Book review: no need for geniuses: revolutionary science in the age of the guillotine by Steve Jones

In No Need for Genuises: Revolutionary Science in the Age of the Guillotine, Steve Jones explores Revolutionary Paris as a ‘city saturated in science’: a flurry of scientific innovation and discovery that seemed to herald the merger of the philosophes and the politiques – until the entrance of the guillotine. While at times hindered by lengthy meanders into the anecdotal, this volume nonetheless provides a glimpse of the intellectual world that gripped France at the time of the Revolution, writes Audrey Borowski.