3/10/2021 French Revolution, 1789–1799 - British and Irish Literature - Oxford Bibliographies

French Revolution, 1789–1799

Nigel Ritchie

LAST MODIFIED: 28 OCTOBER 2020

DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199846719-0169

Introduction

Birthed from national bankruptcy, the French Revolution was a painful political and social transformation that delivered some liberty and
fraternity, if less equality, to its participants. While most would agree that our modern political world originated here, there is less consensus
in understanding the causes or evolution of what political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville described as “a virus of a new and unknown kind.”
The complexity of events, and subsequent layers of interpretation, make studying the French Revolution a daunting prospect for any
historian; and its role as a key reference point for those either inspired or horrified by its outcomes continues to make it a focus of
controversy and debate. A broad consensus concerning its nature—one of class-based conflict—most clearly expressed by French
(Marxist) historians, briefly appeared toward the middle of the 20th century; however, this agreement has now been fatally undermined by
an onslaught of diversified research findings that dissent from the old orthodoxies, most notably in emphasizing political over social or
economic factors. What can be agreed is that the French Revolution was a transformative event. After the fall of the Bastille in July 1789,
French revolutionaries suppressed feudal obligations, abolished the nobility (including titles), reorganized the Catholic Church, introduced
(limited franchise) elections and a republican government, executed the king, and possibly most significantly, started a war that would draw
in most of Europe and reach as far as the Caribbean. Over a quarter of a million people died in civil wars fought within France, hundreds of
thousands more in wars with foreign powers, and 40,000 were executed for political crimes as alleged counterrevolutionaries. By 1799,
France had tried out four different constitutions at home, imposed new ones on conquered territories in Italy, the Netherlands, and
Switzerland, and appeared set on revolutionizing most of Europe, with some countries proudly proclaiming their emancipation by adopting
the tricolor flag of republican France. After a decade of revolutionary upheaval, fifteen years of rule by France’s new leader, the military
dictator and emperor Napoleon Bonaparte restored a degree of stability (and authoritarianism) to France while continuing to impose
revolutionary reforms on the rest of Europe.

General Overviews

For a long time, generations of historians adopted the Revolutionaries’ own view of their actions and portrayed it as a sharp break with the
past. Much recent writing, such as Jones 2002 and Baker, et al. 1987–1994, has been concerned to stress continuity with aspects of the
Old Regime, which ultimately failed to adjust to the long-term structural changes of the French economy and society, while also highlighting
newer agendas focusing on the importance of the struggle for political legitimacy in the ensuing power vacuum. Kates 1997 and Andress
2015 provide invaluable snapshots of the variety of revisionist and post-revisionist thinking on some of these issues, as well as a more
gender-sensitive approach. While the Revolution destroyed a variety of social hierarchies, it accelerated preexisting trends in politics,
culture, economy, consumerism, demography and journalism, whose legacy is covered in some detail in Wolloch 1994. It also bought into
existence a new set of symbols, ideas, and cultural understandings that precluded any return to the past, and, as Gildea 1994 shows, were
instrumental in setting the political debate in France for the next two hundred years. In trying to answer the question of what made the
French Revolution uniquely influential, whether violence was the inevitable price of progress and how its legacy influenced the modern
world, historians have often focused on what they consider to be its main effects: namely, showing how it adopted the structures of
absolutism into its administration to create a modern, centralized state; exposing how religious tensions helped to split society down the
middle, as Aston 2000 shows; or exploring its social and political impact outside France, as Desan, et al. 2013 shows. Another important
aspect, which was initially highlighted in Godechot 1972, and then increasingly by historians tackling the origins and nature of the Terror,
such as in Andress 2005, was recognition of the ever-present dialectical dynamic between Revolution and counterrevolution, which was
drastically accentuated by worsening economic conditions and the onset of internal and external conflict. More recently, Brown 2008

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focuses attention on the latter half of the revolutionary decade to highlight the creation of new state apparatus, which led to the end of this
democratic experiment, as “fatigue” set in, allowing a single leader (or dictator?) to take control and “stabilize” the situation.

Andress, David. The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution. London: Little Brown, 2005.
For many, the violence of the Terror (1793–1794) has always been the French Revolution’s central problem. Was it a product of
circumstance or was it already immanent within revolutionary ideology, as Furet (see Furet 2001, cited under Classic Historiography) would
have us believe? Andress’s rethinking of this difficult period does not try to excuse what happened, only to explain, and to show how many
faced “impossible dilemmas” in polarized circumstances.

Andress, David, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
An invaluable guide to the diverse and ever-expanding field of revolutionary historiography reflecting some of the latest thinking, which
covers a timespan from 1787 (the Assembly of Notables) to 1815 (the Restoration). Almost forty essays from two generations of historians
reflect a considerable diversity of topics and viewpoints, covering origins, the monarchy, the National Assembly, municipal politics, clubs
and factions, religion, insurrection, diplomacy, war, migration, transnationalism, slavery, the Terror, Thermidor. and the Revolution’s legacy.

Aston, Nigel. Religion and Revolution in France, 1780–1804. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
While most other aspects of the French Revolution have been intensively studied, the place of religion, and the conflict between church and
state, have been relatively neglected. Aston’s magisterial study sets out to rectify this omission by surveying the Catholic Church’s role in
France from the late Ancien Régime to the Napoleonic years. What sets his work apart is its broad coverage, synthesizing ambition, and
treatment of Protestants and Jews alongside Catholics during this period of great change.

Baker, Keith Michael, François Furet, Mona Ozouf, and Colin Lucas, eds. The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern
Political Culture. 4 vols. Oxford: Pergamon, 1987–1994.
This series comprises four volumes and four editors: Keith Baker is responsible for Vols. 1 & 4, The Political Culture of the Old Regime &
The Terror; Colin Lucas for Vol. 2, The Political Culture of the French Revolution; and François Furet and Mona Ozouf for Vol. 3, The
Transformation of Political Culture, 1789–1848. Together, these essays by many of the field’s leading practitioners provide a vital snapshot
of current historical (and revisionist) thinking on the French Revolution.

Brown, Howard G. Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2008.
Reversing a historic neglect, some of the most recent scholarship has focused on the period of the Directory and Consulate (1795–1799),
between the fall of Robespierre and the rise of Napoleon. Brown’s authoritative study focuses on the pervasive impact of prolonged
violence and fear on “the fledgling institutions of liberal democracy” by focusing on the attempts of republican regimes from 1795 onward to
restore peace to a country ravaged by four persistent problems: “Catholicism, war, royalism and Jacobinism.”

Desan, Suzanne, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson, eds. The French Revolution in Global Perspective. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2013.
Since the 1990s, the global turn in history has come to dominate the field, especially in the United States, as a new generation of historians
has sought to contextualize national events in international settings. While in some respects, the French Revolution has always been seen
as transnational and “world historical,” few have delved closely into what this might mean, not just for its origins but also for its legacy. This
wide-ranging volume seeks to reframe the revolutionary field of studies by encouraging a more decentered view.

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Gildea, Robert. The Past in French History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.
A history not so much of events than of their perception, Gildea offers a revealing account of how far the act of commemoration, especially
of the Revolution, pervades French public life. By surveying the ways in which various political communities have used competing
constructions of the past to define their identities and legitimate their goals, Gildea shows how history is never fixed, but provides a
continuous dialogue among past, present, and future.

Godechot, Jacques. The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action, 1789–1804. Translated by Salvator Attanasio. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.
Originally published in 1961. Godechot’s timely study filled a glaring lacuna in revolutionary studies, for without a clear understanding of the
counterrevolution, the events of the Revolution make little sense. Divided into two parts, “Doctrine” deals with theory, ranging from Edmund
Burke to François-Réné de Chateaubriand, while “Action” examines its manifestation, from the mass emigration of nobles and officers to
civil war and the White Terror. Above all, Godechot shows how it led to the failure of constitutional government, and ultimately, to military
dictatorship.

