Helen Maria Williams

Provides a first-person account of the author's experiences in Paris during the Reign of Terror, from May 1793 to July 1794, when the government led by Robespierre terrorized the populace with summary arrests and executions.

Helen Maria Williams (1761-1827), English poet, novelist, and chronicler of the French Revolution, here vividly recounts her experiences in France during the Terror. Arrested in the fall of 1793, Williams records with passion and sorrow the degeneration of the Revolution into chaos and murder. She sketches the colorful personalities of her friends and acquaintances (Madame Roland, Charlotte Corday, Georges-Jacques Danton) and enemies (Maximilien Robespierre, Louis-Antoine de St. Just, Jean-Paul Marat), while all the time displaying her enduring optimism that the Revolution would eventually succeed in liberty and justice for people everywhere.

"Helen Maria Williams was a poet, novelist, and radical thinker deeply immersed in the political struggles of the 1790s. Her Letters Written in France is the first and most important of eight volumes chronicling the French Revolution to an England fearful of another civil war. Her twenty-six letters recounting Old Regime tyranny and revolutionary events provide both an apology for the Revolution and a representation of it as a sublime spectacle."--BOOK JACKET.

Book digitized by Google from the library of the University of Michigan and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.