Title: Victims, authority, and terror : the parallel deaths of d'Orléans, Custine, Bailly, and Malesherbes /
Authors: Kelly, George Armstrong, 1932-1987.
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press,
Year: 1982
Subjects: Orléans, Louis Philippe Joseph,; Custine, Adam Philippe,; Bailly, Jean Sylvain,; Malesherbes, Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon de,; France History Causes.; France History Biography.
Abstract: "Victims, Authority, and Terror explores the great political divide between the social gropus that favored change in the France of the 1780s and the Jacobin revolutionaries who perpetrated the Terror of 1793-94. This group biography of four significant victims of the Terror, all of whom accepted revolutionary change to varying degress, isolates precisely what the Jacobins despised - the institutional vessels of aristocracy and their symbolic members. George Kelly develops his argument by using the public biographies of four Terror victims, each of whom is symbolic of a form of aristocracy - princes of the blood, the army, academia, and the parlements. Their lives are compared and contrasted with the institutional attitudes of their caste or corporation, both as we understand them today and as they were perceived by the Jacobins. The wealthy and powerful Louis-Philippe-Joseph, Duc d'Orléans, was the king's cousin, but he assiduously cultivated the revolutionary enterprise.
Contents: The terror per differentiam -- Louis-Philippe-Joseph, Duc d'Orléans -- Adam-Philippe, Comte de Custine -- Jean-Sylvain Bailly -- Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbest -- Aristocracy and the republic of virtue.