Description: Why has the guillotine become one of the best known symbols of the French Revolution? Why did a revolution which set out to provide French people with constitutional government and freedom in 1789 end up with a dictatorship that executed thousands in 1793-4? Questions such as these have fascinated observers of the French Revolution because events in France changed the nature of European society and politics in the 19th and 20th centuries. This book analyzes the Terror's background and plots a path through the historical minefield that lies between the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and the work of the guillotine during the Terror. It puts the Terror into context and shows how events and ideas interacted to create an event that has haunted the political imagination of Europe ever since.

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