How long does it take to read The Guillotine and the Cross?
The Guillotine and the Cross by Warren H. Carroll takes about 3 hours 43 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 43 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1986. 203 pages, about 55,825 words.
8 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 6 hours 12 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 43 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 20 minutes |
The page count is the median across 2 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The Guillotine and the Cross follows in the tradition of Warren Caroll's two other popular historical works, 1917: Red Banners, White Mantle and Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness. In Guillotine, Carroll reveals the titanic struggle between good and evil which marked the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. During the Terror, over 40,000 Frenchmen were executed just for holding fast to the Catholic Faith and objecting to the worst excesses of the Committee of Public Safety. The blood lust of the years 1792-1794 staggers the imagination even in the retelling, and the campaign against the Church was as diabolical as it was cruel. Carroll captures the brutality of the period, but not for its own sake. Rather, underneath the brutality he traces the action of grace in the heroism of the Church, the saintliness of her martyrs, and the dramatic conversion of Danton, which led him to a death-battle with the very mechanisms of terror he had done so much to create. Echoing down the centuries in modern man's totalitarian attempts to stamp out God, the French Revolution's impact on our own time is undeniable—and The Guillotine and the Cross is a very timely book.
