HIST 228: The French Revolution (HC)

This book examines the sudden and irreversible decline of France's Atlantic empire in the Age of Revolution, and shows how three major forces undermined the country's competitive position as an Atlantic commercial power. Those forces are: war, the anti-slavery movement and the French Revolution.

This is a collection of separate essays rather than a cohesive monograph. The authors are opposed to the social history approach used by many contemporary historians.

A bold account of property reform during the French Revolution, arguing that the lofty democratic ideals enshrined by revolutionary leaders were rarely secured in practice--with lasting consequences. As Callaway shows, the property confiscations of Parisian émigrés are a powerful, clarifying lens on the idea of ownership even as it exists today.

Political economy, John Shovlin asserts, can illuminate the social and economic contexts out of which a revolutionary impulse developed in France. Drawing on hundreds of political economic tracts published in France between the 1740s and the early nineteenth century, Shovlin shows how mid-level French elites (magistrates, clerics, lawyers, soldiers, landed gentlemen) sought to balance their interests and values with the need to regenerate a nation that had seemingly entered a period of decline.
Also available as an ebook.

This book uses one of the most infamous examples of monetary innovation, the assignats, a currency initially defined by French revolutionaries as "circulating land" to demonstrate that money is as much a social and political mediator as it is an economic instrument. But the book is also a new history of the French Revolution, one in which radicalization was driven by an ever-widening gap between political ideals and the realities of daily life. Money played a critical role in creating this gulf. Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution restores economics, in the broadest sense, to its rightful place at the heart of the Revolution and hence to that of modern politics.