Volume 2, Number 3 · March 19, 1964
The Deluge
By Peter Gay
Paris in the Terror
by Stanley Loomis
J.B. Lippincott, 415 pp., $6.95
The Terror still arouses passionate debates. No other historical event so remote in time and shadowy in detail has so much actuality. No wonder: ours is an age suspicious of ideals and sick of violence, and the Terror—at least so we are told over and over again—was the incarnation of both. That is why it has long been an embarrassment to admirers of the French Revolution: the Terror seems to stand like an irrefutable condemnation of drastic experimentation and fanatical idealism; it seems to support Burke, not the philosophes. After all, even one man frivolously killed is one victim too many, and his death taints the cause in whose name he was executed. Professional historians, many of of them pro-Revolutionary, have been aware of this, and, on the defensive, they have sought refuge in detail. They have studied the incidence of the Terror, the precise number, social class, and political activities of its victims, its supposed debt to the subversive philosophy of the Enlightenment, and its many causes. On the whole, they have agreed on their facts, if not on their verdicts, but whatever verdict they have reached, one thing they have made plain: the Terror defeats the Monist. It deserves sober attention to statistics, a close study of the domestic and international events that surrounded it, and cool judgment. It gets none of these in Stanley Loomis's book.
Review, 1926 words
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