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Paris in the Terror: The Men and Women Who Led the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution
Paris in the Terror The Men and Women Who Led the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution Author:Stanley Loomis PARIS IN THE TERROR tells the story of the Reign of Terror in terms of the chief performers in that particularly bloody phase of the French Revolution: Marat...Charlotte Corday...Danton... Mme. Roland... Robespierre... Camille Dismoulins...Fouche. Their very names recall the tumbres, the "batches" of condemned prisone... more »rs, the guillotine, yet their lives and their roles in the Revolution are not generally familiar.
They are, all of them, powerful personalities, and Stanley Loomis's intimate study of them and their contributions to the Terror is of utmost fascination. The handsome and aristocratic young woman from Normandy, Marie-Charlotte de Corday, was typical of the early, idealistic pahse of the Revolution, and her murder of Marat, as he sat in his bath, climaxes the first section of the book. The middle part follows the careers of the ambitious, egocentric Mme. Roland and the likable Rabelaisian figure Danton, whose mistakes put Robespierre in power and himself on the guillotine.
The final section recreates the Great Terror, the four months when Robespierre, cruel, sexless, and preoccupied with "virtue", and his chief henchman, St Just, the handsome "Angel of Death," reigned over mass butchery the like of which was not to be seen again until Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany.« less