Jones, Colin. The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon, 1715–99. London: Allen Lane, 2002
The French did not start to call themselves “The Great Nation” until a few years before this panoramic sweep of 18th-century French history
ends. But if the French inhabited the largest, most populous, prestigious, and (almost) most prosperous country in western Europe, why did
they need a revolution at all? Jones suggests that the absolute monarchy perfected by Louis XIV was incapable of adjusting to longer term
economic and social changes.

Kates, Gary, ed. The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies. London: Routledge, 1997.
Professional historians only started to study the French Revolution after 1898, following the creation of the first chair of the History of the
French Revolution at the Sorbonne. Until then it had largely been the domain of enthusiasts, collectors, philosophers, politicians, and
journalists who collectively helped to shape the public understanding of this momentous event. Bringing together many important essays,
this collection tackles some of the quarrels and debates that have captivated historians since the 1989 bicentennial and overthrow of the
Marxist paradigm.

Wolloch, Isser. The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.
After all the books focusing on the French Revolution’s causes, problems, and discursive qualities, Wolloch’s impressive synthetic study
provides a welcome analysis of its consequences, looking at the institutional transformations, which took place at local, regional, and
national levels, that helped to transform French political and social life. These included political suffrage, municipal government, village life,
education, welfare, civil justice, and the army.

Classic Historiography

Whatever else it did, the French Revolution jump-started modern political philosophy. Contemporaries sensed that something momentous
was happening, and as one (shocking) event succeeded another, writers and politicians struggled to figure out where they stood, what they
endorsed, and what they rejected. The liberalism of Staël 2008 (originally published in 1818) was one response; the conservatism of
Edmund Burke and the communism of “Gracchus” Babeuf were others. For Karl Marx, the bourgeois revolution against the feudal
aristocracy presaged the imminent proletarian revolution against capitalism, and he hoped one day to write a history of it, which never
came, so Jean Jaurès (Jaurès 2015, originally published in 1901–1904) did it for him. Alexis de Tocqueville also intended to write a full
account but only managed to publish the influential first part, Tocqueville 2011 (originally published in 1856), which explores the links
between despotism and democracy, while leaving notes for a second volume. No other event in modern history has left a comparable
legacy, with new political terms, organizations, ideologies, and tactics sprouting up, one after the other. Those in charge appeared to

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stumble from one crisis to another, raising questions about the nature of the revolutionary dynamic that fueled the political process, as
explored in Cobb 1998, which focuses on the details of ordinary people’s lived experience in order to understand extraordinary historic
events. More recently, Furet 2001, Hunt 1984, and Baker 1990 focus on the political, linguistic, and symbolic aspects of the revolutionary
process itself, moving away from the classical social approach to a more revisionist, or post-revisionist, one in spearheading a new
direction (now ending?) for revolutionary studies.

Baker, Keith M. Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Possibly the outstanding work of intellectual history since Furet’s bold challenge, this collection of essays sought to explain how the French
Revolution became thinkable. Analyzing the new politics of contestation and its various “languages,” which transformed the final decades of
Old Regime political culture, from the reign of Louis XV onward, Baker revises our understanding of the burgeoning public sphere in which
the Revolution took shape by focusing on public opinion as a new form of political authority.

Cobb, Richard. The French and Their Revolution. Edited by David Gilmour. London: John Murray, 1998.
Described by one historian as “the Goya of our craft,” this collection of extracts from Cobb’s remarkable body of work, including his
masterpiece, The People’s Armies (1961–1963), reveals a gift for understanding extraordinary events through the details of lived
experiences, as well as the relationship between people and their environments. Collectively, Cobb’s writings vividly demonstrate how little
the French Revolution affected the poorest, and most peripheral, of its participants.

Furet, François. Interpreting the French Revolution. Translated by Elborg Forster. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2001.
Originally published in 1978. Despite its idiosyncratic structure and absence of new material, no book has been more influential in shaping
the revolutionary agenda. Divided in two, the first, more polemical part (“The French Revolution Is Over”) presents the conclusions for
which the second part provides the foundation, seeking to overturn the social Marxist approach and rebuild our understanding. Since much
French politics has defined itself as being either for or against the Revolution, previous histories had tended to prioritize declarations of
political faith over analysis.

Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
An early cornerstone of the revisionist movement, Hunt’s book helped to reframe the debate by shifting the discussion away from “social
origins and outcomes” and toward “the institution of a dramatically new political culture,” which pervaded all aspects of daily life. Divided
into two, the first, more influential section shows how a combination of revolutionary rhetoric, ritual symbolism, and radical imagery—“the
poetics of power”—gave this new culture a vital unity, as it was attempting a total break with the past.

Jaurès, Jean. A Socialist History of the French Revolution. Translated by Mitchell Abidor. London: Pluto, 2015.
Originally published in 1901–1904. This is an abridged version of the four-volume history by the first leader of the French Socialist Party
who believed that the “molten metal” of modern socialism emerged directly from the furnace of the French Revolution. Jaurès’s class-
centered account written under “the triple inspiration of Marx, Michelet and Plutarch,” which ends in 1794 with the fall of Robespierre, kick-
started a tradition of Marxist historiography by laying its methodological foundations and promoting the idea that the economic structure of
society “determines its political forms, social customs and even the general direction of ideas.”

Staël, Germaine de. Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution. Edited by Aurelian Craiutu. Indianapolis, IN:
Liberty Fund, 2008.

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Originally published in 1818. Published posthumously, Staël’s history provided the earliest serious analysis of the French Revolution and
Napoleon as well as a classic statement of liberal thinking, with its final part providing a vigorous defense of constitutional liberty, moderate
government, and the rule of law. One of her main points was to emphasize the importance of public opinion in linking a people to its
leaders, and showing how, when this tie was broken, the political elite could no longer manage public affairs effectively.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. The Ancien Régime and the Revolution. Edited by Jon Elster. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Originally published in 1856. Tocqueville’s impassioned defense of liberty is an acknowledged masterpiece of historical analysis, which
challenged the view that the French Revolution signaled a sudden break with the past as well as providing deep insights into political
psychology based on his own experiences as a minister in the 1848 government. For him, the Revolution marked the acceleration of a
preexisting trend toward increasingly centralized and despotic government. See also The European Revolution, edited and translated by
John Lukacs (New York: Doubleday, 1959).

Origins

The question of why there was a French Revolution, or whether it was inevitable, will not go away, and after two centuries of controversy
and debate it has still not been satisfactorily resolved. This is not just a perennial problem of fascination to revolutionary scholars but to
anyone interested in the origins of the modern world. Toward the middle of the 20th century, a consensus, if not an orthodoxy, appeared to
be forming, most clearly expressed in Lefebvre 1989 (originally published in 1939), which placed the classical, social interpretation
foremost. However, since the 1960s all this changed as Alfred Cobban and George V. Taylor led frontal attacks on its edifice while François
Furet followed in their wake. In its place, other interpretations rushed in, of which one of the most notable is Chartier 1991, which pushed
for a more cultural, and longue durée, approach by asking how people came to acquire “habits of free judgement.” All this is brilliantly
summarized in Doyle 1999, which also provides a new (revisionist) framework for explaining the breakdown of the Old Regime and ensuing
struggle for power. More recently, Kaiser and van Kley 2011 presents a stimulating overview of some of the most recent thinking on the
subject, moving beyond social and revisionist approaches to explore the series of interrelated conflicts that helped to transform a long-
standing crisis into a revolution.

Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1991.
Chartier’s contribution formed part of a wider shift toward intellectual history by exploring the connection between the Enlightenment and
the French Revolution, in particular the former’s contribution to the political explosion of 1789. After briskly disposing of the thesis that the
“critical spirit” of the philosophes was largely responsible, he proposes instead that the Revolution was the culmination of a century-long
process of desacralization and creation of a new “public sphere” where “people acquired the habits of free judgement.”

Doyle, William. Origins of the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Originally published in 1980. This updated edition of Doyle’s classic text, which incorporates and critically appraises a new generation of
research and interpretation, after providing an overview of the main historiographical trends since 1939, is still the best introduction to the
problem of what caused the Revolution. In contrast to Lefebvre 1989, Doyle emphasizes the political nature of the crisis of the Old Regime,
arguing that neither aristocracy nor bourgeoisie was unified in defense of clearly defined interests, leading to the emergence of a mixed
elite.

Kaiser, Thomas E., and Dale K. van Kley, eds. From Deficit to Deluge: The Origins of the French Revolution. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2011.
Taking advantage of some of the most recent research, this collection moves beyond social and revisionist approaches to explore the
interrelation of conflicts in the realms of finance, social relations, religion, diplomacy, and colonial policy, seeking to explain how long-

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standing Old Regime financial and structural problems caused a major fiscal crisis to metastasize into a revolution.

Lefebvre, Georges. The Coming of the French Revolution. Translated by R. R. Palmer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1989.
Originally published in 1939. Possibly still the most influential social interpretation, Lefebvre’s version of the French Revolution is based on
a Marxist view of society divided into antagonistic social classes. According to this reading, it was the outcome of a long process of
fundamental social change in which an increasingly assertive bourgeoisie, linked to the growing capitalist economy, displaced an
aristocracy still rooted in the old feudal system. By 1789, all the classes were in turmoil, and each rose up separately to express their
grievances.

Narrative Histories

For more literary minded historians, starting with Louis Adolphe Thiers, who with his ten-volume Histoire de la Révolution française (1823–
1827) made both his name and his fortune from it, the magnitude and excitement of the French Revolution has proved to be the gift that
just keeps giving. For many in the English-speaking world, Carlyle 1989 (originally published in 1837) not only laid down the marker, but
stamped the author’s empurpled vision of blood and thunder, full of allegory and visual motifs, upon an enthusiastic public while casting a
baleful influence not only upon 19th-century literature but the entire anglophone imagination. Lamartine 2014 (originally published in 1847),
focuses on a brief period of the French Revolution and sets a template for future portrayals of “good” Girondins versus “bad” Jacobins. This
work was followed by Michelet 2019 (originally published in 1847–1853), a literary, seven-volume epic, that sets out to rescue the “people”
from the opprobrium of history by blaming their worst excesses on irresponsible demagogues and to vindicate republicanism from its recent
political setbacks. Taine 2002 (originally published in 1878–1883), is still worth reading for its undeniable emotive power. More recently,
ambitious panoramic histories can be found in Schama 1989 and McPhee 2016. But where Schama follows in the footsteps of Carlyle and
Furet, enlivening his revisionism with epic storytelling, McPhee presents a more nuanced account by portraying events in terms of the
choices made by those who had to live through them. As one leading deputy (Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès) replied, on being asked what he
had done during the Terror, “J’ai vécu” (“I survived”).

Carlyle, Thomas. The French Revolution. 3 vols. London: Folio Society, 1989.
Originally published in 1837. Carlyle’s idiosyncratic and impressionistic history captures the Victorian imagination by presenting a powerfully
vivid, occasionally hallucinatory, account of events. More of an experiment in literary form, combining poetic myth with fact, his first version
was accidentally incinerated by the philosopher J. S. Mill’s housekeeper, and the effort of completing it a second time nearly broke him. Its
apocalyptic visions of popular violence, although he was generally sympathetic to the people, had a strong influence on Dickens (1859).

Lamartine, Alphonse de. Histoire des Girondins. 2 vols. Paris: Robert Laffont, 2014.
Originally published in 1847. An overnight bestseller, despite its original eight volumes, Lamartine’s history set the template for the (good)
Girondin versus (bad) Jacobin or “Montagnard” (named after where they sat in the Convention) version of the French Revolution. Compare
with the opposing perspective provided by Alphonse Esquiros, Histoire des Montagnards, 2 vols. (Paris: V. Lecou, 1847).

McPhee, Peter. Liberty or Death: The French Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.
McPhee’s epic overview is wider in scope than many others, reaching out both globally to analyze the French Revolution’s origins and
ramifications and nationally to examine the tension between the metropole and the regions, while also considering its impact on ordinary
people’s lives. From the outset, he poses two key questions: what motivated people, including women and the poor, to take sides for or
against the Revolution, and how did people (not just the French) experience it?

Michelet, Jules. Histoire de la Révolution française. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 2019.

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Originally published in 1847–1853. Described by Furet as “the cornerstone of all revolutionary historiography,” Michelet’s seven-volume
history, which ends in 1794, was required reading in schools under the Third Republic (1870–1940). It provided both a vindication of
republican ideology and a glorification of France’s providential leadership of (revolutionary) modernity. Today, it is more prized for its colorful
poetic qualities and mythologization of le peuple— “The nation had miraculous powers! A blow from its sword meant not a wound, but a
healing,” etc.—than its historical merit.

Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. London: Viking, 1989.
Despite its many faults—a blatantly revisionist agenda, indiscriminate use of sources, lack of clear analysis, and a focus on nobles over
revolutionaries—this specially commissioned narrative history is a gripping page-turner. Less a chronicle than a series of set-pieces (the
Fall of the Bastille, the October Days. etc.) connected by a tissue of stories linking its main characters, Schama’s palpable revulsion at the
French Revolution’s outbursts of violence is underscored by his conviction that ultimately it accomplished very little.

Taine, Hippolyte. The French Revolution. 3 vols. Translated by John Durand. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2002.
Originally published in 1878–1883. Written in the traumatic aftermath of the 1871 Commune, as part of a larger five-volume history, Les
Origines de la France Contemporaine, and reflecting a strong anti-revolutionary bias, Taine’s vivid account is truffled with vivid incidents
from unreliable sources. It constituted an ambitious, albeit programmatic attempt to understand France’s national malaise of political
instability, locating its origins in the Ancien Régime and concluding that violent passions were seething just below the surface, ready to
erupt whenever the constraints of firm government were relaxed. Alfred Cobban has described Taine as the “the most influential and
stimulating, the most dazzling, in a word, perhaps the greatest of bad historians” (p. 331) (Alfred Cobban, “Hippolyte Taine, Historian of the
French Revolution,” History 53.179 [1968]: 331–341).

Primary Resources, including Online, Speeches, Documents, and Newspapers

While the Paris National and Police Archives are often the first port of call for any aspiring revolutionary historian—still yielding their secrets
after all these years to diligent researchers asking the right questions—the following collections of source material provide an excellent
introduction to the field. As with all primary material, caveat utilitor, for some sources are more equal than others and the context of their
production should always be carefully considered. Good anthologies of translated documents can be found in Censer and Hunt 2001,
which also includes images and a dedicated website; Beik 1970, which includes a wide selection of important political, administrative, and
personal documents relating to key events from 1787 to 1799; and Wickham Legg 1905, which performs a similar, more specialized
overview covering the first three years of the National (Constituent) Assembly (1789–1791). For those seeking more focused pickings,
Walter 1968 provides edited transcripts from the Revolutionary Tribunal’s principal trials after 1793, including those of Marie-Antoinette and
Georges Danton, while Godineau 1998 reconstructs the lives of poor parisiennes with the help of police and other, archives. Further
investigation can be continued online with the help of two excellent Franco-American digital resources. Where the ARTFL (ARTFL Project:
American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language) places several key, searchable resources online, such as the
Encyclopédie, Dictionnaires d’autrefois and Marat’s newspapers, the French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA) provides an invaluable
digitized archive of the Archives Parlementaires as well as an extensive collection of revolutionary imagery. Gilchrist and Murray 1971
provides an excellent and varied selection of newspaper articles from across the political spectrum, while Chantreau 1790 provides a
contemporary, and often satirical, view of the rapid evolution (and abuse) of the French language within a dynamic revolutionary context.

