The World Begun Again

About This Book

In the space of ten years, a great kingdom took itself apart and tried to build something entirely new out of an idea — that legitimate power flows up from the people, not down from God and a king. The French Revolution was the hinge of the modern world, and it carried, fully formed from the first, both the glory and the horror of the age it began.

This is the whole sweep of the Revolution in a single volume: the bankrupt Old Regime and the price of bread; the storming of the Bastille and the night feudalism died; the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the flight of the king; the birth of the Republic in the blood of the Tuileries; the trial and execution of Louis XVI; the Terror, the guillotine, and Robespierre's Republic of Virtue; the Vendée and the drowned of Nantes; Olympe de Gouges and the rights of woman; the Black Jacobins who broke their chains in the name of a Revolution that had enslaved them; Thermidor, the Directory, and the young Corsican general who would inherit the Revolution, spread it across Europe, and crown himself emperor.

Vivid, sourced, and clear-eyed, this is a popular history that holds both faces of the Revolution in view at once — the rights of man and the national razor, liberation and terror — without either celebrating or merely condemning. It is the story of the years in which a nation tried to begin the world again, and of the world, still recognizably our own, that the attempt left behind.