David LawdayBesprekingen
Auteur van Napoleon's Master: A Life of Prince Talleyrand
Besprekingen
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France was ready for revolution long before it began. With a system that gave all of the power to a small percentage of the population, the Church and the Nobility, and then exempted them from all taxation, and an empty treasury, it took only a bad harvest or two to send the people into the streets, ready to die fighting instead of waiting to starve. The small middle class were the children of the enlightenment and proved willing to call for reform.
As things simmered, a young man named Danton came to Paris to become a lawyer. The book focuses tightly on Danton, which simplifies the story enormously, for all that he was one of the two towering figures of the Revolution. Danton was gigantic in everything he did. Larger and uglier than everyone else, he had a voice that carried and a talent for public speaking. He also was free of the blind ideology that sent so many of his contemporaries into dead ends. What did him in, in the end, was his out-sized personality which both threatened and annoyed his rivals, as well as his realization that the Terror had to be limited.