Protecting the infant republic

Ever since Edmund Burke deserted the liberalism that had distinguished him as a champion of American independence and Irish home rule and threw up his hands in horror at events across the water, generations of writers have recoiled in disgust from the bloody excesses of the French Revolution. In other words, Robespierre and his allies should have behaved better. The supreme merit of David Andress’s dispassionate study of the course of the revolution after the attempted flight of Louis XVI in 1791 doomed the French monarchy is to draw our attention away from a select band of supposedly bloodthirsty, crazed demagogues and to focus it on what became a true civil war, a vast national upheaval that brought in on the republican side ‘a population mobilised to an unheard-of extent, and ready to commit remarkable crimes in the name of liberty’.

Underlying France’s descent into proliferating violence and authoritarian rule was the constant threat to the new republic from counter-revolution, both at home and abroad, and the pressure exerted on the Convention (as the National Assembly elected to promulgate a new constitution was known) by the sans-culottes to extirpate that threat.