In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution - Couverture souple

Wahnich, Sophie

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1784782025 ISBN 13 : 9781784782023

Editeur : Verso Books, 2016

Synopsis

For two hundred years after the French Revolution, the Republican tradition celebrated the execution of princes and aristocrats, defending the Terror that the Revolution inflicted upon on its enemies. But recent decades have brought a marked change in sensibility. The Revolution is no longer judged in terms of historical necessity but rather by “timeless” standards of morality. In this succinct essay, Sophie Wahnich explains how, contrary to prevailing interpretations, the institution of Terror sought to put a brake on legitimate popular violence—in Danton’s words, to “be terrible so as to spare the people the need to be so”—and was subsequently subsumed in a logic of war. The Terror was “a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty, the only alternatives being to defeat tyranny or die for liberty.”

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Sophie Wahnich is a historian based at the Laboratoire danthropologie des institutions et des organisations sociales in Paris. Her previous publications include L'impossible citoyen. L'étranger dans le discours de la Révolution française and La Longue patience du peuple: 1792, naissance de la République.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Verso Books
• Date d'édition: 2016
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1784782025
• ISBN 13: 9781784782023
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 144
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
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