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Toussaint was unimpressed by the French revolution: for all its liberal measures, the Assembly was dominated by slave owners who refused to abolish slavery. Now in Saint-Domingue 10,000 slaves joined the rebel army, which was soon 80,000 strong, overcoming the 40,000 whites and 28,000 free black people to conquer much of the colony as slave masters were killed, estates burned. Biassou appointed himself viceroy, but Toussaint ‘directed all the strands of the plot and he organized the revolt and prepared the explosion’. Most wanted abolition of slavery; the radicals wanted to ‘kill the whites’; but Toussaint envisioned a multiracial community that kept sugar estates intact. The revolutionaries positioned themselves as loyalists supporting Louis against the pro-slavery lobby in the Assembly: this was partly a revolution against the French revolution.

In July 1792, Toussaint helped draft a ‘Lettre originale des chefs des Nègres révoltés’, advocating abolition of slavery on the basis of ‘universal natural rights’ and creation of a non-racialized community of equals in a multiracial Saint-Domingue.

In August 1792, rallying against the slave-owning Assembly, Toussaint celebrated the birthday of Louis XVI, just as murderous panic – sparked by the fear of foreign invasion and internal betrayal – crackled through Paris. On 9 August, the urban militants of Paris elected an insurrectionary Commune which, in cooperation with Robespierre, organized an insurgent mob that the next day attacked the Tuileries, killing 900 Swiss Guards, and overthrew the constitutional monarchy. ‘What can do they to me?’ cried Antoinette. ‘Kill me, today’s as good as tomorrow.’ Louis and Antoinette fled to the Assembly, where through a grille they witnessed the suspension of the monarchy before they were arrested and jailed in the forbidding Temple fortress. There Louis humbly taught his son Latin and geography every morning. As elections by universal suffrage were held for a new assembly, the Convention, the hysteria – encapsulated by the slogan ‘La Patrie en danger’ – was now murderous.

Ten days after the Tuileries attack, the Prussians invaded France. When they reached Verdun, Paris spun into a vicious frenzy. In September, as the new Convention gathered, Robespierre’s charismatic ally, Georges Danton, a shaggy lawyer’s son from Champagne, rallied the deputies. ‘Anyone who refuses to serve must be punished by death!’ he cried. To conquer their enemies, ‘Dare, dare again, always dare, and France is saved!’ Then came amazing news: on 20 September, at Valmy, the French revolutionary army had defeated the Prussians. On the 22nd the deputies abolished the monarchy. Although there was a stand-off in the Convention between the Girondins, led by Brissot among others, and the more radical Montagnards, so named because they sat on the highest benches of the Convention, now led by Robespierre, the fear and panic drove squads of killers, some spontaneous, inspired by Danton, some probably organized by the Jacobins, to raid prisons, slaughtering 1,300 courtiers and priests, while prostitutes were gang-raped. Antoinette’s friend the princesse de Lamballe was disembowelled and her head displayed to the queen, who fainted.

Yet the government, overseen by the Convention, was totally chaotic as it struggled not only against external enemies but against Catholic and royalist counter-revolution in the Vendée and moderate republican revolt in Lyons. As Robespierre emerged as the personification of republican virtue in the Convention, the new state was blooded with a royal sacrifice – the start of a modern era of mass national politics that remodelled both dynasty and private family. At 5 a.m. on 21 January 1793, Louis was awoken by drums.

* The other sister, Maria, countess of Coventry, died at twenty-seven of cosmetics poisoning, having overused Venetian ceruse, which gave girls fashionable alabaster skin but contained lead and mercury. When Maria’s skin burst out in rashes, she covered them up with more ceruse, which soon killed her: death by cosmetics.

* Wedgwood’s closest friend was a rambunctious doctor, Erasmus Darwin – they were both luminaries of the Lunar Society – who also invested in the Trent and Mersey Canal and advised him to power Etruria with steam engines. Darwin was a brilliant, fat, promiscuous physician, investor and scientist, a founder of the Lunar Society who notoriously fathered many children, including with some of his servants. His son Robert, a six-foot-two giant of twenty-four stone – married Josiah’s daughter Susannah Wedgwood. Their son Charles Darwin, born in 1809, started to study medicine, then, funded by Wedgwood money, switched to learning taxidermy and natural sciences.