Understanding Robespierre, Choosing Terror, and the Road to Thermidor
Two-hundred and twenty-one years after the coup of Thermidor brought about the deaths of Robespierre, Saint-Just, and 106 others, the reasons behind it are still subject to debate. For many...
View ArticleWhat was there to laugh about during the Terror?
A new colleague joins us at the Revolution Network, and introduces himself below: welcome, Jacob! Laughter as a Political Strategy in the National Convention My name is Jacob Zobkiw and I have recently...
View ArticleA Place of Greater Safety
The success of the BBC’s dramatisation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall has inspired it to dramatise her earlier novel, A Place of Greater Safety, on Radio 4. I’ve just noticed that the dramatisation...
View ArticleJeremy Corbyn and Maximilien Robespierre
Has anyone else noticed the uncanny resemblance between Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of the Labour Party – and Maximilien Robespierre? (Robespierre, that is, before the Terror, I don’t mean to imply...
View ArticleMaximilien Robespierre on the BBC
Dear All, Maximilien Robespierre on the BBC The latest episode of the BBC Radio 4 series, ‘The Invention of France’ presented by Misha Glenny, is dedicated to the controversial figure of Maximilien...
View ArticleA Disturbing Reification
In this piece, extracted from a new book, the journalist Jack Shenker comes very close to looking forward to the day that schoolchildren confront soldiers in the name of “the Revolution”.
View ArticleSocial media and Revolution
A thought-provoking meditation on how the ‘Arab Spring’ represented a brief window in which it seemed that social media was an uncontrollable force for democratic empowerment. And how it turned out,...
View ArticleNew Research Article
We are delighted to present here an entirely new research article by Annie Jourdan of the University of Amsterdam, exploring the context of the French Revolution’s infamous ‘Law of 22 prairial’. The...
View ArticleConspiracy and Terror in the French Revolution
Conspiracies – both real and imagined – played a major role in the shifting dynamics of revolutionary politics. The Year II was the crisis point of the Revolution, a year overshadowed by external war...
View ArticleWhat politicians could learn from the French Revolution
It’s the job of historians to try to understand the past, not to predict the future. Normally we keep to our patch, to the stuff we know. So when I wrote my most recent book Choosing Terror, about the...
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