Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution

by R.R. Palmer

In its fifth year (1793-1794), the French Revolution faced a multifaceted crisis that threatened to overwhelm the Republic. In response, the government instituted a revolutionary dictatorship and a "reign of terror," with a Committee of Public safety at its head. R. R. Palmer's fascinating narrative follows the Committee's deputies individually and collectively, recounting and addressing their tumultuous struggles in Paris and their repressive missions in the provinces.

Genres: History, French Revolution, Nonfiction, France, Politics, European History, Biography

417 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1941

About the author

Robert Roswell Palmer (January 11, 1909 – June 11, 2002), commonly known as R. R. Palmer, was a distinguished American historian at Princeton and Yale universities, who specialized in eighteenth-century France. His most influential work of scholarship, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (1959 and 1964), examined an age of democratic revolution that swept the Atlantic civilization between 1760 and 1800. He was awarded the Bancroft Prize in History for the first volume. Palmer also achieved distinction as a history text writer.

Reviews

[Manray9 · Rating 4 out of 5]

R. R. Palmer's Twelve Who Ruled is a noteworthy example of history as it should be -- thorough, insightful, and presented in precise and elegant prose. It's a strong Four Stars in my library.

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of The Terror in the French Revolution [1941] - ★★★★1/2

This book may be dated, but it did not lose any of its power from the time it was first published in 1941, and was re-issued many times (the last edition dates to 2013). In this book, R. R. Palmer looks at one particular time period in the history of France, and its Revolution - the year 1793-1974. But, what a year that was! Chaotic, unbelievable, bordering fantastical. After the death of Louis XVI, twelve people (virtually strangers to each other) started to govern the country and their slide into dictatorship gave the name to the year of their rule - The Year of the Terror. The year's main symbol - the guillotine, operated alongside democratic ideas put in speeches and on paper. France has not seen anything like that before or since. Palmer's engaging, illuminating account traces the months leading to the Year of the Terror, then focuses on the twelve men in charge of the country. The narrative further details the twelve men's town and country policies, laws and actions, as they purported to stand for liberty, democracy, unity, justice and peace, but actually, became the embodiment of the opposite. Foreign and civil wars, rebellions within and outside the country, as well as economic disasters, growing paranoia and the inability to maintain the central rule, are just some of the challenges that faced the twelve men after they were left in change of the country under the innocuous name "The Committee of Public Safety".

We start the account with the fifth summer of the Revolution, when the king's death has already caused divisions among the people of the country; when enemies from abroad have already grown stronger; and when economic insecurity has accelerated - "Anarchy within, invasion without. A country cracking from outside pressure, disintegrating from internal strain. Revolution at its height. War. Inflation. Hunger. Fear. Hate. Sabotage. Fantastic Hopes. Boundless idealism. And the horrible knowledge, for the men in power, that if they failed they would die as criminals, murderers of the king..." [Palmer, 1941/89: 5]. The members of the so-called Forth Committee were the following twelve men (nearly all from the Mountain political group): (1) Maximilien Robespierre, (2) Lazare Carnot, (3) Bertrand Barere, (4) Georges Couthon, (5) Andre Saint-Andre, (6) Jean-Marie D'Herbois, (7) Jean-Nicholas Billaud-Varenne, (8) Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, (9) Robert Lindet, (10) Prieur of the Cote-d'Or, (11) Marie-Jean Herault de Sechelles, and (12) Prieur of the Marne. The pressure on them must have been immense, with one contributing factor being that "there was not in France in 1973 a true majority in favour of anything, except to drive out the foreigners, and no majority to agree on precisely how that could be done" [Palmer, 1941/89: 42].

The great thing about Palmer's book is that it describes the events that took place after the death of the king in a very engaging manner. The author describes scenes and includes speeches which must have taken place at that time, enabling us to step into the then chaotic and complex world of politics and to imagine what it must have felt like to walk the streets of Paris at that time or hear one of the twelve leading men give their speeches to an assembly of people. Our intrigue will be justified: the secrecy of the Committee's meetings, its eccentric, intellectual and privileged members (some privately in dispute with each other, growing distrustful of each other), and the ardent idealism that reigned in the hearts of some of them - everything was at odds with the real, "on the ground" situation in the country. The setting up of the Revolutionary Army, the emergence of different fractions and the extraordinary powers that were conferred on the Committee's individual members only made the situation worse. We get to know about this and about much more as Palmer also takes us to the far-off concerns of France and we witness the situations in Puy-de-Dome, Alsace, Lyon (its doom) and in Brittany. The on and off efforts to "dechristianise" the French population by the Committee, as well as its effort to abolish the Christian calendar and make their own, are some of the eccentric actions that demonstrate the audacity of the ruling twelve to try to erase the past of the country and begin anew.

Perhaps it is right to think that Palmer is a bit too sympathetic to the men he describes, and his account could have included more concrete examples. However, the book can still be considered one of the most informative out there on this period in the French history. In the book, we focus our attention on the men in question, as well as on other emerging leading figures as the events rush forward, seemingly with the speed of light, in Palmer's story. Palmer also makes sure that his account in seen in a broader context of other elements that were ongoing at the same time in the Republic, and finally illuminates the reasons that precipitated the Committee's downfall.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been a while since I've read a book about the French Revolution, an obsession of mine since the age of 15 that remains undimmed. 'Twelve Who Ruled' has been on my to-read list for seven and a half years, as it took me a while to get hold of a copy. It was first published in 1941 and I read a 1971 edition that was apparently purchased by Leicester Polytechnic University, now De Montfort, in 1973. Palmer examines the year of the Terror, 1793-4, via analysis of the activities of the twelve man Committee of Public Safety. While their actions in Paris were already well known to me, I found the chapters following committee members as representatives on mission more novel. The massacres at Lyons are well-covered by other histories of the period, but the missions to Alscace and Brittany are not usually mentioned. The war at sea is discussed as well as the war on land and I was reminded that in 1793 England planned to invade France and France to invade England. Neither actually did. Palmer also doesn't dwell exclusively or even predominantly on Robespierre. Much as he fascinates me, I have a whole biography of him on the shelf if required. It's refreshing to find comparisons of the political writings and activities of the different committee members, as well as their various fates during the Empire and Restoration. Robespierre's total ascendance over the Committee is essentially a historical convenience:

Terrorists of the Year Two identified the Terror with one man, that they might themselves, by appearing peaceable and humane, win the confidence of the moderates. Barère revealed what was going on, writing in self-defense when he himself was accused: 'Is his grave not wide enough for us to empty into it all our hatreds?' This was precisely what happened. The living sought a new harmony by agreeing to denounce the dead.

Ending the Terror: The French Revolution After Robespierre by Bronisław Baczko is a great examination of how this happened in the period immediately after Thermidor.

Palmer's writing style is clear and highly readable, once I became used to him calling the Montagnards 'Mountaineers'. Perhaps this was normal in American scholarship at the time. He reflects upon the personalities and thoughts of the committee members and others, while acknowledging when he indulges in speculation. Who would not be tempted to? I must also admit that the occasional generalisation in a history book can be acceptable when I agree with it. Palmer's attitude towards the French Revolution is quite akin to my own: guardedly admiring, critical of its many failings yet inspired by its philosophies. Long before In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution was published in 2012, Palmer here defends the Terror - but only up to a point. He is critical, indeed dismissive, both of scholars who absolve Robespierre of all wrong-doing and those who treat the Terror as an exercise in totally pointless blood-letting. There is also greater emphasis on economic policy here than I've generally found, as the revolutionaries made so many grand speeches extolling principles that it is easy to overlook their more mundane regulatory decisions. The economy of the Terror is nonetheless interesting and important. I had not previously realised that a fleet of ships bringing wheat from America more or less rescued France from famine in 1794. It's also striking how difficult it was to co-ordinate fair distribution of food across the country while laws governing maximum prices were in effect.

'Twelve Who Ruled' is undoubtedly an appealing work of history. However I also greatly appreciated it from the perspective of historiography. Palmer published it in 1941 and refers in the text to the events of 1940, specifically the capitulation of France. The preoccupations of the time he was writing are prominent throughout: war economics, nationalism, and the stability of dictatorships. This in no way detracted from his analysis, indeed I enjoyed it. During the Terror, France was at war on almost all fronts and Palmer sees in its policies the seeds of later war economies. For example, Parisian workers were employed by the government to manufacture muskets, whether they liked it or not. By Thermidor, they were producing about five hundred a day. Given that the Industrial Revolution had not yet reached France, that is amazing. As Palmer puts it, 'In the summer of 1794 the nationally owned workshops of Paris were probably the greatest arsenal of small arms in the world'. This level of and justification for economic intervention was new, although the government did not intend such nationalisation of manufacture to last beyond the war. However, the political philosophy of the Terror came to depend upon the continuation of the war, which created paradoxes and fragilities that contributed to Thermidor. Palmer hints at the totalitarian regime of his time that took war economics to its greatest extreme: the Nazis. I didn't realise the extent of this until I read The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze, which I recommend.

Similarly, Palmer sees the beginning of modern nationalism in laws enacted during the Terror that treated foreigners in general and the English in particular as inherently suspect. Trade with England was also outlawed. Given that France and England were at war, this seems less surprising today, yet for the time it was quite new. Chapter ten recounts in some detail a revealing Convention debate about whether the government was 'nationalising' the war. St Just gave a speech defending the government from this charge by claiming that France quarreled only with England's government, aristocracy, and businessmen:

It is clear that the Committee of Public Safety was nationalising the war without intending to do so. What the members of the Committee believed was that there was no conflict between free nations; but a free nation was one which overthrew its king and its nobles, and which also, according to the somewhat temporary doctrine of 1793, attacked its rich business class. A nation which persisted in not imitating France was not free, and so not exactly a nation; the war therefore, though the Committee by its own admission consulted only the interests of France, was not a national war.

Thirdly, the examination of whether Robespierre was a dictator (not by most definitions) and whether the Committee was an oligarchy (of sorts, albeit unstable) is shadowed by the dictatorships of 1940. Palmer mentions a hope that totalitarian regimes of the 20th century prove as brief and unstable as the technically undemocratic period of the Terror. I say technically undemocratic as the Committee was continually responding to pressures from the democratically elected Convention (although it purged Convention members), from the Jacobin and other clubs (although these were also purged), from the popular press (although this was selectively suppressed), and the public (although under the Law of Suspects anyone could be arrested). Dissent persisted nonetheless and the Committee did not take formal steps to make themselves dictators or emperors. Their position was inherently temporary and there were both formal and informal mechanisms for their removal, which operated during Thermidor. Crucially, as Palmer notes, the twelve did not foster anything like a cult of personality. That would have been antithetical to their professed philosophy of the sovereign people, un et indivisible. As with previous reading that deals with this period in any depth, this book has much to say about how difficult interpeting this literally makes government in practise. Once I got back into the world of the French Revolution after a couple of chapters, I found 'Twelve Who Ruled' involved, rewarding, and thought-provoking. It invited reflection on the twentieth century as well the eighteenth.

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

The French Revolution is obviously a vast field of history, so it was nice to read such a focused work, and especially one that was so well-written. I'd previously read and really enjoyed Victor Hugo's famous novel Ninety-Three that covers the same time period, and this was an excellent non-fiction counterpart. It covers the actions of the twelve men who constituted the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror from September 5, 1793 until July 28, 1794. Palmer discusses their origins and pre-Revolutionary lives, how they managed to end up in their positions of power, their activities during that turbulent period, and the crises that led up to the day of 9 Thermidor, the famous Thermidorian Reaction, when Robespierre, the Committee's leader, was guillotined along with his colleague Saint-Just and the Revolution ended its most frenetic phase.

The book has a strong narrative style, which is excellent, because this is a confusing time to read about (though of course even more so to actually live through). There are plenty of different groups: the Convention, the Commune, the Committee, the clubs, and Palmer does a good job of explaining who all these groups are and how they related to each other. The Committee, which was intended to be a sort of cabinet, was instituted to solve France's leadership problem and add a little stability to a revolution that had been going on for nearly half a decade, with mixed results. The relationship between political and military instability during this period was notable, and reminded me somewhat of the US Civil War, with politically appointed generals often failing in their campaigns, while the results of those same campaigns threatened to discredit the government that sent them. Despite the increased effectiveness of the French army due to the levée en masse and other Republican techniques (in contrast to the more aristocratic navy, which suffered tremendously from its purges), the Committee's efforts to repel the foreign invaders only really began to pay off towards the end of the Terror.

An additional problem for the Committee was that they just weren't very popular, and hence didn't have a lot of legitimacy with important constituencies like, for example, the people of France. Palmer describes the law of 14 Frimaire, which significantly centralized power, as "an instrument of Terror because the government which it strengthened was the creation of a minority, the triumphant leaders of the Mountain, itself a party among republicans, who in turn were only a party among the original revolutionists, who in their turn did not include all the people in France. As in the name of liberty France now possessed the most dictatorial government it had ever known, so, in the name of the people, it now had the political system which, of all the systems in its history, probably the fewest people really liked." A classic component of leadership, and in fact maybe the biggest one, is the task of managing interactions with people who disagree with you. While the Committee was faced with challenges that would strain the capacities of even the best leaders (foreign invasions, economic collapse, rampant factionalism, religious turbulence, and all the small dervishes spawned by that larger tempest), their solution of the guillotine has done a lot to posthumously discredit their work.

And to that end, much of the modern Anglosphere understanding of the Revolution is in the Burke/Carlyle/Dickens tradition of seeing it as a senseless maelstrom of blood, headed by inflexible fanatics, sustained by mobs of howling peasants and red-eyed tricoteuses, and only ended by the operation of that same guillotine. However, once the Committee's decisions are seen in the light of the circumstances they faced, in large part they seem almost reasonable, as Palmer tries to show. An example is the debate over the role of religion in the new order. France at the time was very religious, and the Catholic Church was involved in many spheres of life in both positive and negative ways (see for example the famous career of Cardinal Richelieu in the previous century). Some of the revolutionaries wanted to completely dechristianize the country, some wanted to replace Christianity with a new state religion, some wanted to simply remove the Church's influence from political life, and some wanted no change at all. The Committee in many ways acted to check the impulses of the more radical revolutionaries to destroy all churches or defrock every priest, and it's instructive to note that many of those who were put to death were these more violent radicals.

