The French Revolution
by Ian Davidson
(Profile Books, £25)

“TO THE average Englishman, the French revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads,” George Orwell wrote in 1940.

Yet, since then, that great tsunami event which has shaped modern history has received much revisionist attention.

The question arises as to whether there is space for yet another book on the subject.

Ian Davidson maintains that whereas “many historians have felt obliged to take sides” — over the rights of man versus the guillotine — he has taken a more neutral position.

But historical commentary, even in Davidson’s “credible, economical and readable” terms, denies neutrality.

His thesis is that what was an essentially bourgeois revolution, initially based on legality, degenerated and culminated in the reign of terror.

The villain of the piece is Robespierre who, initially using the power of the people — the “sans-culottes” — to cement his position, then moved to supreme dictatorship in direct opposition to the demands of his supporters.

This lead to his downfall and the end of the revolution.

Davidson’s Robespierre is not the man who championed free education, common property rights of spouses, equal inheritance rights for sons and daughters, including children born out of wedlock, communal homes providing peace and dignity for the old or the abolition of colonial slavery.

The author traces a linear development from a relatively peaceful revolutionary transition to the violence of the terror, leading to the execution of Louis XVI and an “uncompromising power struggle” between the bourgeois middle-class revolutionaries and the sans-culottes.

He sees the emergence of class-war politics as largely the result of Robespierre’s manipulation of the Jacobin Club against the Girondins grouping of lawyers, businessmen and financiers.

They clung to individual rights and the “sacred” right of property but Robespierre and the Jacobins recognised that the contending interests of the middle and working classes demanded a swing of emphasis towards social rights.

Davidson writes with an enthusiastic vigour and at times his books is like a gripping historical novel.

His research and support material is hugely impressive, with maps and an introductory timeline and appendices covering the destructive economic impact of the creation of assignats — a version of quantitative easing — and a comprehensive list of the more notable victims of the revolution.

In all, it’s well worth reading although the back story to a revolution which still reverberates today ought to add up to more than a tale well told.

Review by Gordon Parsons