Megalomaniac and Loser

Norman Hampson

• Beyond the Terror: Essays in French Regional and Social History 1794-1815 edited by Gwynne Lewis and Colin Lucas
  Cambridge, 276 pp, £22.50, October 1983, ISBN 0 521 25114 1
• Chouannerie and Counter-Revolution: Puisaye, the Princes and the British Government in the 1790s by Maurice Hutt
  Cambridge, 630 pp, £60.00, December 1983, ISBN 0 521 22603 1
• Britain and Revolutionary France: Conflict, Subversion and Propaganda edited by Colin Jones
  University of Exeter, 96 pp, £1.75, June 1983, ISBN 0 85989 179 8

Recent news from the French Revolutionary front is mostly about people who, for one reason or another, regarded the whole business as a disaster. No doubt as we approach 1989, things will change, and a chorus of pious commemoration will drown the irreverent voices of those who express their reservations about the quality of the Emperor’s tailors. This is as it should be: historians, however scrupulous and dispassionate, usually derive from the present the incentive to persevere in their arduous exploration of a past whose significance depends to some extent on the angle from which it is illuminated. If they were to stop changing their minds and disagreeing with each other, we should know that they were all dead.