A Place of Greater Safety

A Place of Greater Safety
Author: Hilary Mantel
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Total Pages: 770
Release: 2006-11-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 142992280X

The story of three young provincials of no great heritage who together helped to destroy a way of life and, in the process, destroyed themselves: Camille Desmoulins, bisexual and beautiful, charming, erratic, untrustworthy; Georges Jacques Danton, hugely but erotically ugly, a brilliant pragmatist who knew how to seize power and use it; and Maximilien Robespierre, "the rabid lamb," who would send his dearest friend to the guillotine. Each, none older than thirty-four, would die by the hand of the very revolution he had helped to bring into being.

Revolutionary Ideas

Revolutionary Ideas
Author: Jonathan Israel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 883
Release: 2014-03-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400849993

How the Radical Enlightenment inspired and shaped the French Revolution Historians of the French Revolution used to take for granted what was also obvious to its contemporary observers—that the Revolution was shaped by the radical ideas of the Enlightenment. Yet in recent decades, scholars have argued that the Revolution was brought about by social forces, politics, economics, or culture—almost anything but abstract notions like liberty or equality. In Revolutionary Ideas, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment restores the Revolution’s intellectual history to its rightful central role. Drawing widely on primary sources, Jonathan Israel shows how the Revolution was set in motion by radical eighteenth-century doctrines, how these ideas divided revolutionary leaders into vehemently opposed ideological blocs, and how these clashes drove the turning points of the Revolution. In this compelling account, the French Revolution stands once again as a culmination of the emancipatory and democratic ideals of the Enlightenment. That it ended in the Terror represented a betrayal of those ideas—not their fulfillment.

Fatal Purity

Fatal Purity
Author: Ruth Scurr
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2007-04-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780805082616

Against the dramatic backdrop of the French Revolution, historian Scurr tracks Robespierre's evolution from lawyer to revolutionary leader. This is a fascinating portrait of a man who identified with the Revolution to the point of madness, and in so doing changed the course of history.

French Revolutionaries and English Republicans

French Revolutionaries and English Republicans
Author: Rachel Hammersley
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780861932733

Following the cataclysmic events of 1789 some of those involved in the Revolution began to take seriously the possibility of a French republic. Various ideas developed about the form this should take and the models on which it could be based, from those of ancient Greece and Rome, to modern republics such as Geneva or the United States of America. However, a small number of thinkers - centred around the radical, Paris-based Cordeliers Club - looked to the writings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English republicans for guidance about realising ancient republican ideals in the modern world. This book offers an intellectual history of the Club, through a close analysis of texts and the relationships between their authors. Its main focus is on individual club members and their translations of and borrowings from the works of such thinkers as Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney and Thomas Gordon: the author shows how the Cordeliers adapted and developed those ideas so as to make them serve contemporary circumstances and concerns, and demonstrates that even after the establishment of a French republic in 1792, members of the Cordeliers Club continued to make use of English republican ideas in order to respond to key constitutional and political questions. Rachel Hammersley is Senior Lecturer in History at Newcastle University.

Choosing Terror

Choosing Terror
Author: Marisa Linton
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2013-06-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199576300

Examines the leaders of the French Revolution - Robespierre and his fellow Jacobins - and particularly the gradual process whereby many of them came to 'choose terror', evolving from humanitarian idealists into ruthless politicians, ready to adopt the use of terror to defend the Revolution.

Stutter

Stutter
Author: Marc Shell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2005
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780674019379

In a book that explores the phenomenon of stuttering from its practical and physical aspects to its historical profile to its existential implications, Shell, who has himself struggled with stuttering all his life, plumbs the depths of this murky region between will and flesh, intention and expression, idea and word. Looking into the difficulties encountered by people who stutter--as do fifty million world-wide--Shell shows that stutterers share a kinship with many other speakers, both impeded and fluent. This book takes us back to a time when stuttering was believed to be 'diagnosis-induced, ' then on to the complex mix of physical and psychological causes that were later discovered. Ranging from cartoon characters like Porky Pig to cultural icons like Marilyn Monroe, from Moses to Hamlet, Shell reveals how stuttering in literature plays a role in the formation of tone, narrative progression and character.--From publisher description.