Jacobinism promised equality, enforced virtue, and left a legacy the left has wrestled with ever since.

Emerging from the French Revolution, Jacobinism was the first modern attempt to make politics absolute—reshaping society in the name of equality, virtue, and popular sovereignty itself. Under leaders like Maximilien Robespierre, the Jacobins fused Enlightenment ideals with mass politics, revolutionary discipline, and terror, leaving behind one of the most contested legacies in history.

This episode explores the Jacobins as both a political movement and an ideology: their roots in Rousseau’s philosophy, their obsession with civic virtue and the general will, and their belief that corruption had to be eliminated for freedom to survive. From the Jacobin Club and the sans-culottes to the Reign of Terror and Thermidor, we trace how revolutionary ideals hardened into coercive power.

Because this season examines the birth of socialism in revolutionary Paris, we also follow the Jacobin afterlife—through Babeuf’s egalitarian conspiracies, Marx’s reading of the French Revolution, Lenin’s admiration for Jacobin resolve, and modern debates about revolutionary violence and emancipation.

This is Season One: The Origins of Socialism: Paris and the Making of Modern Revolution

Next: Paris 1848: The Red Flag in Spring (Part I: The Volcano)

Written and produced by Matt Payne.

Support, Subscribe, Read on Substack: https://ismhistorypodcast.substack.com/

Original Musical Compositions by Ian Payne: https://www.jamesianpayne.com/

Support the Show: PayPal

Contact: [email protected]

The first furnace of modern socialism.

A woman enters a sick man’s room, and a knife turns a revolutionary into a secular saint.

In 1793 Paris — the furnace of modern politics — the French Revolution reaches its most radical phase. From the sans-culottes and the first Paris Commune to the Constitution of 1793 and the Enragés’ demand for bread, this episode traces the earliest roots of socialist politics: liberty colliding with equality, rights colliding with hunger, and popular democracy colliding with centralized power.

Through immersive storytelling and historical analysis — from Marat’s bathtub to Jacques Roux’s “phantoms of ’93” and Babeuf’s dream of real equality — we explore why revolutionary Paris became the seedbed for socialism, and why its legacy remained both inspiration and warning for every revolution that followed.

This is Season One: The Origins of Socialism: Paris and the Making of Modern Revolution

Next: What Is Jacobinism? Virtue, Terror, and the Birth of the Radical Left.

Written and Produced by Matt Payne

Support, Subscribe, Read on Substack: https://ismhistorypodcast.substack.com/

Original Musical Compositions by Ian Payne: https://www.jamesianpayne.com/

Support the Show: PayPal

Contact: [email protected]

Socialism is one of the most argued-over ideas in modern history — praised as a path to equality, condemned as a road to tyranny, and declared dead more than once.

So what is socialism — really?

In this opening episode of ISM: Ideas Meet Power, we trace socialism from its origins in the industrial revolutions of the 19th century to its global transformations in the 20th century and beyond.

Through immersive historical storytelling — from Paris in 1871 and Barcelona in 1937 to Chile in 1973 — this episode explores socialism as a living tradition: a diverse, contested critique of capitalism shaped by workers, revolutionaries, intellectuals, and states.

Along the way, we examine socialism’s shared principles, its internal debates over democracy and power, and why the question of socialism continues to return in moments of crisis.

This is Season One: The Origins of Socialism: Paris and the Making of Modern Revolution

Next: Paris 1793: The Radical City.

Written and produced by Matt Payne.

Support, Subscribe, Read on Substack: https://ismhistorypodcast.substack.com/

Original Musical Compositions by Ian Payne: https://www.jamesianpayne.com/

Support the Show: PayPal

Contact: [email protected]

ISM is a narrative history podcast about political ideologies and social movements—socialism, anarchism, fascism, liberalism, and beyond.

Each season explores a major ideology through immersive storytelling and historical analysis, tracing how ideas move from theory into the real world, shaping revolutions, states, and everyday life.

Ideas Meet Power.

Written and produced by Matt Payne.

Support, Subscribe, Read on Substack: https://ismhistorypodcast.substack.com/

Original Musical Compositions by Ian Payne: https://www.jamesianpayne.com/

Support the Show: PayPal

Contact: [email protected]