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This biography of François Buzot, a Girondin leader in both the Constituent Assembly (1789-91) and the National Convention (1792-93), illustrates how his early life in Evreux and his training as a lawyer influenced his ideas and actions during the French Revolution, when he championed individual rights and the rule of law in a republic. A provincial leader who distrusted the increasingly centralized government in Paris, Buzot worked tirelessly to defend departmental interests, which led his Jacobin opponents to accuse him of federalism. Buzot became an active participant in the factional disputes dividing the national assembly in 1792-93, which led to frequent attacks against him and his cohorts by the radical press and demands for their impeachment. Consequently, Buzot and twenty-nine other Girondin deputies were expelled from the assembly in June 1793 and placed under house arrest. While Buzot and some of his friends escaped and fled to Caen, those Girondins who had remained in Paris were executed that October. After their attempt to form a large departmental force to march against the government in Paris had failed, Buzot and his friends fled to St. Emilion, where they survived as fugitives, often hiding in abandoned stone quarries, until June 1794. Buzot’s memoirs, written when he was on the run in 1793-94, provide an unusual contemporary account of the difficult and dangerous period known as the Terror. In addition, letters to and from his friends, notably Madame Roland, with whom he shared a romantic relationship, offer a more personal view of Buzot than can be found in most texts. Although Buzot was honored as a local hero by the citizens of Evreux in 1789, by the summer of 1793 the authorities had declared him a traitor and ordered his home demolished, and its furnishings sold at auction. Honored again during the centennial celebration of the French Revolution, by 1989 he had almost been forgotten. This first biographical treatment in English of François Buzot, a “bourgeois gentilhomme,” provides a new dimension to the story of an important revolutionary leader.

This biography of François Buzot, a Girondin leader in both the Constituent Assembly (1789-91) and the National Convention (1792-93), illustrates how his early life in Evreux and his training as a lawyer influenced his ideas and actions during the French Revolution, when he championed individual rights and the rule of law in a republic.

This study examines Jacques Pierre Brissot (1754-1793), the influential journalist and Girondin politician who sought championed the new American republic as an example for the French revolutionary government to follow, focusing on his life from his visit to the United States in 1788 to his execution in 1793.

La relecture critique des neuf Mémoires rédigés par des girondins en prison (Brissot et Mme Roland) ou en fuite (Buzot, Pétion, Barbaroux, Louvet, Isnard, Meillan et Riouffe) montre comment ces vaincus qui tentent de sauver leur honneur, présentent et se représentent leur rôle dans la Révolution, les causes du conflit avec la Montagne et de leur défaite, leurs épreuves intimes. Marquées par l’héritage classique, les Lumières et Rousseau, ces confessions révèlent la cohésion d’une culture commune, moins différente de celle des Montagnards qu’on ne l’a dit. Défense et illustration des girondins, ces textes de combat stigmatisent leurs adversaires dont ils prétendent démasquer les coupables projets. Récits autobiographiques décrivant les souffrances de la réclusion ou de la proscription, ils scénarisent la force de l’ipséité face à la perspective de la mort et confèrent une dimension romantique aux destinées des girondins qui espèrent agir sur leur postérité dans l’histoire.

Just as it was not foreordained that the Terror of 1793–1794 should follow the early idealistic years of the French Revolution, neither could it have been imagined that some of those elected deputies who had helped to establish the new republic would become fugitives from their own government. Yet, in May to June 1793, twenty-nine deputies of the moderate Girondin faction were expelled from the National Convention by the radical Jacobin leadership and placed under house arrest. This action followed months of irreconcilable quarrels between the Girondin and Jacobin factions. Some of the proscribed deputies chose to remain in Paris and were subsequently executed in October 1793. Others escaped, fleeing first to Caen in Normandy, where they hoped to ignite a federalist revolt against the government in Paris. When their efforts failed, a small group of the former deputies fled to nearby Brittany and then down the western coast to the Bordeaux area, where they found refuge near St. Emilion. Hiding for several months in the home and attached stone quarry of the deputy Guadet's relatives, four of these fugitives wrote their memoirs before their presence was discovered by one of Robespierre's agents. The memoirs of François Buzot, Jerome Pétion, Charles Barbaroux, and Jean-Baptiste Louvet, in addition to correspondence between them and Jean and Manon Roland, provide the basis for this book. This is the first book to examine the lives of the fugitives during the period of the Terror (1793–94), after which only Louvet remained alive.

