The Jacobins

The Jacobins were the most famous of the political clubs that fomented the French Revolution. Initially moderate, they are remembered mainly for instituting the Reign of Terror. Crane Brinton's The Jacobins was written in the 1930s, itself a decade of the violent centralization of unchecked political power. Brinton offers not an account of the actions of major figures, but an anatomy of Jacobinism, its membership, beliefs and political platform, the relations between the central Paris club and t