Solidarity in Conflict: A Democratic Theory. By Rochelle DuFord. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. 216p. $65.00 cloth.

chance. The failure of the revolution was “the failure of a plan that could not possibly have succeeded” because no permanent foundation for an idealized united people will ever be found (p. 179). From what standpoint can the French Revolution be judged a tragedy rather than a promissory note for future generations? Gauchet is clear. “It has taken two centuries,” but the French have at last broken free of the revolutionary spell. By 2018—notably the year after Emmanuel Macron became president—the means to balance liberty and equality “have been firmly established” (p. 3). Robespierre is written, if not at the end of history, at least at the end of French history. “All these disputes” between revolutionaries and reactionaries “now belong to the past” (p. 2). That is why Gauchet can appreciate the revolution’s tragedy—its necessary impossibility—with solemnity rather than condescension or angst. The man who once diagnosed runaway “social fracture” has at last spotted a fragile liberal consensus: We must live with social division rather than transcending it. That is the standpoint from which Robespierre retroactively embodies tragic necessity. Gauchet has written an extraordinary history of Robespierre because he hopes it is dead history. His writings after 2020 attest he is already less sanguine now. Future dangers, the book warns, will come from social movements that weaponize the rights of man “with a view to perfecting the workings of the existing order” and so unleash, despite themselves and like Robespierre, “a destabilizing potential whose consequences are liable to be every bit as grave as those of the first eruption” (pp. 189–90). It’s true: Young radicals have a habit of surprising even fate itself.