And sometimes it hiccups. Here is a hiccup. We start with the moral and political catastrophe that was the French Revolution. It was more a nationwide psychotic break than a revolt—a great ...

In this debate, McPhee's softly stated preference is to see the revolution -- and, by extension, Robespierre -- as an enduring model for all those who yearn for civic republicanism. To this effect, ...

seeing Lenin and then himself as the true Robespierre of the Russian Revolution. In the late 1930s Trotsky asked one French supporter to help him gather quotes from his paragon to use in his ...

The watchwords of the French Revolution were liberty, equality and fraternity. Maximilien Robespierre believed in them passionately. He was an idealist and a lover of humanity. But during the 365 ...

The hyperelitist world of prerevolutionary France fostered resentment among writers excluded from salons and high society.

Ruth Scurr (ed.) Carlyle’s The French Revolution (London and New York: Continuum, 2010) and Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (London: Vintage, 2006) The boy kneels ...

More than 200 years after his head was chopped off, Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre is ... to a persistent ambiguity in French attitudes to the Revolution of 1789-94 and the ...

And since Robespierre presided over the most bloodthirsty period of the French Revolution, the idea of him as The Incorruptible comes to suggest, not so much the decency of a politician who could ...