HIST 228: The French Revolution (HC)

This magisterial work is a comparative history of three important revolutions in the Americas: the American Revolution in 1776, the 1791 slave revolt in the French colony that became Haiti, and the prolonged Spanish-American struggle for independence that ended a half century later. Lester Langley describes the movements and events that led to these wars of independence, explaining why revolution took one form in one place and a different form in another. Langley examines the political and social tensions reverberating throughout British, French, and Spanish America, pointing out the characteristics that distinguished each unpheaval from the others: the impact of place or location on the course of revolution; the dynamics of race and color as well as class; the relation between leaders and followers; the strength of counterrevolutionary movements; and, especially, the way that militarization of society during war affected the new governments in the postrevolutionary era.

Here Timothy Tackett tests some of the diverse explanations of the origins of the French Revolution by examining the psychological itineraries of the individuals who launched itthe deputies of the Estates General and the National Assembly. Based on a wide variety of sources, notably the letters and diaries of over a hundred deputies, the book assesses their collective biographies and their cultural and political experience before and after 1789. In the face of the current "revisionist" orthodoxy, it argues that members of the Third Estate differed dramatically from the Nobility in wealth, status, and culture.

What prevented revolution in Britain during the French revolutionary era? How did George III's monarchy withstand republican challenges? This book examines the British monarchy - and the values, beliefs, and images attached to it - during the contentious decade of the 1790s. Through a wide-ranging exploration of loyalist and reform propaganda, newspapers, political caricatures, sermons, and records of prosecution for sedition and treason, Marilyn Morris arrives at a new perspective on the forces of social stability in Britain that prevented revolution and preserved the Crown. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Between 1793 and 1794, thousands of French citizens were imprisoned and hundreds sent to the guillotine by a powerful dictatorship that claimed to be acting in the public interest. Only a few years earlier, revolutionaries had proclaimed a new era of tolerance. How and why did the French Revolution's lofty ideals descend into violence and terror? Timothy Tackett offers a new interpretation, tracing the inexorable emergence of a culture of violence among the political elite buffeted by popular uprisings, pervasive subversion, and foreign invasion. Violence was neither a preplanned strategy nor an ideological imperative but rather the consequence of the Revolutionary process itself, including an initial breakdown in authority, the impact of the popular classes, and a cycle of rumors, denunciations, and panic fed by fear--fear of counterrevolutionary conspiracies, fear of anarchy, fear of oneself becoming the target of vengeance.

Conspiratorial views of events abound even in our modern, rational world. Often such theories serve to explain the inexplicable. Sometimes they are developed for motives of political expediency: it is simpler to see political opponents as conspirators and terrorists, putting them into one convenient basket, than to seek to understand and disentangle the complex motivations of opponents. So it is not surprising to see that just when the French Revolution was creating the modern political world, a constant obsession with conspiracies lay at the heart of the revolutionary conception of politics.

In Cultural Revolutions, Leora Auslander takes a highly original approach to the significance of the political changes wrought by the English Civil War (1642-1651), the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), and the French Revolution (1789-1799). This broadly conceived yet succinct essay advances a new argument: that these three revolutions were not bourgeois in character but were revolutions of culture that led to a transformation of the ways societies could be politicized.

This book reveals that modern democracy was born in secrecy, despite the widespread conviction that transparency was its very essence. Unveiling modern democracy's surprisingly shadowy origins, Carter reshapes our understanding of how government by and for the people emerged during the Age of Revolutions.

The residence of the last three French kings of the ancien regime, Versailles, was also the residence of their wives: Marie-Thérèse, who died there in 1683, Marie Leszcynska, who lived there from 1725 to 1768, and Marie Antoinette who was dauphin in 1770, then queen from 1774 to 1789. Each of these three women left their imprint on Versailles, Marie-Antoinette's being the most readable. The female members of the royal family also occupied an important place at Versailles. Finally, other women illuminated Versailles: a Madame de Maintenon, who had become the secret wife of Louis XIV, Louis XV's numerous favorites, Madame de Mailly, Madame du Barry, Madame de Pompadour, and Marie-Antoinette's friends.

