One June 2, 1793, the Girondin faction was expelled from the National Convention, thus paving the way for Maximilien Robespierre's rise to power within the recomposed Committee of Public Safety, soon to become the defacto dictatorship that exercised oversight of the infamous Reign of Terror. The Girondins, up to now the moderate controlling faction of the Convention, were accused by their more radical opponents, the Montagnards, of conspiring to align themselves with conservative and even royalist interests and thus betray the objectives of the Revolution, while the Girondins accused the Montagnards of seeking a bloody dictatorship. The debates were heated but resulted only in a stalemate, while many Montagnards (Robespierre among them) looked on and remained noncommittal. The deadlock was finally resolved by the Insurrection of the sans-culottes, the radicalized common people of the lower classes of Paris, which had begun on May 31st and culminated on June 2, when 80,00 armed men surrounded the Convention and demanded the arrest of the leading Girondins. The sans-culottes were incensed by the moderate faction's inability to come to terms with the exorbitant bread prices, their reluctance to execute Louis XVI and their failure to repulse foreign incursion, and were further incited by thier idol, Jean-Paul Marat, who would soon pay the price for that at the hands of Charlotte Corday, a Girondist sympathizer.

A Place of Greater Safety, though by no means history, is a terrific novelization of the lives of some of biggest players in the Paris Commune and succeeds very well at transporting us into the middle of events.

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