This is a history of the darker side of the French Revolution. Through an examination of contemporary visual and literary representations of executions, funerals, processions and ceremonies it aims to bring the often horrific events of the time to life. Among the seven real life cases on which the author focuses are: the public autopsy performed on the corpse of Mirabeau; the exhumation and transportation of Voltaire's body to the Pantheon; the public torture, murder and subsequent mutilation of the Princesse de Lamballe; and the agonizingly slow death of Robespierre.

This is a history of the darker side of the French Revolution. Through an examination of contemporary visual and literary representations of executions, funerals, processions and ceremonies it aims to bring the often horrific events of the time to life. Among the seven real life cases on which the author focuses are: the public autopsy performed on the corpse of Mirabeau; the exhumation and transportation of Voltaire's body to the Pantheon; the public torture, murder and subsequent mutilation of the Princesse de Lamballe; and the agonizingly slow death of Robespierre.

This is a remarkable history of the French Revolution told through the study of images of the body as they appeared in the popular literature of the time, showing how these images were at the very center of the metaphoric language used to describe the revolution in progress.
The author draws upon some 2,000 texts, pamphlets, announcements, opinions, accounts, treatises, and journals to exhume the textual reality of the Revolution, the body of its history. The deployment of bodily imagesthe degeneracy of the nobility, the impotence of the king, the herculean strength of the citizenry, the...