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The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution

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The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution

By: Timothy Tackett
Narrated by: Michael Page
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About this listen

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?

©2015 The President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2020 Tantor 18th Century Europe France Military Modern French Revolution Monarchy Soviet Union War Middle Ages

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All stars
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I liked the reader, very clear and easy to follow. The book is great at breaking down what is a very complex but important period of history.

Very interesting and easy to follow

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Extremely well detailed and fantastic reading. This audiobook is very pleasant to listen to. Bravo!

Formidable!

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Great summary of the French Revolution. Well read , clear and not boring. Definitely recommend this book

Fantastic

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This is a solid history of the French Revolution, focused on the violence rather than the politics (including war, civil war, riot, and suchlike). This focus makes it mostly fairly easy to follow - trying to understand the Revolution in all its complexity is a near impossible task, so focusing on specific aspects makes it far more comprehendible.

However, TBH I'm not convinced it really delivers on the promise of explaining how an idealistic movement got perverted into an orgy of conspiracy theory, paranoia and unthinking execution. The general impression is it was a gradual drip of rumour and overexcitment over a long period of time, with idealism itself leading to extremism almost as an inevitability, and conspiracy theories providing one of the few ways to make sense of all the chaos and rapid shifts in France's fortunes.

Fine - but if that's the hypothesis, I want a bit more comparative history of other idealistic or revolutionary movements where similar shifts happened, or at least more first-hand evidence of individuals' thinking evolving over time (surely possible in a period where so many wrote so much), to justify the theory. There was some of that here, but not enough for me to come away with much greater insight into how an industrial scale state killing machine came into being.

Still, it's not a bad overview. Worth a read if you're interested in the period - which, increasingly, I think everyone should be. The more I read, the more fascinating I find it - and the more I want to try and understand the (probably) un-understandable.

A good overview

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