Podcast / Revolutions

"Hello, and welcome to Revolutions."

—The introduction to every episode.

Revolutions (2013-2022) is the second history podcast by Mike Duncan. Unlike his previous podcast, Revolutions is not the history of one society or polity but rather a thematic series focusing on particular revolutions in the history of the modern world.

The podcast is divided into seasons, with each season focusing on a particular revolution. These are:

• Season 1 (September 2013-January 2014; 16 episodes plus 7 supplementals): The English Civil War
• Season 2 (February-May 2014; 15 episodes plus 2 supplementals): The American Revolution
• Season 3 (July 2014-August 2015; 55 episodes plus 5 supplementals): The French Revolution. By Duncan's own admission, the real beginning of the series, when he really starts to take off and find his stride.
• Season 4 (September 2015-April 2016; 19 episodes plus 1 supplemental): The Haitian Revolution. Per Duncan, the season that had the most impact on him and his worldview (and, when you hear it, no wonder).
• Season 5 (June 2016-February 2017; 27 episodes plus 1 supplemental): The South American wars of independence, with a particular focus on Simón Bolívar
• Season 6 (March-May 2017; 7 episodes plus 5 supplementals): The July Revolution of 1830. Because of the lightning-quick pace of events, Duncan took the opportunity to give a minute-by-minute blow-by-blow account of the revolution in the core four episodes (6.04 through 6.07) on the narrative of the "Three Glorious Days". Duncan also took the opportunity here to add some additional supplements on the Belgian Revolution, the June Rebellion of 1832 (made famous by Les Misérables), the Carbonari, and Metternich.
• Season 7 (July 2017-March 2018; 32 episodes): The Revolutions of 1848.
• Season 8 (April-June 2018; 8 episodes): The collapse of the Second French Empire as a result of the Franco-Prussian War and then the Paris Commune. Another "mini-season", Duncan notes in Season 11 that while his original intent for Season 8 was to look at just the Commune, the overthrow of the Second Empire and establishment of the Third Republic also counts, making this the highest revolution-to-episode-count density of the lot.
• Season 9 (August 2018-March 2019, 27 episodes): The Mexican Revolution. One that Duncan notes he was very excited to do, as he had done a good chunk of his Master's work on the subject and planned from the beginning to include.
• Season 10 (May 2019-July 2022, 103 episodes): The Russian Revolution. Officially surpassed The French Revolution as the podcast's longest season in July 2021. Planned as the last "proper" season of the show. Duncan had to take an eight-month hiatus in the middle of the season to finish his book and then deal with a series of health problems.
• Season 11 (September 2022-December 2022): An epilogue season comparing and contrasting all the Revolutions from the 10 seasons while trying to give Duncan's own answer to the historical question of "what makes a Revolution?".

Tropes

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Invoked Trope. Duncan will often offer a short summary of the life and career of monarchs or other important figures when they leave the narrative (either as a result of death or exile), often including an appraisal of their role, their virtues and their shortcomings as well as a glimpse what their death might mean given the circumstances of the time it happened in. This is a holdover from The History of Rome, and has been copied by other narrative-history podcasts following in Duncan's footsteps.
  • 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.
  • Averted in the Russian Revolution season, which seems to be heading this way with Duncan's initially sympathetic portrait of Tsar Nicholas II as a smart and kind man and a loving husband and father. But then Duncan spends many episodes laying out at great length the obstinate incompetence of Nicholas's regime, owing almost wholly to His Majesty’s insistence on his divine right to rule, his incessant micromanagement, and his interminable vacillation, 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.
• Alas, Poor Villain: While it's clear he thinks Maximilien 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.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: The llaneros cowboys in the Venezuelan wars of independence fought gunpowder armies with nothing but machetes, fire-hardened wooden lances, and superb horsemanship, and performed so well that they became the formidable kingmakers during every stage of the conflict.
• Awesome, but Impractical: In every Revolutions fundraiser, Duncan offered the opportunity to choose which revolution he would cover in a forthcoming season. He was clear that he was totally sincere about the offer. The cost? $25,000. No one ever ponied up.
• Backstory: Every season starts out with a series of episodes detailing the relevant immediate history of the nation in question to lay the groundwork for the coming political upheaval.
  • 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.
