The Terror — The Shadow of the Guillotine: France 1792-1794
Piatkus (UK), St Martin’s Press (USA), 2013
An exhaustively researched, character-driven chronicle of the French revolutionary Terror, its victims, and the young men – energetic, idealistic, and sincere – who turned the French Republic into a slaughterhouse. In 1792 the new republic was under threat, with the British blockading the coasts, Continental armies crossing the frontiers, and the provinces verging on open revolt. As paranoia mounted in revolutionary Paris, the Jacobins rose to power for two of the bloodiest, most extraordinary years in French history. The Terror contemplates these years and a remarkable range of the people who lived (and died) in them, drawing on contemporary police files, eyewitness accounts, directives from the Committee for Public Safety, and letters from prisoners awaiting execution to do so.