Stanley Eskin

Such Politics: Eminent Persons of the French Revolution Stanley Eskin

Such Politics is a collection of short biographies of some of the main players of the French Revolution, covering a broad sampling of the political spectrum. Through these it seeks to retell the story of the Revolution for a reasonably educated audience that may have forgotten much and welcomes a fairly sophisticated refresher course. Action and words: these were the axes of the Revolution, and the words were far more prominent than the actions. Much of the time there was little to be done, but always there was much to be said. This is the subject of Such Politics: to ask what, after all, did Robespierre do? What did Mirabeau do? What Lafayette? Who, anyway, was Madame Roland? The unfortunate "rien" that was Louis XVI's diary entry for July 14, 1789, has plagued his memory ever since, but it was equally applicable to his revolutionary cousin, the duc d'Orléans, and to his two brothers. From another perspective, the period of the French Revolution consisted largely of one power vacuum after another, with most of our actors throwing themselves?or being shoved?into it to fill it, almost always unsuccessfully. Such Politics tells the story of the Revolution as an anthology of exciting personal failures.