French Revolution

Daughter of Necker of Geneva, twice French Minister of Finance, Germaine de Staël reflected in her life and writings the enthusiasm of the Revolutionary Age. By Douglas Hilt.

‘A true moderate’, Madame de Staël sought ‘to formulate the theory and effect the practice of real political freedom’. By M.J. Sydenham and Frances S. Montgomery.

J.L. Carr describes how, in revolutionary France, the debonair delights of civilization were replaced by a more virtuous albeit often stale cultural climate.

Former terrorist, responsible for some of the bloodiest excesses of the Revolution, Joseph Fouché, thanks to his intellect, his ruthlessness, his political flair and his unequalled “knowledge of men and circumstances,” lived on to play an important role under both Napoleon I and Louis XVIII. By Harold Kurtz.

Maurice Hutt offers a study of the secret operations conducted from Jersey by which the British Government kept in touch with the royalist Chouans and spied on French designs.

The famous French revolutionary was a graduate in medicine from St Andrews University, writes W.J. Fishman, and was once a teacher at a Non-conformist College in Warrington.

During the aftermath of the French Revolution, writes C.E. Hamshere, a prosperous state arose in Haiti under the leadership of a powerful and gifted ruler.

During the years before the French Revolution, writes D.M. Walmsley, Mesmer’s treatment of patients by 'animal magnetism' in some ways foreshadowed the methods of modern pyschiatry.

In the autumn of 1792, as Lamartine wrote, the “national heart of France seemed to beat in Danton’s breast.” Eighteen months later, writes Maurice Hutt, Danton went to the scaffold, crying: “Show my head to the people; it is well worth it!”

Suspicion and persecution fell upon the lively Philosophical Societies of the late eighteenth century because of their international sympathy with Revolution, writes Eric Robinson.