The ARTFL Project: American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language.
Formed in 1982 as a result of a collaboration between the University of Chicago and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
(CNRS), the ARTFL project provides online access to North America’s largest collection of digitized, keyword-searchable French resources.
These include the Newberry French Revolution collection, a complete set of Marat’s Ami du peuple, the Diderot and d’Alembert
Encyclopédie, and the Dictionnaires d’autrefois for words no longer in active use or whose meaning has changed.

Beik, Paul H., ed. The French Revolution: Selected Documents. New York: Macmillan, 1970.
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Beik’s anthology is probably the single most useful translated collection of key documents and speeches, spanning from the Parlement
disputes of 1787 to Madame de Staël’s thoughts on dictatorship in 1799. It includes many of the key historical documents, such as abbé
Sieyès “What is the Third Estate,” the National Assembly’s “Declaration of the Rights of Man” (both 1789), and Robespierre’s “Report on
the Principles of Political Morality” (1794).

Censer, Jack, and Lynn Hunt. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution. University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2001.
Excellent educational resource that combines commentated primary materials spanning from 1689 to 1814, ranging from the aftershock of
the Damiens Affair to political clubs, slavery, and Napoleon’s Civil Code. Includes a dedicated website offering a multidimensional,
multimedia view of the Revolution through image, song, and text. The accompanying CD-ROM contains over 300 images and 600 primary
documents.

Chantreau, Pierre-Nicolas. Dictionnaire national et anecdotique pour servir à l’intelligence des mots. Paris, 1790.
The first of several such revolutionary dictionaries, Chantreau presents a semi-satirical look at the rapid evolution of the meanings of
commonly used (and abused) words, such as patrie and patriote, through a series of alphabetical commentaries on their referents and
connotations. For example, in 1789 patriote had two meanings: a person who loves the country where he was born and a person who
seeks to work for that country’s common good by means of liberty; however, the latter meaning rapidly came to replace the former,
becoming synonymous with révolutionnaire.

French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA).

A collaboration between Stanford University and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The FRDA includes a complete, searchable,
chronological archive of priceless revolutionary imagery and caricatures as well as the comprehensive Archives Parlementaires, Première
Série: 1787–99, edited by Jérôme Mavidal and Emile Laurent. This is a lively, retrospectively compiled—so not always accurate—collection
of parliamentary speeches and business.

Gilchrist, J. T., and W. J. Murray, eds. The Press in the French Revolution: A Selection of Documents Taken from the Press of the
Revolution for the Years 1789–1794. London: Ginn, 1971.
A fascinating and balanced compendium of translated and contextualized extracts from a variety of royalist, radical, and moderate
newspapers, including the Ami du Roi, the Actes des Apôtres, the Mercure de France, the Gazette de Paris, the Courrier de Provence, the
Feuille villageoise, the Ami du peuple, the Révolutions de France et de Brabant, the Revolutions de Paris, the Patriote français, and the
Père Duchêne.

Godineau, Dominique, ed. The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution. Translated by Katherine Streip. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998.
Originally published in 1988. Godineau’s archive-based reconstruction of the lives of poor parisiennes during the Revolution reveals
through analysis of numerous documents, many from police interrogations, how working-class women found time to participate in
assemblies, gatherings, and demonstrations while struggling to make ends meet. In the process, Godineau identifies three main groups:
militant activists, those claiming their citizen rights, and those provoked by food shortages.

Walter, Gérard, ed. Actes du tribunal révolutionnaire. Paris: Mercure de France, 1968.
Edited reconstruction from the transcripts of the most important revolutionary trials from 1793 to 1794, including those of Charlotte Corday,
Marie-Antoinette, the Girondins, Madame Roland, Jean-Sylvain Bailly, the Hébertistes, and Danton. For further historical context, combine
with Henri Wallon, Histoire du Tribunal Révolutionnaire de Paris. 6 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1880–1882).

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Wickham Legg, L. G., ed. Select Documents Illustrative of the History of the French Revolution: The Constituent Assembly. 2
vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1905.
Outstanding collection of original (untranslated) documents, which spans the period from May 1789 to September 1791 to provide a
detailed account of the first National Assembly. What makes it invaluable are the many helpful extras, such as annotations, maps,
eyewitness accounts, newspaper extracts, and an appendix detailing many of the new laws, including the 1791 constitution. For a more
comprehensive selection extending to 1795, see John Harman and J. M. Roberts, eds., French Revolution Documents, 2 vols. (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1966–1973).

Memoirs and Eyewitness Accounts

To fully immerse oneself into the feel of a historical period, there is nothing quite like plunging into the vividly re-created present of memoirs
and eyewitness accounts. Two excellent collections—Cobb and Jones 1988 and Burley 1989—do just this, placing us squarely within the
action, as letters, reports, and other documents from participants, visitors, and foreign dignitaries provide both a birds-eye view, and a more
detached analysis, of events as they were happening. Brétonne 1788–1794 and Chateaubriand 2018 provide two very different but
compelling views of the Revolution, one from the street level and the other from the lofty aristocratic heights. Memoirs from leading
Girondins, such as Brissot de Warville 1911 and Roland 1989, provide a fascinating, if biased, account of the life and times of two of the
French Revolution’s active participants, including their rich and varied prerevolutionary lives.

Brétonne, Restif de la. Les nuits de Paris, ou Le Spectateur-nocturne. 16 vols. Paris: s.n., 1788–1794.
This sprawling work paints a vivid and moralistic description of life among the Parisian lower classes. The last two volumes, covering the
years 1789 to 1793—often referred to as Les nuits révolutionnaires—provide a rare eyewitness account of street-level activity during these
turbulent times, when Brétonne would compulsively walk the streets of Paris after dark and convey his adventures as a kind of reportage,
or history on the hoof, welding together two disparate genres of promenade and témoignage.

Brissot de Warville, Jacques-Pierre. Mémoires, 1754–1793. Edited by Claude Perroud. 3 vols. Paris: A. Picard, 1911.
Brissot’s self-serving memoir, composed while on the run, after being expelled from the Convention along with his Girondin colleagues,
offers a fascinating account of a prerevolutionary, entrepreneurial “Grub Street” life, as well as a privileged view of the French Revolution
itself. Touching on numerous Enlightenment themes, he describes his relations with a host of memorable characters, including the
polemicist-lawyer Simon-Nicholas Linguet, scientist and fellow journalist-politician Jean-Paul Marat, and Madame Du Barry, Louis XV’s
mistress.

Burley, Peter, ed. Witness to the Revolution: British and American Despatches from France, 1788–94. London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1989.
Burley’s collection includes extracts from Travels in France (1793) by Arthur Young, an agricultural reformer and archetypal Englishman
abroad during 1788–1790; the correspondence of William August Miles, a British agent and government pamphleteer; the secret agent
Colonel Monro; the British ambassadors, the Duke of Dorset and the Duke of Sutherland; and the correspondence of American diplomats
William Short, Gouverneur Morris, and Thomas Jefferson (later president).

Chateaubriand, François-René de. Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1768–1800. Translated by Alex Andriesse. New York: New
York Review of Books, 2018.
Originally published in 1849–1850. Written over four decades, Chateaubriand’s beautifully written Mémoires d’outre-tombe has drawn the
admiration of writers ranging from Charles Baudelaire to W. G. Sebald and Paul Auster, who called it “the best autobiography ever written.”