"The twentieth century is usually seen as "the century of total war." But as the historian David Bell argues in this work, the phenomenon actually began much earlier, in the era of muskets, cannons, and sailing ships - in the age of Napoleon. It was during this time, Bell argues, that our modern attitudes toward war were born. Bell exposes the surprising parallels between Napoleon's day and our own - including the way that ambitious "wars of liberation," such as the one in Iraq, can degenerate into gruesome guerilla conflict."--BOOK JACKET.

Challenging classical histories of the French Revolution, this revisionist work argues that any history and analysis of the period must give as much weight to counterrevolution as to revolution itself.

Bergeron, a distinguished French historian with sympathies for theAnnalesschool, has produced an excellent social history of France in the Napoleonic period.... Highly recommended. -- Library Journal

""The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789" is the French Revolution's best known utterance. By 1789, to be sure, England looked proudly back to Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, and a bill of rights, and even the young American Declaration of Independence and the individual states' various declarations and bills of rights preceded the French Declaration. But the French deputies of the National Assembly tried hard, in the words of one of their number, not to receive lessons from others but rather "to give them" to the rest of the world, to proclaim not the rights of Frenchmen, but those "for all times and nations."

This Reader introduces students to a wide range of modern scholarship on the French Revolution. The readings are grouped into five categories: Interpretations and Debates, Socio-Cultural Approaches, Gender in the Public Sphere, Revolutionary Politics, and The Crowd, Terror, and Counter-Terror.

Gary Kates' The French Revolution is a collection of key papers at the forefront of current research on the French Revolution. Kates contributes a clear and thorough introduction which contextualizes the historiographical controversies surrounding the Revolution, weaving them into a sophisticated narrative. Taken together, the pieces challenge orthodox assumptions concerning the origins, development, and long-term historical consequences of the Revolution, including the inevitability of the Terror, subsequent issues for nineteenth century French history, the intellectual connection, the late role of Napoleon, and the feminist dimension.

Democracy is perhaps the defining characteristic of modern Western society, but even as late as the nineteenth century it was often viewed with suspicion by many who saw it as akin to anarchy and mob rule. Taking as its focus the French Revolution, this book explores how the experience in France influenced the emergence of electoral democracy, arguing - contrary to recent revisionist studies - that it was indeed the progenitor of modern representative democracy.

Multiple volumes discussing the nature of French political culture.

From Deficit to Deluge takes stock of shifts in scholarly investigation of the origins of French Revolution. During the last decade, scholars have moved beyond "revisionist" historians of the 1970s, who highlighted the monarchy's degeneration into despotism, to explore related conflicts in the realms of finance, social relations, religion, diplomacy, the Enlightenment, and colonial policy.

A pendant to two well-received books by the same author on the departmental clubs during the early years of the Revolution, this book is the product of thirty years of scholarly study, including archival research in Paris and in more than seventy departments in France. It focuses on the twenty-eight months from May 1793 to August 1795, a period spanning the Federalist Revolt, the Terror, and the Thermidorian Reaction.

This book examines a decisive five-year period in the life of Jacques Pierre Brissot, one of the influential leaders of the French Revolution. An idealistic, somewhat naive journalist who became a member of the national assembly, Brissot championed the new American republic as an example for the French revolutionary government to follow. This book is not intended to serve as a biography of the Girondin leader, but rather to present an examination of his life between 1788, when he visited the United States, and 1793, when he was executed. As such, the narrative necessarily focuses on the events of the revolution as the ever-present background to Brissot's thoughts and actions.

It took the Revolution three days and two nights, from October 14 to 16, 1793, to judge and execute Marie Antoinette. She was condemned in advance. This dramatic confrontation between the former queen of France and her judges in the Liberty Hall of the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris is at the same time a closed session, a dialogue between the deaf and a trial of strength. While being the trial of a queen, it is also that of a foreigner, a woman and a mother.
Emmanuel de Waresquiel recounts the events in the light of previously unpublished sources.

