Reviews for Saint-Paul-lès-Dax au temps de la Révolution

The average rating for Saint-Paul-lès-Dax au temps de la Révolution based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-01-19 00:00:00 James Husband Such a fascinating figure, such a dry as the desert read. I tried to read this years ago but gave up somewhere in the middle because it was such a slog. Hampson doesn't appear to even try to see his subject as a human being rather than just a collection of speeches and political ideas, leaving the reader with little more sense of Saint-Just's personality than they had going in.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-03-15 00:00:00 Jim Breez Saint-Just is one of the most fascinating figures of the French Rev in my mind ~ and a rather shadowy one ~ but I wasn't thrilled with this biography. Though I generally liked where Hampson was coming from (i.e. S-J was a turkey of the first magnitude) yet by the time I'd finished reading it I felt I didn't know much more about him than I had done after reading Palmer's beautiful "Twelve Who Ruled"; the Twelve being the members of the infamous Committee of Public Safety of 1793-94, and S-J being only one of them, and not the one most focused on. Hampson's style I found a little hard to get into, and rather than seeing S-J as a man ~ a man with friends (or not), relationships, daily interchanges, etc ~ I could only see him in terms of the vague "history" of his political thought and its contradictions, and clearly Hampson thinks very little of his thought altogether, as S-J in this light is seen as fairly changeable an immature. I'm starting another bio of S-J, and already am on my way to taking more notes on it in the first 30 pgs than I had throughout the whole of Hampson's work. To give it the benefit of the doubt, however, this might (italics needed on "might") be a work to return to as an interesting analysis once I feel I have a better grasp on the outline of S-J's life.