Retracing the French Revolution with Will Clark of Grey History

Tour: https://greyhistory.com/tour
Podcast: https://greyhistory.com

Gary:
Today’s special episode is an interview with Will Clark, Host of Grey History: The French Revolution and Napoleon.  We’ll be talking about his exciting new venture, a tour of the most famous places during the French Revolution.  What they mean and how they changed the world.

Thank you so much for being on the show, William Clark. You are a fellow comrade in the charting of French history with your fantastic podcast, Grey History: French Revolution, and Napoleon. Thank Friend of the show, congratulations on your success. And as we dive into both this podcast and also this exciting upcoming project you've got going, tell us just a bit about your podcast and perhaps why my listeners should add it to their playlist, aside from perhaps the incessant need that many have to get a little French Revolution and Napoleon in their life because my podcast is still in the medieval period. So aside from that, what are the strengths of your pod?

Will:
Well, Gary, I don't want to rush you out of the medieval period because I'm completely up to date on your show and I'm quite enjoying an earlier tour of French history. So you're in no rush to join me in the modern era. But yes, hello, everybody. My name is Will Clark and I am the host of Grey History, the French Revolution and Napoleon.
It is a long form history podcast where we're slowly working our way through the revolutionary era in a roughly chronological order. the backbone The backbone of the show is scripted storytelling, but I also interview historians occasionally as we
And we've recently crossed to the 100 episode mark, and at the moment we're in the heart of the terror, specifically the de-Christianisation campaign, and over the next few months we'll be seeing the implosion of the ruling Jacobins as they begin to turn on themselves.
The show is called Grey History because of its focus on historiography. So there's a big emphasis on comparing the different experiences of contemporaries and the different conclusions of historians. Essentially, the core premise of the show is that history isn't black and white.
And so we should try to appreciate the ambiguities and nuances of the past as we explore what happened.

Gary:
What a fascinating take, and I know one that will particularly be a big draw for history enthusiasts. aside from the podcast itself, you are actually going to engage on a living history project. You've launched week-long tours of the French Revolution. Can you tell us what that is all about?

Will:
I'd love to. So in mid-May 2026, I'm running a small group eight-day French Revolution tour designed to let you experience the French Revolution where it actually happened.
So we're going to spend five nights in Paris and do a full day at the Palace of Versailles. We'll also retrace July 1789 through the streets of revolutionary Paris to the former Bastille, and we'll visit sites like the Conciergerie, the Pantheon, the Louvre. And of course, you know, yes, the emphasis is the French Revolution, but we can't ignore Napoleonic Paris as well. And so we'll be touching on Napoleon's tomb and the Arc de Triomphe. And after that, we will then do two nights in the Loire Valley to see some of France's most remarkable chateaus and royal towns. The Loire isn't just famous for its remarkable pre-revolutionary history, but there's plenty of connections to the revolutionary Napoleonic and Restoration eras as well.
I suppose the key thing is that the tour is designed by a history enthusiast for other history enthusiasts. We have expert local guides at the key sites. And in some cases, I've arranged for access to areas that are normally closed to the public and in some cases i've actually arranged for access to areas that are normally closed to the public This is not a large group tour. It's strictly capped at 20 people. And in the Louvre, we will even split the group down into no more than groups of six so that you can enjoy sort of semi-private experience where you can enjoy all the details and discuss each masterpiece with your local guide.
So if that tour sounds like your kind of trip, the full itinerary and booking info is at greyhistory.com/tour. You can reserve your place with a deposit or download the full itinerary. And if you have any questions, you can schedule a quick call with me as well.

Gary:
So, let's dive into the sites themselves. I know that Paris and Greater Paris in general has these incredible historic and also beautiful areas. So, let's dive into the actual important sites for the revolution and beyond. Where do you want to start?

