The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre

The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre PDF Author: Norman Hampson
Publisher: London : Duckworth
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description

The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre

The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre PDF Author: Norman Hampson
Publisher: London : Duckworth
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description


Robespierre

Robespierre PDF Author: Peter McPhee
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300183674
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre

The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre PDF Author: Norman Hampson
Publisher: London : Duckworth
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description


Fatal Purity

Fatal Purity PDF Author: Ruth Scurr
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780805082616
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Robespierre

Robespierre PDF Author: Marcel Gauchet
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691234957
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
How Robespierre’s career and legacy embody the dangerous contradictions of democracy Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) is arguably the most controversial and contradictory figure of the French Revolution, inspiring passionate debate like no other protagonist of those dramatic and violent events. The fervor of those who defend Robespierre the “Incorruptible,” who championed the rights of the people, is met with revulsion by those who condemn him as the bloodthirsty tyrant who sent people to the guillotine. Marcel Gauchet argues that he was both, embodying the glorious achievement of liberty as well as the excesses that culminated in the Terror. In much the same way that 1789 and 1793 symbolize the two opposing faces of the French Revolution, Robespierre’s contradictions were the contradictions of the revolution itself. Robespierre was its purest incarnation, neither the defender of liberty who fell victim to the corrupting influence of power nor the tyrant who betrayed the principles of the revolution. Gauchet shows how Robespierre’s personal transition from opposition to governance was itself an expression of the tragedy inherent in a revolution whose own prophetic ideals were impossible to implement. This panoramic book tells the story of how the man most associated with the founding of modern French democracy was also the first tyrant of that democracy, and it offers vital lessons for all democracies about the perpetual danger of tyranny.

Choosing Terror

Choosing Terror PDF Author: Marisa Linton
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0199576300
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

A Place of Greater Safety

A Place of Greater Safety PDF Author: Hilary Mantel
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0312426399
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 770

Get Book Here

Book Description
Set during the French Revolution, this "riveting historical novel" ("The New Yorker") is the story of three young provincials who together helped destroy a way of life and, in the process, destroyed themselves.

The Life of Maximilien Robespierre

The Life of Maximilien Robespierre PDF Author: George Henry Lewes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution

The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution PDF Author: David Andress
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191009911
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 705

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Virtue and Terror

Virtue and Terror PDF Author: Maximilien Robespierre
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1786633388
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
Robespierre's defense of the French Revolution remains one of the most powerful and unnerving justifications for political violence ever written, and has extraordinary resonance in a world obsessed with terrorism and appalled by the language of its proponents. Yet today, the French Revolution is celebrated as the event which gave birth to a nation built on the principles of Enlightenment. So how should a contemporary audience approach Robespierre's vindication of revolutionary terror? Zizek takes a helter-skelter route through these contradictions, marshaling all the breadth of analogy for which he is famous.