• Better than a Bare Bulb: Mike frequently stops the narrative to discuss his storytelling techniques, explaining or justifying why he chose to introduce certain events and people in specific ways. It usually comes down to pacing reasons, and Mike's intent to keep the story focused and to make sure those who are hearing this history for the first time aren't confused.
• Book Smart: A frequent trait of the "great idiots" he ultimately concludes are probably in power if a revolution is going to obtain any degree of success. Many of them are fairly intelligent and cultivated people, but they lack imagination and critical thinking skills and they don't like listening to others who have them.
  • After Charles I's execution, Mike points out that he was a pretty clever guy who loved art and had a good grasp of history, but that his rigid absolutism and utter inability to compromise or convince anyone that he wasn't going to go back on his word the second he had the chance to do so (because, well, Charles was always planning to go back on his word and do as he saw fit as soon as he had the upper hand) ultimately spelt his doom, by making it clear to his subjects that he'd never accept defeat and never stop trying to get back into total control.
  • 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. One of his most prominent teachers was a gloomy, miserable man who considered basically everything thought up after 1700 to be evil; he was nicknamed "the high priest of stagnation."
• Born Lucky: Ruefully described as the foremost quality of all "great men," with a special emphasis on Simon Bolivar, who repeatedly survives assassination attempts by pure chance.
• Bourgeois Bohemian: One reason Duncan is skeptical of revolutions is that he notes that most revolutionaries — whether English, American or French — exaggerate their "oppression" and invoke fears of "slavery" to justify their revolution. In most cases, these revolutionaries start out as functionaries in the old order. Some of them were even nobles. They tended to rebel for a combination of both idealistic and selfish reasons, and often because the old regime simply wasn't respondent enough to their interests and ambitions. And, unlike the vast majority of the population, they were mostly well-off and slept in comfortable beds. The major exception is the Haitian Revolution, where actual slaves and oppressed people revolt against real and actual tyranny. In the Haitian Revolutions, claims of "oppression" and "slavery" are honest and free of hyperbole. (Significantly, Duncan starts expressing this opinion after Season 4; as revealed in the last episode of Season 11, this is not a coincidence.)
• Breather Episode: Much like on his previous Podcast, Duncan does occasional episodes on a particular topic or person in depth - they are often interspersed at a point where a long break would otherwise have to be taken due to him being occupied by his travels or his private life.
• Bullying a Dragon: Sometimes, sufficiently brutal crackdowns can work, especially if the government commits to them hard, 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.
• Cadre of Foreign Bodyguards: The French King had one at the outset of the French Revolution (actual Swiss Guards to boot); Duncan points out that they were in anything but an enviable position.
  • The Swiss Guards 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 Guards 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.
• Call-Back: One to the The History of Rome in season 10, Duncan saying he has to go back to Didius Julianus after he bought the Emperorship in an auction to think of a government that had less political or popular support when looking at the Kerensky Russian government following the Kornilov Affair.
• Catchphrase: During the French Revolution, Mike likes to note executions by guillotine with "Zip, thud, the end."
  • Duncan coined the term "entropy of victory" to explain how victorious revolutionary coalitions invariably fly apart due to internal conflicts once the original regime has been toppled. The term comes up a lot over the course of the show's run.
• A Day in the Limelight: Duncan will include "supplemental" episodes on people and groups who might appear in the main narrative but whose full stories can't be fully integrated into it without disrupting the flow. These include the Diggers and the Earl of Clarendon (in Season 1) and Talleyrand and Philippe of Orléans/Égalité (in Season 3).
• Determinator: How Duncan portrays Bolívar in Season 5, never breaking a sworn oath, always getting back up again from every setback no matter how catastrophic. It's entirely accurate.
• Deadpan Snarker: Most of Duncan's humor is delivered this way. When he was discussing the Thermidorians who brought down Robespierre and the Committee of public safety, he said "their principled opposition to the terror turned out to have been a principled opposition to being on the wrong side of the terror."
• Doomed Moral Victor: Obviously, it happens more than once in a series full of revolutions that don't always succeed. But an Italian commander during the Revolutions of 1848 gets special credit for invoking it; fully aware that there was no possible way he could keep his city under republican control long-term, he instead set out to ensure that his government was just, honest, capable, and fair, so as to embed these things as the legacy of republican rule in the Italian psyche and wash away the dark shadow of the French revolution so that, one day, Italy might be free. It worked, in part because the heavy-handed reactionary cardinals that replaced him were the ones who set up a guillotine in the city square and began beheading political radicals they didn't like while ignoring the problems that beset the people.
