Co-Winner of the 2001 Award for Scholarly Distinction, American Historical Association "[An] impressively measured, frank and thoughtful book... Ambitious ... Continuously suggestive and inquiring."
John Dunn, The Times Literary Supplement "[An] enormous and ambitious work... Comparing the French and Russian revolutions, Mayer focuses on how they reflected the struggle between revolutionary ardor and counterrevolutionary resistance, antireligious fervor and religious intransigence. He ... Read morestresses the contingencies affecting revolutionary terror rather than the ideology or psychology of leaders. [Mayer's] examination of conceptual signposts such as revolution, violence, vengeance, and terror is a useful contribution to the history of ideas."
Stanley Hoffman, Foreign Affairs "A courageous and dispassionate reflection on the French and Russian revolutions. This is the first serious attempt to answer the revisionist historians, many of whom insist on viewing the past through the prism of present day requirements. Mayer reminds us that revolutions by their very nature provoke a violent response from those being deprived of power."
Tariq Ali, The Financial Times "Probably the best comparative study of the French and Russian Revolutions to date. Carefully researched and filled with cogent and insightful analysis, it is mandatory reading for all scholars in the field."
J.W. Thacker, History "Mayer's absorbing recapitulation of these ultimately tragic events leaves the reader with the desire to read more about the French and Russian Revolutions: the best compliment any historical work can receive."
Library Journal "There are many ways to read this long, rich and idiosyncratic book. As Mayer warns, objective and value-free study of the subject is impossible ... Mayer traces the road from reform to rage and terror, one of menace and fear, vengeance and countervengeance, exhilaration, self-delusion and mutual carnage. He has wise things to say about the blending of traditional enmities and new war cries, and about the clash between urban imperialism and rural distrust, about the satisfaction of butchering familiar enemies rather than complete strangers, about the rise of informing as a civic virtue... [A] long, rich, and idiosyncratic book."
Eugen Weber, New York Times Book Review "Mayer boasts a long record of intellectual provocation... [Here he] minimizes the rold of both ideology and the personality of the revolutionaries. Violence, he argues, resulted from seismic collisions of old order and new... Indeed, Mayer demonstrates, some of the bloodiest episodes of both revolutions occurred as old animosities between Christians and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, and contending groups in the countryside turned into armed antagonisms."
Corey Robin, Boston Review "[Mayer] insists that contrary to such conservative scolds as Edmund "Burke and Hannah Arendt, violence is not the product of ideological intoxication; it is an objective historical necessity in all polities. Citing an array of hard-headed thinkers from Machiavelli to Hobbes to Carl Schmitt...Mayer affirms that violence has been indispensable to every 'founding act' in history, even in such legalistic polities as our own
a proposition which it is difficult to dispute."
Martin Malia, Los Angeles Times Book Review Show Less