Winner of the 2004 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize and the 2006 Leo Gershoy Award

Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon

Howard G. Brown

480 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4

16 b&w illustrations, 2 maps, 4 tables

Cloth 0-8139-2546-0 • $45.00

Paper 0-978-0-8139-2729-9 • $24.50

Paperback available January 2008

For two centuries, the early years of the French Revolution have inspired countless democratic movements around the world. Yet little attention has been paid to the problems of violence, justice, and repression between the Reign of Terror and the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. In Ending the French Revolution, Howard Brown analyzes these years to reveal the true difficulty of founding a liberal democracy in the midst of continual warfare, repeated coups d’état, and endemic civil strife.

Brown argues that despite the ringing slogans of 1789, liberal democracy was not the most significant outcome of the French Revolution. Rather, after years of politicized violence and perverted justice, attempts to impose the republic helped to forge a modern "security state" in its place. The performance of elected magistrates and citizen jurors, especially in the face of widespread banditry and regional revolt, led to emergency measures such as martial law and military justice. Brown explores these developments by combining extensive archival research with a wide array of conceptual strategies ranging from political theory to microhistory. By highlighting the role played by violence and fear in generating illiberal politics, Ending the French Revolution speaks to the struggles facing democracy in our own age. The result is a fundamentally new understanding of the French Revolution's disappointing outcome.

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Howard G. Brown, Professor of History at Binghamton University (The State University of New York), is the author of War, Revolution and the Bureaucratic State: Politics and Army Administration in France, 1791-1799 and co-editor of Taking Liberties: Problems of a New Order from the French Revolution to Napoleon.