• Double-Meaning Title: 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).
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The original plan was to keep each season to around 15 episodes apiece, and the first two seasons stuck to that pretty closely. Then came the French Revolution season, which exploded to 55 episodes, and the whole "15 episodes per season" idea went out the window.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: 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. (Sonthonax didn't quite return the favor; his intrigues against L'overture for betraying him are described as a possible factor in Bonaparte refusing to deal with the dictator.)
• Embarrassing Nickname: After seeing that Simón Bolívar 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 Bolívar engages in some feat of riding long distances really fast, Duncan will joke that "They don't call him Iron Ass for nothing!"
• Enemy Mine:
  • France really, really, really did not like Austria, but when the "stately Quadrille" turned round and allying with Austria was the thing to do to give it to the English, ally with Austria they did. Duncan points out that this alliance (and the Seven Years' War that resulted from it) were very unpopular in France and sad unpopularity rubbed off on Marie-Antoinette and at least in part explains the Girondin war fever (Austria was to be the main target) and the eagerness with which conspiracy theories about a royalist/Austrian conspiracy behind all evils befalling France were believed.
  • Discussed as the major factor behind "the entropy of victory" in Season 11. In order for a revolution to come about and achieve success, a massive cross-class alliance who all agree their problems are the result of the incompetent sovereign's mismanagement has to come together to overthrow them. But after they succeed, it quickly becomes apparent that, far from an harmoniously united front, this alliance was composed of completely different kinds of people who wanted completely different things, often opposing and contradictory. While the sovereign was there to provide a unifying mutual enemy, they could cooperate, but once they're gone they realize they're not friends and may be natural enemies. For example, urban workers want cheap food and better working conditions who resent the government kowtowing to their bosses, rural workers who want land and don't want their produce confiscated to ensure said cheap food, and landlords and bosses who want the resumption of normal economic activity and their property rights respected, and really don't want a bunch of new regulations or having their property redistributed.
• Even Evil Has Standards: 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.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • 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 general stubbornness, Louis XVI's general indecisiveness, Nicholas II's general incompetence paired with thin-skinned insensitivity to criticism), Mike pegs the great common flaw they all share as 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 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.
  • Less dramatically, Prince Rupert was an incredible general during the English Revolution who brought the latest military theories from the Continent, and in the first few battles of the English Civil War was basically invincible on the field. He could probably have completely crushed the Parliamentary cause out of existence in the very first dust-up of the war and snipped off the whole series in the bud... but he was maddeningly undisciplined as a cavalry officer, constantly running off and chasing after fleeing enemies or looting camps rather than wheeling back to actually win battles, so the Parliamentary armies were always able to either fall back or, fatefully at Marston Moor, win while his horse were elsewhere.
• Fate Worse than Death: 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 the threat of death can only be so effective 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.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: A snafu in the third season resulted in Duncan accidentally uploading a garbled version of the previous episode instead of a new episode. Some commenters on the podcast website used the comment thread for that episode to write an intentionally ridiculous story touching on Star Wars, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Babylon 5, Dune, Starship Troopers, Dr. Strangelove, some bits of actual history (including, of course, Roman history), and an imagined upbraiding of Duncan himself by none other than Napoleon Bonaparte. So Duncan recorded an episode where he just read the story as though it was a standard historical narrative (it was only a couple minutes long, fortunately).
• For Want Of A Nail:
  • The first three seasons are full of examples where military or political blunders turned what could have been a minor squabble or an easily suppressed revolt into the earth shattering revolutions they eventually turned out to be. In Season 3 there are several episodes that could all be titled "How and when did all this become inevitable" and Duncan's answer clearly lays some blame on less-than-inspired leadership and unwillingness and inability to reform.
  • Duncan from time to time dwells on the consequences of a particular decision or stroke of luck and what would have happened, had things gone the other way. For instance, he wonders what Napoleon could have done allying with the army of Toussaint L'Ouverture instead of fighting him, and notes that Napoleon himself wondered the same thing in his exile on St. Helena.
  • He also points out that the French Revolution 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 Vendée 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 Reign of Terror and no Napoleon.
  • Simón Bolívar ends up on both sides of this. First, he loses a fortress, a city, and one war all because the officer in charge of a the fortress left to attend a wedding. His treacherous second-in-command then releases captured Royalist prisoners, who proceed to take over the fort and convince a large proportion of Bolívar's Republican soldiers to switch sides.
