Revolutionaries at work Book

A book both wonderful and frustrating. This book offers a glimpse into a world of remarkable and, to me, utterly unknown history. In the years following the depths of the revolutions Terror, France was wracked with crime and violent reactions to the actions of the "government" in Paris, the so called "White Terror," much of it centered around Lyon, a city that had suffered terribly under the Republic. This is also my introduction to the work of Richard Cobb, whose approach to history here is to focus on the effect of events on the individual, to dissect the generalities of tradition into its parts and to try and understand the currents that escape the common stream. Unfortunately, much of the original material -- criminal court records and related documents; the meat of the story -- is not translated so that pages of detail are only printed in French. The other frustration is that this era of French history is almost undocumented in easily accessible English texts so that a reader wanting more is left with, at best, a difficult quest. Still, I'm delighted to have read what's here, to have had even this little peak at an astonishing time and place and I'll try to use the frustration to encourage me to improve my French reading skills in the new year.