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In these early volumes, Chateaubriand looks back on his youth, his aristocratic family, and the rumblings of revolution as he witnesses the
first heads carried on pikes through the streets of Paris. It ends with his return to France after seven years of exile in England.

Cobb, Richard, and Colin Jones, eds. The French Revolution: Voices from a Momentous Epoch; 1789–1795. London: Simon &
Schuster, 1988.
A lavishly illustrated anthology that presents translated extracts from a variety of sources, including decrees, pamphlets, memoirs, and
letters, opposite a contextualized account of the events they are describing or responding to. Combine with Peter Vansittart’s Voices of the
Revolution (London: Collins, 1989), an entertaining anthology of shorter, translated extracts drawn from newspapers, memoirs, aphorisms,
diaries, letters, notes, poems, novels, and the writings of historians.

Roland, Marie-Jeanne (“Manon”). The Memoirs of Madame Roland: A Heroine of the French Revolution. Translated and abridged
by Evelyn Shuckburgh. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1989.
Originally published in 1796. “Oh liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!” With these words, spoken just before her execution in
November 1793, Madame Roland inscribed herself into a history whose outlines she had taken great care to sketch out in her Memoirs,
subtitled “Appeal to impartial posterity.” Written in prison, the first part tells the disillusioned tale of a revolution turned sour, while the
second recounts her idyllic childhood in Paris, producing a portrait of exemplary female virtue that succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.

Reference

For newcomers, the French Revolution can often appear to be a bewildering and dizzying array of dates, names, events, institutions,
edicts, and new terminology, succeeding one another with little obvious rhyme or reason. These four indispensable works should help to
provide a solid framework on which to hang much of this information. Where Favier, et al. 1989 presents a detailed, week-by-week
snapshot of political and cultural events, Jones 2013 provides the nitty gritty of revolutionary facts, encompassing chronology, government,
new institutions, international relations, society, economy, religion, and culture, along with a useful glossary and series of mini-biographies.
Furet and Ozouf 1989 provides a more considered analysis of key aspects of the Revolution under the categories of “Events,” “Actors,”
“Institutions,” “Ideas,” and “Historians.” For those more visually inclined, Bonin and Langlois 1987–2000 presents eleven volumes of maps
to cover every imaginable permutation of prerevolutionary and revolutionary change, including literacy rates, attitudes to monarchy and
religion, and the sociology of sans-culottes.

Bonin, Serge, and Claude Langlois, eds. Atlas de la Révolution française. 11 vols. Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en
Sciences Sociales, 1987–2000.
This multivolume set of themed maps covering the period 1770–1820 devotes each volume to a different topic, including “Economy,”
“Religion,” “Politics,” “Education,” “Demography,” “Bureaucracy,” “War,” “Medicine,” and “Paris.” An excellent single-volume alternative,
which ranges from graphic representations of the prerevolutionary colonial trade to the Latin American revolutions of the 1820s, is available
with Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire and Silvia Marzagli, Atlas de la Révolution française (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2016).

Favier, Jean, Robert Maillard, Thomas André, et al., eds. Chronicle of the French Revolution, 1789–1799. Harlow, UK: Longman
Chronicle, 1989.
Detailed month-by-month account of the Revolution produced under the supervision of the director of the National Archives, this chronicle
is filled with fascinating snippets of information that might otherwise have fallen through the cracks of more conventional histories. For
example, in January 1791, the Paris Commune issued a municipal decree banning masquerades and requiring the police to be informed of
anyone wishing to hold a public ball in the capital.

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Furet, François, and Mona Ozouf, eds. A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Originally published in five volumes in 1988, Furet and Ozouf present a useful collection of concise, themed essays covering “Events,”
“Actors,” “Institutions and Creations,” “Ideas,” and “Historians of the French Revolution.” Contributors alongside Furet and Ozouf, include
Marcel Gauchet, Keith Baker, Bronislaw Bazcko, David Bien, Gaile Bossenga, Patrice Higonnet, Denis Richet, and Patrice Gueniffey.

Jones, Colin. The Longman Companion to the French Revolution. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Originally published in 1988. This invaluable handbook covers most aspects of Revolutionary France, with sections on chronology, the
framework of government (1787–1795), the institutions of revolutionary government (1792–1795), international relations and war, politics,
administration, justice and finance, religion and ideas, and society and economy as well as maps, tables, and selected mini-biographies.

The Public Sphere: Publishing, the Press, and Popular Culture

Until recently, historians have struggled to assess the influence of the press on the French Revolution. While Carlyle described it as a great
historical force, recalling, “A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, [that] springs up; increases and multiplies; irrepressible, incalculable,” (Vol. I, p.
223, cited under Narrative Histories) he offered no view on whether the press merely accelerated the flow of ideas or was capable of
initiating them too. For a long while, the dominant social interpretation relegated the press to a secondary role. But the rise of a more
discursive approach with its greater emphasis on rhetoric and “communicative action” has provided a welcome platform for a dynamic
reevaluation of its importance, alongside other printed media, in the dissemination of radical ideas. Impetus for this renewed interest can be
traced to several quarters, including Ozouf 1988, a pathbreaking work on the symbolic importance of festivals; Darnton 1982, a study of the
literary underground; and Hunt 1984 (cited under Classic Historiography), a study of the visual imagery of political culture. Since the
publication of these works, Maza 1993, Roberts 1999, and Lilti 2017 have taken up the baton and extended this analysis into other fields,
including legal memoirs, visual culture, and celebrity. The springboard for many of these studies has been Habermas 2014, which helped
focus attention on the importance of public opinion and the role played by print in circulating new ideas throughout the Old Regime public
sphere of salons, cafés, and learned societies. However, while it soon became a commonplace that the press helped to create the
necessary conditions for the rise of mass politics during the 19th century, little had been written about its impact on the revolutionary public
sphere, for which Popkin 1990; Chisick, et al. 1991; and Walton 2009 all provide welcome correctives. Hesse 2001 provides another in
arguing that the expansion of publishing technology during the Revolution helped to accelerate an Enlightenment trend toward greater
feminization of the public sphere.

Chisick, Harvey, Ilana Zinguer, and Ouzi Elyada, eds. The Press in the French Revolution. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991.
Following the resurgence of interest in the importance of public opinion, this rich and varied collection of almost thirty papers from many of
the leading names in the field goes a long way toward making the case for studying the press as a vital component of the revolutionary
dynamic. Following Furet’s reinterpretation of the French Revolution as a power struggle over language within the new political culture, the
press has become a fecund source for studying the seeds of that conflict.

Darnton, Robert. The Literary Underground of the Old Regime. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Darnton’s influential collection of essays provides a fine example of how to resuscitate vanished worlds from dusty archives—here, those
involved in the illegal book trade—while setting new agendas, such as the “Grub Street” thesis of Revolution. According to this view, a
group of unsuccessful, impoverished, and resentful hack writers were motivated to take their revenge on the Old Regime: “it was from such
visceral hatred . . . that the extreme Jacobin Revolution found its authentic voice” (p. 40).

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.
Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014.
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Originally published in 1962. Written almost sixty years ago, yet belatedly discovered by the anglophone world, Habermas’s influential study
remains the most frequently cited source on the social history of the “bourgeois public sphere,” defined as the space where “private” people
joined together to form a critical “public.” In particular, it helped to focus attention on the importance of public opinion and the role played by
print in circulating new ideas throughout the emerging 18th-century public sphere of salons, cafés, and learned societies.

