Terreur ! La Révolution française face à ses démons: démons

The book challenges the longstanding myths and prevailing assumptions about the French revolutionary "terror", sometimes characterized as "the Reign of Terror", and to show in a measured and grounded way, based on the evidence, what "terror" in the French revolutionary context actually was, how it originated, how it was organized, what was the extent of it, what was the thinking behind it, and what was its impact and legacy. The guillotine, initially designed to be a 'humane' form of capital punishment, became a formidable instrument of political repression and left a deep imprint, not only on how we see the Revolution, but also on how France's image has been depicted in the world. This book reconstructs the Terror in all its complexity. It shows that the popular view of a so-called 'system of terror' was retrospectively invented by the group of revolutionaries who overthrew Robespierre, as a way of trying to exonerate themselves from culpability. What we think of as 'the Terror' is best understood as an improvised and sometimes chaotic response to events, based on the urgent needs of a revolutionary government confronted by a succession of political and military crises. It was a government of 'exception' - a crisis government. Terror brings together a wealth of factual elements, along with recent thinking on the ideological, emotional and tactical dimensions of revolutionary politics, to throw new light on how the phenomenon of terror came to demonise the image and memory of the French Revolution.