Overview

What transformed moral citizens into guillotine cannibals during the French Revolution and the Great Reign of Terror? The answer, argues Eli Sagan, is the same force that has killed millions of people in the 20th-century ideological terror. This book offers a comprehensive explanation of the gruesome Terror, its causes and its consequences for the modern world. The French Revolution introduced ideological terror to the world, but Hitler and Stalin were among its 20th-century perpetrators, maintaining its survival.

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9780742508316

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Citizens and Cannibals, by Eli Sagan, is fascinating and thought-provoking. It is a very important contribution to the study of the French Revolution and the origins of Ideological Terror.--Michael Kennedy

History is served well in Eli Sagan's Citizens and Cannibals. Sagan provides worthy insights into the revolutionary and evolutionary processes unleashed when nations take the wrong path to democracy. If you enjoy reading history, you will want to read this book. Bookviews.Com More successfully than anyone thus far, Eli Sagan has brought us close to a real understanding of the causes of the French Revolutionary Terror, and thereby, to a comprehension of the greatest scourge of the twentieth century: ideological terror. Anyone intrigued by the paradoxes and contradictions of the modern world must read this book. -- Robert Bellah Robespierre-and later Lenin-were men of virtue, but the regimes they created spawned terror. Why? Eli Sagan's book is a comprehensive effort to provide an answer. -- Daniel Bell Eli Sagan is that great rarity-the truly independent scholar. He belongs to no school. He follows no fashion. Instead, he crafts complex, tough-minded works on huge subjects. He doesn't shy away from big questions. In this moving plea for the creation of citizens freed from the destructive burdens of resentment and paranoia, he strikes a blow for moral freedom. -- Jean Bethke Elshtain, author of Democracy on Trial Citizens and Cannibals, by Eli Sagan, is fascinating and thought-provoking. It is a very important contribution to the study of the French Revolution and the origins of Ideological Terror. -- Michael Kennedy, author of The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution, 1793-1795 I find the book fascinating, provocative, and enormously stimulating. Sagan's observations in this and in his earlier book, The Honey and the Hemlock, are often original and insightful and of great value in assisting the historian in understanding certain aspects of Revolutionary behavior. I have learned much from him. -- Timothy Tackett, University of California, Irvine Important and timely... book. Library Journal Recommended for serious students of the French Revolution. Publishers Weekly Citizens and Cannibals siezes our imagination, not with sociological theories and psychoanalytic attempts to divine the wellsptring of human iniquity, but with compelling descriptions of pernicious edicts, fanatical leaders, and innocents massacred on altars of Ideological Truth. -- Michael Burns The American Scholar

Citizens and Cannibals siezes our imagination, not with sociological theories and psychoanalytic attempts to divine the wellsptring of human iniquity, but with compelling descriptions of pernicious edicts, fanatical leaders, and innocents massacred on altars of Ideological Truth.--Michael Burns The American Scholar

Author Information

Eli Sagan is the author of several books, most recently The Honey and the Hemlock (Basic Books) and At the Dawn of Tyranny (Knopf).

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