Franklin L. Ford – författare

Professor Ford concentrates on the critical century and a half ushered in by the Peace of Westphalia and brought to a violent close by the French Revolution. This was a period of transition in Strasbourg, as French elements were introduced and combined with German tradition to produce not a national, but a uniquely continental culture. Professor Ford examines in detail the political and economic life of the free Imperial city, the gradual economic and cultural changes under French rule in the early part of the eighteenth century, and the rapid cultural and social alterations during the thirty or forty years before the French Revolution--when Strasbourg became a city more than half catholic, essentially bilingual, and dominated by French rather than by German standards. He has made full use of both French and German sources--published and unpublished--to provide a new interpretation of the life of early modern Europe from the vantage point of a single, strategically located community.

Europe 1780--1830 rapidly established itself as a standard introduction to European history in the age of the French Revolution and its aftermath when it first appeared. Now for the first time the book has been fully revised, updated and expanded. The half-century covered constitutes one of the most complex, eventful and rapidly changing of any in Europe's history. It is a period whose emphasis on conflict and political crisis combines daring innovation with the stubborn persistence of many older attitudes and patterns of human behaviour. Professor Ford explores these tensions throughout; and he gives his readers a powerful sense of the extraordinary energy, in every aspect of human activity, that characterised the time.

Franklin Ford's unprecedented inquiry into assassination traverses civilizations, cultures, religions, and modes of social behavior to locate the common threads of this often mysterious and always shocking phenomenon.Are there similarities between the killings of the Gracchi brothers and the Kennedy brothers? Does the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang have roots in the rightist murder teams of Weimar Germany? Was political context as important to the crucifixion of Jesus as to the death of Martin Luther King in 1968? Are political murders usually produced by elaborate conspiracies, or are they more often the work of lone assassins? What circumstances and impulses motivate an individual to risk his or her own life to kill another for reasons of state? This fast-paced narrative, interspersed with reflections, finds intriguing implications in a multitude of famous cases.From the first known case of political murder, Ehud the Benjamite's stabbing of Eglon, to the recent gunning down of Indira Gandhi by two trusted Sikh bodyguards, the frequency of such acts has varied greatly over time. Mainland Greece suffered few political murders in the violent century of Pericles. The Romans, despite their bloody record under the Empire, avoided assassination for almost four hundred years under the Republic. There was a third such "remission" during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Europe's high Middle Ages, matched by yet another extending from 1650 to 1789. In the interval between, the sixteenth century was an especially violent time in countries such as Scotland, the Netherlands, and France. Assassination and terrorism increased again after 1815, but the nineteenth century did not come close to equaling the twentieth in the number of brutal episodes.Ford's exploration of calculated, personalized assassination draws on history, literature, law, philosophy, sociology, and religion. Addressing the vast array of cases and combing thousands of years of history, he asks most of all whether assassination works. Does it, in even a minority of cases, produce results consistent with the aims of those who attempt it? Can it forestall evil acts or prevent irreparable damage inflicted by misguided leaders? Or is it "bad politics" in every sense of the term? The questions are large ones, and this book offers a sophisticated basis for seeking answers.