Alice Pemberton: In thirteen seventy-two, Trần Duệ Tông takes the throne of Đại Việt, but his brother keeps hold of the government. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen twenty-eight, the Netherlands premieres The Great Mecca Feast, the first documentary film ever made of the Hajj. Alice Pemberton: And in eighteen seventy, France wins the Battle of Coulmiers, at a Pyrrhic price. Alice Pemberton: This is The Long Echo for the ninth of November. I'm Alice Pemberton. History doesn't repeat itself — but it echoes. Alice Pemberton: In this edition: Edmund Cavendish on a general who wouldn't stage a coup on a Friday; Arthur Nightingale on an emperor crowned at two who waited decades to rule; Vivian Hale on a kingdom freed by paperwork; Rufus McCrae on a leaky skiff and a tin cup. Let's begin. Alice Pemberton: On this day in seventeen ninety-nine, the French Revolution ended with a motion to change the venue. For the front page, our professor of history, Edmund Cavendish. Edmund? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Change the venue, and change the guard. The Council of Ancients, citing a supposed Jacobin threat, voted to move both chambers out of Paris to Saint-Cloud, and put Napoleon Bonaparte in command of the troops around them. Five men were in on the plot: Bonaparte, the director Emmanuel Sieyès, Talleyrand, the police minister Fouché and Roger Ducos. Alice Pemberton: Why Bonaparte? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Because Sieyès wanted a sword: a strong man with no ambitions of his own. His first choice, General Joubert, had been killed at Novi. Bonaparte had already tried joining the Directory legally and been told he was too young, since directors had to be forty. Alice Pemberton: And at Saint-Cloud? Professor Edmund Cavendish: He told the Ancients, 'You are on a volcano. The Republic no longer has a government.' The Council of Five Hundred met him with open hostility. Luckily for him, its president was his brother Lucien. The Coup of Eighteen Brumaire was bloodless, and most historians say it ended the Revolution. Alice Pemberton: So Sieyès got his sword. Professor Edmund Cavendish: Sieyès got a First Consul, and soon an Emperor. Republics rarely fall to a mob storming the doors. They fall legally, in a different building, for their own protection. Alice Pemberton: He was born in a purple room to a mother not yet married to the emperor, and spent his life proving he belonged there. For the Biographical Sketch, our storyteller, Arthur Nightingale. Arthur? Arthur Nightingale: The purple room was the whole argument. Constantine the Seventh was born in Constantinople in a chamber lined with porphyry, where an emperor's legitimate children came into the world. His mother, Zoe, was not yet the wife of Emperor Leo the Sixth. So she gave birth in the purple, and the boy carried the proof in his name: Porphyrogenitus, born in the purple. Alice Pemberton: Did the name protect him? Arthur Nightingale: On paper. He was crowned at two. By eight he was emperor in name, with regents fighting over him: first a patriarch, then his own mother. Then an admiral, Romanos Lekapenos, married his daughter Helena to the boy and climbed, title by title, until he was senior emperor himself. Alice Pemberton: Pushed aside in his own palace. Arthur Nightingale: Third in line, behind the admiral's eldest son. The sources remember a sad youth, awkward to look at and silent by nature. So Constantine Porphyrogenitus did what clever, overlooked people do. He studied, above all the ceremony of the court, and shared a throne for a quarter of a century. The books of his reign are a watcher's books: on ceremony, on the provinces, and one headed, in Greek, 'To his own son Romanos.' Alice Pemberton: A handbook for his heir. Arthur Nightingale: For a son who would rule from the start, as he never had. On this day in nine fifty-nine, the chronicle says, seen breathing his last, Constantine 'made his son Romanos sovereign emperor, entrusting him to, and putting under oath Joseph, the patrikios and praipositos, to guard him.' The boy passed from regent to regent spent his final breath choosing a guardian for his own child. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen fifty-three, a king took his country back from France one signature at a time. For the Inflection Point, our economist, Vivian Hale. Vivian? Vivian Hale: One signature at a time is exactly how Cambodia did it. In late summer, Prime Minister Penn Nouth and the French High Commissioner, Jean Risterucci, signed over the police and the courts. Two months later came command of the army. On this day, King Norodom Sihanouk returned to the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, and Risterucci stood down. Alice Pemberton: What tipped it? Vivian Hale: That summer, France said it was prepared to hand over the powers it had kept. Cambodia answered with seventy counter-proposals. Its benchmark was full sovereignty inside the French Union, on terms at least equal to India's in the Commonwealth. Seventy demands is