The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France

by David Andress

Overview

For two hundred years, the Terror has haunted the imagination of the West. The descent of the French Revolution from rapturous liberation into an orgy of apparently pointless bloodletting has been the focus of countless reflections on the often malignant nature of humanity and the folly of revolution.

David Andress, a leading historian of the French Revolution, presents a radically different account of the Terror. In a remarkably vivid and page-turning work of history, he transports the reader from the pitched battles on the streets of Paris to the royal family's escape through secret passageways in the Tuileries palace, and across the landscape of the tragic last years of the Revolution. The violence, he shows, was a result of dogmatic and fundamentalist thinking: dreadful decisions were made by groups of people who believed they were still fighting for freedom but whose survival was threatened by famine, external war, and counter-revolutionaries within the fledging new state. Urgent questions emerge from Andress's trenchant reassessment: When is it right to arbitrarily detain those suspected of subversion? When does an earnest patriotism become the rationale for slaughter?

Combining startling narrative power and bold insight, The Terror is written with verve and exceptional pace-it is a superb popular debut from an enormously talented historian.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374530730
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	12/26/2006
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	800,794
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.05(d)

About the Author

David Andress, a leading historian of the French Revolution, is Principal Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Portsmouth, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. The Terror is his first book for a general readership.

Read an Excerpt

In the brief midsummer darkness of 20-21 June 1791, Louis XVI, King of the French, fled his capital and his people. Using secret passageways in the Tuileries palace, the royal family were spirited away by a small band of loyal followers, leaving central Paris in a hired hackney carriage driven by Axel von Fersen, a dashing young Swedish knight, and rumoured lover of Queen Marie-Antoinette. Outside the city walls Fersen left them to make his own escape, and the party embarked in a second-hand berline, a bulky coach pulled by a team of six horses. Louis had spurned the chance to flee in anything lighter and faster, because it would have meant traveling apart from his wife and their two children. Together, he reasoned, they were safer, but as the coach creaked and groaned eastwards towards the frontier fortress of Montmedy, laden down with the family, their attendants, bodyguards and luggage, it would prove a fatefully unwise choice.

The fugitives’ schedule had been carefully plotted, and relays of cavalry were to see them to safety, once they had passed into the jurisdiction of the marquis de Bouille, loyal governor of the frontier region. The departure had been delayed by several hours, however, by last-minute hesitations and confusions, and the berline was too slow to make up the time. The duc de Choiseul, commander of the first relay of horsemen, presumed the escape postponed (as it had been once already, after repeated earlier reschedulings), and ordered his men to withdraw to barracks, concerned that their presence was alarming the locals. He passed the same instruction to all the later relays. Ignorant of this critical decision, the royal party proceeded towards the first rendezvous. Escorted by only two horsemen, the berline meandered on across the rolling landscape of Champagne as morning turned to afternoon—twice the king ordered a rest-stop, and, casting aside all effort at concealment, chatted with passers-by as if nothing unusual was occurring.

Yet what was happening was amazing and traumatic. Not since the religious and political strife of the early seventeenth century had a king of France had to flee his people, and never had one made so brazenly—or so desperately—for the frontiers. This episode had been brought about by upheavals which were unprecedented in European history, with a long and tortured trail of antecedents reaching across Louis’ reign into that of his predecessor. If the king and his companions regarded their move with insouciance, this was a symptom of the wider delusions that the entire court laboured under, long after events had first decisively challenged their right to rule France as they saw fit…

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgements	vii
	Maps	viii
	Introduction	1
1	Night Flight	9
2	Hankering After Destruction	38
3	The Fall	71
4	The September Massacres	93
5	Dawn of a New Age	116
6	Things Fall Apart	149
7	Holding the Centre	178
8	Saturnalia	210
9	Faction and Conspiracy	244
10	Glaciation	277
11	Triumph and Collapse	312
12	Terror Against Terror	345
	Conclusion	371
	Timeline of the French Revolution to 1795	379
	Glossary	385
	Cast of Characters	391
	Notes	403
	Index	429

Editorial Reviews

Countering the historiography of the last generation, including Simon Schama…Andress focuses not just on the killings but on the "grand political pronouncements, uprisings, and insurrections"…His focus on the Terror as the culmination of a complex historical process rather than an unprovoked outbreak of violence, makes for a bracing historical reassessment.” —Publishers Weekly

“ [A] well-researched, well-written, and highly revisionist work.” —Sunday Times

“Andress, in this compelling study . . . scotches many myths, and gives some sobering parallels to contemporary society.” —Scotland on Sunday

“Andress creates a vivid picture of the time… Amid today's issues of individual rights, legitimate limits of state power and demonization of enemies, the book has great relevance” —Waterstones Books Quarterly

“This is the most authoritative treatment we are likely to have for many years.” —William Doyle, The Independent

“A tour de force. There is nothing to beat it.” —Spectator

“[A] brilliantly deadpan account . . . one of the ironies that Andress skillfully reveals is that the law was denied, bit by bit, by the very men who had once been practicing it . . . he also shows how the feeble poisoned the righteous, revolutionary anger.” —The Guardian

