Threshold of Terror The Last Hours of the Monarchy in the French Revolution

In this exciting look at the fall of King Louis XVI, Allen looks at the two days in August, 1792, which lead to the King's fall and began the Reign of Terror, during which more than 40,000 people were guillotined.

Independent scholar Allen (who read history at Oxford) sees in the August 10, 1792 Revolution in France the same failed attempt to establish "a new social and political era" that marked the October 25, 1917 Revolution in Russia. Using a number of eyewitness accounts previously unpublished in English, with direct quotations and paraphrases interwoven into the text, Allen has produced a marvelously detailed picture of the final hours of this crucial collapse and transformation of the high hopes that had begun in France with the fall of the Bastille in 1789. Its aftermath would be totalitarian politics, terror, civil war, and external conflict as a means both to rejoin a fractured society and to spread ideology. Recommended for academic libraries and larger European history collections.ARobert C. Jones, formerly with Central Missouri State Univ., Warrensburg
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