The Making of a Terrorist

"Alexandre Rousselin's biography explores how the French Revolution inspired an educated Parisian to become a terrorist and then spent the next 45 years dealing with the consequences of his choices. Rousselin became the confidential secretary of Camille Desmoulins and Georges-Jacques Danton before undertaking two missions to Champagne as a commissioner for the Committee of Public Safety in the fall of 1793. His enthusiastic implementation of the Terror left him vulnerable to denunciation as a terrorist after the fall of his patrons. Sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal, he was acquitted, as part of political shift that brought down Maximilien Robespierre. Rousselin spent the next few years in and out of jail as he sought rehabilitation despite ongoing denunciations. The coup d'etat of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799 made him an outsider. Rousselin had to find other means of earning a living and being useful. Acquiring a noble title, he helped to found the liberal standard-bearer Le Constitutionnel the best-selling newspaper in the world in the 1820s where he fought against censorship and for limitations on government authority paving the way for the Revolution of 1830. Although the newspaper made him rich and influential, he retired in 1838 to write history in order to avoid the consequences of his past as a terrorist. His biography explores the role of emotions and institutions across the Age of Revolution for the large generation of survivors of this exceptional trauma: Rousselin's choices show how a revolutionary became a liberal"--