  • Bolívar's dispute with his landlady in Jamaica ends up saving his life when he moves out just before his servant's assassination attempt. The servant mistakes an old acquaintance sleeping in Bolívar's hammock for the man himself and kills him instead.
• Framing the Guilty Party: Duncan points out that many of the kangaroo courts during the French Revolution actually had a case to make, but hurt their own credibility by making up ridiculous claims of supposed crimes that clearly did not exist. For example, the revolutionary tribunal could have focused on Marie Antoinette's undeniable efforts to escape France and come back with a foreign army to crush the revolution. Instead, it threw in some truly horrific and obviously false accusations that Antoinette had sexually abused her son, which appalled even observers who hated the former queen and wanted her killed.
• Full-Circle Revolution: 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 Dessalines' 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.
• Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!: While a major theme throughout, the biggest example is definitely the Haitian Revolution, where the slavery and death in question are entirely literal and non-metaphorical.
  • During the initial uprising, the rebels take heart in the folk religious belief that if they die, their spirits will return to Africa and be free. Besides, it's not like they won't be killed anyway, and probably a lot more messily than a bullet, if they give up, so they have nothing to lose, especially once the panicking establishment starts cracking down on all the blacks.
  • When it becomes clear that Napoleon's regime plans to reinstate slavery on Saint-Domingue, all the bickering factions on the island put aside their differences to throw them out. Unarmed volunteers literally throw themselves in human waves at French soldiers to serve as bullet-sponges for the native soldiers behind them, knowing they'll die and willing to do it rather than go back to being slaves.
• Grand Finale: 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.
• Hates Everyone Equally: 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 Bolívar's army, he killed everyone white, regardless of which side of the conflict they were on.
• Head-in-the-Sand Management: 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, in contrast to this attitude, literally named something like "Help Yourself and Heaven Will Help You."
• Heroic BSoD: Duncan speculates that this happened to Robespierre in his final months. This theory has been advocated by biographers such as Peter McPhee and Timothy Tackett. He noted that until Robespierre's final months, he was generally pragmatic and balanced as a politician, even sparing some Girondins from joining the purge, supported Desmoulins' call for a Committee of Clemency, but he noted that at some point in 1794, after a period of absence where he collapsed from exhaustion, Robespierre became more erratic, fevered and paranoid, moving into a self-destructive spiral.
• Hero of Another Story: A couple of really important historical figures show up tangentially throughout the series, but the follow-up episode on Haiti, charting their history into the modern day, is pretty major, involving Fredrick Douglass, Theodore Roosevelt, and Smedley Butler. Mike actually takes a moment to say that he doesn't have time to get into Smedley Butler's whole career, but that anyone with time on their hands and a curious heart should look up "gangster for capitalism," and then, once they're done reading, look up "business plot."
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Discussed by Bakunin, who argued that trying to force the people into compliance with a new socialist order from the top-down was both a violation of socialist principles and unlikely to actually work. While no friend of religion of any kind, Bakunin was particularly critical of attempts to shut down churches, arguing this would only estrange and reactionarize the people where a gentler hand and long-term education would produce better results. Mike summarizes his policy as "Don't be a dick about it."
• Historical Villain Upgrade: Duncan does on occasion weigh in on the common portrayal and appraisal of the historical figures he talks about.
  • 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).
• Hoist by His Own Petard: It comes up so often, it's difficult to pinpoint individual instances. Especially prominent in the French Revolution. Just one example is the same mobs and public opinion that allowed the Parlements to pick a fight with the King over noble privileges and win leading to their own dissolution and the end of those same noble privileges when public opinion turned on them.
• Horrible Judge of Character: 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 who'd convinced the king and himself that he was a Renaissance man of politics, finance, diplomacy, and warfare. Parliament wanted to impeach Buckingham get his hands off the levers of power and away from the coffers of the kingdom for a wide array of very good reasons. Charles, who was by nature a quiet, standoffish guy who didn't have a lot of real friends in the first place, 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 squabble with a common officer over a promotion, in a war the kingdom couldn't afford he'd muddled his way into starting that only wasn't disastrous because the countries England was at war with were too busy with enemies who actually mattered.
• I Gave My Word: Whether out of aristocratic honor or something deeper, Duncan describes Simón Bolívar as considering his oaths Serious Business:
  • When his beloved first wife died young, he swore never to marry again, and though he had many love affairs afterwards and even entered at least one serious relationship with a mistress, who also died young, he never did.
