ABSTRACT
The liberals entertained a lively interest in the French Revolution during the 1905 Revolution. The main reason was that the 1905 Revolution was the first time in Russian history that liberals played a major role in politics. The dream of the French Revolution, Novgorodtsev implied, was responsible for the Reign of Terror, for the Jacobins attempting to reconcile social contradictions with the guillotine's blade. Political utopianism did not die in tandem with the toppling of the Jacobin government, but instead remained a powerful force in the periods that followed the French Revolution. The Russian liberals' cultural visibility was also deceptive. Indeed, liberals and those who were close to them were a dominant force in the intellectual life of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. The main point of the majority of Russian liberals was to convince the Russian monarchy to make concessions to the liberal opposition, and they incorporated images of the French Revolution in their various arguments.
