Victims, authority, and terror

Description:

"Victims, Authority, and Terror explores the great political divide between the social gropus that favored change in the France of the 1780s and the Jacobin revolutionaries who perpetrated the Terror of 1793-94. This group biography of four significant victims of the Terror, all of whom accepted revolutionary change to varying degress, isolates precisely what the Jacobins despised - the institutional vessels of aristocracy and their symbolic members. George Kelly develops his argument by using the public biographies of four Terror victims, each of whom is symbolic of a form of aristocracy - princes of the blood, the army, academia, and the parlements. Their lives are compared and contrasted with the institutional attitudes of their caste or corporation, both as we understand them today and as they were perceived by the Jacobins. The wealthy and powerful Louis-Philippe-Joseph, Duc d'Orléans, was the king's cousin, but he assiduously cultivated the revolutionary enterprise. General Adam-Philippe, Comte de Custine, a leading military noble who eventually became commander of republican armies, was too haughty and ambitious for the Jacobins. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, a noted scientist and academician, rushed into politics in 1789 and, while he was mayor of Paris, executed a conservative repression. Lamoignon de Malesherbges, a liberal noble of the robe, was one of the public defenders of Louis XVI before the convention. Each of the victims was more progressive than his caste would lead one to believe, but none could efface the aristocratic stigma from his political image. Each symbolically represented what was obnoxious to the Jacobin notion of society and government. In essence, these four men were executed because of their Old Regime institutional connections. Kelly concludes that Jacobin political philosophy could not tolerate any residues of the aristocratic temper in its Republic of Virtue. This unusual use of biography isolates Jacobin biases and motives so that the events and rhetoric of the Terror can be more clearly understood. The author challenges many of the ways in which French revolutionary history has been interpreted for several generations and contributes to the redefinition of Jacobinism and its use as a political category." -- from dust cover.

subjects: Biography,  Causes,  History,  France, history, revolution, 1789-1799, causes,  Victims of terrorism

People: Adam Philippe Custine comte de (1740-1793),  Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes (1721-1794),  Jean Sylvain Bailly (1736-1793),  Louis Philippe Joseph Orléans duc d' (1747-1793)

Places: France

Times: Revolution, 1789-1799