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Revolution and Terror in France, 1789-1795 by D. G. Wright Pdf
The French Revolution was riddled with paradoxes and in this key Seminar Study Dr Wright tackles the many controversies surrounding these events. He also reviews the arguments of leading historians, and analyses some of the key documentary evidence on which they have based their judgements.
The French Revolution marks the foundation of the modern political world. It was in the crucible of the Revolution that the political forces of conservatism, liberalism and socialism began to find their modern forms, and it was the Revolution that first asserted the claims of universal individual rights on which our current understandings of citizenship are based. But the Terror was, as much as anything else, a civil war, and such wars are always both brutal and complex. The guillotine in Paris claimed some 1500 official victims, but executions of captured counter-revolutionary rebels ran into the tens of thousands, and deaths in the areas of greatest conflict probably ran into six figures, with indiscriminate massacres being perpetrated by both sides. The story of the Terror is a story of grand political pronouncements, uprisings and insurrections, but also a story of survival against hunger, persecution and bewildering ideological demands, a story of how a state, even with the noblest of intentions, can turn on its people and almost crush them.
The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution by Timothy Tackett Pdf
How did the French Revolution’s ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity descend into violence and terror? Timothy Tackett offers a new interpretation of this turning point in world history. Penetrating the mentality of Revolutionary elites on the eve of the Terror, he reveals how suspicion and mistrust escalated and helped propel their actions.
At the heart of how history sees the French Revolution lies the enigma of the Terror. How did this archetypal revolution, founded on the principles of liberty and equality and the promotion of human rights, arrive at circumstances where it carried out the violent and terrible repression of its opponents? 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. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of the French Revolution and for anyone concerned with the ways in which political conflict can descend into violence.
An incisive new interpretation of the French Revolution and its violent upheaval looks at troubling parallels between the Terror and the rise of today's political and religious fundamentalism, arguing that the violence of the French Revolution resulted from dogmatic and fundamental thinking that led to a pointless bloodletting.
This is the story of the French Revolution told from a psychological and group dynamic perspective. The aim is to throw light on the workings of the revolutionary mind and the emotions at work in society which pave the way towards revolution and war. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are presented as a couple trapped by the symbolism invested in them, a circumstance that turned them into scapegoats. The contrasting personalities of the two most controversial leaders of the Revolution Robespierre and Danton provide psychologically informed explanations of their success and failure as leaders. The group perspective the nature of crowd behaviour and mob violence links to the complex relationship between leaders and groups. In the Parisian case of 1789 group emotions fear, rage, euphoria and fervour influenced the course of the Revolution. The assassination of Marat and the struggle to the death between the extremists of the Left and the Moderates is a classic study in group paranoia culminating in a Reign of Terror destined to end in self-destructive violence. The conflict between the Revolution and the Church as an expression of belief in an ideal society led to a battle for the minds of a people facing two incompatible ideologies. The French Revolution was an important milestone in western social and political development. It carried within itself the seeds of a humane society, but turned into murder and execution. The dichotomies arising echo down the generations. The same split in our thinking applies to how we view today's social upheavals and conflicts conflicts of opposing mythologies with their psychological overtones interpreted as political doctrines as evinced currently in Russia's territorial claims to Eastern Ukraine, Islamic fundamentalist wars, and the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. Hope lies in the application of therapeutic principles garnered from the field of group dynamics.
Natural right—the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are “natural” in origin—is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. Edelstein further contends that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed that the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he proves that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre. A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period.
The French Revolution marks the foundation of the modern political world. It was in the crucible of the Revolution that the political forces of conservatism, liberalism and socialism began to find their modern form, and it was the Revolution that first asserted the claims of universal individual rights, on which our current understandings of citizenship are based. But the Terror was, as much as anything else, a civil war, and such wars are always both brutal and complex. The guillotine in Paris claimed some 1,500 official victims, but executions of captured counter-revolutionary rebels ran into the tens of thousands, and deaths in the areas of greatest conflict probably ran into six figures, with indiscriminate massacres being perpetrated by both sides. The story of the Terror is a story of grand political pronouncements, uprisings and insurrections, but also a story of survival against hunger, persecution and bewildering ideological demands, a story of how a state, even with the noblest of intentions, can turn on its people and almost crush them.
"Is terrorism crime or war? Can there be a 'war against terrorism'? In this fully updated edition, Charles Townshend unravels the questions at the heart of the problem of terrorism - its causes, methods, effects, and limitations - suggesting that it must be understood as a political strategy whose threat can be rationally grasped and answered"--Publisher's description.
This book is a study of the relationship between revolution and terror. Historically many have claimed that revolution inevitably devolves into terror, best reflected in the way in which after coming to power the revolutionary elite turns on itself, and one section of it uses terrorist means to eliminate another section. This thesis originally stemmed from the French revolution but has more recently also been applied to the Russian and the Chinese revolutions. Graeme Gill argues that in order to understand the relationship between revolution and terror, it is necessary to distinguish between different types of terror. There are three such types: revolutionary terror, in which the aim is to destroy enemies and thereby consolidate the regime; transformational terror, designed to drive the politico-socio-economic transformation of society that is the purpose of the 'great' revolutions; and inverted terror, which is when terror is turned against part of the elite and regime more broadly. The analysis explains how these different types of terror are related to the revolutionary seizure of power, showing that revolutionary and transformational terror are organically connected to revolution while for inverted terror the connection is mediated through the leader. The argument is prosecuted through detailed analysis of the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. The study ends by assessing the contemporary salience of the lessons of the great revolutions in the light of the low level of violence in the negotiated revolutions of 1989.
The Terror in the French Revolution by Hugh Gough Pdf
We now live with the threat and the reality of political terror and terrorists. The French Revolution was the first occasion when a democratic government used terror as a political weapon, executing thousands of people for political crimes. What caused reasonable people to implement such a brutal regime? What did it achieve? What are its links with the terrors of the present day? This established text examines a range of key issues, analyses the terror's background and traces the course from the fall of the Bastille in 1789 to the work of the guillotine during the terror of 1793-4. It puts the terror into context and shows how circumstances and ideas interacted to create an event that has haunted the political imagination of Europe ever since. Thoroughly revised in the light of recent scholarship and debates, this new edition of an essential introduction includes: - An updated historiography section - Clearly set-out definitions of the 'terror' and more detail on its workings - An entirely new chapter exploring the social and cultural policies of the Revolution - An up-to-date bibliography, organised thematically for ease of reference
Examines the leaders of the French Revolution - Robespierre and his fellow Jacobins - and particularly the gradual process whereby many of them came to 'choose terror', evolving from humanitarian idealists into ruthless politicians, ready to adopt the use of terror to defend the Revolution.
Robespierre's defense of the French Revolution remains one of the most powerful and unnerving justifications for political violence ever written, and has extraordinary resonance in a world obsessed with terrorism and appalled by the language of its proponents. Yet today, the French Revolution is celebrated as the event which gave birth to a nation built on the principles of Enlightenment. So how should a contemporary audience approach Robespierre's vindication of revolutionary terror? Zizek takes a helter-skelter route through these contradictions, marshaling all the breadth of analogy for which he is famous.