Will:
Yeah, I'm keen to discuss maybe some of the overlooked sites of revolutionary Paris. I mean, we know of the Bastille, we've heard of the Pantheon. For the Napoleonic Paris, most people are familiar with the Arc de Triomphe. So, I'm going to focus on a few overlooked to underappreciated sites. But in saying that, I'm actually going to start with one of the most iconic landmarks in France.
But I'm going to start with it because surprisingly, few people associate it with the French Revolution, and that's odd because it is a product of the French Revolution. And so I want to start with arguably the most famous museum in the world, and that is, of course, the Louvre.
I'd argue that the history of the Louvre encapsulates the history of the French Revolution in so many ways. Its origin story, the building itself, the art inside.
But in the interests of time and ensuring that this doesn't become an episode on the history of the Louvre, the short version is that the Louvre opens on the 10th of August, 1793.
And that is exactly one year after the overthrow of the French monarchy. Now, the origins of the Louvre predate the Republican era. In fact, they predate the revolution itself.
But those origins also reflect the priorities and, I would say, the inefficiencies of the royal administration. Despite plans to open a public art gallery or a public art museum in the Louvre since the mid-1770s, the king's officials had failed to actually convert the former palace into a functioning museum by the time the monarchy was overthrown almost two decades later.
And importantly, pretty much as soon as the monarchy fails, the new government, the new republican government, quickly realizes that the Louvre is a huge priority for them.
And it's a priority for several reasons. The first is legitimacy. If the Republic can create a new national art museum for the people, that is a powerful statement in legitimizing the new order and repudiating the inadequacies of the past.
Moreover, it also matters internationally. As the revolution sours in European public opinion, as France goes to war with an ever-increasing number of neighbors, as the revolution passes through what many but not all historians refer to as the terror. The Louvre becomes a tool for propaganda. It's a positive aspect of the new regime. It's a way to emphasize the enlightened regeneration of the French nation, if you like. It's a way to position Republican France as a sort of new Athens, a new cultural capital of the Western world that is the heir to the republics of antiquity.
And in a similar way, the museum could also be used, or it was a priority because the museum could also be used as a key tool for education. With France becoming a republic, the revolutionaries believed that they needed institutions that could shape and mould republican citizens. They needed ways to kind of cultivate the virtues and values that they wanted to promote, like self-sacrifice and patriotism and the like.
And so the Louvre is imagined as part of that program. So for these reasons and others, the Louvre is a huge priority for the new Republican government. And as I said, the museum successfully opens, and it's no coincidence, on the first anniversary of the overthrow of the monarchy in August 1793.
And in that sense, the Louvre is unmistakably a product of the French Revolution as it tried to legitimize itself against a monarchy that had long tried and failed to accomplish the same feat.

Gary:
Yes, I can certainly go off about the Louvre all day. In fact, I have. One of the reasons why the main show has been on a minor hiatus has been because I just finished up a patrons exclusive series on the Louvre that goes on for 10 hours long. So, I'm very well familiar what's going What I would say is not even debatably the most famous art museum in the world, but we can have that gripe. But speaking of the art itself, do you want to tell us a little bit about the place of art in the Louvre and its perhaps influence on the revolution?

Will:
Yeah, I think the art in the Louvre, I mean, obviously you can make the case that the building encapsulates and represents the French Revolution and is an important revolutionary site, but so is the art within.
And I think you can tell a story about the broader collection and then stories about individual artworks. As a starting point, a great deal of the initial collection was actually created through nationalized and seized art. Art from the church, art from royal properties, from emigre nobles. In fact, the building itself is a former royal palace, and that is a seized asset after the overthrow of the monarchy.
Importantly, under Napoleon, these seizures then go international. Under Napoleon, the Louvre enters a kind of golden age, and during the French Republic and then the Napoleonic era that follows, it becomes stacked with work taken from across the continent. And it's under Napoleon that the Louvre reaches it’s zenith and cements itself as the leading model for what  a national art museum can be.
But if you focus on specific pieces of art, you can get a different sort of story and doing so allows you to experience really the transformation of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras in a way that you can't experience simply if you were to try to replicate it through, say, podcasts or documentaries alone.
If you take the work of Jacques-Louis David, for example, he's a revolutionary artist, he's a revolutionary himself, and if you look at the paintings that were created only a few years apart, before the revolution, during the revolution, and then under Napoleon, you can watch as values and ideals and as priorities shift between each canvas, which are practically side by side. And in some ways, the most revealing parts, I think, is actually the pre-revolutionary art. It's the art that most people don't think of. But you can already see in these artworks the kind of values that are going to explode onto the political scene just a few years later, the ideas around virtue, patriotism, self-sacrifice, these canvases act as sort of a time capsule, but they also let you see what's building underneath. And this ultimately, these ideas will explode and and shape the political world and the art that follows.
And being in the Louvre allows you to see this in a way that you can't if you're anywhere else. But it also allows you to experience it. I mean, some of these artworks are enormous.
David's painting on Napoleon's coronation is about 20 feet high by 32 feet wide, which is like 6 by 10 metres. And that scale... is just simply phenomenal.
And you can't capture the beauty of that artwork or the skill that it took to produce it, or indeed the intended propaganda effect of the regime which commissioned it, unless you're standing in front of it and standing in front of it in an environment that has been purpose-built to.
                                                   
And in an environment that has been purpose-built to intensify the statement the artist or the regime was trying to make. So what I like about the Louvre as a revolutionary site is that the building encapsulates royal reform, royal incompetence, revolutionary priorities and visions, the nationalization and seizure of properties.
But then the collections themselves have their own story. the changing values, the competing ideals, the rise of the Republic and the Napoleonic era. It's one of the few places where you can see so many expressions literally side by side of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras.
And to fully grasp these expressions, you actually have to be standing before these paintings, which, as I said, at times are more than 30 feet wide.