not a plea. It turned independence from a war into an inventory. Alice Pemberton: And the cascade? Vivian Hale: Cambodia had negotiated its way out of an empire. Within a generation, the Vietnam War spilled across its border, and the Khmer Rouge came to power. A kingdom that could bargain its way free of France could not bargain its way out of a neighbour's war. Alice Pemberton: In eighteen fifty-one, men from Kentucky crossed into a free state and dragged a minister back over the river to stand trial. The Quick Fire, with our sceptic and man of letters, Rufus McCrae. Rufus? Rufus McCrae: Back over the Ohio, the same river he'd just carried a woman across. The minister was Calvin Fairbank. The woman was Tamar, enslaved to a Louisville man named Shotwell. Alice Pemberton: Carried her how? Rufus McCrae: In his own words, 'an old leaky skiff.' Tamar bailed with a tin cup while Fairbank paddled with a piece of board. Alice Pemberton: And they made it. Rufus McCrae: They reached the Indiana shore by four in the morning. Fairbank hired a horse and buggy and drove her to friends near Salem. Alice Pemberton: Then how does he end up in Kentucky? Rufus McCrae: He went back to Jeffersonville and stayed a week, which was a week too long. Men from Kentucky caught him at the very stable where he'd hired the buggy. Fairbank demanded the protection of Indiana law and the Constitution. The county sheriff handed him over anyway. Alice Pemberton: You've been waiting for the literary part. Rufus McCrae: From Louisville Jail, Calvin Fairbank wrote to Frederick Douglass's paper, the North Star: 'She fled from their reach, and has not been recovered.' He was a man in a cell, and the sentence he chose to publish was about her. Alice Pemberton: At the table: our foreign correspondent for Australia and the Pacific, Cooper Vale; our rabbi, Daniel Aaronson; and our arts and culture critic, Margaux Delacroix. Margaux, you've brought a magazine. Margaux Delacroix: In nineteen sixty-seven, the first issue of Rolling Stone came out, made in a San Francisco loft by Jann Wenner, a Berkeley dropout of twenty-one. John Lennon was on the cover in an army helmet. The editor's note ends, 'We've been working quite hard on it and we hope you can dig it.' Cooper Vale: That's the humblest mission statement in publishing. Margaux Delacroix: It cost a quarter. They dug it. Cooper Vale: Humility's my theme too. In eighteen sixty-seven, the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, handed power back to Japan's emperor. His memorial admits that 'governmental and legal improprieties are not few in number.' Daniel Aaronson: In my tradition, confession is where repair begins. Few rulers confess on their way out. Cooper Vale: Hawaii's king was given no such dignity. In eighteen eighty-seven, the United States won exclusive rights to Pearl Harbor. King Kalākaua refused to sign, until businessmen and an armed militia imposed the Bayonet Constitution and his new cabinet told him to. Margaux Delacroix: A constitution named after the weapon. At least it was honest. Daniel Aaronson: Then here is an honest document of a far worse kind. In nineteen thirty-eight, Kristallnacht began across Germany and Austria. At twenty past one in the morning, Reinhard Heydrich wired the police: 'Business establishments and homes of Jews may be destroyed but not looted.' They had drafted etiquette for a pogrom. Thirty thousand men went to the camps. Alice Pemberton: Margaux, a turn to Detroit. Margaux Delacroix: In nineteen sixty, Robert McNamara became president of the Ford Motor Company, the first man outside the family since Henry himself. He lasted about a month before Kennedy made him Secretary of Defense. Daniel Aaronson: And he spent his old age writing about regret over Vietnam. Repentance, very late. Alice Pemberton: A shogun's confession, a coerced signature, a late regret: the ninth of November keeps catching men explaining themselves. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Well, that was the day that was — the ninth of November — where in eighteen eighty an earthquake struck Zagreb and brought down its cathedral; where in nineteen thirty-six the fashion designer Ruth Harkness brought a cub named Su Lin out of Sichuan, and he became the first live giant panda in the United States; and, more recently, where in nineteen ninety-three Mostar's old bridge, the Stari Most, standing for more than four centuries, fell after days of shelling. The echo never stops. Neither do we. See you tomorrow. Humphrey Thwaite: In six ninety-four, at the Seventeenth Council of Toledo, the Visigothic king Egica told his bishops the Jews of Spain were conspiring with their cousins overseas. The council sentenced them all to slavery. Mortimer Finch: On what evidence? Humphrey Thwaite: News he said he'd heard. The same council passed a canon protecting his own children, and took Jewish children from their parents at seven. Mortimer Finch: And the minutes survive? Humphrey Thwaite: They're the best source for the period. His crime is the best-documented thing he did.