The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris (Oxford University Press), by Colin Jones

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The Fall of Robespierre

Unlike the American Revolution, the French Revolution did not produce an enduring constitution or a stable new order. Instead, it destroyed itself in a mounting fury of decapitations, climaxing with the execution of its most fervent ringleader, Maximilien Robespierre. Usually, the coup against Robespierre is depicted as a plot by rival revolutionaries. With The Fall of Robespierre, British historian Colin Jones sees it as a popular rising of those restless Parisians, like the storming of the Bastille (1789) or the deposing of Louis XVI (1792).

The work Jones produced to support his point is remarkable. The Fall of Robespierre is intensely focused on a single day, July 27, 1794 (or 9 Thermidor II in the Revolutionary calendar), tracing the movements and utterances of a large cast of figures, some of them playing only supporting roles or even—in theatrical terms—merely members of the chorus. Jones was able to reconstruct this wider pattern of activity because the archival documentation is “exceptionally rich”—letters, newspapers, pamphlets, police dossiers and post-facto reports are preserved in great number, allowing for “hundreds of micro-narratives that cover fragments of the day from a multitude of angles.”

Robespierre was the archetypal revolutionary idealist, an austere figure for whom “the People” was an abstraction. He was prepared to kill thousands of individual people in their name. His “republic of virtue” brokered no compromises. Robespierre made enemies and the crowd of Parisians who once cheered him on proved fickle.

With its minute detailing of human characters, The Fall of Robespierre has the texture of literature and is good material for a mini-series or … how about another Hamilton?