  • When he almost ruined himself at the gambling table in France, and had to borrow money to get it back and repay his creditors, he swore never to gamble again, and while he did some risky things later, he kept to it.
  • Most famously, during a visit to Rome he and his friends stood on the hill the Plebeians 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, Bolívar 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 Bolívar'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 Bolívar 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.
• Last Stand: As Revolutions live and die on idealism, those happen sometimes, but the last episode of the 1848 series has four of them at once. With one exception (Hungary) the defenders get off surprisingly lightly, thanks in large part to the leniency of Marshal Radetzky (of military music fame).
• Magnificent Bastard: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.
• Majored in Western Hypocrisy: Many leaders of the early phases of the Haitian Revolution (especially those belonging to the "free coloreds") were educated in France, which led to their indignation at the racist laws in Saint Domingue and (relatively) egalitarian views, as Duncan points out. (These leaders were mostly overtaken by Black former slaves in the final push to independence, though a few of them—most notably the Colored Alexandre Pétion—managed to break into that circle.)
• Miscarriage of Justice: This is how Duncan portrays Parliament's persecution of Thomas Wentworth in the run up to the English Civil War. They tried impeaching Wentworth for treason, charges that Wentworth was able to utterly demolish due to their fundamental weakness. So Parliament went ahead and passed a Bill of Attainder, which simply required a majority vote instead of a trial. Wentworth was executed as a result. Later, this pattern of parliament putting together a dramatic but utterly incompetent prosecution that turned into a farce of a trial, leading to a brute-force majority vote to execute a prisoner in custody would repeat throughout the revolution, culminating in the execution of King Charles himself.
• Mission Creep: Duncan is fascinated by how revolutions start small and almost modestly but progressively become bigger and greater in scope, far beyond the intentions and purposes that its original authors envisioned.
  • As he notes, the English Parliamentarians and the American Revolutionaries were not really intending or seeking to upturn the social order. They were looking for modest concessions but circumstances made them take stands that they would otherwise not have taken. He notes that the Declaration of Independence was not as bold as its language would lead one to believe, that the Continental Congress came to it as an afterthought and improvised it along the way. The French Revolution began with an attempt to reform finances, summoned by the King but it brought out social tensions and the original Third Estate delegates upon convening became radicalized and set about writing a constitution that slowly overturned the social order.
  • invokedDuncan cites the 1792 Insurrection that was led by Georges Danton as a Genre Turning Point. He notes that while Bastille and earlier uprisings were spontaneous and unplanned events, the 1792 Insurrection was a planned revolution with a definite political program and that it would inspire and codify the revolutions of the 19th and 20th Century. He notes that Vladimir Lenin cited Danton as the great revolutionary strategist precisely because he wanted to use a chaotic situation to create a new form of government rather than improvise and radicalise in response to reactionary backlash.
  • In a more meta-sense, Duncan initially planned his seasons to have "about fifteen episodes", the very idea of "supplementals" grew out of his description of the armies in one of the first episodes on the English Civil War being too long (and hence getting its own episode) and he planned the "mini-series" on 1830 to be six episodes. Not that anybody is complaining... (Well maybe Mike's family, but if so he never mentioned it.)
• Never My Fault: Stalin had a gift for blaming everyone else when something went wrong with one of his plans.
• Nice to the Waiter: This is how Duncan portrays the young future Czar Nicholas II — yes, he was a spoiled rich kid, but he wasn't a Spoiled Brat. Nicholas liked hanging out and drinking with lower-ranking officials, especially the military servicemen he felt a particular fondness for.
• No Sympathy: 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 François "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.
• Odd Friendship: Nobody expected the aristocratic Simón Bolívar and the illiterate cowboy Páez to get along, but when they met, Bolívar did manage to impress the llaneros with his 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 Páez remained a free-spirit who only ever took Bolívar's orders under advisement for the rest of the wars of independence, he quashed any attempts to get him to overthrow Bolívar and take the title of supreme commander for himself, and did respect Simón Bolívar personally.
• Old Soldier: Joseph Radetzky von Radetz, Field Marshal of the Austrian Empire: Duncan takes pains to note that Radetzky really was an 81-year-old veteran of the French Revolutionary Wars and the The Napoleonic Wars when the First War of Italian Independence started in March 1848—and that Radetzky was one of the sharpest commanders and shrewdest political strategists the Austrians had in any theater of 1848.
• Only Sane Man: The way Duncan assumes the two halfway competent Prime Ministers of Nicholas II, Sergei Witte (an economics expert who dragged Russia kicking and screaming into the Industrial Age) and Piotr Stolypin (a Magnificent Bastard who used every trick up his sleeve to bend Russia's political system to his will) saw themselves. Duncan mostly agrees with that assessment of their competence, even if he does not agree with their methods. Of course having a Pointy-Haired Boss like Nicholas II, their careers both ended badly.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Duncan generally tries to maintain a neutral, genteel tone when recounting the events and actions of the series, even when talking about people he clearly has low opinions of. However, he does have his limits.
  • When discussing post-revolutionary Haiti and the death of "Papa Doc" Duvalier, Duncan cuts loose with a disgusted "good riddance" and remarks that out of all the leaders he's discussed in the series, Duvalier was one who offered his people literally nothing but terror and death, all the while enriching himself at their expense.
  • When Tsar Nicholas makes a final attempt to resist abdication in the wake of heavy resistance and rioting at Saint 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 Saint 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'.
• Paper Tiger: 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 sit around and 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, and the rest of France mostly shrugged and went along with them.
• Pet the Dog:
  • While Charles X was, in most respects, an Evil Reactionary trying to restore absolutist rule in France and sweep away such rights and reforms of the Revolution as 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.
  • As to Louis Philippe 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.
• Plot Detour: Episode 85 of season 10 puts a pause on the Russian Revolution narrative to discuss the then concurrent, and short-lived, German Revolution of 1918-19.
• Plunder: When revolutionary France couldn't print its way out of its economic problems, but the levee en masse and a number of clever generals proved very adept at conquering other nations, the Republic started instead patching holes in its leaking economy by extracting every particle of wealth out of other nations, while letting soldiers keep loot and live off the land as an incentive to enlist and fight. This especially ramped up after the Thermidorian Reaction and led directly to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.
• Pointy-Haired Boss: During the finale season, when summing up how a regime becomes an ancien regime despite having every possible advantage in any contest with a rebel faction, Mike brings up what he calls the "great idiot" theory, in contrast to "great man" theories that argue exceptional individuals drive history. Essentially, because the regime's leader is stubborn and lacks imagination, when faced with challenges that more-able political leaders would be able to solve, the "great idiot" doubles down, either trying to ram through unpopular reforms or refusing to implement popular ones, right up until the situation totally degrades and would-be allies are throwing in with the revolutionaries.
• Pregnant Badass: Episode 16 of season 5 is devoted to Simón Bolívar'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.
• Previously on…: Most episodes begin with a very short recap of the previous episode covered — usually just a couple sentences. Season 10, on the other hand, had an entire Previously on… episode recapping what the season covered before Duncan went on his extended hiatus. And later in the season, when discussing the origins of World War I, there was an episode running down everything relevant they had discussed throughout the entire run of the podcast to show how much of the background to that war the show had already covered.
• Rape, Pillage, and Burn: While many revolutionary and establishment armies engage in it throughout the series, Boves and the Legion of Hell from the wars of the Venezuelan Second Republic take the cake. Drawn from the llaneros, mostly mixed-race cowboys native to the Llanos region, Boves's Legion of Hell were nominally royalist, but in practice were mostly interested in plundering all the wealth they could get their mitts on and doing unspeakable things to every civilian that fell into their hands.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: While Season 3 was already the longest season up to that point, Duncan's decision to take 18 Brumaire as the cutoff point (as opposed to the Bourbon restoration or Waterloo) has as much to do with the birth of Duncan's second child as it has with the narrative of the revolution. Napoleon fans would still get ample treatment of his exploits (albeit from unusual perspectives) first in the "retrospective" episode on the French Revolution and then in Seasons four and five which dealt extensively with the Leclerc Expedition and the "Spanish Ulcer" respectively, albeit from a Haitian / Spanish American perspective rather than from a European one. Duncan also discusses the Napoleonic Wars in Episode 10.11 ("War and Peace"), dealing with the war from a Russian perspective, and Episode 10.12 ("The Decembrists") shows the impact of the war on Russian society and politics.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: While only briefly touched upon in Season 2, there are frequent allusions to Joseph II, the ruler of Austria and the older brother of Marie Antoinette. The French are all terrified that his familial loyalty will lead him to quash the Revolution. In fact, Joseph is something of an Internal Reformist who believed the Revolution was a natural consequence if you don't do ''anything'' for your subjects.