Not that that really excuses the sometimes arbitrary arrests and executions ordered by Robespierre and the rest of the Committee, of course, but while tens of thousands did die during the Terror, many of those deaths were not ordered by the Committee, and additionally you also have to take into account the atrocities committed by the previous regime (e.g. Louis XIV's massacre of 8,000 Parisians in 1788) and the state of total war that existed at the time. Additionally, as as the book is explicit about, there's a difference between a revolutionary party as it's involved in overthrowing governments, and the same party when it has to then govern. Revolutionaries are fiery, aggressive, and iconoclastic, while government officials need to be bureaucratic, conciliatory, and predictable - individuals with one group of qualities do not often have the other, and Robespierre et al. did much to transition the fury of the regicide into the steadiness of the administrator. The end of the Terror was not the end of violence, but when the Convention finally turned on the Committee, those who remained benefited from the work that had gone on before.

In a way, one of the best indicators of the Committee's success was how much of its work was either kept or imitated, to the extent that the invading Allies suggested that they needed an international Committee of General Security to organize their armies as well as the French were doing. You can look at the Revolution as a sort of game theoretic move - once they introduced their methods of rationalizing, standardizing, and energizing, every other country was forced to adopt, adapt, or imitate their work.

Plus, they had some really inspiring words. Robespierre in particular was an excellent orator, and some of the book's best parts are where Palmer steps back and lets the power of their vision shine:

"We wish an order of things where all low and cruel passions are enchained by the laws, all beneficent and generous feelings awakened; where ambition is the desire to deserve glory and to be useful to one's country; where distinctions arise only from equality itself; where the citizen is subject to the magistrate, the magistrate to the people, the people to justice; where the country secures the welfare of each individual, and each individual proudly enjoys the prosperity and glory of his country; where all minds are enlarged by the constant interchange of republican sentiments and by the need of earning the respect of a great people; where industry is an adornment to the liberty that ennobles it, and commerce the source of public wealth, not simply of monstrous riches for a few families.

We wish in a word to fulfill the course of nature, to accomplish the destiny of mankind, to make good the promises of philosophy, to absolve Providence from the long reign of tyranny and crime. May France, illustrious formerly among peoples of slaves, eclipse the glory of all free peoples that have existed, become the model to the nations, the terror of oppressors, the consolation of the oppressed, the ornament of the universe; and in sealing our work with our blood may we ourselves see at last the dawn of universal felicity gleam before us! That is our ambition. That is our aim."

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Among the many gaping holes in American historical knowledge is any grasp of the French Revolution (and that includes my own knowledge). As an abstract matter, this is unfortunate, but nothing notable, given that the historical knowledge of modern Americans is essentially one large gap. As a concrete matter, though, it is a real problem, because in our own troubled times, the French Revolution offers critical, universal lessons, which we forget to our peril. Nowhere is this more true than with respect to the Terror, the rule of the twelve-man Committee of Public Safety, from 1793-94, the subject of this classic 1941 work.

The frame of this book is as political biography of the members of the Committee, all of whom were part of the loose grouping commonly referred to as Jacobins. The Committee was, for this one year, a dictatorial body that drew its power from the National Convention, a pseudo-parliamentary body claiming to represent the interests and will of Frenchmen. The Convention created the Committee in July of 1793, in response to a wave of existential threats, ranging from foreign invasion to internal counter-revolution to economic turmoil. During the following year, the Committee ruled through two basic methods: issuing decrees, which theoretically could be overridden by the Convention but never were, and by sending some of its members on assignment, “representatives-on-mission,” to critical areas around the country, with plenipotentiary power of life and death. At the same time, the Committee’s members involved themselves in, and led, the descending spiral of internal purges and violence against perceived ideological enemies who were themselves part of the Revolution, a process which ended in the Committee’s own destruction and the execution of its most prominent members.

The task of the author, R. R. Palmer, was complicated by the Committee having left essentially no record of its own internal discussions. All that exists are a few anecdotes and recollections of dubious accuracy set forth in the autobiographies of some of the Committee’s survivors. Thus, Palmer’s focus is on what the individual members of the Committee actually did, according to contemporary reports and letters, and on the orders and decrees they signed and issued. This is probably more interesting than a record of internal debates would have been, and it makes Palmer’s book more compelling as a result. However they made their decisions, the Committee’s executive actions were largely a success in pushing back threats to the Revolution (and, as Palmer notes, many of their actions presaged the modern world, such as the “Levy in Mass,” conscripting the entire population to participate in declared national goals). Foreign invaders were beaten back (although as Palmer makes clear, contrary to French myth, it was not the élan of revolutionary armies or even superior leadership, though the latter was true, but that the Allies were opposed to each other as much as to the French). Internal enemies, equally poorly led and worse organized, were brutally suppressed. (The counter-revolutionaries who are most often remembered today are those in the Vendée, royalist and Catholic. But Palmer makes clear that of greater concern to the Committee were the “federalists,” centered around Lyon and Marseilles, who strongly supported the Revolution but opposed the Jacobins and those even farther left, the so-called Hébertists.) The economic situation was stabilized, both in terms of food supply and in terms of ability to manufacture essential goods for the state, especially munitions. So the knock on the Committee is not that its members failed; for a committee, especially, they were remarkably effective, if blessed in their enemies. It was their vicious treatment of defeated internal enemies, and most of all, of former allies now treated as enemies, that earned them the deserved reputation of bloodthirstiness.

The Committee’s bloodthirstiness followed an exponentially rising arc. Just prior to the Committee’s formation, the “moderate” Girondists had been completely purged from the Convention, by the simple expedient of arrest and execution. This began the pattern of subsequent purges, where as factions developed after each cleansing, their opponents would attempt to tar them with the brush of those who had been purged earlier, and so distinguishing oneself from those killed earlier became essential to survival. Purge followed purge. Each one was made easier by law, culminating in the “Law of 22 Prairial” (the irritating French Revolutionary calendar makes following dates hard; that’s June 10, 1794) which allowed anyone to be summarily tried for sedition on the vaguest of charges, without any lawyers or defense being allowed and the only possible verdict death or innocence. By this point everyone active in politics not in the Committee’s camp figured it was only a matter of time before the guillotine would come for him (or her—the Committee went in heavily for executing women, as well as men, for political opposition). Thus, the purges culminated in the “Thermidorean Reaction” of July, 1794, in which a combination of those members of the Convention more moderate and more radical than the Committee, both fearing they would be the next to go, executed three members of the Committee and then dismantled it entirely. (Those three were Maximilien Robespierre and his two closest allies, Antoine Saint-Just and Georges Couthon; the exact interaction of Robespierre and the other members of the Committee is still hotly debated, but he was clearly the leader at that point.)

The Committee’s actions were, and were meant to be, “revolutionary,” by which they meant outside the rule of law, “exceptional and expeditious,” not governed by any constitution or charter other than the grant of power itself to the Committee. Their actions “rested on higher law.” As Saint-Just, the youngest and most icily nasty of the political fanatics who composed the Committee, put it: “Since the French people has manifested its will, everything opposed to it is outside the sovereign. Whatever is outside the sovereign is an enemy.” Or, in an even more modern-sounding phrasing, “All is permitted to those who act in the Revolutionary direction.” In essence, the Committee’s core belief was Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will, animated to malevolent life. All the Revolutionaries were obsessed with the "Social Contract," so this is no surprise. The results were predictable, at least from our vantage point. It was not just in mass killing that the rule of law was destroyed, it was also in many other actions, such as ending elections to the Convention, because, according to the Committee, “When the revolutionary machine is still rolling, you injure the people in entrusting it with the election of public functionaries, for you expose it to the naming of men who will betray it.” Very convenient.

My favorite passage to illustrate the corruption of language that characterized the Committee is Palmer’s summary of a speech by Saint-Just on March 13, given as the internal purges gathered steam. “Saint-Just began by discussing the right of revolution, affirmed in the Declaration of Rights and recently invoked by the Cordeliers [a purged group]. Insurrection, he said, is of course a right, a guarantee for the people; but government also has its guarantee, the people’s justice and virtue. Whoever corrupts this virtue makes government impossible, and public virtue is corrupted when confidence in the government is lost. The present sovereign is not a tyrant; it is the people. Whoever opposes the present order is therefore evil, and insurrection, once a useful recourse, is now counter-revolution. Opposition does exist—furtive, clandestine—because no one ever opposes an established order openly. Opposition always disguises itself; subversive elements always pretend to be loyal.” This is a perfect example of James Burnham’s definition of ideology, “a more or less systematic and self-contained set of ideas supposedly dealing with the nature of reality . . . and calling for a commitment independent of specific experience or events. . . . . An ideologue—one who thinks ideologically—can’t lose. He can’t lose because his answer, his interpretation and his attitude have been determined in advance of the particular evidence or observation.” There is nothing more dangerous than a man driven by ideology, and there is no dealing with people who can justify themselves in this way. Not only have they departed from any relationship with reality, but the result, empirically, is always a trail of corpses, the creation of which can be ended only one way.

I promised lessons, so what’s the lesson here? It should be obvious—all the behavior I’ve outlined in the past several paragraphs, if you took out the specific of names and dates, could equally well characterize any regime of the Left in power for the past two-and-a-half centuries. Those behaviors did not spring from nothing—the Terror, and the Gulag, and Year Zero, are real fruits of the Enlightenment, whatever Steven Pinker may say. While it is possible, perhaps, for a time, for Enlightenment ideas to not lead to the Terror, such as in the American Revolution, and perhaps not every key Enlightenment idea necessarily leads to terror, in both cases that’s the exception, rather than the rule (and probably impossible outside a context based on English traditions, as opposed to those of Rosseau).

So what are those Enlightenment ideas? The Twelve were religious believers, adherents of the first of the secular, ideological religions, and the same core religious beliefs have characterized the Left since and as a result of the Enlightenment. The religion of the Twelve was, and the religion of any ideologue of the Left is, the central Enlightenment idea that it is possible to create a heaven on earth, “the dawn of universal felicity,” through reason. In this ideology, heaven is reachable through ever-more liberty and emancipation compelled by the ever-heavier hand of the state. And not only is it reachable, but it is the natural end of humans, who are inherently good and perfectible through proper training and education. Who could disagree with such a goal? Only evil men, clearly. But the problem is, to the believers, in order to attain such a utopia, any cost is bearable, and any opposition doubly evil, since it attempts to deny happiness to those alive today and also to all the generations yet unborn. A believer must therefore conclude that if the promised utopia fails to arrive, it is because evil men oppose it for their own base reasons. If that is true, certainly such evil men deserve to die, a small cost that must be paid so that many others may reach heaven, even if most of those paying the price are actually innocent of any opposition. Thus, the end result of the Left being in total power is always going to be the same as that in 1794 (even if may not always be as compressed in time or as dramatic as the Terror). Or, put another way, any person of the Left has to endorse the Terror or reject the essential premises of the Left, because the Terror was, and such terror is, a necessary consequence of the Left being in power. The only alternative, and the only solution, is to reject much or all of the Enlightenment itself, something that is fortunately coming back into fashion.

Palmer himself basically endorses the Terror. Compared to most scholarship about the Terror, though, he’s relatively even-handed. And he sees the Twelve’s motives clearly; he notes, in the context of the suppression of Lyons, featuring such activities as the daily killing of hundreds by grouping them together, harrowing them with grapeshot and then bayoneting the survivors, “the combination of blood lust with the jargon of revolutionary idealism. . . . It is necessary to realize that these men inflicted death with a holy glee.” At root, though, he thinks that the behavior of the Committee is excused by their desire to make the world a better place. But that is not an excuse for their monstrous behavior, it is the reason—it is what made them do what they did. There is a complete and universal parallel between the behavior described in this book and the subsequent behavior of the global Left in power, both in Europe and in Asia during the twentieth century. Palmer couldn’t see that, really, at the time he wrote. But his overriding goal of excusing the Terror can be seen by examining his approach to various matters that are part of his history.

First, while he couldn’t see the full sweep of the twentieth century, not once does Palmer criticize the Left, Marxism or Communism, or analogize later leftist thought and actions to the Revolution, even in the slightest way. The closest he comes is one single reference to the show trial of Georges Danton, calling it “an outrage to civilized procedure comparable only to certain political trials of our own time.” This is not an overt attempt to excuse the Terror, but it shows where Palmer’s heart is, since even in 1941 the parallels were obvious. And when he re-issued the book in 1989, Palmer was extremely proud that he made no substantive changes to the text, as he notes in his “Preface to the Bicentennial Edition,” completing his whitewash of the Terror as it relates to the Left.

Second, Palmer explicitly declines to talk about the “Grand Terror,” that is, the culmination of and most violent period of the Terror. “We shall not dwell much on [that is, we shall not dwell at all on] the Grand Terror, which in fact was by no means entirely the work of the Committee of Public Safety. The Hundred Days before Thermidor were not primarily a time of destruction. They were a time of creation, of abortive and perhaps visionary creation, nipped by the fatal blight of the Revolution, the inability of the Revolutionists to work together. Had the Jacobins been a revolutionary party of the modern kind, drilled to a mechanical obedience, the whole French Revolution would have been different.” The dishonesty and naiveté of this is breathtaking. So, when Palmer suggests that “We cannot understand [the Revolution’s] history or [European] memories without dwelling on events that many modern historians pass over as sensational,” we realize that he, just as much as all the others, is “passing over” events that might whip up sentiment against the Revolution. Historians, including Palmer, pass over these events, not because they are “sensational,” but because their existence is corrosive to their own most fondly held political beliefs, which align with those of the Committee. They are only too happy to endlessly discuss, and use as a bludgeon, “sensational” events if they relate to medieval times, or religion, or any modern Right regime. It is the bad behavior of the Left that they always screen with a thick curtain, and not by accident or because they are delicate.

So, Palmer notes that Jean-Baptiste Carrier, who ordered the murder of thousands of men, women and children after their defeat in the Vendée by drowning them in barges sunk in the Loire, is “condemned as a monster by reactionary and humanitarian writers,” but for others, presumably by all historians not characterized with epithets, “is subject to attempts at rehabilitation” (although Palmer thinks those are “on the whole not very successful”; whether that chagrins him or not is unclear). Palmer also notes that the Terror would have been infinitely more bloody if it were not the case that the Committee “habitually used an exaggerated manner of speaking; but they were, in reality, for the most part, still checked by humane and Christian scruples.” He does not note the contradiction, or rather, the now-obvious conclusion, that combining “a revolutionary party of the modern kind,” something he endorses as making the Revolution better, with an absence of Christian scruples necessarily leads to deaths in the tens of millions, rather than the tens of thousands, not a more “visionary creation.” Just ask Pol Pot, who, after all, studied in Paris, drinking deep of Revolutionary ideology.

Third, Palmer is eager to make generalized excuses that relieve the Committee of moral responsibility—“The Terror was born of fear, from the terror in which men already lived, from the appalling disorder produced by five years of Revolution and the lawless habits of the old regime. It was anarchy that stood in the way of the stabilization of the Republic, and it was anarchy that was causing France to lose the war.” This is more slipperiness. That men lived in one type of fear does not imply that more fear is the obvious solution, and this is just throwing excuses at the wall and hoping one sticks with the reader. Moreover, the endless purges of mostly imaginary enemies were the very definition of anarchy, not a solution for it, which is why the Committee ultimately destroyed itself. Perhaps it’s easier to see from the vantage point of 2018 than of 1941, but it’s very obvious that the source of leftist terror is leftist ideas and thought patterns, not the fact that seizing power usually generates enemies and disorders. The creation of order does not require terror. Concealing this rather obvious truth seems to be the project of most modern historians of the Terror, all men of the Left themselves, who therefore recoil from the necessary conclusion.

Palmer’s project of excusing the Terror can also be seen indirectly, through his continual commentary on the scholarly controversies of the half century preceding the publication of his book, mostly centering on two French academic luminaries: Alphonse Aulard and Albert Mathiez, the latter a proud Marxist who, according to Palmer, held (along with his entire school, still extant today) “that Robespierre was always right.” According to Palmer, both Aulard and Mathiez, who collectively at the time totally dominated scholarship about the Revolution, excused the Terror as necessary. While Palmer agrees that the Terror was necessary, he likes to snipe at Mathiez’s ideological prison, saying, for example, that he was “of the opinion that his hero [Robespierre] was better justified by certain principles of class struggle than by the ideas which Robespierre himself never tired of expounding.” All these scholars, though, strongly approved of the Revolution and approved of much or all of the Terror; their disagreements appear to have revolved around causes, dividing into Marxists and non-Marxists, and whether Robespierre was a hero whose death prevented utopia from arriving, or a villain who maybe took the Terror just a little bit too far. Palmer fits right into the this tradition, whether he admits it or not.

[Review completes as first comment.]

[Eric_W · Rating 4 out of 5]

For two years after the French revolution, France was ruled by a committee of twelve men. At the time of their ascent to power, France was in chaos, its ports closed by the British and foreign armies were driving toward its borders. The "Committee of Public Safety" as it was known, realized that if they failed in their mission to stabilize France, they would be treated as murderers of their king and destroy ers of the few democratic gains that had been accomplished by that time. As we shall see, the term
"democracy" was used very loosely indeed. R. R. Palmer recounts the events of "The Year of Terror" in Twelve Who Ruled.This book was finished in 1941, and it contains oblique (but not opaque) references to invading armies and the dangers of totalitarianism. The twelve were an interesting combination. Robespierre, a lonely bachelor and idealist, who was against capital punishment, fell under the guillotine. Carnot was a mathematical genius, former army officer and engineer. He became a revolutionary because advancement in the army was limited to aristocrats. Barere, like Robespierre a lawyer, was a shifty politician who believed in public participation in government. Saint-Just was the enfant-terrible of the revolution, originally a playboy, but eventually rising to become a dedicated and principled leader.

Saint-Andre was a Protestant minister (before 1787 it had been illegal to be a Protestant) and former ship captain who believed in secular control of religion because religious fervor too often conflicted with public order. Billan-Varenne was a self-educated lawyer and committed anti-Catholic who wanted to confiscate all church property and made good use of the guillotine. He was totally intolerant of others' viewpoints. The sullen Callot was the only one of the twelve not established in a profession. As an actor (considered social outcasts during the 18th century,) he craved recognition. Herault de Sechells was the only nobleman on the Committee, completely amoral and an egoist. Of the other three, Lindet, Pierre- Louis Prieur and Claude-Antoine Prieur (no relation,) not much is known. The peasantry, which comprised 4/5ths of the population, was not represented. None of the twelve had ever done manual labor, all were fairly well-off and except for Herault, were members of the middle class; provincials who knew nothing of the city proletariat. Why should this group lead the revolution and terror? Palmer's explanation is that all were intellectuals, steeped in philosophy, but ensnared in a middle class with no place to go. The aristocracy despised them and placed numerous artificial barriers in their paths. The church was corrupt, badly in need of reform, and had lost all moral and intellectual leadership.

The Committee longed for a simpler more natural form of government and religion. They detested compromise, tolerated no free discussion, even among themselves. Ironically they did not start the revolution but stepped into the vacuum it created. It is paradoxical that the French, who tried so hard to recreate the American Revolution, and who fervently believed in Constitutional government, feared factions and divisive thought. Robespierre's statement of 5 Nivose -- they had invented their own calendar based on the metric system which was mandatory but virtually ignored -- was a dramatic statement of the philosophy of dictatorship and an attempt to suppress factions. He should have read James Madison more thoroughly. Madison believed factions were an essential component of the defense against tyranny. Robespierre wanted to save the people from themselves. For him factionalism was synonymous with treasonable conspiracy (a la McCarthy, Alien and Sedition Acts, etc. -- 20th century Americans would do well to reread Madison.) Of course, the Committee failed politically. As a minority it decided it could succeed only by recourse to the Terror, to which it ultimately succumbed. Their goal was to create a democracy based on a common cause and belief system. Yet, paradoxically, even a century later, the Republic was associated with suppression of liberty, persecution of religion, violence and terror. More faith in diversity and democracy would have been their salvation. Democracy, totalitarianism, and intolerance cannot coexist. '

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific exploration of the Reign of Terror with special emphasis on the political, religious, economic, and philosophical assumptions of Committee of Public Safety leaders.

[Pavol Hardos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jedna z naj historických kníh, aké som kedy čítal. Strašne dobré to je. Pútavé, empatizujúce, obsiahle, dôkladné. Povinné čítanie, obzvlášť pre tých, ktorí žijú s konzervatívnymi predžutými naratívmi o drbnutých Jakobínoch.

Palmer vystaval plnokrvné portéty skoro všetkých 12 z Výboru pre verejné blaho, ktorí vládli a snažili sa manažovať chaos kľúčového roku II. novej francúzskej republiky (sleduje ich od leta 1793 do júla 1794), čeliac anarchii, vzburám, chaosu, hladu, ekonomickej kríze, blokáde a invázii nepriateľských vojsk zo všetkých strán, zorganizovali obranu, vojenské víťazstvá, verejnú administratívu, osvietenské pokroky, ale aj morálne paniky, teror a masové vraždenie.

Teror tu nie je ospravedlňovaný, ale ani spakruky zatracovaný alebo zosmiešňovaný. Revolucionárov berie vážne a ich myslenie predkladá v kontexte, ako aj jeho vplyve na naše politické myslenie. Kniha nie je rehabilitáciou Robbespierra, Saint-Justa a Couthona, ale oveľa lepšie budete rozumieť tomu, čo a prečo hlásali, čo robili a čomu čelili. Normálne vám možno bude za nimi aj trochu smutno, ako kniha neodvratne speje ku svojmu tragickému koncu - 9. thermidoru. A váš zoznam zloduchov bude aspoň obsahovať úplne iné mená.

A keď u nás jednému poslancovi nadávajú, že je "drbnutý Jakobín", až mám chuť zvolať, že je to urážka Jakobínov - hoci ich tam bolo dosť drbnutých. A potom si spomeniem na ľudí ako Collot d'Herbois, a poviem si, že možno lepšie by bolo povedať, že je to drbnutý Hebertista.

[Ric · Rating 3 out of 5]

The French Revolution has fascinated me for basically my entire life, but even though I’ve watched a bunch of documentaries on it this is the first book I’ve read on the subject. And I’m glad that this was the one I chose, because it was an interesting deep dive into the twelve men who were most prevalent during the Reign of Terror. It could be a little dry at times, but I thought the author did a great job of explaining the political nuances of the time. I especially liked his recounting of the downfall and execution of Robespierre and Saint-Just. Definitely worth a read if you’re a fan of the subject matter.