The great romance and fear of bloody revolution--strange blend of idealism and terror--have been superseded by blind faith in the bloodless expansion of human rights and global capitalism. Flying in the face of history, violence is dismissed as rare, immoral, and counterproductive. Arguing against this pervasive wishful thinking, the distinguished historian Arno J. Mayer revisits the two most tumultuous and influential revolutions of modern times: the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917. Although these two upheavals arose in different environments, they followed similar courses. The thought and language of Enlightenment France were the glories of western civilization; those of tsarist Russia's intelligentsia were on its margins. Both revolutions began as revolts vowed to fight unreason, injustice, and inequality; both swept away old regimes and defied established religions in societies that were 85% peasant and illiterate; both entailed the terrifying return of repressed vengeance. Contrary to prevalent belief, Mayer argues, ideologies and personalities did not control events. Rather, the tide of violence overwhelmed the political actors who assumed power and were rudderless. Even the best plans could not stem the chaos that at once benefited and swallowed them. Mayer argues that we have ignored an essential part of all revolutions: the resistances to revolution, both domestic and foreign, which help fuel the spiral of terror. In his sweeping yet close comparison of the world's two transnational revolutions, Mayer follows their unfolding--from the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Bolshevik Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Masses; the escalation of the initial violence into the reign of terror of 1793-95 and of 1918-21; the dismemberment of the hegemonic churches and religion of both societies; the \"externalization\" of the terror through the Napoleonic wars; and its \"internalization\" in Soviet Russia in the form of Stalin's \"Terror in One Country.\" Making critical use of theory, old and new, Mayer breaks through unexamined assumptions and prevailing debates about the attributes of these particular revolutions to raise broader and more disturbing questions about the nature of revolutionary violence attending new foundations.

This book is the first systematic comparison of the civic integration of Jews in the United States and France--specifically, from the two countries' revolutions through the American republic and the Napoleonic era (1775-1815). Frederic Jaher develops a vehicle for a broader and uniquely rich analysis of French and American nation-building and political culture. He returns grand theory to historical scholarship by examining the Jewish encounter with state formation and Jewish acquisition of civic equality from the perspective of the \"paradigm of liberal inclusiveness\" as formulated by Alexis de Tocqueville and Louis Hartz.

For this book R. R. Palmer has translated selections from the abundant writings of the versatile French political figure and writer Marc-Antoine Jullien, weaving them together with his own extensive commentary into an absorbing narrative of Jullien's life and times. Jullien's hopes and fears for the \"progress of humanity\" were typical of many of the French bourgeoisie in this turbulent period. His life coincided with the whole era of revolution in Europe and the Americas from 1775 to 1848: he was born in the year when armed rebellion against Britain began in America, he witnessed the fall of the Bastille as a schoolboy in Paris, joined the Jacobin club, took part in the Reign of Terror, advocated democracy, put his hopes in Napoleon Bonaparte, turned against him, and then welcomed his return from Elba. Under the restored Bourbons, he became an outspoken liberal, rejoiced in the revolution of 1830, had doubts about the July monarchy, welcomed the revolution of 1848, and died a few weeks before the election of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte as president of the Second Republic. Drawn from books, pamphlets, reports, letters, book reviews, magazine articles, poems, and private notes and memoranda, Jullien's comments are supplemented here by letters that his mother wrote during the early years of the French Revolution and by articles by Jullien's collaborators in theRevue Encyclopédique. In Palmer's skilled hands, these selected materials from a now forgotten life vividly portray France's transition from revolutionary republicanism and the Terror through the Napoleonic years to the more placid liberalism of the nineteenth century.

\"Yep,\" I replied. \"It was in last week's paper. The one that resembled a notice from the RCMP...\" I've published information on telephone and internet scams in the past. The sad truth is that I just can't possibly cover the details on each one. There are too many. And even if I did, it's human nature to ignore things like this until they're staring us in the face.

Au contraire, says Chantal Girondin, director of this year's Alliance Francaise French Film Festival. She says French cinema is robust, with healthy attendance figures in France for hit films such as Look at Me, the festival's crowd-pleasing opener. And she points to the first-time writers and directors whose films stand up alongside those of veterans including Alain Resnais, whose 46th feature is a musical comedy Not on the Lips (Pas Sur la Bouche). International politics have taken a back seat, but there is quite a deal of wine, women and song. Jonathan Nossiter's documentary Mondovino is timely in a year when Australia's wine surplus is up in the squillions of litres and anxious glances are being cast by exporters at exchange rates. Nossiter, a film-maker who doubles as a sommelier (only in France!) examines the global winemaking industry as a reflection of cultural change, disappearing tradition and the marginalisation of independent thought. The story shifts from a winemaking family in Burgundy struggling to conserve their few acres, to the wine giants of California's Napa Valley and the rivalry between two Florentine winemaking dynasties.