On August 10, 1792, Louis XVI of France abandoned his Paris chateau, walked across the Tuileries gardens, and surrendered his crown. In the tumultuous months that followed, he was tried, found guilty, and sent to the guillotine. When originally published, David Jordan's riveting account of that turbulent time identified key issues, focused attention on a matter once considered only an episode of French history, and reframed the academic debate on the meaning of the most significant trial in French history.

In one of the lengthiest and most controversial trials of the revolutionary decade, Babeuf and his allies defended political liberty and social equality against a regime they accused of tyranny. Mason explains how an elected government's assault on popular democracy and social justice destroyed the republic, and why that matters now.

Telling the story of three overlooked revolutionary thinkers, Liberty in Their Names explores the lives and works of Olympe de Gouges, Sophie de Grouchy and Manon Roland. Sandrine Bergès examines the lives and writings of these trailblazing women philosophers, and their impact on philosophical thought during the French Revolution.

A thought-provoking, authoritative biography of one of history's most maligned rulers. Based in part on new scholarship that has emerged over the past two decades, Hardman's illuminating study describes a highly educated ruler who, though indecisive, possessed sharp political insight and a talent for foreign policy; who often saw the dangers ahead but could not or would not prevent them; and whose great misfortune was to be caught in the violent center of a major turning point in history.

Although she was an obscure princess, Madame Élisabeth had an exceptional destiny. She never married and stayed with her elder brother, Louis XVI, who made her a present of the Montreuil estate on her 19th birthday: a country house only a few hundred metres from the Palace of Versailles.
This matchless horsewoman spent her days pleasantly there, surrounded by her friends who accompanied her on hunting outings or fishing trips. Passionately interested in mathematics and geography, and gifted in drawing, she never really interrupted her studies. Deeply pious, learned and sensible, Madame Élisabeth was also funny, cheerful and incredibly generous to everyone, heaping gifts on her friends and winning the affection of the inhabitants of Montreuil by her many acts of charity.
She showed great courage during the Revolution, refusing to go into exile in order to stay with her family. Imprisoned in the Temple with the royal family, she was guillotined just after reaching the age of thirty. A cult grew up around the memory of Madame Élisabeth which intensified after the Restoration and the return to power of her brothers from 1814 on.

This book reasserts the importance of the French Revolution to an understanding of the nature of modern European politics and social life. Livesey argues that the European model of democracy was created in the Revolution, a model with very specific commitments that differentiate it from Anglo-American liberal democracy.

In 1789 the French colony of Saint Domingue was the wealthiest and most flourishing of the Caribbean slave colonies, its economy based on the forced labor of more than half a million black slaves raided from their African homelands. The revolt of this underclass in 1791-the only successful slave rebellion in history-gained the slaves their freedom and set in motion the colony's struggle for independence as the black republic of Haiti.

The editor brings together letters, descriptions and other documents for a thematic treatment of the queen's life and historiography.

This anthology contains texts written by people who knew Marie Antoinette. The authors include, among others, her official portraitist, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, Louis XV's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the Duke of Choiseul, and some of her closest friends. She is seen in dramatic moments, such as her first dance in the Hall of Mirrors, following the marriage ceremony marriage with Louis XVI, or her obstinacy during interrogations by revolutionaries. Marie Antoinette is charming and irritating, frivolous but also ingenuous and determined, often naive, and sometimes calculating. Includes two letters decrypted in 2016 from Marie-Antoinette to Axel de Fersen: "I love you to madness and (...) never, never can I be a moment without you love. "

This book proposes, for the first time, an in-depth analysis of the Philosophie sociale, published in Paris in 1793 by Moses Dobruska (1753-1794). From Dobruska's ideas, which were widely used between the late eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century without attribution to their author, emerge some of the key concepts of the social sciences as we know them today.

"This volume provides the first comprehensive treatment of regicide in Britain and Europe from the Middle Ages to 1800 (1300-1800). Using case studies of physical assaults on kings and on members of royal families, major changes and continuities in the meaning and nature of monarchy across periods and societies are brought to light. The volume ranges from Gothic kingship to the transformation of monarchy within the emerging modern constitutional context of the American and French Revolutions."--BOOK JACKET.

