The Fall of Robespierre

The Fall of Robespierre
Author: Colin Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2021-08-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191025046

The day of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) is universally acknowledged as a major turning-point in the history of the French Revolution. At 12.00 midnight, Maximilien Robespierre, the most prominent member of the Committee of Public Safety which had for more than a year directed the Reign of Terror, was planning to destroy one of the most dangerous plots that the Revolution had faced. By 12.00 midnight at the close of the day, following a day of uncertainty, surprises, upsets and reverses, his world had been turned upside down. He was an outlaw, on the run, and himself wanted for conspiracy against the Republic. He felt that his whole life and his Revolutionary career were drawing to an end. As indeed they were. He shot himself shortly afterwards. Half-dead, the guillotine finished him off in grisly fashion the next day. The Fall of Robespierre provides an hour-by-hour analysis of these 24 hours.

Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre

Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre
Author: David P. Jordan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2013-10-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1476725713

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, Robespierre has remained an enigma. While his revolutionary career embraced the most crucial years of the Revolutions—1789 to 1794—it was little presaged by the unremarkable course of his early life. The Jacobin leader to whom the revolutionary masses clung is thus both as mysterious as his remote provincial past and as awesome as the world-shaking regicide he inspired. Confronted by these extremes, historians have often contented themselves to caricature Robespierre as an antichrist, a bourgeois manipulator of the rabble, or a canny political tactician. Jordan looks to Robespierre’s own self-conception for a true understanding of the man and his Revolution. Indeed, Robespierre wrote about himself often, and at length. Influenced by Enlightenment rationalism and the new literary genre of autobiography, he left behind a voluminous body of speeches, newspaper articles, and pamphlets laced with reflections and revelations about his self-created destiny as living martyr and revolutionary Everyman. From these thoughts and words, Jordan attempts to uncover Robespierre, to reveal what made this unlikely figure—onetime provincial lawyer, small-town académicien, and uninspired versifier—the most important in revolutionary France.

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.

The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution

The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution
Author: David Andress
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 705
Release: 2015-01-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191009911

The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution brings together a sweeping range of expert and innovative contributions to offer engaging and thought-provoking insights into the history and historiography of this epochal event. Each chapter presents the foremost summations of academic thinking on key topics, along with stimulating and provocative interpretations and suggestions for future research directions. Placing core dimensions of the history of the French Revolution in their transnational and global contexts, the contributors demonstrate that revolutionary times demand close analysis of sometimes tiny groups of key political actors - whether the king and his ministers or the besieged leaders of the Jacobin republic - and attention to the deeply local politics of both rural and urban populations. Identities of class, gender and ethnicity are interrogated, but so too are conceptions and practices linked to citizenship, community, order, security, and freedom: each in their way just as central to revolutionary experiences, and equally amenable to critical analysis and reflection. This Handbook covers the structural and political contexts that build up to give new views on the classic question of the 'origins of revolution'; the different dimensions of personal and social experience that illuminate the political moment of 1789 itself; the goals and dilemmas of the period of constitutional monarchy; the processes of destabilisation and ongoing conflict that ended that experiment; the key issues surrounding the emergence and experience of 'terror'; and the short- and long-term legacies, for both good and ill, of the revolutionary trauma - for France, and for global politics.

The Robespierre Uprising

The Robespierre Uprising
Author: Steve M
Publisher: Steve M
Total Pages: 749
Release:
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

60 Million. That's how many people were sent to the transformational labor camps.Welcome to the American Dystopia. Ten years later and the initial boom is over. America is in a recession and only phony government statistics tell us that everything is fine. The Income Paradox has arrived. In the American future, much has changed -- Now there is a northern wall and a southern wall on our borders Getting into America is hard - getting out is even harder Abortion is illegal again Being LGBT is back in the shadows and illegal again Church attendance is necessary to avoid the camps Atheists now face a death sentence in god-fearing America All pregnancy tests are transmitted to your church and they manage the pregnancy - even helping you choose an appropriate biblical name English is the official language. Speaking anything else is a crime Our military is now available for hire by other countries, and has become our largest source of government revenues. In short, it's the sort of America some people dream of. Strong and Wrong. Bobby only survived the camps because of his one act of bravery. He's not a brave man. But desperation causes some people to be something they are not. Sydney Delos is Vice President and keeps it all running. He has the President's ear and is her right-hand.. Still, he knows it's not working the way it was advertised. And he's scared. The person he loves the most is at risk from the rules he administers. Then, there is the Hinton Confession. Chris Hinton ran the CIA for twenty three years. On his death bed, he confessed to the Reno bombing, San Diego and Boston, too. He confessed to every act of terrorism he orchestrated on behalf of the Democratic Party in order to swing elections their way. But as a life-long Republican, he didn't mention a single act done for his side, and there were many. Now Vice President Delos must decide whether to use the confession to transform the electoral map forever. Enrique Saba is a member of The Inbreds, a card and chip copying gang that live outside of the law. They steal your data then they steal your money. This small-time thief dreams of getting his mother and sister safely to Spain. Americans are tired. Americans are poor. Americans have become their own huddled masses. Americans are angry. Only a spark is needed.. And it is coming.

Ending the Terror

Ending the Terror
Author: Bronislaw Baczko
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1994-07-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780521441056

A major assessment of a crucial moment in the history of the French Revolution - the fall of Robespierre in July 1794.

Robespierre

Robespierre
Author: Peter McPhee
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2012-03-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0300183674

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 conceived outside wedlock and on the margins of polite provincial society. Exploring how these experiences formed the young lawyer who arrived in Versailles in 1789, the author discovers not the cold, obsessive Robespierre of legend, but a man of passion with close but platonic friendships with women. Soon immersed in revolutionary conflict, he suffered increasingly lengthy periods of nervous collapse correlating with moments of political crisis, yet Robespierre was tragically unable to step away from the crushing burdens of leadership. Did his ruthless, uncompromising exercise of power reflect a descent into madness in his final year of life? McPhee reevaluates the ideology and reality of "the Terror," what Robespierre intended, and whether it represented an abandonment or a reversal of his early liberalism and sense of justice.

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.