• Rebellious Rebel: Naturally, people change sides or rebel against the initial rebellion more than once. Duncan has a particular fascination with those that started out at the most radical and leading edge of a particular revolutionary wave only to be overtaken by events ultimately to be branded conservatives or even reactionaries, not because their own opinions had changed, but because the views which were considered "radical" had shifted so drastically so quickly.
• Ridiculous Future Inflation: Seasons 2 and 3 both involved governments (the Continental Congress and the National Assembly/National Convention) who tried to print their way out of financial problems and ended up with this trope as a result. Also, at one point, Duncan auctioned off an actual French Revolutionary assignat, commenting on how worthless it had been as actual money.
• Running Gag:
  • "Gentleman Johnny's Party Train" became standard reference for Gen. John Burgoyne's ill-fated Saratoga expedition in Season 2. They even made a T-shirt of it (illustrated by Kate Beaton, no less!)
  • Duncan, who used to be a fishmonger, also seems to have a thing for fishmongers, bringing them up as an example of a "random average citizen" more often than could be explained by mere chance.
  • Duncan's inability to pronounce foreign languages in general, and French in particular, is a repeat source of self-deprecating humor for him.
  • Whenever the matter of Poland is somehow tangential to the story (and it happens every other season, like when Prussia leaves France be to focus on its eastern flank during the French Revolution), Duncan cracks a joke that European history and/or French politics are really being all about Poland.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: A time-tested solution for the dangers of revolutionary chaos is for a given side to pull up stakes and leave when it looks like they're going to be the losing side. Notable examples include both emigre nobility from both the French and Russian revolutions and the "48'ers" who fled what they saw as the hopelessly reactionary European continent for England and the United States when the Revolutions of 1848 failed to pan out. Duncan notes that this was to the United States' great benefit; these 48'ers went on to fight against slavery both in politics and, eventually, on the battlefield. That said, Duncan singles out many figures who refused to invoke this trope, usually out of a fear of never being able to return to their beloved home countries or a desire to try to leave behind some kind of bastion of their ideals that might survive.
• Self-Deprecation: Duncan sometimes turns his Deadpan Snarker tendencies on himself.
  • In the American Revolution season, he referred to a British admiral as being 86 years old. A few episodes later he issued a correction, acknowledging that the admiral was actually 68 years old, not 86, which he admitted made much more sense. In that same episode the admiral made another appearance, and Duncan straight-facedly referred to him as "the 137-year-old" admiral. This led to a humorous callback in Season 7, when Duncan felt it necessary to point out when introducing Marshal Radetzky that he really was 81 in 1848 and he was not making a mistake this time.
  • In the Russian Revolution(s) season, he joked it took him 8 episodes to even begin talking about Russia in the season about Russian history and then another 20 episodes to begin talking about an actual Russian Revolution.
• Sequel Escalation: The podcast is one to Duncan's previous endeavor, going into the narratives of multiple revolutions and countries over the course nine years.
• Single-Target Law: A bill of attainder, "the scariest thing you've never heard of" was ultimately used by Parliament to declare two of Charles I's ministers, Wentworth and Laud, guilty and sentenced to death when they couldn't assemble a good enough case against them, helping cement the division that would lead to the English civil wars. Duncan notes that bills of attainder are specifically prohibited in the U.S. Constitution twice.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: Duncan already made allusions to the hypocrisy of preaching liberty, equality and justice while holding slaves in Season 2, but he is particularly hard on slave-holders during season 4 when he talks about the Haitian Revolution. He even compares the founding fathers of the US to the Haitian "big whites", the slaveowners who profited most from the colonial class and race system.
• Spare to the Throne: One aspect of many revolutions that is often commented on but not quite laid out explicitly is that many of the kings or leaders who turn out to be screw-ups while in power and ultimately get overthrown were actually second, third, or even further down in the line of succession, and had to take up the job of heir after their older, more capable, better suited siblings, some of whom had been actually trained for the job since birth, died. Nicholas II is spiritually an example in that, while he was his father's legitimate heir, his father disliked him so much and put off the job of actually preparing him for the throne for so long that when he did die, Nicholas also hadn't had any training to be Tsar.
