HIST 228: The French Revolution (HC)

Offers an authoritative treatment of the first great national, patriotic, revolutionary, and mass army, engaged in what has been called the first total war: that between revolutionary France and the other European powers. Integrates military history with social and political history and depicts the army as a "school for the republic" that by subtle changes after 1795 made way for the Napoleonic regime.

The study of sociability in the long eighteenth century has long been dominated by the example of France. In this innovative collection, we see how a distinctively British model of sociability developed in the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the early nineteenth century through a complex process of appropriation, emulation and resistance to what was happening in France and other parts of Europe.

Examining the social and political history of workers and entrepreneurs engaged in constructing the French capital from 1763-1815, this book argues that Paris construction was a core sector in which innovative practices were symbiotically used by guilds, the state, and enterprises to launch the commercial revolution in France.

Louis Mandrin led a gang of bandits who brazenly smuggled contraband into eighteenth-century France. Michael Kwass brings new life to the legend of this Gallic Robin Hood and the thriving underworld he helped to create. Decades before the storming of the Bastille, surging world trade excited a revolution in consumption that transformed the French kingdom. Contraband exposes the dark side of this early phase of globalization, revealing hidden connections between illicit commerce, criminality, and popular revolt. As French subjects began to crave colonial products, Louis XIV lined the royal coffers by imposing a state monopoly on tobacco from America and an embargo on brilliantly colored calico cloth from India. Vigorous black markets arose through which traffickers fed these exotic goods to eager French consumers. Eventually, Mandrin was captured by French troops and put to death in a brutal public execution intended to demonstrate the king's absolute authority. But the spectacle only cemented Mandrin's status as a rebel folk hero in an age of mounting discontent.

Author Elizabeth Amann shows that in France, England, and Spain, daring dress became a way of taking a stance toward the social and political upheaval of the period. France is the centerpiece of the story, not just because of the significance of the Revolution but also because of the speed with which its politics and fashions shifted. Amann aims to revise our understanding of the origins of modern dandyism and to recover the political context from which it emerged.

Relating changes in the perception of military mortality to broader changes in society's relationship with death, Dying for France highlights essential turning points in the rise and fall of the patriotic ideal of the soldier's death. See chapters on the Old Regime, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.

"In a book that challenges many assumptions about gender and politics in the French Revolution, Suzanne Desan offers an analysis of the ways the Revolution radically redefined the family and its internal dynamics. She shows how revolutionary politics and laws brought about a social revolution within households and created space for thousands of French women and men to reimagine their most intimate relationships. Families negotiated new social practices, including divorce, the reduction of paternal authority, egalitarian inheritance for sons and daughters alike, and the granting of civil rights to illegitimate children. Contrary to arguments that claim the Revolution bound women within a domestic sphere, The Family on Trial maintains that the new civil laws and gender politics offered many women unexpected opportunities to gain power, property, or independence."--BOOK JACKET.

"This latest work from an author known for her contributions to the new cultural history is a daring multidisciplinary investigation of the imaginative foundations of modern politics. "Family romance" was coined by Freud to describe the fantasy of being freed from one's family and belonging to one of higher social standing. Hunt uses the term more broadly, to describe the images of the familial order underlying revolutionary politics. "

This book introduces an interpretation of the Revolution that highlights the key role that religion and sexuality played in determining the shape of the Revolution. These were issues that occupied the minds and helped shape the actions of women and men; from the pornographic pamphlets about queen Marie-Antoinette to the puritanical morality of revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre, from the revolutionary catechisms that children learned and to the anathemas hurled on the Revolution from clandestine priests in the countryside.

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.

Over the course of a decade, the French Revolution grappled with questions about ownership. Punctuated by false starts, contingencies, and unexpected results, this process laid the foundations of the Napoleonic Code and modern notions of property. The revolutionary changes aimed at two fundamental goals: the removal of formal public power from the sphere of property and the excision of property from the realm of sovereignty. It destroyed the conceptual basis of the Old Regime, laid the foundation of France's new constitutional order, and crystallized modern ways of thinking about polities and societies.