This is a study of faction, lynching, murder, terror and counter-terror during the French Revolution. It examines factionalism in small towns like Aubagne near Marseille, and how this produced the murders and prison massacres of 1795-8.

The most celebrated general in history, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) has for centuries attracted eminent male writers. Yet in all this time, no definitive portrait of Napoleon has endured, and a mere handful of women have written his biography--a fact that surely would have pleased him. With Napoleon, Ruth Scurr, one of our most eloquent and original historians, emphatically rejects the shibboleth of the "Great Man" theory of history, instead following the dramatic trajectory of Napoleon's life through gardens, parks, and forests.

This new study of Napoleon emphasizes his ties to the French Revolution, his embodiment of its militancy, and his rescue of its legacies. Jordan's work illuminates all aspects of his fabulous career, his views of the Revolution and history, the artists who created and embellished his image, and much of his talk about himself and his achievements.

This exhibition catalog explores the impact Napoleon had on the city both in terms of exercising political power and building a monumental center of power. Subjects range widely to include political, social, art, and architectural history accompanied by nearly 300 illustrations documenting Napoleon's attempts to make Paris the capital of Europe.

The Napoleonic period cannot be interpreted as a single historical 'block'. Bonaparte had many different persona: the Jacobin, the Republican, the reformer of the Consulate, the consolidator of the Empire and the 'liberal' of the Hundred Days. The emphasis here will be on Napoleon as the heir and executor of the French Revolution, rather than on his role as the liquidator of revolutionary ideals.

How did the French Revolutionaries explain, justify, and understand the extraordinary violence of their revolution? In debating this question, historians have looked to a variety of eighteenth-century sources, from Rousseau's writings to Old Regime protest tactics.

Historians of the French Revolution have traditionally emphasised the centrality of violence to revolutionary protest. However, Micah Alpaugh reveals instead the surprising prevalence of non-violent tactics to demonstrate that much of the popular action taken in revolutionary Paris was not in fact violent. Tracing the origins of the political demonstration to the French Revolutionary period, he reveals how Parisian protesters typically tried to avoid violence, conducting campaigns predominantly through peaceful marches, petitions, banquets and mass-meetings, which only rarely escalated to physical force in their stand-offs with authorities. Out of over 750 events, no more than twelve percent appear to have resulted in physical violence at any stage. Rewriting the political history of the people of Paris, Non-Violence and the French Revolution sheds new light on our understanding of Revolutionary France to show that revolutionary sans-culottes played a pivotal role in developing the democratically oriented protest techniques still used today.

"First published in 1980, this book rapidly established itself as the indispensable guide to what brought about the French Revolution, and to the debates of historians about the issue. It combined a full critical account of recent controversies with a fresh interpretation taking stock of where the debate had led. Since 1980 discussion among historians has continued as lively as ever, and has moved in directions scarcely explored at that time."--BOOK JACKET. "This new edition brings the subject up to date with an extensively rewritten survey of the historiography up to the present day, and a revised interpretation modified in the light of research by a new generation of scholars."--BOOK JACKET.

This book is the first comprehensive study of the entire body of Cloots's written works and political actions. By contextualizing them, the book non only rehabilitates Cloots as a political thinker worthy of consideration, but also argues that his political thought constitutes a specific branch of republicanism in the age of Atlantic revolutions: cosmopolitan republicanism.

This collection of essays explore the way portraits intersected with politics during the Revolutionary and Imperial Eras in The United States and France. These essays analyze how artists in the United States and France grappled with how abstract notions of individual liberty, delegated powers, and collective governance can be invested in drawn, painted, printed, or mapped likenesses of high-ranking individuals during the Age of Revolution.

One of the most dramatic images of the French Revolution is of Parisian market women dragging cannons as they marched on Versailles and returned with bread and the king. These market women sold essential foodstuffs to the residents of the capital but, equally important, through their political and economic engagement, held great revolutionary influence.

