THE THERMIDORIANS & THE DIRECTORY

by Georges Lefebvre ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 22, 1964

The Thermidorians were the middle-roaders of the French Revolution, honest but middle-headed. They effected Robespierre's fall and the defeat of leftist revanchism; they denounced the Red Terror but tolerated a White one; though against both the ancien regime and the economic controls of pseudo-proletarian Statists, they produced bourgeois class consciousness, the 1795 Constitution, the Directory's four floundering years, and unwittingly Napoleon's 18th Brumaire coup d'etat. Yet if military imperialism leveled out social upheaval, all was not totally lost: the nobles and clergy never quite regained feudal glory; the commoner's religious and political freedoms were, to a degree, assured; and the industrial dawn, along with the forthcoming ""liberal experiment,"" could be discerned. Two periods- complex, excessive, influential- analyzed with scrupulously rational scholarship, the sort where, as Tawney (slyly) remarked, ""passion has cooled into curiosity, and the agonies of people have become the exercise in the schools."" The author, the late Georges Lefebvre was one of France's greatest historians.

Pub Date: Oct. 22, 1964

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1964

Categories: NONFICTION