A fundamental work edited by the Dominican Renaud Escande. Fifty articles on the revolution by the most outstanding French authors. Among them, among others: Pierre Chaunu, expert on the history of the 18th century, Stéphane Courtois, editor of the famous “Black Book of Communism”, Jean Tulard, expert on the Napoleonic era, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jean Sévillia, Jean-Christian Petitfils and Reynald Secher, author of “The Franco-French Genocide” about Vendée genocide.
In the first volume, the authors focus on the most important events related to the revolution.
In the second, they deal with the ideas of revolution and counter-revolution and their main representatives.
The third volume is an anthology of previously unpublished texts showing the cruelty and anti-civilization and anti-Christian role of the French Revolution.
All three volumes are collected in one volume of over 1,000 pages!
The French Revolution was usually presented as legitimate and worthy of praise, as a celebration of brotherhood and a mature work of “reason” that had been waiting for centuries. Meanwhile, the events that led to it constituted one of the bloodiest chapters of history, inaugurating a tragic series of revolutions and conflicts that marked the history of Europe until the mid-20th century. (…)
We came up with the idea of publishing “The Black Book of the French Revolution” during a conversation with one of the authors of this collection. We thought about collecting the works of the best specialists in one work, which would be both a “summary” and a “breviary”. The sum of the “understatements of revolutionary historiography”, containing an analysis of the most important events, both uplifting and demolishing at the same time, and a philosophical and political breviary containing portraits and views of the opponents of the revolution, whose perspective, by no means archaic, very insightfully showed the nature of the coming times of totalitarianism and democracy, this anthology finally documents the blind violence of revolutionary ideology.
Renaud Escande OP
For over a hundred years, the French Revolution was the prototype and point of reference for all those who opposed monarchies described as “absolute” and dictatorships and autocracies such as the one that existed in tsarist Russia.
Stephane Courtois
Editor of “The Black Book of Communism”
Encyclopedia of knowledge about the French Revolution, its crimes and victims!
If we really think about it, there were two Reigns of Terror; in one people were murdered in hot and passionate violence; in the other they died because people were heartless and did not care. One Reign of Terror lasted a few months; the other had lasted for a thousand years; one killed a thousand people, the other killed a hundred million people. However, we only feel horror at the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. But how bad is a quick execution, if you compare it to the slow misery of living and dying with hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery is big enough to contain all the bodies from that short Reign of Terror, but the whole country of France isn’t big enough to hold the bodies from the other terror. We are taught to think of that short Terror as a truly dreadful thing that should never have happened: but none of us are taught to recognize the other terror as the real terror and to feel pity for those people.
They are doing Black Book for the French Revolution too now. I can’t say that it’s unexpected, honestly.
Just read how they advertised that rag:
I can only answer with Mark Twain’s quote: