The Terror

This history of the French Revolution chronicles the violence and fear inflicted by idealistic young men who turned the Republic into a slaughterhouse.

1792 found the newborn Republic threatened from all sides: the British blockaded the coasts, Continental armies poured over the frontiers, and the provinces verged on open revolt. Paranoia simmering in the capital, the Revolution slipped under control of a powerful clique and its fanatical political organization, the Jacobin Club. For two years, this faction, obsessed with patriotism and purity—self-appointed to define both—inflicted on their countrymen a reign of terror unsurpassed until Stalin's Russia.

It was the time dominated by Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton, Jean-Paul Marat and Louis-Antoine Saint-Just (called “The Angel of Death”), when Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette met their ends, when any hint of dissent was ruthlessly quashed by the State. It was the time of the guillotine, neighborhood informants, and mob justice.

This extraordinary, bloodthirsty period comes vividly to life in Graeme Fife's The Terror. Drawing on contemporary police files, eyewitness accounts, directives from the sinister Committee for Public Safety, and heart-wrenching last letters from prisoners awaiting execution, the author brilliantly re-creates the psychotic atmosphere of that time.

“Strongly evokes the sense of isolation that fueled the violence of those two years.” —BBC History Magazine (UK)

“Graeme Fife's engrossing narrative captures the perverted idealism that fueled the Terror and vividly portrays the atmosphere of fear, panic, suspicion, and betrayal that gripped the populace.” —Yorkshire Evening Post (UK)

Includes black and white photographs