The French Revolution

The American Revolution, though it profoundly stirred the imagination of the French people, was not so cataclysmic, nor so immediate and widespread in its effects as the events that broke out thirteen years later in France. The French Revolution provoked a deep cleavage within society that it later exported to most of Europe. France's Communists hold Robespierre, the instigator of the Terror, as one of their inspirations while Gaxotte, writing in the 1920s, viewed Communism as the logical heir to the Revolution. Many contemporary historians appear far closer to Gaxotte in their more realistic portrayals of those events than to the innumerable Marxist scholars who preceded them.