Top

We have updated our Privacy Policy Please take a moment to review it. By continuing to use this site, you agree to the terms of our updated Privacy Policy.

The Terror

On sale

7th September 2006

Price: £12.99

Selected:  Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780349115887

Disclosure: If you buy products using the retailer buttons above, we may earn a commission from the retailers you visit.

The French Revolution marks the foundation of the modern political world. It was in the crucible of the Revolution that the political forces of conservatism, liberalism and socialism began to find their modern form, and it was the Revolution that first asserted the claims of universal individual rights, on which our current understandings of citizenship are based. But the Terror was, as much as anything else, a civil war, and such wars are always both brutal and complex. The guillotine in Paris claimed some 1,500 official victims, but executions of captured counter-revolutionary rebels ran into the tens of thousands, and deaths in the areas of greatest conflict probably ran into six figures, with indiscriminate massacres being perpetrated by both sides.

The story of the Terror is a story of grand political pronouncements, uprisings and insurrections, but also a story of survival against hunger, persecution and bewildering ideological demands, a story of how a state, even with the noblest of intentions, can turn on its people and almost crush them.

What's Inside

Read More Read Less

Reviews

Timothy Tacket, author of BECOMING A REVOLUTIONARY AND WHEN THE KING TOOK FLIGHT
David Andres s' important new book is a major contribution in our efforts to rethink the French Revolution . . . It is also exceptionally well-written
LITERARY REVIEW
A meticulous account . . . stands beside Simon Schama's Citizens
Munro Price, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
Commendably fair and even-handed . . . A lucid study
William Doyle, INDEPENDENT
The most authoritative treatment we are likely to have for many years