Reviews

Twelve who Ruled

Twelve Who Ruled remains one of the strongest accounts of the Terror, not least because Palmer neither romanticises it nor reduces it to a catalogue of horrors. His prose is readable and often remarkably vivid, and he manages to combine serious scholarship with a narrative that never feels weighed down by it. His liberal outlook is evident, but he is generally fair to the men he studies and resists easy moral judgements. More than eighty years after its publication, the book has inevitably been overtaken in places by later scholarship, but surprisingly little of it feels obsolete. As an introduction to the Committee of Public Safety and the politics of Year II, it is still difficult to better.