The French Revolution and The Terror. Current perspectives from social and cultural history

The Terror of the French Revolution has been the subject of many analyses in the historiography and, in many cases, these have served as key elements in interpreting and evaluating the whole process. This work takes the same focus, analysing the intellectual origins of the Revolution, the figure of Robespierre, and the period of The Terror. The approach is one of social and cultural history, and leads us to conclude that determinist, materialist and idealist explanations must be avoided and that specific contexts, contingencies, and individual decisions must be considered as decisive factors; and also to indicate that the authors we analyse present a weakness in their analyses, namely the absence of or scant importance given to the conflict between republican freedom and the right of property, that is, between the Robespierrist Jacobin project and doctrinaire liberalism, in explaining the revolutionary events.