| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Arno J. Mayer. The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2000. Pp. xvii, 716. $35.00.

Arno J. Mayer undertakes to counter what he sees as an unjustified tendency to stigmatize 1789 and 1917 as disasters whose "human and material costs [were] morally and historically indefensible," a perspective he sees as both a distortion of the past and a denial of the possibility that revolution may be the only way to alter the "unjust and oppressive social order" that still prevails in much of the present-day world (p. 3). No one can accuse Mayer of having tried to elude the difficult questions posed by the two revolutions he analyzes. Rather than emphasizing the positive achievements of revolution, as Isser Woloch has done for the Jacobins in The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s (1994), Mayer hones in exclusively on the issue of revolutionary violence and the chronology of its development. In his view, "there is no revolution without violence and terror," but this violence stems from the "inevitable and unexceptional resistance of the forces and ideas opposed to it, at home and abroad," rather than, as many recent historians of both movements have claimed, from the ideological obsessions of the revolutionaries (p. 4). . . .

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