Desk Revolutionaries

Biancamaria Fontana is Emeritus Professor of the History of Political Ideas at the University of Lausanne. Her books include Montaigne’s Politics (2008) and Germaine de Staël (2016).

In a series of shrewd and finely etched depictions of political figures during the French Directory (1795–9), Biancamaria Fontana’s Desk Revolutionaries deftly rehabilitates the unjustly neglected years that followed the Terror. These backroom boys may have failed to stop the rise of Napoleon, but by their unglamorous commitment to Enlightenment rationalism, bureaucratic paperwork and republican values they showed that the pen was equal to the sword in shaping the long-term legacy of the Revolutionary decade. - Colin Jones, Emeritus Professor of Cultural History, Queen Mary University of London, and author of The Fall of RobespierreThe history of the French Revolution often centres on the Twelve who Ruled, or the dozen members of the Committee of Public Safety who headed the first French Republic between 1793 and 1794. Biancamaria Fontana’s Desk Revolutionaries is the first major study of the Five who Ruled, and offers an original examination of the Executive Directory that governed France between 1795 and 1799. - Michael Sonenscher, Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and author of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Before the DelugeBeautifully written by a leading authority on the politics of the French Revolution, Desk Revolutionaries focuses on its later phase, between the end of the Terror and the coming of Napoleon. Through studies of the leading figures in government as they struggled to make the new republican constitution work, Biancamaria Fontana shows that they achieved underestimated successes as well as the failures highlighted by later Napoleonic propaganda. In fact, the regime established by Napoleon could scarcely have worked without patient and unrewarding groundwork by these men, who had sought in vain to bring a successful end to an unfinished revolution. This is a book that nobody interested in The French Revolution, or the ideals and pitfalls of republicanism in general, should miss. - William Doyle, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Bristol, and author of Napoleon at PeaceDesk Revolutionaries does for the overlooked period of the French Revolutionary Directory (1795–9) what R. R. Palmer’s classic Twelve Who Ruled did for the Terror. Fontana’s riveting group biography of the men who found themselves in power between the guillotining of Robespierre and the coup that brought Napoleon to power shows us ordinary politicians and bureaucrats in extraordinary times. She reconstructs the personal and professional pasts of her cast and explains their contributions to the lasting achievements and disappointments of the Revolution. This is a new, historically and politically astute portrait of a group that has too often been unfairly dismissed or even ridiculed. Fontana has transformed and humanised our understanding of the Directory. - Ruth Scurr, Professor of Politics and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, and author of Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows