The Terror: The Shadow of the Guillotine: France 1792--1794

by Graeme Fife

For the audience that made a major bestseller of Simon Schama’s A Chronicle of the French Revolution comes this exhaustively researched, character-driven chronicle of revolutionary terror, its victims, and the young men---energetic, idealistic, and sincere---who turned the French Republic into a slaughterhouse. 1792 found the newborn Republic threatened from all the British blockaded the coasts, Continental armies poured over the frontiers, and the provinces verged on open revolt. Paranoia simmering in the capital, the Revolution slipped under control of a powerful clique and its fanatical political organization, the Jacobin Club. For two years, this faction, obsessed with patriotism and purity---self-appointed to define both---inflicted on their countrymen a reign of terror unsurpassed until Stalin’s Russia. It was the time dominated by Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton, Jean-Paul Marat and Louis-Antoine Saint-Just (called “The Angel of Death”), when Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette met their ends, when any hint of dissent was ruthlessly quashed by the State. It was the time of the guillotine, neighborhood informants, and mob justice. This extraordinary, bloodthirsty period comes vividly to life in Graeme Fife’s new book. Drawing on contemporary police files, eyewitness accounts, directives from the sinister Committee for Public Safety, and heart-wrenching last letters from prisoners awaiting execution, the author brilliantly re-creates the psychotic atmosphere of that time.

Genres: History, France, French Revolution, Nonfiction

448 pages, Hardcover

First published January 8, 2004

Reviews

[Braden · Rating 1 out of 5]

While reading Graeme Fife’s The Terror, I became very curious about who would publish such an abysmally written history of the Terror. I tried to find information about Portrait Books, an imprint of Piatkus, but the imprint seems to have been wiped out of existence. The only official mention I could find was from an interview with the publisher of Piatkus in which she stated that “[o]ur Portrait imprint is more about entertainment than information and appeals to history and music buffs” (http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/publi...). I really, really wish I had known that this publisher of supposed non-fiction considers these books to be more about entertainment before I had started reading this book. I could’ve saved a lot of time and frustration.

I probably should have stopped reading after the introduction, in which Fife describes Charlotte Corday as being "voluptuous" multiple times. He then lustfully describes how her breasts were exposed to the eyes of her captors and goes on to unnecessarily describe how transparent her clothes were on the way to the guillotine. It was creepy and the book only got worse from there.

To say that The Terror is a bad book doesn’t really explain my total contempt for this work. This is possibly the worst book of history writing I have had the misfortune of laying eyes upon. Where to begin? The most obvious flaw is that Fife does not use any citation whatsoever. There is a very scant bibliography in the back but other than that, the reader has no idea where he drew his “facts” from and cannot judge his sources as actually being reliable. The book is littered with quotations but good luck finding where he pulled them from. And Fife is very credulous regarding any sort of cockamamie story that paints the revolutionaries in a poor light but suddenly finds some kind of academic standard when dismissing similar stories that show counter-revolutionaries in a similar light. This comes as no surprise, though, as Fife appears to be the most reactionary writer who ever conned someone into paying him to write what amounts to a 400-page rant against the French Revolution.

Fife also made the extremely curious choice to use highly abnormal nomenclature for his subjects. I have read a lot of books by esteemed scholars on the French Revolution, but never have I seen anyone refer to the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security as “CPS” and “CGS,” respectively. In the foreward, Fife explains his motive for using these initialisms as being to impart a more sinister tone on these committees. In essence, he is trying to link the “CPS” to more familiar, 20th-century security bureaus like the KGB or the Staasi and therefore imposing his poorly-explained judgment on complex events of 200+ years ago using such inappropriate shorthand. That’s just bad history writing. And there are many more cases of strange nomenclature that come off as out-of-touch with most English-language scholarship on the French Revolution (e.g. “national Guard” instead of “National Guard,” “constituent Assembly” instead of “Constituent Assembly,” etc.).

As noted above, Fife makes absolutely no attempt to disguise his personal feelings of disgust toward just about every faction of revolutionary in this time period, with the curious exceptions of the Girondins and Danton (his favourite folks are definitely the counter-revolutionaries, though). It is one thing to have a thesis and stick to it, but it is another thing entirely to make ham-fisted, simplistic assessments of various factions of the 1790s using words like “thugs” or “hoodlums” (the latter word being used by Fife to describe the section of Marseillaise volunteers after whom the French national anthem is still named). Fife does not even try to analyze the nuances of the era, instead sticking to a reactionary dichotomy that depicts any attempt at direct democracy as “mob rule” and portraying anyone who was not Danton, Girondins, or the saintly martyrs of the Vendée (as Fife depicts them) as being nothing more than hooligans.

