McDormodon

Can I please have your attention?

Thank you, Jiggy!

Greetings, you're listeners. This is Joan of over, a host of the Revenant Podcasts brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media.

I got to say I'm very, very, very excited about this podcast and part because I get to exact some revenge on the part of various friends of mine.

I have heard from maybe a half dozen friends who say, I've said words to the effect of Dam U Goldberg.

I started listening to that Revolutions podcast and I'm now like 35 episodes into the French Revolution and I can't get out.

And which brings me to my guest today, Mike Duncan, he's the host of the Revolutions podcast.

Before that, he did his very famous Roman history podcast. He's got a new book out called Hero of Two Worlds, the Marquit de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution.

Mike Duncan, welcome to the Revenant. Thank you very much for having me.

So, one of my cardinal rules, because I've written books, I've had a lot of book authors on here.

One of my first rules, because book tours suck, is I always ask the easiest, the best question that every author wants to hear, which is what's your book about.

You kind of gave up the goods in the title. It's right there in the subtitle.

Yeah. So, how about, why did you write this book? Why Lafayette? Why does Lafayette matter?

Lafayette matters to me, I mean, it grows organically out of the show. You're encouraging people to listen to the show. And so, it's a multi-season thing where I'm sort of moving chronologically through great political revolutions in history.

The second series of it was The American Revolution. And I knew that the third season was going to be about the French Revolution. And so, as I was writing about the American Revolution, I sort of was paying closer attention to people who I knew were going to show up in the French Revolution, among like Tom Payne, because somebody who I was paying a lot of attention to, because I know that he's going to show up in the French Revolution.

And then, of course, the Marquis de Lafayette is the most famous of these individuals who plays a role in the American Revolution, and then goes on to play a role in the French Revolution. And so, I'm paying attention to him. And I think he's a really interesting guy. And when you're reading about him in the American context, it's very much like, oh, we love him.

He's George Washington surrogate son. He sacrificed his life and earned it in sacrifices. But he put his life on the line for the American cause.

So, it's a very rosy picture of Lafayette in American history and American historiography. And then I moved over to the French Revolution and started writing about him.

And I find in the books that I'm reading, not just French historians, but also English historians and American historians who were writing about the French Revolution, have a very different portrayal of this guy Lafayette. He now becomes, oh, that bumbler Lafayette.

So, he blew this in Lafayette who was asleep at the switch again. These kinds of little digs would come into it. And so, this then became very, very interesting to me.

Nothing changed about him. He was the same person between the American Revolution and the French Revolution. But there's something that happened here where one group portrays him one way and one group portrays him another way.

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