Gary:
And a truly unforgettable experience. And the Louvre is going to be very different, I hear, in the coming year because the Mona Lisa will finally be put in its own room. So you can admire some of the works of Jacques-Louis David and other great figures from the era that you're looking at without having a giant crowd of people all trying to take blurry photos of this famous woman. So I highly recommend going to the Louvre. It's always a good day to go to the Louvre. You know, go there, have some fun, maybe leave with a couple priceless artifacts because the security guards are asleep.  Good times all around. But aside from the Louvre itself, tell us a bit more about what you call the overlooked sites of the French Revolution and why you want to highlight these and their importance during your tours.

Will:
Yeah, so I started off with a bit of a cheeky answer because while the connection to the French Revolution is often overlooked as it relates to the Louvre, it is, of course, one of the most iconic  landmarks of, well, of the world as one of the most famous global museums.
My next suggestion is also cheeky, but for a slightly different reason. It is definitely overlooked. The issue is that it's technically, I'm technically leaving the city of Paris because we're going to Versailles and not the palace itself, but specifically its tennis court.
What I love about the tennis court at Versailles is that this is where rhetoric became momentum in 1789. It's the cradle of the constitutional monarchy.
It's the principal site where political authority shifts away from the king and moves to the nation in the form of the new National Assembly. And in a nutshell, without getting into the whole revolutionary history, but the elected representatives of the Third Estate, the commoners, had been summoned to participate in an archaic institutional body known as the Estates General.
And a constitutional crisis had been simmering for weeks. The Crown wanted help with a bankruptcy crisis. The deputies of all three estates wanted their own version of political reform, and so the result was deadlocked. And a few days earlier, on the 17th of June 1789, the deputies of the Third Estate had declared themselves unilaterally the National Assembly.
Now, the monarchy tried to put a stop to all these shenanigans, unsurprisingly, and in closing their regular meeting room, the Crown unintentionally funnels these deputies to a nearby alternative, in this case, a tennis court.
And it's here in this tennis court, and to be clear, the tennis court is a building rather than an open lawn court like what you might think of today. It's in this building that the deputies bind themselves together with the so-called tennis court oaths.
And what they do is they vow that they will not separate until France had been given a written constitution. And they also empowered themselves with the full authority to decide matters of taxation.
So when people ask where the constitutional monarchy began or where the revolutionary project really erupted in a way that kind of crossed the revolution to a point of no return, it's this room and the associated oath that I think is one of the key answers.
So there's a few reasons, in addition to its kind of historical importance, that I particularly like this site. And as I said, it's  criminally overlooked. One is the architectural contrast. And that might sound a bit nerdy, but hear me out. Versailles is a monument to absolute monarchy. You walk through the palace, you walk through the gardens, and you just you're struck by the scale and by the majesty of what's been built.
And there's a reason for this, and that's because it was it was deliberately designed that way. And there's also a reason why this is one of the most visited sites in the world. And then you step into this tennis court, and as I said before, it's an indoor tennis court. And this tennis court, it's plain. it's so stark compared to the palace next door. It's practically naked. And that contrast does something really useful.  It tells a story that is difficult to encapsulate just in words. i mean, Versailles physically embodies and it then imposes on you this these ideals of hierarchy and privilege.
And then you walk into this tennis court and you get something that embodies austerity, perhaps equality, and certainly the nation. Now, I don't want to romanticize this too much. I mean, this is a tennis court. Tennis at this time is a sport for the aristocracy. It is not the pastime of the everyday man. But the simplicity of the space... I think reinforces the contrast to what's just outside. And it lets you focus your attention on the importance of what occurred within.
And sure, this is not a building that represents a spectacle, but it does represent power and the transition of power from one man to the nation as a whole.
And the other thing I like about the tennis court is the art inside. There are some striking pieces of art, including a huge painting based on Jacques-Louis David's initial sketch of the tennis court oath. It's not his painting, but it is based on his original design. And what I love about this is that this encapsulates the revolution's complexity. If you look at the figures depicted in that painting, within a few years, many of them are dead or at least discredited.
They are labelled enemies of the people. Some have gone to the guillotine, some send others to the guillotine, and this space allows you to reflect on that early unity of purpose in 1789, but it also allows you to consider really the deterioration of the revolution and its collapse into suspicion and fear and rivalry. And the statues around the hall allow you to do much the same. Many of the figures that are portrayed there are dead by 1795. And so for me, this room encapsulates the revolution's triumph and the revolution's tragedy. And so that's why for me, the tennis court is unmissable. It's easy to miss. It's often overlooked, particularly compared to the grandeur of Versailles. But if you want to experience the revolution where it actually happened, it's a real shame to miss the tennis court.

