Book review: The French Revolution - From Enlightenment to Tyranny

The French Revolution was a triumph followed by a tragedy. Michael Duggan discovers some surprises from a seminal work on the period, among them the number of ambitious young lawyers involved    

SOMETIMES books announce their theme to perfection in the very first sentence.

Ian Davidson pulls off this trick in his new history of the French Revolution: “The story of the French Revolution is the story of how a group of educated Frenchmen, many of them lawyers, set about building a new state in France, on new principles based on the rule of law; of how, for a while, they succeeded; and how, after a while, they failed.”