The French Revolution

The fall of the Bastille on 14th July 1789 has become the commemorative symbol of the French Revolution. However, this violent and random act was unrepresentative of the actual work of the early revolution, which was taking place ten miles west of Paris, in Versailles. There, the nobles, clergy, and commoners of France had just declared themselves a republic, toppling a rotten system of aristocratic privilege and altering the course of history forever.

The Revolution was led not by angry mobs, but by the best and brightest of France's growing bourgeoisie: young, educated, ambitious. Their aim was not to destroy, but to build a better state. In just three months, they drew up a Declaration of the Rights of Man, becoming the archetype of all subsequent declarations worldwide, and they instituted a system of locally elected administration for France which still survives today. They were determined to create an entirely new system of government, based on rights, equality, and the rule of law. In the first three years of the Revolution, they went a long way toward accomplishing this, until the rise of Robespierre, the Terror, and unspeakable acts of barbarism.

In a clear, dispassionate, and fast-moving narrative, Ian Davidson shows how and why the Revolutionaries, in just five years, spiralled from the best of the Enlightenment to tyranny and the Terror. The French Revolution reminds us that the Revolution was both an inspiration of the finest principles of a new democracy and an awful warning of what can happen when idealism goes wrong.