Europeans are forever the offspring of Machiavelli, trapped in a historical rollercoaster that can bring us a monarchy-toppling French Revolution and then a few years later Napoleon Bonaparte as emperor.

The French revolution taught us the rights of man.

Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; - the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!

Ninety-three" was the war of Europe against France, and of France against Paris. And what was the Revolution? It was the victory of France over Europe, and of Paris over France. Hence the immensity of that terrible moment?, '93, greater than all the rest of the century

Anything written in the French Revolution, that kind of era, is so poignant.

The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.