Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution - Hardcover

Scurr, Ruth

3.9

1,269 ratings by Goodreads

9780701176006: Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701176008 ISBN 13: 9780701176006

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2006

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Robespierre was only 36 when he died, sent to the guillotine where he had sent thousands ahead of him. Only a few months before, this pale and fragile man, formal, anxious to the point of paranoia, steeled by deep-held principles, had held centre place in the new Festival of the Supreme Being, wearing his sky-blue coat and decreeing a new religion for France. Robespierre and the Revolution were inseparable: a single inflexible tyrant. But what turned a shy young lawyer into the living embodiment of the Terror at its most violent? Admirers called him 'the great incorruptible'; critics dubbed him a 'monster', a 'bloodthirsty charlatan'; even his friends found him hard to understand. Ruth Scurr sheds a dazzling new light on this puzzle, tracing Robespierre's life from a troubled childhood in provincial Arras to the passionate idealist, fighting for the rights of the people, and sweeping on to the implacable leader prepared to sign the death warrant for his closest friends. No backdrop can match the French revolution: it burns with human interest. As Scurr says, 'More than haunting, it obsesses, because it will not lie down and die'. Her brilliant, probing narrative brings the Revolution and its chilling hero to fiery life once again, helping us to understand how ideals and fanaticism can so often go hand in hand, as they still do today.

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Review:

"Scurr brilliantly evokes the sheer speed and intensity of change after the fall of the Bastille". -- Guardian (Sat): Rebecca Abrams

"Scurr has written a lucid, readable and finely balanced biography of this flawed French revolutionary" -- Mike Rapport, BBC History Magazine

"The best English-Language book on the subject for decades" -- Book of the Week, The Week Magazine

"This is a biography that will stimulate all those interested in the subject of state terror" -- Antonia Fraser, The Times

"fine political biography" -- Independent (Fri): David Coward

"it is difficult to ignore the contemporary resonances" -- Times

A much-lauded debut -- Bookseller

Engaging and insightful biography... Scurr writes with sensitivity and clarity about this paradoxical individual -- Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

`extremely intelligent, well researched book...'
-- The Sunday Herald Books of the Year. Chosen by Lady Antonia Fraser, historian.

‘Scurr has an important tale to tell, and she tells it judiciously.’ -- The Sunday Times, Lucy Hughes-Hallett

From the Publisher:

How idealism turned to blood: a powerful new portrait of the most enigmatic politician of all times, and a vivid re-reading of the turbulent French Revolution itself.

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