Hesse, Carla. The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Hesse moves the study of the French Revolution’s gender politics in a new direction by displacing the focus from whether it was good for
women to how well they exploited its opportunities. Demonstrating that the rapid expansion of publishing had catapulted women into the
public sphere by allowing them to engage in literary and political debate, Hesse challenged previous feminist scholarship, which had
argued that revolutionary republicanism was inherently masculine and had reversed this trend toward greater feminization of the public
sphere.

Lilti, Antoine. The Invention of Celebrity. Translated by Lynn Jefress. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017.
Originally published in 2014. Lilti reveals that the notion of celebrity, frequently perceived as a product of modern Western culture—and
reaching its apogee with the hysterical response to the death of Lady Di—has much older roots, stretching back into the Enlightenment.
This was made possible by important developments in technology and culture long before the tabloid age, namely the mass production of
print and images, the rise of sentimental fiction, and the transfer of empathy from fictional characters onto those in the headlines.

Maza, Sara. Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993.
Between 1770 and 1789, a succession of well-publicized cases involving charges of fraud, blackmail, and sexual misconduct riveted the
attention of the French public through the publication of uncensored and sentimentalized mémoires judiciaires. The best known of these
causes célèbres was the “Diamond Necklace Affair,” but as Maza shows, publication of these private scandals often touched on wider
political issues, such as aristocratic injustice, and they had a decisive impact on politicizing the public sphere in the decades leading up to
the Revolution.

Ozouf, Mona. Festivals and the French Revolution. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Originally published in 1976. Since its publication, Ozouf’s book has paved the way for a reconsideration of the importance of revolutionary
iconography and symbolism. From the early provincial festivals full of hope and reconciliation to those of the Federation, commemorating
the fall of the Bastille, the planting of the tree of liberty, and the short-lived cult of the Supreme Being, Ozouf’s groundbreaking cultural
analysis was the first to focus on festivals as playing a vital twin role in both public celebration and instruction.

Popkin, Jeremy D. Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789–99. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990.
Popkin’s sweeping survey of the explosion of press that took place after 1789 views it as a vital aspect of revolutionary political culture. In
particular, he challenges Hunt 1984 (cited under Classic Historiography) for separating the message from the medium and claiming no
distinction for journalism over other media. He suggests instead that the press served as an indispensable indicator of public opinion and
was vital in legitimating the new political culture as well as helping to create new conflicts.

Roberts, Warren. Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Louis Prieur, Revolutionary Artists: The Public, the Populace, and Images of the
French Revolution. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.
Roberts’s comparative study of the major artist, Jacques-Louis David, and the minor illustrator, Jean-Louis Prieur, tracks their parallel
revolutionary careers, providing valuable insight into the relationship between art and politics. Although they were both members of the

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Jacobin Club, the two artists had little in common, for while David re-created great historical moments in an academic style, Prieur’s vivid
tableaux are the closest we have to visual “documentary” evidence from this period.

Walton, Charles, Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
The French have always been a bit touchy, and Walton’s book explores the importance of the “culture of calumny,” or political slander, on
the Revolution’s development at a time when it was “a kind of murder to attack the honour and reputation of someone” (p. 39). In doing so,
Walton offers a provocative new perspective on the increasing radicalization of the Revolution, suggesting that the lapse into the Terror
owed much to the trial and execution of thousands for crimes of self-expression.

Political Culture

While undoubtedly the French Revolution gave birth to many kinds of revolutionary ideas, the question of whether it was made by ideas
that were revolutionary from the outset is far less clear. Tackett 1996 looks at how a “revolutionary” culture was created among the deputies
—mainly Third Estate lawyers—by analyzing the institutional culture of the National Assembly, suggesting that, overall, they became more
“revolutionary” by force of circumstances rather than ideology. Paris, of course, played a disproportionate role in influencing many of these
circumstances, and Garrioch 2002, Rudé 1986, and Soboul 1971 all examine the crucial part played by the capital and the sans-culottes,
from different perspectives and time periods, ranging from the longue durée (Garrioch) to the micro treatment of a single year (Soboul). By
contrast, Jones 1988 looks at the important but often neglected role played by the peasantry and how, despite the rhetoric, the Revolution
handed very little land back to the peasants. Baecque 1997 and Campbell, et al. 2010 offer timely and fascinating studies of revolutionary
rhetoric, focusing, on the one hand, on the deployment of metaphors of the body politic in various guises and, on the other, on the myriad
manifestations of conspiracy thinking before, during, and after the Revolution. Shapiro 1993 provides a detailed account of attitudes toward
political crime, or lèse-nation, during the Revolution’s first year, showing how legal lenience helped contribute to the political volatility.
Blanning 1996 examines the important role played by military reform and revolutionary wars on domestic and foreign policy, and how the
army became not only a “school for the republic” but also helped to pave the way for the Napoleonic regime, going so far as to suggest that
the Revolution may have begun and ended with a military coup. Finally, Hampson 1998 looks at the hardening of French attitudes toward
Great Britain during the Revolution and how a new level of mutual cross-Channel phobia became an ideological component of revolutionary
foreign policy.

Baecque, Antoine de. The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770–1800. Translated by Charlotte Mandel.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Originally published in 1993. Baecque offers a novel perspective on revolutionary ideology through a study of corporeal images in
contemporary writing, drawing on 2,000 different texts (pamphlets, announcements, journals, etc.) to show how their deployment became
increasingly embedded in the metaphoric language of this period. Ranging from aristocratic degeneracy and royal impotence to the brute
strength of the citizenry and the bleeding wounds of the Revolution’s martyrs, such imagery allowed French society to represent itself
regenerating at a pivotal moment in its history.

Blanning, T. C. W. The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802. London: Edward Arnold, 1996.
By placing the French Revolution squarely within its European context, Blanning demonstrates how it affected, and was affected by,
France’s neighbors. He views foreign policy in general, and war in particular, as decisive both in causing the Revolution and in determining
its trajectory. He also identifies a crucial relationship between foreign and domestic policy, in which real foreign threats impacted on
domestic politics, while imaginary ones fabricated by politicians had real international consequences.

Campbell, Peter Robert, Thomas E. Kaiser, and Marisa Linton, eds. Conspiracy in the French Revolution. Manchester, UK:
Manchester University Press, 2010.

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This collection tackles a theme that has become increasingly important within the historiography of Europe in the Early Modern period by
probing into the phenomenon of conspiracy in order to explain its centrality to revolutionary political culture. The contributors show that far
from indicating aberrant or primitive thinking, conspiratorial thinking was endemic to 18th-century French politics, especially after 1789, with
its increasing emphasis on counterrevolutionary and “foreign” plots.

Garrioch, David. The Making of Revolutionary Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
With an eye on broad social trends, Garrioch’s innovative synthesis describes changes in family dynamics, women’s status, religion, the
literary imagination, and politics, showing how from the 1750s onward, waves of political, social, economic, and demographic reform swept
through a city previously characterized by a strong sense of hierarchy. Garrioch rewrites the history of the French Revolution as a century-
long urban metamorphosis, making a strong case for the pivotal role played by the capital and how it was reshaped, in turn, by events.

Hampson, Norman. The Perfidy of Albion: French Perceptions of England during the French Revolution. Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.
Hampson’s account of the relationship between Great Britain and France describes how the Revolution, which appeared to promise a new
era of Franco-British partnership, led instead to ever more bitter estrangement between the two nations following a revival of old suspicions
and creation of new, ideological differences. As a leading revolutionary declared in May 1794, “National hatred must sound forth.” All this
only confirmed traditional perceptions of each nation’s identity, centered on the “state” in France and the “people” in Great Britain.

