Coming of the terror in the french revolution (Harvard University Press)

Between 1793 and 1794, thousands of French citizens were imprisoned and hundreds sent to the guillotine aby a powerful dictatorship that claimed to be acting in the public interest. Only a few years earlier, revolutionaries had proclaimed a new era of tolerance, equal justice, and human rights.

How and why did the French Revolutions lofty ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity descend into violence and terror$1145 by attending to the role of emotions in propelling the Terror, Tackett steers a more nuanced course than many previous historians have managed...Imagined terrors, as...Tackett very usefully reminds us, can have even more political potency than real ones.

--David A. Bell, The Atlantic analyzes the mentalit of those who became terrorists in 18th-century France...In emphasizing weakness and uncertainty instead of fanatical strength as the driving force behind the Terror,...Tackett...contributes to an important realignment in the study of French history....