Gary:
So, let's move from outside of Paris. Let's get back to the City of Lights. So, there was another major site, which perhaps isn't as famous, but you wanted to highlight it as an important center of the French Revolution. Tell us all about this central location for the changing of history.

Will:
Yeah, so given that we've just been speaking about some of the tragedies of the French Revolution, I'm going to take us on a slightly darker turn with this final site. And I want to take you to the Conciergerie. Now, this is on the central island of Paris near the Notre Dame, and the Conciergerie is part of a broader palace complex that began as a royal residence, but by the time of the Revolution, it had become a centre of justice. And specifically, the Conciergerie itself functioned as a prison. The revolutionary tribunal operated just next door. And that proximity was critical.
One contemporary described the Conciergerie as the antechamber of death. And this is where many people waited for their trial and where many waited for their execution after their trial, especially in the period commonly referred to as the terror. And it's in these walls that many of the most iconic revolutionaries passed through. Robespierre, leading Girondins, leading Jacobins, many spent time in the Conciergerie.
Now, I should probably preface what I'm about to say by saying that You know, liking the Conciergerie, I'm not quite sure if I want to use the word like. It's an amazing historical experience, but it's not the sort of place that you leave with a smile on your face. But if I can use that language, what I like about the Conciergerie is precisely the gravity that it conveys.
The whole building just has this grim coldness that seeps into your bones. But I would say most notably when you're standing inside the former prison cell of Marie Antoinette.
That prison cell has been altered over time. It was renovated when the Bourbons were restored to power into technically a sort of chapel. But even with that layer of refinement, you really get this sense of this joyless place of this bleak cell.  
And that's what makes the Conciergerie an amazing revolutionary site. A lot of revolutionary Paris, and even Napoleonic Paris, and then Paris particularly under the July monarchy. The events that occur after 1789, they're presented to visitors in a way that is kind of romanticized. It's the birth of of modern Europe. It's the high ideals of 1789. It's the triumphs of Napoleon.
The Conciergerie pulls you into a completely different direction. And it's not hope. It's not victory. It's not opportunity or liberty. It's fear.  It's anxiety. It's a loss of innocence. And for me, it helps to personalize the revolution in a way that few of these other more grander places can do.  We're talking about places where you can experience the French Revolution. And if you want to experience it in your bones, it's hard to look past the Conciergerie. And to be frank, it's another site that is all too often overlooked, when people are doing the highlights of Paris.

Gary:
And what an incredible series of places you are going to look at. Of course, Paris is always worth a visit. I hear it's worth a mass as well. But you have these places. You have a lot more. Are there any other last things that people should know about the walking tour?

Will:
Yeah, so one question that I'm getting a lot is if solo travelers are welcome and they are absolutely welcome. In fact, I suspect that a majority of attendees for our May tour will be traveling by themselves.
You can either take a private room with a single supplement or if you're happy to share, you can be matched with a roommate in a twin room. And as I said, we've got a lot of solo travelers that have already booked their ticket and the tour is designed so that you can enjoy history with other people who also have a passion for the past.

Gary:
So do you want to tell us the dates and perhaps where to go to book your next vacation?

Will:
Yeah, so it's Tuesday the 12th of May to Tuesday the 19th of May. As I said, it's eight days, five nights in Paris and two nights in the Loire Valley. And you can go to greyhistory.com/ tour. You have all the information there. You can reserve your spot with a deposit. There's only a few tickets left, so I wouldn't sit on it. But if you have any questions, you can download the full itinerary and you can schedule a quick call with me. If you have any queries, we have some people that, they haven't traveled to Europe too many times or at all, and they've got a few questions. We've got some, you know, veterans with us that um were only in Paris last year, but, you know, they they want to come along and do a tour with a whole bunch of other history lovers and really experience history in a really deep and meaningful way ah where it actually happened. So that's greyhistory.com/ tour and you can go from there.

Gary:
Yeah. So thank you very much for telling us all about your exciting forays into living history.
For all those who keep asking me, when is the next episode coming out? Well, if you want another podcast to tide you over, perhaps one which will scratch that French Revolution itch, check out Grey History, French Revolution, and Napoleon. Thank you very much for being on the show.

Will
Thank you for having me.