As the author notes, this book "concentrates upon events and people rather than ideas". I was reminded of my impressions of high-school history: trains of designated famous people doing random things at specified times and mostly in capital cities.

For example, what was the point of the September Massacres? I don't expect a closely-reasoned argument for mass murder, but I do expect the historian to reconstruct the rationale or the irrationalities relevant to the act. I see one explicit motivation: forgers of revolutionary currency were believed to operate within the prisons. More generally, some prisoners had been jailed as counter-revolutionaries. But a massacres at "a prison hospital for the poor and mad"? I could guess, or give up. If Hibbert can't guess, I'd like to know that.

So I would have liked to see more large-scale structure to the history -- I'll try another book for that. But this is a readable account, and comprehensible to the general reader.

eub 7/96