The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris

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This is a remarkable, barnstorming doorstop of a book. It gives us a portrait of an astonishingly confused and dangerous day in the life of revolutionary Paris, spread across over 450 pages of lucid, attention-grabbing, present-tense prose. Carved up into short, and sometimes indeed fragmentary, half-page, sections, the narrative has a filmic quality, thrusting the reader into alternating shouting-matches at the centre of the action, and moments of calm or bewilderment in the presence of peripheral characters confronting the main events. Colin Jones also makes strategic use of the extended flashback, allowing him to expertly sketch in just enough of the vast context of prior revolutionary events for what is taking place to rise above incomprehensibility. For, of course, much of what happened on 9 thermidor in the Year II was almost incomprehensible to anyone not soaked in the bitter stew of assumptions that formed the political culture of the French First Republic’s opening years; a period that Jones resolutely refuses to refer to as ‘the Terror’ because nobody had yet decided to call it that in late July 1794, but whose characterization as such has dominated all subsequent understandings, ever since the ‘Thermidorian’ survivors of what happened in 1793/94 began to explain and excuse their own behaviour, and seek scapegoats for what could not be excused.