Jeff Horn. The Making of a Terrorist: Alexandre Rousselin and the French Revolution.

Abstract

Alexandre Rousselin was sixteen years old when the French Revolution began in 1789. A native Parisian, his working-class father had died when Alexandre was a child, and his mother fortunately married a wealthy aristocrat, who paid for Alexandre to attend one of the most prestigious schools in Paris, the Collège d’Harcourt. Alexandre traded a classical education for a political one. He immersed himself in the Paris districts, particularly the Cordeliers, taking lessons from its hotheaded radicals. His big break came when he was hired as the personal secretary of the journalist and politician Camille Desmoulins. Soon he went on to work for Georges Danton, and by 1793, at barely twenty years old, he was given several important assignments during the Terror. Fifty years later, Rousselin had become a well-known and wealthy man from editing and partly owning Le Constitutionnel, a major liberal newspaper. In this relatively short, fast-paced, insightful, and well-written biography, The Making of a Terrorist: Alexandre Rousselin and the French Revolution, Jeff Horn traces the Terror’s impact on Rousselin’s career as he negotiated the various French regimes until his death in 1847.