Ruth Scurr (ed.) Carlyle’s The French Revolution (London and New York: Continuum, 2010) and Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (London: Vintage, 2006) The boy kneels in ...

A death mask made by Madame Tussaud has been used to recreate the likeness of Maximilien de Robespierre - the infamous revolutionary leader. Madame Tussaud, now known for her world-renown waxworks ...

Some years ago, in Paris, my son and I read Christopher Hibbert’s history of the French Revolution. When we were done, we talked about how the book had inadvertently convinced us that Maximilien ...

Revolutionary France in 1794 was a crucible, combining all the elements that would embody Western politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All eyes were on Paris. Depending on who was ...

Today is July 27, known in the French revolutionary calendar as 9 Thermidor. It’s the anniversary of the July 27, 1794, overthrow of French revolutionary Robespierre and his cohorts Saint-Just and ...

The problem for Robespierre's biographer was best stated by the 19th-century historian John Wilson Croker. "Of no one of whom so much has been written is so little known," Croker boldly asserted, ...

Ever since he lost his head to Madame Guillotine in 1794, the historical jury has been out on the life and legacy of Maximilien de Robespierre, French revolutionary and architect of la Grande Terreur.

The letter, a witness to the birth of the French Republic, was sold to a private collector at auction to the disappointment of a group of historians, writers and politicians including Annie Duprat, ...

He expected it to end badly, and it did: a bullet from a pistol which shattered his jaw, a night of unspeaking agony, death without trial. During that night – ninth Thermidor, or 27 July 1794 – he ...

It is tempting to take sides for or against the characters in history. It is usually just as much fun, afterwards, to go back and revise these judgements: to find the flaws in the heroes and to ...