he was close to his family. In contrast to his brother, Louis XIX's unshakable conviction that the whole French Revolution had been masterminded by Philippe the Duke of Orleans to seize the throne, Charles embraced Philippe's son Louis Philippe and felt the Bourbon family should stick together.

* EarnYourHappyEnding: Mike notes that Sonthonax, unable to get re-posted to Saint Domingue to finish what he viewed as his life's work, instead got the rare revolutionary privilege of happy and peaceful retirement. Along the way, he'd officially emancipated all the slaves on the island, tried to do right by the people against the influence of various moneyed interests (marrying a free black woman and trying to invest in schools and infrastructure rather than endless military build-up), and even proved to be the only major political force on the island trying to move away from the dysfunctional plantation cash-crop economy into a more fair, decentralized means of cultivation. It's worth noting that the ever-ambitious and ruthless L'overture merely intrigued to have him sent off to France with the "honor" of being their elected representative rather than outright trying to remove him completely as he would Sonthonax's openly racist replacement or eliminate him like many of his other rivals, presumably as a sign of respect.

* FullCircleRevolution: Well, obviously, but perhaps the most tragic and emphasized example is Haiti. Through multiple revolutions that killed huge chunks of the population, and even literal genocide, the lot of the black former slaves who had fought so bravely to attain their freedom just didn't change much. From the whips and drivers of the big whites to the clubs and foremen of the Loverturian Republic and Dessaline's empire, the cultivators were still forced to work on plantations for meager rewards under draconian labor laws. Ironically, despite everything, it's also Haiti Mike refers to in the final season as the one exception when people try to argue that each of the revolutions wasn't ''really'' a revolution, and his refutation of the idea that none of the revolutions covered failed to accomplish positive change better than non-revolutionary incrementalism: would ''you'' tell a Haitian slave, worked to death, that battling for their freedom wasn't necessary because thirty years down the road, long after they're stone-dead from depreciation, emancipation ''might'' come?