“In such alarming times, it is important to understand what exactly terror is, how it works politically, and what, if anything, can be done to combat it. The historian David Andress has made a serious contribution to this central subject of our times with an accessible account of the way terror overtook the French Revolution at the end of the 18th Century.” —The Times

“It is a staggeringly complicated story that is just about ordered into a manageable narrative in Andress's even-tempered re-telling.” —The Observer

“Much important work on the French Terror has been done over the past 20 years by French, English, and American historians, and there is now a need to synthesize this into an accessible narrative history for a wider public. This is David Andress's aim, and one which he generally achieves in this well-written and handsomely produced book.” —Sunday Telegraph

“David Andress has given the reader a meticulous account of the Terror, in all its confusing twists and turns . . . While never failing to convey the drama and horrors of the Terror, Andress resists the temptation to exaggerate or turn drama into melodrama. He has written a book which stands beside Simon Schama's Citizens.” —Times Literary Review

“Andress, in this compelling study, offers a far subtler, far more cogent approach to understanding the period, without ever becoming an apologist for the excesses.” —Scotland on Sunday

“Andress creates a vivid picture of the time… Amid today's issues of individual rights, legitimate limits of state power and demonisation of enemies, the book has great relevance.” —Waterstones Books Quarterly

From the Publisher

"To readers primed by Simon Schama's Citizens (1991), Andress will be a trustworthy guide to an extraordinary period in which hardly any event or personage is historically uncontroversial . . . At his explanatory best when invoking the interpersonal animosity and suspicion that preceded a faction's dispatch to the guillotine, Andress viscerally re-creates the Reign of Terror's deadly spectacle."
—Booklist

Gilbert Taylor

Andress offers a visceral account of the guillotining of King Louis XVI in 1793: "he was strapped to a tilting plank, which dropped his head into a brace, and the blade... plunged from above." While the British historian's graphic depiction of numerous executions is a high point of his account of the Terror, he explicitly states it was not the most salient point of the revolution. Countering the historiography of the last generation, including Simon Schama, who said, "violence was the revolution itself," Andress focuses not just on the killings but on the "grand political pronouncements, uprisings and insurrections," from the varying ideologies of the dissident parties to the upheaval of the counterrevolution that rendered France unstable for more than a decade, resulting not just in violence but also in social upheaval. And Andress follows the Terror beyond its conclusion to Napoleon Bonaparte's coronation as emperor in 1804, which brought the revolution "full circle," creating a strong central government that scorned democracy and popular sovereignty, the revolution's central tenets. His focus on such paradoxes and on the Terror as the culmination of a complex historical process rather than an unprovoked outbreak of violence, makes for a bracing historical reassessment. 3 maps. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

According to Andress (history, Univ. of Portsmouth, UK; The French Revolution and the People), the French Revolution ushered in an era that has had an essentially positive impact-a view that few recent historians have shared. Simon Schama in Citizens and Fran ois Furet in Interpreting the French Revolution see the revolution as an aberration and point to the bloody excesses of the Reign of Terror (1793-94) as the inevitable culmination of a misguided attempt to change French society. For his part, Andress skillfully evokes the context that led to state-sponsored terror, and although he condemns the brutality of such intransigent revolutionaries as Danton, Saint-Just, Robespierre, and their fanatical minions, he asserts that it was the iron will of these zealots that sustained the ideals of a new epoch, where the rights of humankind took center stage. Andress may draw fire for comparing the ideological intolerance of the Committee of Public Safety with measures adopted by the post-9/11 American government, but even his most vehement critics will have to agree that his thesis is thoroughly grounded in all the pertinent primary and secondary sources on the era and readably presented. This is the best book on the French Revolution to be published in years and is recommended for academic and public libraries.-Jim Doyle, Sara Hightower Regional Lib., Rome, GA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Meticulous, readable account of the French Revolution's poisonous politics and blood-soaked methods of conflict resolution. Author of several scholarly works about the Revolution, Andress (History/Univ. of Portsmouth) draws upon his expertise to successfully expand on the characters and forces involved in one of history's most significant events. He places particular emphasis on its most violent phase, the Reign of Terror (1792-94), which claimed thousands of lives. Beginning with a dramatic, highly readable account of Louis XVI's flight to Varennes and ending with the arrival on the scene of Napoleon Bonaparte, Andress provides a cornucopia of detail about the people and events leading to a dictatorship that allowed mass detentions and executions of perceived enemies of the Revolution. Driven by real and imagined fears of enemies within and outside France, the vicious cycle of killings was noted for the ferocity and ruthlessness of the players involved in this tragic internecine battle to the death (most infamously by guillotine). Murders and campaigns of devastation were carried out to quell counter-revolutionaries; in the Vendee region alone, more than 200,000 perished. Intense factionalism bitterly divided the political leadership. In the end, the Revolution turned on itself, and the blade of the dreaded guillotine claimed its leading light, Maximilien Robespierre. Girordins and Montagnards, St. Just and Robespierre are but a few of the dizzying array of factions and notables crowding the narrative. Mercifully for those unfamiliar with the history, Andress includes a timeline, glossary and list of characters to help the reader navigate through a myriad of information. A usefulcontribution to understanding the terrible and prolonged tragedy that engulfed France.

Kirkus Reviews