After 1789, portraiture came to dominate French visual culture because it addressed the central challenge of the Revolution: how to turn subjects into citizens. Revolutionary portraits allowed sitters and artists to appropriate the means of representation, both aesthetic and political, and articulate new forms of selfhood and citizenship, often in astonishingly creative ways. The triumph of revolutionary portraiture also marks a turning point in the history of art, when seriousness of purpose and aesthetic ambition passed from the formulation of historical narratives to the depiction of contemporary individuals.

Marie-Thérèse of Austria (1717-1780) is one of the great figures of her country. In her private letters she reveals herself as a warrior, a wise politician, and a tender but stern mother. But she also is a woman of absolute power, inherited from the Habsburgs, who reigned for forty years. In so doing she had to manage three lives, sometimes in opposition to each other: wife of a beloved husband, a mother of sixteen children, and sovereign of an immense territory.

"This book provides a synthesis of the most recent scholarly literature on the diplomatic, political, social, economic, and cultural history of eighteenth-century and revolutionary France. On the basis of that synthesis and current theoretical writing on major modern revolutions, Bailey Stone argues that the outbreak of the French Revolution, and the dramatic developments of the subsequent ten years, were attributable to the interacting pressures of international and domestic politics on those national leaders attempting to govern France and to modernize its institutions. The book furthermore contends that the revolution of 1789-99, reconceptualized in this fashion, needs to be placed in the larger contexts of "early modern" and "modern" French history and modern "progressive" sociopolitical revolutions. In staking out these positions, Stone offers a unique interpretation of the French Revolution, one that dissents from both the Marxist socioeconomic orthodoxy of earlier times and more recent "political-cultural" analyses."--BOOK JACKET.

"How did the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity evolve out of the corporate structure of the Old Regime in France? This study investigates the evolution of a new ideal in polity in 1789 and the reaction of French society to it." "Concentrating especially on the restructuring of the administration and judiciary, the author argues that the new political structure created by the Constitution of 1791 was the most equitable and participatory national political system in the world. In particular, by the standards of the eighteenth century, the polity enacted by the National Assembly was more inclusive than exclusive, and the Constitution of 1791 was much more of an object of consensus than has been acknowledged. Challenging criticisms of the Assembly and the constitution, it is argued that the achievements of the National Assembly deserve greater recognition than they have traditionally received."--BOOK JACKET.

"Andrew Matthews provides an account of the key developments of the period, from the causes of the French Revolution to the failure of the revolutions of 1848. In chapters that focus on the French Revolution, Napoleon, Restoration France, Metternich's Europe and the 1848 revolutions, he considers the key individuals, groups and political, social and economic pressures that produced so much revolution, repression and war." "This book contains a wide range of visual and written sources and includes an additional document study section, The origins of the French Revolution, 1774-92."--BOOK JACKET.

How objects associated with the American, French, and Haitian revolutions drew diverse people throughout the Atlantic world into debates over revolutionary ideals. Historian Ashli White explores the circulation of material culture during the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, arguing that in the late eighteenth century, radical ideals were contested through objects as well as in texts.

This volume comprises essays by an array of international scholars and examines Robespierre's life and work from three main perspectives: his ideology and vision of the Revolution, his role in the period's tumultous politics, culminating in his year on the Committee of Public Safety in 1793–94, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of the Incorruptible - by historians, dramatists and writers of fiction.

Gauchet shows how Robespierre's personal transition from opposition to governance was itself an expression of the tragedy inherent in a revolution whose own prophetic ideals were impossible to implement. This panoramic book tells the story of how the man most associated with the founding of modern French democracy was also the first tyrant of that democracy, and it offers vital lessons for all democracies about the perpetual danger of tyranny.

These two French historians present an analysis of the creation of Robespierre's myth not only during his lifetime but up through the present age as he continues to be a figure of controversy.

