The most important puzzle of the French Revolution has always been how a revolution that had begun in 1789 with a humanitarian, reforming zeal developed into a tough Jacobin regime of constraints on individual liberties and the safety of the person by 1793–94. Was ‘terror’ an inevitable outcome of revolution?

In more recent decades, the resurgence of authoritarian nationalism has posed a different question for historians. Why did a democratic and rights-based revolution ultimately result in the seizure of power in 1799 by a militaristic clique under Napoleon and his one-man rule by 1804? Does revolution inevitably result in dictatorship?

What drove the Revolution onwards through war and terror? The armed menace of counter-revolutionaries inside and outside France or the messianic zeal of revolutionaries themselves? While Popkin does not make his own judgement explicit, he implicitly endorses the ‘force of circumstances’ thesis, quoting the young revolutionary Saint-Just: ‘the force of things has perhaps led us to do things that we did not foresee’. Reflecting on the extraordinary year of ‘terror’ in 1793–94, Popkin concludes that it is unlikely that ‘the basic achievements of the Revolution could have been preserved … without something resembling a revolutionary dictatorship’.

Similarly, Popkin insists that the coup of December 1799 did not inevitably portend one-man rule: Bonaparte and his supporters had no clear or agreed agenda other than the imperatives of political stability and social order. Instead, Napoleon’s path to authoritarian emperor by 1804 was the result of his own megalomania and the exigencies of warfare with Europe.

This is an immensely assured, coherent narrative of the Revolution from someone who has devoted his career to understanding this tumultuous period of triumph and tragedy, from his earliest study of the liberation of the newspaper press after 1789 to later work on the slave uprising on Saint-Domingue in 1790, the abolition of slavery there in 1794, and the triumph of the new nation of Haiti in 1804. Not surprisingly, Popkin writes particularly well of these themes throughout the book, as he does of the attempts of women activists to push the Revolution towards greater recognition of their civic rights.

In contrast, there is hardly a word about peasant women and the many women across all sectors of society who regretted or contested revolutionary reforms to the Church. This is a shortcoming of Popkin’s otherwise thorough overview. The deep confrontation between the secular and civic values of revolutionaries and the claims to authority of the eighteenth-century Catholic Church, so deeply embedded in particular rural regions, was to have deadly and durable consequences in France and elsewhere.

Popkin has produced a more detailed political narrative than my own general history of the Revolution, Liberty or Death, published in 2016. Mine is rather shorter and concentrates far more on provincial France, where ninety-eight per cent of French people lived. He has much more to say than me about slavery and the Caribbean, and about national politics: I have more to say about rural and small-town responses and the social consequences of the Revolution. That’s all a matter of choice, of course.

Napoleon Bonaparte in the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire in Saint-Cloud, François Bouchot (Wikimedia Commons)

He gives us lively and detailed accounts of the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 and of Napoleon’s clumsy ‘Brumaire’ coup d’état of 9 November 1799, but skips over in one page the peasant revolt or ‘Great Fear’ of July–August 1789, the largest popular uprising in French history. Whereas I see the abolition of privilege and the seigneurial system as the most significant social change of the period, he emphasises the abolition of slavery and the experience of ‘the laboratory of modern politics’.

The book’s length perhaps explains the absence of helpful aids to readers such as a chronology or bibliography. The absence in the text of any reference to historians’ debates about the Revolution may be due to his target audience of the educated general public, but it will be a loss to the students who will nonetheless value this book for the precision and reliability of its detail.

Popkin enlivens his account with vivid pen-portraits of individuals who experienced the Revolution firsthand, such as the feisty Parisian glazier Jacques-Louis Ménétra; brilliant and outrageous celebrities such as Mirabeau and Danton; deeply contentious figures such as Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and Robespierre (all sketched with sympathy); and in particular the young friends Jean-Marie Goujon and Pierre-François Tissot.

Goujon, born in 1766, was a clerk in a law office when the Revolution began, but found his calling as a brilliant administrator and Jacobin politician. After the overthrow of Robespierre, he despaired of a future ‘where equality is disregarded, rights violated, and [where] the masses will be completely subservient to the rich, sole masters of the government and of the state’. Arrested after involvement in the last great insurrection of the revolutionary period, in ‘Prairial Year III’ or May 1795, Goujon stabbed himself to death before he could be guillotined. He was perhaps given the knife by his close friend Tissot (born 1768), who had married Goujon’s sister. Tissot survived the Revolution with his core political values intact, became a successful historian and businessman – and was still alive when France next became a republic in 1848.