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." ( )

Palmer is rightly considered among the leading historians of the French Revolution. Twelve Who Ruled is an exceptional history of the Terror, managing to provide great depth and context while at the same time keeping the reader engaged. Though the Terror is an immensely political and fraught subject, Palmer manages to provide a clear-minded review of its development and fall, arguing that the Terror was at first justified by the chaos of its time but ultimately overtaken by its own logic. ( )

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

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. ' ( )

A very enlightening history of the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution. It begins with the rise of the Jacobins, and ends with the fall of Robespierre. A very detailed book, full of insights for anyone who wants to delve deeper into the motivating factors behind this particular episode in history. ( )