A historian goes looking for the inner life behind the French Revolution
In a new book, Olivier Bétourné draws twelve portraits of 1789's leading figures, trying to locate the private, personal roots of their revolutionary drive.
The historian and editor Olivier Bétourné has written a book, « Les Révolutionnaires », built around twelve portraits of figures from the French Revolution, according to Le Monde. The subjects include Babeuf, Barnave, Clermont-Tonnerre, Condorcet, Danton, Olympe de Gouges, Marat, Mirabeau, Robespierre, Manon Roland, Saint-Just and Toussaint Louverture.
Rather than retracing political events, Le Monde reports that Bétourné examines each figure's « moi » — their inner self — in search of what personally drove their desire for revolution, an approach the newspaper frames as an attempt to grasp that desire at its most intimate.
The twelve chosen figures span the Revolution's range, from the radical egalitarian Babeuf and the controversial tribune Marat to the moderate Barnave and Clermont-Tonnerre, from writers and polemicists such as Condorcet, Olympe de Gouges and Manon Roland to the central actors Danton, Mirabeau, Robespierre and Saint-Just, and to Toussaint Louverture, whose revolution unfolded in Saint-Domingue. No further details on the book's structure, length or publisher were given in the source material.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.