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Discover French history as you’ve never read it before in this bold account of the French Revolution from the perspective of the lower classes. This blow-by-blow narrative busts pervasive myths and reveals how the French Revolution shaped the Western world. The assault on the Bastille, the Reign of Terror, Danton mocking his executioner, Robespierre dispensing a fearful justice, and the archetypal gadfly Marat—the events and figures of the French Revolution have exercised a hold on the historical imagination for more than 200 years. It has been a template for heroic insurrection and, to more conservative minds, a cautionary tale. In the hands of Eric Hazan, author of The Invention of Par...
In changing forever the political landscape of the modern world, the French Revolution was driven by a new personality: the confirmed, self-aware revolutionary. Maximilien Robespierre originated the role, inspiring such devoted twentieth-century disciples as Lenin—who deemed Robespierre a Bolshevik avant la lettre. Although he dominated the Committee for Public Safety only during the last year of his life, Robespierre was the Revolution in flesh and blood. He embodies its ideological essence, its unprecedented extremes, its absolutist virtues and vices; he incarnated a new, completely politicized self to lead a new, wholly regenerated society. Yet as historian David P. Jordan observes, Rob...
Cracking the Walnut: How Being a Little Nuts Helped Me To Beat Prostate Cancer is an enlightening, entertaining and straight shooting depiction of a patient's experience with Prostate Cancer treatment. Unlike other survivor books, the writer isn't strong-willed and must resort to all sorts of fanciful distractions, however nutty, to survive. Honest and brave, it portrays, in humorous detail, a patient's apprehension, perceptions and serves as a confidence builder for all patients. Physicians call it eye-opener and something that will help them prepare patients to deal with prostate cancer or any illness.
Natural right—the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are “natural” in origin—is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. Edelstein further contends that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed that the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he proves that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre. A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period.
For some historians and biographers, Maximilien Robespierre (1758–94) was a great revolutionary martyr who succeeded in leading the French Republic to safety in the face of overwhelming military odds. For many others, he was the first modern dictator, a fanatic who instigated the murderous Reign of Terror in 1793–94. This masterful biography combines new research into Robespierre's dramatic life with a deep understanding of society and the politics of the French Revolution to arrive at a fresh understanding of the man, his passions, and his tragic shortcomings. Peter McPhee gives special attention to Robespierre's formative years and the development of an iron will in a frail boy conceiv...
The day of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) is universally acknowledged as a major turning-point in the history of the French Revolution. Maximilien Robespierre, the most prominent member of the Committee of Public Safety, was planning to destroy one of the most dangerous plots that the Revolution had faced.
'A truly remarkable writer, one of the most gifted non-fiction authors alive' Simon Schama, Financial Times Robespierre was only thirty-six when he died, sent to the guillotine where he had sent thousands ahead of him. 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'. Ruth Scurr sheds 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.
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It is time for a major work of synthetic interpretation, and this is what The Jacobin Republic Under Fire offers.".