The problem of the Terror lies at the heart of any reflection upon
the French Revolution and its implications for modern political
culture. Contemporaries sought to grasp its meaning immediately
after the fact as they struggled to explain an experience which
seemed to defy the Revolution's fundamental assumption: that
rational human intentions could erase the arbitrariness of history
and institute a transparent social order. Since then, historians
and philosophers have not ceased to ponder what Benjamin Constant
called "that inexplicable delirium known as the reign of the
Terror." For some, the Terror deviated from the rights of man only
to preserve them: it was a system of revolutionary government
dictated by circumstances that threatened the very existence of the
infant French Republic. For others, it revealed a dynamic inherent
in the Revolution from the start: a dynamic unleashed by the very
effort to refashion society in the light of human reason. For still
others, it was a symptom of the fact that the promised
transformation of society was still incomplete - and a model for
any future revolution that would complete it.
This volume has been designed to bring together contributions by
representatives of a wide range of historiographical approaches to
the French Revolution. It seeks, in the wake of the heated
historical debates of recent years, to reopen old questions and to
formulate new ones, to suggest how the problem of understanding the
Terror is being approached, or might be approached, two hundred
years after the event. In a century more than ever aware of the
fragility of the boundaries between citizenship and victimization,
the topic reatains its challenge forhistorical comprehension - and
its profound relevance to the enduring question of the nature and
conditions of democracy.
Now volume 4 is published. Drawing clear inspiration from the
earlier highly acclaimed volumes, Professor Baker has now edited a
supplementary volume. It has as its aim to advance, by focusing
more precisely on the period of the Terror, the explanation of the
nature and implications of the political culture of the French
Revolution the early volumes initiated.
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