Volume 3, Number 3 · September 24, 1964
The Great Revolution
By J.H. Plumb
The Age of Democratic Revolution (Volume II)
by R.R. Palmer
Princeton, 650 pp., $10.00
The French Revolution, mother of monsters—Robespierre, Marat, Fouquet, Napoleon; or a gorgon of iniquities, destructive of religion, of tradition, of the slowly accreted virtues of human society; or a breeder of evil that even in this century has spawned tyrants such as Hitler and Stalin; or was it rather the awkward, blood-stained dawn of all that is best in the modern world? Does the passionate hatred of injustice, of tyranny in all its forms, racial, colonial, religious, stem from these few dramatic years in Paris, when the age-old laws of subordination were irrevocably broken? Is it possible to eradicate all the subtle propaganda from the dashing Scarlet Pimpernels and heroic Sidney Cartons to the subtler denigrations of a Madelin or an Aulard? Can we ever forget the picture of the Terror in which fine-drawn aristocrats meet their death with stoic wit and unbearable dignity? Or readjust our ideas of Robespierre, Danton, Marat? Will Robespierre forever remain in the historic consciousness of the West as the epitome of cold-hearted, passionless, intellectual revolutionaries who love ideas but hate men? Will Marat always seem to be as full of evil as of pus? And Danton lionhearted but wrong-headed? Questions, indeed, that are far from rhetorical, for the French Revolution has been too valuable a parable for the conservative forces in Western Society for them to permit, without a struggle, novel and disinterested judgments.
Review, 2082 words
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