• Strawman Political: Generally averted but Duncan does have a very liberal perspective i.e. emphasis on reforms from within, focusing on Internal Reformist rather than popular movements from below, which does lead him occasionally to not give some factions and figures within various revolutions their due:
  • He is somewhat sympathetic towards the Levellers during the English Civil War, but argues that their egalitarian political proposals failed because they couldn't compromise and compared their stubbornness to Charles I himself, who was similarly convinced that God himself was on his side and so compromising was a sin.
  • In the case of the French Revolution, Duncan openly hates Jean-Paul Marat and describes him as the Psycho Party Member of the Revolution, which was indeed the common view of Marat by 19th and early 20th Century historians. He was and indeed remains more controversial than even Robespierre. More recent historians and writers have emphasized Marat's instances of moderation, such as when he opposed the Anglophobia common among Revolutionaries, defending English culture and arguing against narrow nationalism^note A view credited to him by Norman Hampson, no Marat fan, in The Perfidy of Albion, the fact that he was the only Revolution who advocated colonial independence during the events^note as noted by Aime Cesaire, the Mauritanian poet, that he often intervened to save political opponents from attacks^note such as when he rescued Theroigne de Mericourt, a Girondin, from attacks by Revolutionary Women's groups and that most of his wild accusations in his papers (about Mirabeau's corruption, Dumouriez's defection, the war being a mistake) turned out to be accurate.
  • Duncan is also generally dismissive of Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, whom French leftists and other historians regard as the great tragic prodigy of the revolution but Duncan sees as a dilettante young man too arrogant for his own good, which was the view of Simon Schama, author of the widely divisive Citizens which Duncan cites in his Bibliography.
  • In general, "utopian" political ideologies like the Diggers during the English civil war or Robespierre's attempts to build his "Republic of Virtue" during the Great Terror get nothing but scorn from Duncan.
• Take That!: Duncan makes a couple glancing and critical references to Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution during the season on...well, you know. In one of them he calls the book "famously incomprehensible."
• Velvet Revolution: Mostly averted for the revolutions covered in the series, which are almost all violent. In the case of the French Revolution, Duncan discusses the fact that later observers separated the so-called "good" revolution of 1789-1791 from the "bad" revolutions of 1792-1794. This remains a source of fierce contention among historians, a fact Duncan acknowledges and discusses.
  • The events of season 6 get as close as events Duncan describes can possibly get in this department and even then, there is some barricade fighting in Paris ^note though as Duncan points out in an episode mostly done on request answering the "what happened elsewhere?" question, it mostly stayed limited to Paris and a few dead or injured here or there.
• Villainous Breakdown: General Leclerc of the ill-fated namesake expedition to retake Saint-Domingue goes, over the course of his military occupation of Haiti from an idealistic young army officer horrified by Toussaint Louverture's harsh labor laws and repulsed by the idea of going back on the revolution's ideals of liberty and equality and putting the blacks in chains; to a bungler incapable of securing the loyalties of the native population or retaining the affiliation of the American and British forces supplying him; to an embittered man fighting a mass insurrection tacitly admitting that his replacement is going to reinstate slavery and that it was his job to prepare the colony for that; to a paranoiac shut up in his home base in primitive quarantine alternately begging Napoleon for reinforcements and to relieve him of command before the yellow fever ravaging his troops kills him too; to a dying man, wasting away from yellow fever himself, drafting plans to suppress the insurrection so genocidal that even his successor the vicomte de Rochambeau, himself a racist and twisted sadist, balked at implementing them after his death.
• Warts and All: Mike generally sums up major figures after their deaths, and attempts to acknowledge their virtues and flaws.
  • He's actually somewhat lenient towards the Trope Namer, pointing out that while Oliver Cromwell did reign as an essential military dictator for much of his time in power, he never stopped trying to call up legislative bodies to serve as co-leaders in a constitutional government and was generally more stymied by venal figures outside his control than his own autocratic impulses.
  • He calls Toussaint Louverture nothing less than a political and military genius, one who only hasn't gotten his fair due because of his status as the face of a state formed from a slave insurrection that the other powers didn't like to acknowledge, but also points out that Loverture's first loyalty was always to himself and his own ambitions as much as to Haiti, that he repeatedly gave himself dictatorial powers and used them tyrannically to press the population into a state that barely differed from slavery, and that he lacked the imagination to see an economic future for Haiti beyond the cash crop plantation economy.

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