[Jackson Cyril · Rating 5 out of 5]

Palmer's account of the Terror is supposed to be a classic on the subject, and it is easy to see why. It's meticulously researched, well-written and is effortlessly communicated. That's not to say it is an easy read, it is not. The details can bog one down, but they're worth fighting through to the end of the chapter, when Palmer brilliantly pulls all the differing strands together to provide conclusions. Palmer's passion, which he does not try to hide, comes out and is in and of itself a propellant to reading this book.

PS: Robespierre in my opinion is very much like Shakespeare's Brutus, the only one who comes off as truly believing in the cause of the Terror and who really thought that he was doing the right thing. And Saint-Just seems to be the most exciting, highly-intelligent, handsome and unbelievably arrogant. A brilliant combination.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

How many books, outside of literature, let alone history books, published in 1941 are still in print and still worth reading, not out of antiquarian interest but as still worthwhile works of scholarship? That Mr. Palmer's 'Twelve Who Ruled' was and is has to be the strongest recommendation that this book can be given. It is also immensely readable. If you want to begin to understand how the French Revolution went from being the birth of a new and better world and became the Terror while still believing in itself as just, and pure and true - then you need to read this incredible book.

[Logan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stupendously good! I’m making a languorous journey through reading about the history of early modern France. The biography of Louis XIV I read before this was uninspiring, but this was electrifying. It READS like a biography, but with an unusual take:

It’s a history of the (first) French Revolution and Republic through the lens of a SINGLE(ish) year (1793 - 1794 or Years 2-3 in the French Republican calendar) and focuses almost exclusively on the twelve men who comprised the Committee of Public Safety. This Committee—the most prominent of the Jacobin state organs following the fall of the Bourbon monarchy—is (in)famous for presiding over the worst of the Reign of Terror; but Palmer’s take on their actions, successes, and failures is nuanced and avoids both hagiography and demonization.

Ultimately, in Palmer’s estimation, the Committee of Public Safety *was* a dictatorial apparatus, with immense centralized public control of economy, war, and ideology that rivaled (and anticipated by a century) the authoritarianism and dictatorships of the 20th century. YET, the Committee also shepherded in one of the first truly recognizable eras of liberal democracy.

In December of 1793, when the Committee came into its full power, France was a brutally divided nation devolved into revolutionary chaos, economic insolubility, and on the brink of capitulation to the invading monarchies of Europe. By the early summer of 1794, when the Committee fell with Robespierre’s execution, France’s economy had become stabilized and its military had driven back all its enemies while establishing substantial gains. And—in ways not truly recognized even now—class freedom, widespread suffrage, and economic mobility was accessible to large swathes of the French population.

Palmer never excuses the Terror—and he repeatedly notes the hysterical conspiracism of the Jacobins as well as the nationalistic violence that many European authoritarians echoed in the following centuries—but he, with relentless even-handedness and occasional admiration, goes to pains to acknowledge the unprecedentedly chaotic and violent reality that the Committee stepped into.

Throughout this book, Palmer does an exceptional job of situating the main personalities of the Committee (especially Robespierre) in their historical setting, making their actions seems comprehensible (or at least understandably incomprehensible) in light of events. BUT, and I think this is the genius of “Twelve Who Ruled,” Palmer labors to make sure his readers understand that the men of the Committee of Public Safety, and the Jacobins as a whole, were not merely reactionaries borne along by irresistible historical currents.

They, most fundamentally, were driven by principle. The first French Revolutionaries successfully brought one of the most ancient and powerful monarchies in Europe down because they were obsessed with the idea that a new world—driven by liberty, equality, and fraternity and founded on Enlightenment ideals of reason, science, and freedom from “superstition”—was on the cusp of emerging in their fitful Republic. These utopian ideals drove them mad many times, as demonstrated by the orgy of state-sanctioned revolutionary Terror that claimed a third of the Committee members’ lives. But, Palmer does an exceptional job of drawing you into the middle of the principals and chaos which animated these men—and STILL animates our world that longs for liberty, equality, and fraternity, yet so troublingly fails to realize it.

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

While since this book's original publication in 1941 many more works on the French Revolution, the Terror, and its architects have been published, it's easy to see why most if not all of them cite Palmer's well-researched, insightful and gripping classic among their main sources. Very much worth reading.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

hnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. So goddamn boring

[Degenerate Chemist · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Twelve Who Ruled" is an outstanding analysis of the French Revolution. Although there were places where this book did drag a bit it did an excellent job of explaining the politics of the era. There really isn't much more I can say about this book that hasn't already been said.

[William Bahr · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you’re generally familiar with the French Revolution and even if you’ve read “Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution” by Simon Schama, you’re guaranteed a real treat with Palmer’s “Twelve Who Ruled.” Together with Isser Woloch’s extremely helpful foreward, Palmer focuses specifically on the Reign of Terror, a timeframe many accept as going from 5 September 1793 (Bertrand Barre proclaims terror the “order of the day”!) until 27 July 1794 (the day before Robespierre’s execution). Palmer clearly explains how the Twelve freedom dreamers became fire-and-brimstone dictators.

Of special note, Palmer theorizes that the little-discussed event of 23 Ventose (13 March 1794) was extremely important. At that time, Saint-Just (one of the Twelve) claimed “Every party is then criminal because it is a form of isolation from the people…a form of independence from the government.” Whoever opposed the government was then officially in a state of insurrection, counter-revolution, criminality, and treason. Summary justice at the guillotine soon followed. The Committee of Public Safety was then “a full grown dictatorship,” all flowing from 23 Ventose.

IMHO, Palmer does a great job of presenting the complex events that comprised the terror, how twelve seemingly reasonable, albeit inexperienced men wound up guiding the Terror, when 16 to 40 thousand people were guillotined. My bottom-line take-away is that Revolutionary France, in its attempt to export freedom, started what was euphemistically called a five-front war. To defend itself, the French government then quickly fell into disarray. Their Constitution was “written in the sky,” with little useful/practiced law connecting it to what was really happening on the ground. In other words, “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” were really just great sounding buzz-words for pie-in-the-sky idealistic dreams. Anarchy ensued, but many hoped that there was safety in numbers, and unity became the goal for survival. But what if all that united them was what they were against, not what they were for? Such governmental “unity” was dysfunctional. Thus, the Twelve, the Committee for Public Safety (CPS), maneuvered to gain control. With normal persuasion not working, CPS forcefully gained control through purges. And with persecution came paranoia and the continuous need for scapegoating (and further purges) when cascading emergencies arose in the wake of incompetent policy. Thus, did the Revolution devour its own children, the "Twelve Who Ruled."

Note: "The Twelve Who Ruled" were just some of the more (in)famous members of the Committee of Public Safety, of which there were 13 versions from 25 March 1793 to 27 October 1795. The author’s twelve were all on the 4th Committee (5 September 1793 – 31 July 1794): Barere, Billaud-Varenne, Carnot, Collot, Couthon, Herault (de Sechelles), Jeanbon (Saint-Andre), Lindet, Prieur, Prieur-Duvernois, Robespierre, and Saint-Just. This twelve is not the same as the (Extraordinary) Commission of Twelve, which the Girondins, feeling threatened by Montagnard supporters, created on 21 May 1793 to look into all decisions made by the Commune over the previous month and to unmask all plots menacing the National Assembly. The Commission actions led to the revolt of 2 June 1793, the fall of the Girondins, and the start of the Reign of Terror.