"This is a bold new history of the sans-culottes and the part they played in the French Revolution. It tells for the first time the real story of the name now usually associated with urban violence and popular politics during the revolutionary period. By doing so, it also shows how the politics and economics of the revolution can be combined to form a genuinely historical narrative of its content and course. To explain how an early eighteenth-century salon society joke about breeches and urbanity was transformed into a republican emblem, Sam-Culottes examines contemporary debates about Ciceronian, Cynic, and Cartesian moral philosophy, as well as subjects ranging from music and the origins of government to property and the nature of the human soul. By piecing together this now forgotten story, Michael Sonenscher opens up new perspectives on the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century moral and political philosophy, the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the political history of the French Revolution itself."--BOOK JACKET.

"This concise survey of the French Revolution and Napoleonic period offers an alternative to the long, detailed texts more suited to advanced study. Author Jeremy D. Popkin introduces readers to the major events that comprise the story of the French Revolution, to the different ways in which historians have interpreted them, to the political, social, and cultural origins of the Revolution, and to the latest methodological approaches." "Beginning with the prerevolutionary crisis, Popkin leads readers through the dramatic events that led to the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Along the way, he discusses the effort to create a constitutional regime, the collapse of the new constitution, and the overthrow of the monarchy. This newly revised edition provides expanded discussion of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the king's trial. In addition, A Short History of the French Revolution: explores the Jacobin dictatorship and the Reign of Terror; examines the search for stability under the Directory; features in-depth coverage of Napoleon's Consulate and Empire; and looks at the long-term consequences of the Revolution for France and the world."--BOOK JACKET.

Drawing on archival sources ranging from village council minutes and reports of government spies to investigations into sedition and seditious speech, A Show of Hands for the Republic provides a new account of the politicization of the French peasantry from the early eighteenth century through the Revolution. Jill Maciak Walshaw demonstrates here that villagers were well-informed and outspoken on political issues. In addition, though the political authorities characterized peasants as ignorant and easily manipulated, Walshaw shows that the ruling elite also carefully monitored and suppressed their opinions, revealing a contradiction in the governing practices of the state. By documenting the lively political forum that existed in eighteenth-century rural France, this study challenges not only the bourgeois nature of the public sphere, as defined by Jürgen Habermas, but also the notion that it was predominantly urban.

The advent of the principle of popular sovereignty during the French Revolution inspired an unintended but momentous change in international law. Edward James Kolla explains that between 1789 and 1799, the idea that peoples ought to determine their fates in international affairs, just as they were taking power domestically in France, inspired a series of new and interconnected claims to territory.

Terror brings together a wealth of factual elements, along with recent thinking on the ideological, emotional and tactical dimensions of revolutionary politics, to throw new light on how the phenomenon of terror came to demonise the image and memory of the French Revolution.

"Natural right - the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are "natural" in origin - is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. But during the French Revolution, this tradition was interpreted to justify the most repressive actions of the violent period known as the Terror." "In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the "enemy of the human race" - an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities - to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. But the significance of the natural right did not end with its legal application. Edelstein argues that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls "natural republicanism," which assumed the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he argues that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis's trial until the fall of Robespierre." "A work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period."--BOOK JACKET.

Historian Jon Cowans adds a strong and genuinely original voice to the historical debate over the problem of legitimacy during the Revolution.

"The opening events of the French Revolution have stood as some of the most familiar in modern European history. Traumatic Politics emerges as a fresh voice from the existing historiography of this widely studied course of events. In applying a psychological lens to the classic problem of why the French Revolution's first representative assembly was unable to reach a workable accommodation with King Louis XVI." "Barry Shapiro contends that some of the key political decisions made by the Constituent Assembly were, in large measure, the product of traumatic reactions to the threats to the lives of its members in the summer of 1789. As a result, Assembly policy frequently reflected a preoccupation with what had happened in the past rather than active engagement with present political realities."--BOOK JACKET.

In its fifth year (1793-1794), the French Revolution faced a multifaceted crisis that threatened to overwhelm the Republic. In response the government instituted a revolutionary dictatorship and a "reign of terror," with a Committee of Public Safety at its head. R. R. Palmer's fascinating narrative follows the Committee's deputies individually and collectively, recounting and assessing their tumultuous struggles in Paris and their repressive missions in the provinces.