Author: Carla Hesse
In “The People’s Justice,” Carla Hesse offers a sweeping reappraisal of political violence in the French Revolution.
From Charles Dickens to Hannah Arendt, the Revolution of 1789–1799 in France has been depicted as the bloodiest of the 18th-century democratic revolutions.
Through extensive new archival research, Hesse shows that, to the contrary, what set the French Revolution apart was neither the scale nor the intensity of its violence but rather the ubiquity of its political tribunals and the use of novel forms of criminal law and procedure as a means of adjudicating political conflict.