One gets the sense that Fife actually thought he was writing a historical novel, considering the abundance of unsupported suppositions that he throws out with nothing more than such terms as "one can imagine," "no doubt," or "certainly" when there is a high degree of doubt regarding the veracity of his assertions.

In much of his dumbed-down analysis, Fife comes across as nothing more than a moralizing, supercilious, reactionary school marm or country parson. I could just hear Fife clutching his pearls in shock and horror as he described (and insulted) the revolutionaries who set about de-Christianizing France in 1793. I’m no Jacobin apologist, but I found myself rooting for Robespierre and his ilk just because Fife’s criticism of them was so inept.

Lastly, this is also the most poorly edited book I have ever read. The book is riddled with typos, spelling errors, duplicate words, elided words, and bizarre sentence structure. If Portrait Books were still around, I would go out of my way to never read another of their titles.

Tl;dr: I hated this book with a passion and have no idea how it was ever published.

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

Where do I start?
I’m not a historian by far. However, I’m sure everyone will agree, that everyone is entitled to their own opinion; so this is merely my opinion.
This book is overrun by the same information: atrocities, mass killings, accusations and many, many more idiosyncratic traits exposed from within the dark side of the human condition, during the French revolutionary terror of 1792-1794.
By the time I’d reached the end, I had the feeling that I had read a series of witness accounts, similar to that of the Nuremberg trials.
The question I would like to ask, as another reviewer has aptly put, where did all these direct quotes and eye witness accounts come from?
I’ve never read a book so bias and blood thirsty as this about the French Revolution.
There seems to be no balanced opinion, and some of the descriptive writing seems to be fantasised as if the camera had been invented before it’s time;
did Charlotte Corday’s dress make such an impression amidst the shock of Maras’ assassination? I’ve never read that her dress was ripped to expose her breasts before in any book!
Was the Loire River called ‘the national swimming pool?’ Acronyms like CPS and CGS really don’t fit in and really insinuate that Graeme Fife wants to compare the terror to the Stalinist purges or ‘the night of the long knives’.

Fife doesn’t seem to conjure a balanced argument, which is what I thought history books are meant to do; a kind of literary court case from which to to draw some new light on history; that’s what keeps it potent and alive.

[Balanjay F · Rating 3 out of 5]

Certainly an interesting book but, as many reviews on this platform illustrate, quite flawed. I do concur with some of the author's conclusions on the moral and philosophical side of the revolution, especially in the destruction of the Church, the dissolution of the monarchy, &c. Putting aside personal views, though, the book is rather poorly executed. There are an array of typos scattered throughout, a vulgar tone is taken in many uncalled-for areas, and liberties are certainly taken with nomenclature and quotation...
Overall, my biggest issues with the work are in its lack of citation, and very biased treatment of the subject matter. As for the former it makes the work seem generally untrustworthy, and the latter intesifies this. The author's intention, clearly, was not for a sterile historical text, but he seems to have gone a bit too far.
As for the good points of the work, it makes for an attention grabbing read (if a bit repetitive), and I found it a fairly easy read. A list of dramatis personæ would have helped though.

[B K · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Terror in detail.

A rather emotional and dramatic history of the Terror and the men who ran it. Compelling in its way. A detailed listing of the major and minor events, with an underlying thesis that is plausible.

[Patrick Lacher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent history of the Terror in France from 1792-1794. The one period in European history that makes the 1932-1945 period in Germany not look so bad.

[Sandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an enormously difficult read, in part because there's a cast of hundreds--or at least dozens and dozens--and in part because the author assumes a lot of background knowledge that, alas, this reader did not have, and also because his writing is just difficult to understand. Is this being said tongue in cheek, is this what the subject said or what someone else said about the subject, etc, etc? He kept inserting the last names of people in the middle of a paragraph, without reference to who they were and then I would have to go back twenty pages to find that out again. A better editor and a chart describing all the people and their roles would have been most helpful. This is why Dostoevsky is readable and this author isn't..

Despite all this, I kept reading because I wanted to be educated and because the whole story was just so horrifying, I couldn't stop. It was hard to believe it was true. I just finished the Rape of Nanking, and thought that was a grim tale. This is leventy times worse. It's enough to turn one away from idealism in any form. Can revolutions ever succeed? Well, I guess the one of 1776 did, though not all the votes are yet in.

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book might be an informative source of the turmoil that was the French Revolution but it's written so poorly that I can't make head nor tails of the sentences. The use of commas is rampant and they are splattered here and there until sentences are incomprehensible. Such a pity.

[Roger Md · Rating 5 out of 5]

Putting the modern world in perspective of the French Revolution (that surprisingly followed the USA successful revolution by a dozen or so years!)