Jones, P. The Peasantry in the French Revolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
One of the most enduring myths of the Jacobin interpretation of the French Revolution was that it gave land to the peasants, thus
vindicating the years of upheaval and helping to marshal support from France’s largest social grouping. Jones’s extensive study helps to
scotch this, and other revolutionary myths. For example, when the confiscated lands of the Church and nobles were resold, it was the
bourgeoisie and town dwellers rather than the peasants who became the biggest gainers.

Rudé, George. The Crowd in the French Revolution. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986.
Originally published in 1959. Rudé’s book was the first anglophone study of the actions of the Paris crowd during the Revolution, following
in the footsteps of Albert Mathiez’s groundbreaking, but narrower study, La vie chère et le mouvement social sous la Terreur (Paris: Payot,
1927), which combined social and economic history to great effect. Divided into two parts, the first looks at the revolutionary crowd in action
between 1788 (the Parlement riots) and 1795 (Vendémiaire), while the second looks at its composition, leadership, and motives.

Shapiro, Barry M. Revolutionary Justice in Paris, 1789–1790. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Shapiro provides a detailed account of political crime during the French Revolution’s first year, exploration the implications of the
replacement of the Old Regime offense of high treason, or lèse-majesté, with that of lèse-nation. Shapiro skillfully debunks the revisionist
notion that the Revolution’s early legal bodies constituted embryonic versions of the Terror, showing rather, how their lenience—only one
person was executed for lèse-nation—contributed to political volatility, despite the pragmatic concerns of France’s new ruling groups to
contain the early popular violence.

Soboul, Albert. The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 1793–94. Translated by Gwynne Lewis. Oxford: Clarendon,
1971.
Originally published in 1958. Soboul’s pioneering, if flawed, study of the militant urban movement of Paris during Year Two of the
Revolution, took up where his mentor, Georges Lefebvre’s landmark study of the northern peasantry left off, by restoring autonomy to a
previously neglected or travestied movement. Through extensive use of the archives, Soboul helps to transform former political
abstractions into living human beings, although he did himself few favors by relying upon the vulgar press to ventriloquize their thoughts.

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Tackett, Timothy. Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a
Revolutionary Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Tackett’s collective biography of 129 National Assembly deputies from all three orders—nobles, clergy, and third estate—during the first
year of the Revolution (1789–1790), reconstructed from their letters and diaries, shows how they became “revolutionary” in tandem with the
evolution of the Assembly’s institutional culture. As Tackett shows, their practical association with provincial politics and preexisting social
networks, including Freemasonry, corporations, and Jansenism, was far more influential in shaping their political outlook than any abstract
Enlightenment philosophy.

Events

Sometimes, the easiest way to understand complex historical periods is to break them down into separate, micro-sized events. The studies
cited in this section do just that by shining a forensic light onto some of the French Revolution’s key moments, or turning points, in order to
set them in context before panning out to consider their broader consequences. Godechot 1970, Lefebvre 2016, and Fitzsimmons 2003
consider three key events from 1789, analyzing revolutionary upheaval from the perspective of Paris, the countryside, and the newly
formed National Assembly. Turning the clock forward three years, Price 2002 delves into the clandestine royal diplomacy with the courts of
Europe, which ultimately led to the fall of the monarchy in August 1792. Caron 1935, meanwhile, attempts to separate fact from fiction in its
thoroughly researched account of the organization and execution of the September Massacres, a consequence of impassioned nationalist
speeches (“Il nous faut de l’audace. . .”) and wild rumors of a fifth column of imprisoned “counterrevolutionaries” waiting to pounce on a
defenseless capital. Walzer 1974 analyzes the rhetoric and implications of the king’s trial and execution in January 1793, which became
inevitable after the acute sense of betrayal and loss of public support that followed his failed attempt to flee the country in 1791. Slavin
1986 anatomizes a key moment in the political battle between the Girondin and Mountain factions within the Convention later that year,
when the former disconcertingly discovered that the crowd no longer answered to them. Finally, Gendron 1993 examines the Thermidorean
Reaction that followed Robespierre’s fall, as young, well-dressed men, known as la jeunesse dorée, came out onto the streets to assert the
Convention’s authority against the Jacobin movement. This culminated in the failure of the revolts of Prairial (20 May) and Vendémiaire (5
October), which marked an end, respectively, to the popular and royalist movements of 1795.

Caron, Pierre. Les massacres de Septembre. Paris: Maison du Livre Français, 1935.
Surprisingly, for such a controversial event, when, following the collapse of the monarchy, 3,000 prisoners were butchered over three days
of September 1792, this thorough reappraisal by the former head of the national archives remains the best account. Caron is especially
good at casting a critical eye over the primary sources and showing how hard it can be sometimes to spot where the facts end and the
finger of blame begins.

Fitzsimmons, Michael P. The Night the Old Regime Ended: August 4, 1789 and the French Revolution. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2003.
If 14 July marked the symbolic start of the Revolution, then the night of 4 August represented a more tangible one when the National
Assembly voted to abolish feudalism. Arguing against those who contend that the Terror was already implicit in 1789, Fitzsimmons presents
the activities of the first Assembly (1789–1791) as a surprisingly moderate phase of the Revolution when most of its members worked
toward the same goal of fundamental, bloodless reforms, deliberately eschewing punitive legislation against recalcitrant clergy or émigrés.

Gendron, François. The Gilded Youth of Thermidor. Translated by James Cookson. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press,
1993.
Originally published in 1983. Gendron’s lively account of the “street fighters” of the Thermidorian Reaction, following Robespierre’s fall in
July 1794, shows how gangs of jeunesse dorée, an unofficial, reactionary militia of cravat-wearing, club-wielding young men, finally
crushed the Jacobin movement during the first White Terror. These perfumed (hence “Muscadin”) sons of “minor officials and small
shopkeepers” delighted in smashing up Jacobin busts (and supporters) with their bludgeons, which they called their “constitutions.”
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Godechot, Jacques. The Taking of the Bastille, July 14th, 1789. Translated by Jean Stewart. London: Faber & Faber, 1970.
Originally published in 1965. Drawing inspiration from R. R. Palmer’s “Atlantic Revolution” thesis of a wider global movement for political
change, Godechot argues that the storming of the Bastille was not an isolated event, even if its consequences were, by linking it to a series
of rural and urban disturbances over the preceding two years. Contextualizing these events, he shows how a fusion of political agitation
from above combined with economic uncertainty from below catalyzed in the assault on one of the Old Regime’s most hated symbols.

Lefebvre, Georges. The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France. Translated by Joan White. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2016.
Originally published in 1932. This fine analysis of the collective psychology of 18th-century peasantry by one of France’s most distinguished
revolutionary historians, remains the best account to date of the phenomenon of the “Great Fear,” when a spontaneous wave of rural revolt,
triggered by economic crisis, hunger, and political chaos, gripped France. Drawing upon regional archives, Lefebvre shows how and why
panicking peasants rose up in arms, razing chateaus and abbeys to the ground, and burning municipal records.

Price, Munro. The Fall of the French Monarchy: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the Baron de Breteuil. London: Macmillan, 2002.
Forced to relocate to Paris in October 1789 following a large march on Versailles, the royal family effectively became prisoners of the new
political situation, compelled to approve the revolutionary program while working behind the scenes to undermine it. Using previously
unpublished material, Price reconstructs their clandestine diplomacy from 1789 onward by focusing on the role played by the baron de
Breteuil, their secret emissary to the courts of Europe.

Slavin, Morris. The Making of an Insurrection: Parisian Sections and the Girondins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1986.
Slavin’s detailed, and unabashedly social, micro-history explores a key moment during the Republic’s turbulent first year when the radical
Jacobin (“Mountain”) faction, helped by hard-line members of the Paris sections, and Commune, with whom they did not always see eye to
eye, finally triumphed over the “moderate” Girondin grouping by surrounding the Convention with over 80,000 men over the weekend of 31
May–2 June and forcing it to vote for their suspension.

