Between 1793 and 1794, thousands of French citizens were imprisoned and hundreds sent to the guillotine by a powerful dictatorship that claimed to be acting in the public interest. Only a few years earlier, revolutionaries had proclaimed a new era of tolerance, equal justice, and human rights. How and why did the French Revolution's lofty ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity descend into violence and terror?
What was it like to live through one of the most transformational periods in world history? In The Glory and the Sorrow, eminent historian Timothy Tackett answers this question through a masterful recreation of the world of Adrien Colson, a minor lawyer who lived in Paris at the end of the Old Regime and during the first eight years of the French Revolution.
Based on over a thousand letters written by Colson, this book vividly narrates everyday life for an 'ordinary citizen' during extraordinary times, as well as the life of a neighborhood on a small street in central Paris. It explores the real, day-to-day experience of a revolution: not only the thrill, the joy, and the enthusiasm, but also the uncertainty, the confusion, the anxiety, and the disappointments. While Colson reported on major events such as the storming of the Bastille and the King's flight to Varennes, his correspondence underscores the extent to which the great majority of Parisians in no way anticipated the Revolution; the incessant circulation and power of rumors of impending disasters in Paris, not just in the summer of 1789 but continually throughout the Revolutionary decade; and how this affected popular psychology and behavior.
An evocative account of Colson's time and place, The Glory and the Sorrow is a compelling microhistory of Revolutionary France.
