Ruth Scurr

The men of blood get their comeuppance in Revolutionary France

The arrest and execution of Robespierre and Saint-Just in July 1794 are described in hourly detail in Colin Jones’s account of Paris in the grip of Terror

The execution of Robespierre, Saint-Just and their supporters on 28 July 1794. [Getty Images]

Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, who believed that only by getting ‘up close’ to the ‘infinitely small’ details would it be possible to understand the truth about a Revolution that was stranger than fiction.

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