Highly recommended by a fellow author!

[Eric Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have heard a lot about this book over the years of my interest in the French Revolution, but hadn’t gotten around to reading it now. I can now say that R.R Palmer’s work has more than exceeded my expectations. This book was incredible, thorough, insightful, and deeply interested in exploring the minutiae of events in the Year II.

I think that Palmer does an excellent job of depicting the members of the Committee of Public safety as complex and interesting individuals, all coming together and putting aside their often wildly divergent views about the revolution and its future for the sake of establishing a stable political order capable of beating back the revolutions enemies, both internal and external. It takes pains to demonstrate the ways in which each member of the Committee was able to contribute to its work, and how their actions and character traits would ultimately culminate in the Committee’s sudden and violent self destruction on the 9th of Thermidor (July 27).

I also think Palmer does a good job of debunking lots of historical myths surrounding this time period, the Committee, and its members. He makes the point throughout the book that the Committee did ultimately create a political dictatorship in France, but that this dictatorship was likely necessary at the time in order for the French to organize themselves for the challenges of the European war, without which the republic most likely would have crumbled. He challenges, in no uncertain terms, many of the common historical portrayals of Robespierre. He argues that Robespierre was neither a ruthless dictatorial monster nor a proto-socialist hero of the working class. The real picture of Robespierre, excellently portrayed by Palmer, is that of a strong willed and uncompromising idealist, who’s inability to compromise or see those who disagreed with him as “true” revolutionaries ultimately led to his destruction and the failure of his ideas. Most of the other figures on the committee were also portrayed with similar depth, and I found Palmer’s portrayal of Saint-Just particularly evocative and engaging.

This is probably the best book I’ve read on the French Revolution so far and I honestly have very few criticisms of Palmers work, and even then, most of them can be excused on account of this books age. I absolutely loved it and strongly recommend.

5/5

[KarenH · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finally got through this book, but that's not a bad thing because I spent so long annotating and really taking it all in. This is one of the best, most nuanced interpretations of the French Revolution, or rather specifically the Terror, that I have ever seen. It takes an individual approach in providing a look at each member of the Committee of Public Safety and how they acted as individual characters throughout this year, but it also emphasizes the collective objective and responsibility. Factionalism galore, but also Rousseauian ideology of the state as one being. Palmer avoids falling into the trap of either deifying or demonizing the actors, but rather explains the situations as they come and rationalizing how they made their decisions.

Even though this is certainly an academic text, and someone who is not super into the FR probably would not get through this, I appreciated how there was still a narrative especially in the beginnings of the chapters. It provided a very human aspect to all the people involved in this messy time. Also my god the dramaaaaa. (side note: this is not a professional historian opinion so you didn't see anything but can i just take a moment to comment on saint-just cuz !!! maybe it's my enjolras phase coming back shhh)

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Robert Palmer's "Twelve Who Ruled" is a scholarly history of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution -- that is, from the beginning of September 1793 until the fall and execution of Robespierre on 10 Thermidor the following year (July 28, 1794). Palmer was a well-known American scholar of the French Revolution from the early twentieth century, and although his book is very well-researched and is useful, he is unfortunately very biased in favor of the Revolution.

Palmer focuses on the lives, personalities, and roles of each of the twelve men who constituted the Committee of Public Safety, which was a type of executive power of the National Convention. Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just are the most well known and were its de facto leaders, but in theory, all twelve had equal say in the Committee. The other ten were Lazare Carnot, Bertrand Barère, Jeanbon Saint-André, Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, Georges Couthon, Robert Lindet, Pierre-Louis Prieur, Claude-Antoine Prieur-Duvernois, Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles, and Collot d'Herbois.

All except two were from unremarkable, middle-class backgrounds and all were convinced Rousseauians. Elected members of the National Assembly, they radicalized along with the Revolution. A few months after the execution of Louis XVI, they managed to take power, throw off all pretense at incremental reform, and, by sword and guillotine, implement the most radical application of the principles of the Enlightenment. As Palmer admits, the French Revolution was the first bloody, totalitarian dictatorship in the modern sense. It foreshadowed nearly every dictatorship and genocide to come over the following two hundred years.

Today we could say the twelve members of the Committee of Public Safety (and all the Jacobins) were psychopaths: dedicated to their cause with a truly religious zeal and ferocity, utterly unmoved by "bourgeois" feelings of pity towards their thousands of victims, full of hate for Catholicism, and secure in the certainty that they were history's elect, summoned for the salvation and regeneration of mankind. In truth, they were the spiritual ancestors of the Communards, Socialists, Marxists, Communists, Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, and National Socialists.

Some estimates put the number of Frenchmen killed during the French Revolution at 1 million, including victims of the Terror, famines, the Revolutionary Wars, and the massacres such as the Vendéean Genocide. But it would be a mistake to think that the primary evil of the Reign of Terror was the number of victims.

Robespierre and the other eleven wanted to utterly annihilate everything of the previous society, all history, tradition, social structures, religion, even the memory of the Ancien Régime. They changed the calendar to eliminate Catholic feast days and Sundays and launched a massive wave of "Dechristianization" that saw the destruction of churches, relics, statues, and the slaughter of priests, nuns, and countless French Catholics. Robespierre even created a new religion called the "Cult of the Supreme Being" with which he tried to replace Catholicism. The Committee also had plans to demolish castles, towers, churches, and chateaux from the Old Regime and began to implement (but never fully carried out) proto-socialist economic policies such as land and wealth redistribution.

The Reign of Terror ended when most of the National Assembly feared that Robespierre was planning a great purge of the Assembly to consolidate his own power, just as he had done to Danton and the Hébertists 100 days before. In a preemptive strike, they arrested him along with Saint-Just and Couthon and guillotined them the following day, 10 Thermidor (July 28, 1794). The remaining nine shared different fates. Some were killed shortly after, others went on to support Napoleon, and others were exiled and died in poverty. Their lives after the fall of Robespierre were as unremarkable as their lives before 1789.

Unfortunately, Palmer is always trying to excuse the Twelve of the worst abuses of the Terror. He often blames local officials such as Carrier or Fouché for the excesses of the Terror, claiming that the Twelve, and in particular Robespierre himself, didn't approve of the most radical excesses of the Terror.

In fact, Robespierre wanted a more tightly controlled war on religion because he knew that a rabid slaughter of Catholics all over France would lead to uprisings like what happened in the Vendée, Brittany, and Lyon. Just like the Soviet Constitution, he paid lip service to "freedom of religion" but in practice tried to annihilate Catholicism and replace it with the Cult of the Nation and his very own Cult of the Supreme Being. A too-radical persecution would have provoked a reaction and possible return to the monarchy (which is what happened following Napoleon).

Although he does admit that they were guilty of terrible crimes (an obvious fact), Palmer is always trying to minimize the culpability of the Committee of Public Safety. The French Revolution is, like the Communist Revolution, one of those episodes of history towards which it is impossible to be neutral. Either you support it or oppose it. Palmer clearly supports it. I believe it was a Satanic orgy of hate and murder without justification and without precedent in history up until that time. As Joseph de Maistre wrote:

"There is a satanic element in the French Revolution which distinguishes it from any other revolution known or perhaps that will be known. Remember the great occasions - Robespierre's speech against the priesthood, the solemn apostasy of the priests, the desecration of objects of worship, the inauguration of the goddess of Reason, and the many outrageous acts by which the provinces tried to surpass Paris: these all leave the ordinary sphere of crimes and seem to belong to a different world."

[Bethany Currie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was really interesting and I learnt a lot of new information. It was a little too academic at times and I didn’t like the narrator as I listened on audiobook- but overall I got a lot out of this.

[Hans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book that I have read on the French Revolution to this date.
Very thorough, clean and little blood.
The nucleus of the period has been extensively described.

[Matthew Carney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated this book much more on a reread knowing more about the French Revolution than when I read it the first time. A good examination of how the comittee of public safety wielded power. Keep track of who's who.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are big gaps in my knowledge of the French Revolution. My mind holds only the broadest outline: Louis XVI calls the Estates General because France is nearly bankrupt, and he needs new taxes. They turn themselves into the Constituent Assembly. The Bastille is stormed. The king is executed. Chaos ensues. Many people die. Napoleon comes along and makes himself emperor. But a lot of stuff happened in between, and a much of it is a blur for me. This book helped to fill in a big gap in the middle -- the year in which France was ruled by the Committee of Public Safety and its most famous member, Robespierre, when Terror become the official policy and many heads rolled under the blade of the guillotine.

This book is filled with facts and events. It has its share of interpretation and historical point of view, but it is mostly very objective. That was exactly what I wanted. I'm sure that I won't remember much of the fire hose drenching of facts that I got from this book, but plenty will stick and now I have a much better sense of the flow of events in this critical year, including the efforts to put down internal rebellion, the ebb and flow of antireligious sentiment, the efforts to rebuild a viable army and navy in the face of severe external threats, the ongoing efforts to remake society in a new mould, and the factionalism that led to repeated purges and murders within the radical revolutionaries who controlled the government. I was expecting to get a much better sense of Robespierre as a person, but he comes off as being very bland and gray, maneuvering in the background until he finally maneuvers himself to his own doom.

In reading this book, I was struck again and again with the parallels between the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. The author several times refers to parallels to the Nazis, but doesn't mention the Russians at all. I'm sure that in some ways the Russians consciously followed the example of the French, but there is much more to it than that, and I can only conclude that much of what happened in both revolutions is a natural result of any situation where a small urban based radical group claiming to act for the people manages to seize power -- the factionalism and purges, the struggles between radicals and moderates, the food requisitions, the flip flops between loosening and tightening of economic control, the efforts to rebuild and expand the military, the politically reliable people sent to the provinces to enforce the will of the center, the use of arrest and execution as a political tool, and, of course, not to be omitted, the establishment and strengthening of the secret police. It made my skin crawl. I have little doubt that this pattern will be repeated in future history. I can only hope that I won't be around to see it because it will be even worse next time.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still a favorite the second time through.

The book is a great story. It's basically just one year of the French Revolution, describing the actions of the twelve people who were on the Committee of Public Safety. This group had a lot of power for that year, and they did a lot with it. It's impressive how much happened in a single year: they held back the Allied European powers that were invading France, they implemented all sorts of domestic laws, they went to different parts of France to prevent the country from falling apart, etc. And of course, there's the Terror, which is an important part of the French Revolution, but if you go into this book without a preconceived idea about whether the French Revolution was the best or worst thing that happened to Europe, you'll get a good perspective on what was going on.

The book is also interesting because it shows the variety of French personalities that ended up as part of the ruling group in France. If you've ever worked on a committee yourself, you'll recognize people that are like them. Some are technocrats, others are politicians, etc. I have my favorites from the committee. Rereading it the second time, I was drawn to slightly different members of the committee.

The book also shows different parts of France. The committee wasn't just in Paris; they went on "missions" to different parts of the country to help unify the nation against the European powers. Francophiles will enjoy this.

In terms of how approachable it is, I think it helps to have a basic understanding of the French Revolution coming into this, but not much is necessary. I don't remember needing to Google anything when I read through this either time. Even without knowing the details of every political faction or knowing the weighty history of historical giants like Marat or Danton, you can follow what's going on. And the French Revolution is such an important piece of history! Highly recommended.

[David Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though a bit of a slog sometimes - Palmer did a lot of research for this book and is fond of sharing anecdotes and details - TWELVE WHO RULED is otherwise an essential and generally very readable account of the Committee of Public Safety. Modern historians might quibble with some of Palmer's terminology, like his conflation of a “virtuous” (classical) republic with a democratic one, but I suspect relatively few would argue with his conclusion that the radical Jacobins replaced the revolutionary chaos of 1789-92 with a functioning government, one capable of quelling rebellion at home (however bloodily) and defending France against foreign armies. Ultimately, the author argues, Robespierre and his peeps fell victim to their own success: the regime they created became too efficient at identifying and arresting "conspirators" (100,000 in jail and 40,000 executed by July 1794), and no-one in the National Convention would tolerate the Great Terror once the threat of foreign invasion had passed. After the Committee of Public Safety fell, of course, France returned to revolutionary chaos until the only public institution that still worked, the Army, took charge.

[Alan Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent account by a premiere twentieth-century historian.

Quotation from page 77 of R. R. Palmer’s Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1949):

Saint-Just did not believe in 1791, still less in 1793, that the majority of Frenchmen endorsed the revolutionary régime. He would agree, however, with Rousseau, who said: “What generalizes the will is not so much the number of voices as the common interest that unites them.” He would add that only a virtuous will could be sovereign. And he believed absolutely in his own virtue. So did Robespierre and others, for in no trait were the French revolutionaries so much alike as in their moral self-approval. The doctrine of the Social Contract, with these moral overtones, became the theory of the Terror. A group of the consciously right-minded, regarding their enemies as “outside the sovereign,” took to themselves, in the name of justice and reason, that majestic sovereign will which Rousseau had called indestructible, indivisible, imprescriptible, constant, unalterable and pure.

[Kate Woods Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid, readable history of the Reign of Terror, Twelve Who Ruled by R.R. Palmer gives us a 1940s-era overview of the closing days of the French Revolution. The author's use of literary scenes to open each chapter helps the narrative along, and the insertion of the author's voice from time to time gave me needed perspective on what is, ultimately, a cast of hundreds, and intrigues almost as numerous.

This was the fifth book in a series of five I tackled, and was clearly the superior history. After suffering through Hibbert's Days of the French Revolution I actually enjoyed reading most of this book. It seemed to flow most easily when the author recounted military maneuvers or battles, although he did a creditable job with the politics and economics as well.

[Sean Chick · Rating 5 out of 5]

We have 2 levels of understanding of most events. First there is the myth, filtered through the bias of the group, and then there is an intimate understanding of the inner workings of the event, which brings out the humanity and often the tragedy of its participants. Palmer is a bit of each for he was a revolutionary romantic, but one committed to evidence and unwilling to ignore the complexity of human experience. Twelve Who Ruled is a classic of its kind, being fair and honest without being cynical. This is the French Revolution as tragedy.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent work of historical scholarship. It can be a bit dry at times, though that is to be expected when reading scholarly works. Palmer has a distinct narrative voice that carries throughout the book and heightens the reading experience.

I found that this read like a 12-part biography (if the title wasn't a giveaway), with a backdrop of the Year of Terror. Particular focus was given to Robespierre, but that's not exactly a surprise when reading about the French Revolution.

[AskHistorians]

One of the standard histories of the Terror, but again more of a professional history.