It’s Bastille Day so I asked my fiancé, the writer, journalist and comedian Marc Burrows, to interview me about my love of the French Revolution because I felt like chatting about what it means to me in advance of my biography of Marie Antoinette coming out NEXT MONTH.

1) Isn’t the French Revolution, ya know, horrible? What makes it so fascinating for you?

Yes, some aspects of the Revolution are pretty grim and tbh, initially at least, that was a big part of the fascination for me - until I fell in love with the people, the politics and all the incredible drama of it all. It’s all just so OVERWROUGHT and everyone is turned up to eleven and you’ve got all these HUGE personalities and they’re all so YOUNG and apparently all knew each other before it all kicked off, so the drama isn’t just political, it’s often personal too. It’s just so ridiculously over the top and a microcosm of all the best and very worst aspects of human nature. I love it. It’s probably my most favourite thing.

2) Where do you think your obsession comes from? When did you first “get into” revolutionary France?

Hah, well, I initially got into it when I was very small and we were living in the grounds of my godmother’s castle, Ballindalloch in Aberdeenshire, which is a bit grand to say the least. I watched a BBC Blue Peter show about Marie Antoinette and became absolutely OBSESSED and insisted upon raiding wardrobes and jewellery boxes for long dresses, big hats and pearls in order to dress up as her all the time. I’d hang around the rose garden all dressed up, pretending to be Marie Antoinette, which must have been a bit weird for any visitors. Later on, when I was about ten, I got into the real nitty gritty of it via the usual pipeline of fancying Armand Saint Just in The Scarlet Pimpernel and then looking him up to discover that he was based on real-life hottie Antoine de Saint-Just. My fate was sealed from that point on, and the bicentennary in 1989 just confirmed it. I was SO into that and even insisted upon going to Paris that year so I could visit revolutionary sites.

3) Which figure in 18th-century Paris do you most relate to?

I am not sure that anyone is really relatable as such, but I definitely feel a kinship with many of the women of the time, who went through things that I personally have also experienced, such as separation from children (Joséphine de Beauharnais, Marie Antoinette) and miscarriage etc. However, ultimately, I think my most favourite person and the one that I relate to the most is Charlotte Corday because, like her, I have an absolute seething loathing of injustice, a fine sense of drama, a love of striped dresses, an intimidating manner and a tendency to make public scenes. I’d like to think that I would at least be TEMPTED to do what she did (leave home, travel to Paris and assassinate someone that I believed was a danger to society), but, alas, I am pretty sure that I lack her admirable resolve.

4) Are there “goodies” and “baddies” in the Revolution?

I think it really depends on where you stand politically as one of the most fascinating things about the revolution is the moral ambiguity of everyone involved - most people are heroes to their political peers and villains to their opponents with only a very few people being absolute outright monsters (Carrier being an example) and even fewer being absolutely blameless (such as the children of Louis XVI and indeed all children who suffered during this time).

5) What do you think most people get wrong about that era in French history?

Oh boy, where to start?! I know that everyone goes on about the whole ‘Let them eat cake’ thing, but honestly, by this point I am pretty sure that most people know damn well that Marie Antoinette never said that but JUST DON’T CARE, so I can’t be bothered to argue about it any more. There’s also the fact that a LOT more ‘ordinary’ people were guillotined than aristocrats, which isn’t to say that plenty of nobles didn’t end up on scaffold and indeed the execution lists in the summer of 1794 really do read like a roll call of some of the most grand names in French history. For me though, there’s one thing that I really do like to get on my soap box about and that is that despite the popular idea that they were imprisoned in dank cells and treated horribly straight after being taken from Versailles, the royal family continued to live very well indeed until August 1792, after which their situation dramatically deteriorated. 

6) If you could go out drinking in Revolutionary France, who would you go out with?

I REALLY want to say Antoine de Saint-Just because he fascinates me and also I am currently researching a book about him BUT he wasn’t much of a drinker, possibly ascribed to a few opinions that we would nowadays refer to as ‘redpilled’, which would give me hideous flashbacks to my last relationship, and I am pretty sure he would hate me. Instead, I would prefer to hang out with Camille and Lucile Desmoulins, as they were, by all accounts, delightful. I also know from the deep research that I have done for my upcoming biography of her, that Madame Élisabeth, sister of Louis XVI, was great fun.

7) How has your interest in the period shaped your own views on life and politics?

I am not totally sure that it has to be honest, but it has certainly given me a lot of insight into things happening in our world right now and vice versa. On a deep and large scale, it means that I am very apprehensive about current events in the US, about what happens when a ruling class behaves with reckless indifference to the suffering of those who have less than them - or maybe I should be more optimistic than apprehensive about what might very well occur, I don’t know. It won’t end well, that’s for sure. On a smaller scale, I had some interesting parallels here in my own city, Bristol in the UK, which had a moment in the spotlight a few years ago when the much hated statue of a notorious slave trader was pulled down, dragged an actually quite considerable distance by an angry mob and then thrown into the harbour, which naturally made me think about all the royal and noble statues that were torn down by furious crowds in Revolutionary Paris and beyond and how ELATED the people involved must have felt. At around the same time, I also, perhaps foolishly, decided to observe one of the protests in Bristol city centre as I wanted to know more about how crowds act together and what happens when they clash with the authorities. It inevitably turned into a riot, and I witnessed a lot of stuff that left me feeling very disturbed, but ultimately I learned a LOT that night, most significantly that it is impossible to simply ‘observe’ a riot - if you are there, then you are in it. That has really informed my subsequent writing about the way the Parisians behaved during the revolution.

8) I don’t get people's cultish obsession with Saint-Just, he seems like a massive prick. Please explain that to me.

No. Hah, no seriously, I think it basically just boils down to the fact that he was young (just twenty six when he was guillotined) and also relatively handsome with a bit of a dandyish air and is usually depicted as such in books and films etc, which means that he is often the eye candy element in most dramatic versions of the French Revolution. There’s also the whole shipping him with Robespierre thing, but let’s not get into that right now. NONE of which, obviously, has anything to do with his actual writings, speeches, opinions or political behaviour, which are not quite so appealing. Unless you count the time he rode around on a battlefield with his top hat on top of his sword, which is quite hot, admittedly.

9) Where did it all go wrong?

Did it ever go right? I am not sure it did. Yes, the revolution had its ceremonial high points, BUT it was also a bit of a mess, mostly BECAUSE of all the big personalities, personal dramas and youth and relative inexperience of a lot of the main players. Which is, of course, ironically, why so many of us love it.

My book about Marie Antoinette is due to be published in August 2025 and is due to be followed by biographies of Madame Élisabeth, Madame Royale, Louis XVI and Saint-Just and books about guillotined women during the Terror.