Overview

How idealism turned to blood- a powerful new portrait of the most enigmatic politician of all times, and a vivid re-reading of the turbulent French Revolution itself. 'A truly remarkable writer, one of the most gifted non-fiction authors alive' Simon Schama, Financial Times Robespierre was only thirty-six when he died, sent to the guillotine where he had sent thousands ahead of him. Robespierre and the Revolution were inseparable- a single inflexible tyrant. But what turned a shy young lawyer into the living embodiment of the Terror at its most violent? Admirers called him 'the great incorruptible'; critics dubbed him a 'monster', a 'bloodthirsty charlatan'. Ruth Scurr sheds new light on this puzzle, tracing Robespierre's life from a troubled childhood in provincial Arras to the passionate idealist, fighting for the rights of the people, and sweeping on to the implacable leader prepared to sign the death warrant for his closest friends.

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9780099458982

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Ruth Scurr does for Robespierre and the French Revolution what Quentin Bell did for Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: she apprehends the complete personality of the man, the moment, and the movement. A work of genuine scholarship and political literature, Fatal Purity is an electrifying biography of an epoch's vaulting ambitions and wounded pride, radical vision and terrifying uncertainty, bracing heroism and decimating energies. -- Corey Robin, author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea <br>

Author Information

Born in 1971, Ruth Scurr is an historian of Political Thought, specialising in eighteenth-century France. She is an affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and is a regular reviewer for The Times and the Times Literary Supplement. This is her first book.

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