The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution - Hardcover

Timothy Tackett

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674736559 ISBN 13: 9780674736559

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Between 1793 and 1794, thousands of French citizens were imprisoned and hundreds sent to the guillotine by a powerful dictatorship that claimed to be acting in the public interest. Only a few years earlier, revolutionaries had proclaimed a new era of tolerance, equal justice, and human rights. How and why did the French Revolution s lofty ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity"descend into violence and terror? The Coming of the Terror"in the French Revolution "offers a new interpretation of this turning point in world history. Timothy Tackett traces the inexorable emergence of a culture of violence among the Revolution s political elite amid the turbulence of popular uprisings, pervasive subversion, and foreign invasion. Violence was neither a preplanned strategy nor an ideological imperative but rather the consequence of multiple factors of the Revolutionary process itself, including an initial breakdown in authority, the impact of the popular classes, and a cycle of rumors, denunciations, and panic fed by fear fear of counterrevolutionary conspiracies, fear of anarchy, fear of oneself becoming the target of vengeance. To comprehend the coming of the Terror, we must understand the contagion of fear that left the revolutionaries themselves terrorized. Tackett recreates the sights, sounds, and emotions of the Revolution through the observations of nearly a hundred men and women who experienced and recorded it firsthand. Penetrating the mentality of Revolutionary elites on the eve of the Terror, he reveals how suspicion and mistrust escalated and helped propel their actions, ultimately consuming them and the Revolution itself."

About this title

Review:

A wonderful book, a veritable masterpiece. Tackettfinds new sources to answer one of the oldest questions about the French Revolution: why did the deputies of the National Assembly put the Terror in place? In a captivating synthesis of the entire Revolution, he captures its drama and emotion, the fluctuating joys, anxieties, and fears of those who lived through unprecedented events. --David Garrioch, author of "The Making of Revolutionary Paris"

In Tackett s boldly conceived and important book, (...) he seeks to explain a key political process, one which fundamentally transformed the character of the Revolution and, in the eyes of many, betrayed its most basic principles. This is a superb study of pressures that came to bear on individual politicians... This is a thought-provoking book that makes a major contribution to our understanding of terror and political intolerance, and also to the history of emotions more generally. It helps expose the complexity of a revolution that cannot be adequately understood in terms of principles alone. -- Times Literary Supplement

About the Author:

Timothy Tackett is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Irvine.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0674736559
• ISBN 13: 9780674736559
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 480