"This book studies how doctors responded to - and helped shape - deep-seated fears about nervous degeneracy and population decline in France between 1750 and 1850. it uncovers a rich and far-ranging medical debate in which four generations of hygiene activists used biomedical science to transform the self, sexuality and community in order to regenerate a sick and decaying nation; a programme doctors labelled 'physical and moral hygiene'. Moreover, it is shown how doctors imparted biomedical ideas and language that allowed lay people to make sense of often bewildering socio-political changes, thereby giving them a sense of agency and control over these events."--BOOK JACKET.

The French Revolution brought momentous political, social, and cultural change. Life in Revolutionary France asks how these changes affected everyday lives, in urban and rural areas, and on an international scale. An international cast of distinguished academics and emerging scholars present new research on how people experienced and survived the revolutionary decade, with a particular focus on individual and collective agency as discovered through the archival record, material culture, and the history of emotions.

"What did it mean to live through the French Revolution? This is a new narrative account of the Revolution which probes the lived experience of revolutionary upheaval for the people of France's village and country towns. Peter McPhee draws on a vast range of material to listen to how working people understood, participated in or rejected the Revolution." "He contests the orthodox view of the Revolution as an urban upheaval of which the outcomes were political and ideological. For the working people of country towns, villages and farms, the Revolution had a dramatic impact on daily life: from family relationships and religious practice to the nature of social and economic structures and the environment. Above all, people would never understand themselves or their world in the same way." "The book will be of particular use to undergraduate students and their teachers because of its clear narrative style and illustrations."--BOOK JACKET.

Marriage and Revolution is a double biography of Jean-Marie Roland (1734-1793) and Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, later Madame Roland (1754-1793), leading figures in the French Revolution. Siân Reynolds examines the Roland marriage from its beginnings in an ancien régime mésalliance, opposed by both families, through its close cooperation in the 1780s, to its final phase as a political partnership during the Revolution. Both Roland's actions as minister and Mme Roland's role as a woman close to power were praised and blamed at the time, and the controversies have persisted.

"The history of the French Revolution is too often written from a purely national perspective, with Paris taking the lead and imposing its own agenda and political values on regions of the country that were still not completely assimilated into the nation. Yet, not all initiatives within the Revolution originated in Paris. The National Assembly represented a wide variety of interests and cultures. Indeed, this study argues that France had a number of different experiences of revolution, and that no single national agenda can explain this level of divergence."--BOOK JACKET.

An analysis of the lists of grievances which various classes of French people submitted.

Most historians account for the French Revolution by viewing it in retrospect as the outcome of underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, social tensions, or the influence of Enlightenment thought. But what did Parisians themselves think they were doing--how did they understand their world? What were the motivations and aspirations that guided their actions? Available also in print.

Sharing Freedom traces the development of republicanism from an older elitist theory of freedom into an inclusive theory of emancipation during the French Revolution. Analysing the argumentative logic that led republicans to justify the exclusion of many, this book renews the republican tradition and connects it with the enduring issues of colonialism, immigration, slavery, poverty and gender.

Alfred Cobban's The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution is one of the acknowledged classics of post-war historiography. This 'revisionist' analysis of the French Revolution caused a furore on first publication in 1964, challenging as it did established orthodoxies during the crucial period of the Cold War. A generation later this concise but powerful intervention is now reissued with a new introduction by Gwynne Lewis, providing students with both a context for Cobban's own arguments, and assessing the course of Revolutionary studies in the wake of The Social Interpretation.

"This volume of essays by international scholars examines the formative experiences of men and women - soldiers, citizens and civilians - in the years 1792-1815, drawing particularly on their personal documents and social and cultural practices, to offer a perspective on the wars which is at some distance from broader and more familiar historical narratives."--BOOK JACKET.

In this work Alan Forrest brings together some of the recent research on the Revolutionary army that has been undertaken on both sides of the Atlantic by younger historians, many of whom look to the influential work of Braudel for a model. Forrest places the armies of the Revolution in a broader social and political context by presenting the effects of war and militarization on French society and government in the Revolutionary period.