Walzer, Michael, Regicide and Revolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
Louis XVI’s execution on the damp, foggy morning of 21 January 1793 marked the final stage in the creation of France’s first Republic, and
a calendar reset. Walzer’s helpful introduction to this selection of speeches from the king’s trial, which mainly attempted to delegitimize his
right to power by accusing him of conspiring against the “nation,” tackles the moral, legal, and political implications of this turning point
while considering its precedents in the trial of Charles I in England almost 150 years earlier.

Biographies

There is a good reason why biography is one of the most popular nonfiction genres. Nothing quite beats the fascination of peering under
the hood of someone else’s life, the more famous or controversial the better, in order to understand how they became the person they did
and to view the warp and weft of historical events through their eyes. The best biographies can open up new and unexpected perspectives
by combining the detailed scrutiny of a pathologist with the empathetic eye of an artist, in order to capture a “warts and all” portrait that
avoids flatness, flattery, or distortion. The biographies listed here cover a myriad of approaches to some of the French Revolution’s leading
personalities. Manceron 1977–1989 and Palmer 2017 provide two very different examples of group biography. The first is a panoramic,
multivolume survey of prerevolutionary France through a succession of vivid vignettes of prominent individuals (and their families). The
second is a collective biography of the Committee of Public Safety, a group of twelve men who ushered France through an intensely difficult

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period of civil war, foreign war, and inflation. Reynolds 2012 offers an exemplary dual-biography approach to an influential revolutionary
“power” couple, the Rolands, neither of whose careers make much sense without consideration of their partner. By contrast, Hampson
1974 provides multiple perspectives on a single figure, Robespierre, in an exemplary, experimental biography that seeks to understand this
complex man without pinning him down to a single interpretation. Hardman 2016 and Thomas 1999 provide very different approaches to
the royal couple, with Hardman updating his earlier, sympathetic account of the misunderstood king with new research and a more
integrated approach to the complex world of court politics, while Thomas offers an imaginative examination of the queen’s public persona
through a history of her verbal and visual representations. Coquard 1993 and Clark 2018 provide thorough, and nuanced, accounts of two
important but often misunderstood political figures, the Swiss journalist-politician Jean-Paul Marat and the English-born American activist
Thomas Paine, whose writings allegedly inspired one revolution (Common Sense [1776]) and were inspired by another (Rights of Man
[1791–1792]). Finally, Tisdall 1965 provides a lively account of the real Scarlet Pimpernel, an ex-actress who devoted much of her life and
fortune to failed attempts to rescue, first, the queen and, then, the Dauphin (royal heir) from the clutches of their revolutionary jailers.

Clark, J. C. D. Thomas Paine: Britain, America and France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2018.
Although a late starter, Paine’s Common Sense (1776) became one of the most widely read tracts of his age, while his Rights of Man
(1791–1792) led to his conviction, in absentia, for seditious libel, and an invitation to sit in France’s National Assembly as an honorary
Frenchman, making him a household name on two continents. Clark’s provocative and erudite biography tackles the problem of how to
characterize Paine’s political thought and rescue this gifted polemicist “from the enormous approbation of posterity.”

Coquard, Olivier. Marat. Paris: Fayard, 1993.

The best biography—sorely in need of translation—of a neglected, prickly, and much misunderstood revolutionary figure, this journalist-
politician is probably still best known for being stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday. Coquard provides plentiful archival research to back
up his detailed account, showing how before the Revolution Marat was a controversial scientist and royal physician, filling in many of the
gaps for what can often appear, aside from his writings and prosecutions, as a somewhat ghostly presence in the historical record.

Hampson, Norman. The Life and Opinions of Maximilian Robespierre. London: Gerald Duckworth, 1974.
Despite attracting more attention than any other revolutionary figure, little consensus exists on Robespierre’s character, or motivations, as
the dominant theoretician of the Terror. Hampson’s experimental biography assesses his legacy by weighing the evidence for and against
his achievements from four different perspectives: a communist, a clergyman, a civil servant, and Hampson himself, who alchemizes the
frequent doubts encountered by historians in getting to grips with their subject into a new way of thinking about history.

Hardman, John. The Life of Louis XVI. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.
The product of a lifetime’s research, this is Hardman’s second attempt at decoding the enigmatic king, whose elusiveness was compared
by his younger brother to “a set of oiled billiard balls that you vainly try to hold together.” A well-meaning but ineffectual, intelligent but
indecisive, and notoriously taciturn monarch, Hardman’s authoritative study reveals sympathy for a depressed king—his eldest son having
died after a long illness in June 1789—who could see what was happening but who felt increasingly trapped by forces beyond his control.

Manceron, Claude. The French Revolution. 5 vols. Translated by Patricia Wolf and Nancy Amphoux. New York: Knopf, 1977–1989.
Originally published in 1972–1987. A devotee of Michelet and cultural adviser to Mitterrand, Manceron’s five-volume history of the fifteen
years leading up to 1789 consists of an omniscient, and frequently irreverent, series of vividly written vignettes recalling key experiences in
the prerevolutionary lives of a cast of almost 200 characters, ranging from Rousseau, Franklin, and Mozart’s mother to Lafayette, Mirabeau,
and Jean-Paul Marat.

Palmer, R. R. Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.
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Originally published in 1941. This convincing and empathetic group biography looks at the “Twelve Terrorists to be” who made up the
powerful Committee of Public Safety that ruled France during the Reign of Terror from July 1793 to July 1794. In this classic account,
Palmer emphasizes the difficult choices made by these men, working twenty-hour days under great stress in order to defend the Republic
from its many enemies, and how the circumstances for the world’s first modern dictatorship arose from these conflicts.

Reynolds, Siân. Marriage and Revolution: Monsieur and Madame Roland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Jean-Marie “Manon” Phlipon, better known as Madame Roland, has never lacked for biographers, thanks to her eloquent memoirs and the
interest in women’s history. Reynolds’s deft, dual-biography approach has produced an insightful account, which reveals far more about its
protagonists precisely because their joint careers depended so much upon each other, and contributes to our understanding of the
interaction between private lives and public affairs.

Thomas, Chantal. The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette. Translated by Julie Rose. New York: Zone,
1999.
Originally published in 1989. Thomas’s book is not a conventional biography but rather an analysis of the queen’s public persona through
its visual and literary representations, showing how the focus shifted from royal impotence—she did not become pregnant for seven years
—to her denunciation as a foreign intriguer, spendthrift, and nymphomaniac. Relentless public exposure to the queen’s “wickedness”—
buttressed by the fact that the king never took a mistress who might have deflected some of the blame—helped to pave the way for her
revolutionary dehumanization.

Tisdall, E. E. P. Mrs “Pimpernel” Atkyns. London: Jarrolds, 1965.

In this fascinating account of a real-life “Scarlet Pimpernel” with the gender roles reversed, based on a cache of letters from royalist spies,
Tisdall describes how Charlotte Walpole, a celebrated Drury Lane actress who married a wealthy English gentleman, devoted much of her
later life, and most of their fortune (estimated at £15 million), in attempting to rescue, first, the queen—penetrating her prison cell disguised
as a National Guardsman—and, then, the Dauphin from the clutches of their revolutionary jailers.

British and Irish Reactions

The French Revolution ignited the biggest debate on politics and society in Britain since the English Civil War. The initial positive reaction to
the events of 1789 soon changed, due in large part to the September Massacres of 1792, to one of disgust and hostility, leading to the
government’s lifting of habeas corpus in 1794 and the outlawing of radical societies in 1799. Radical hopes for unprecedented social and
political change were offset by widespread fears of the contagious “flame of liberty” as contemporaries sensed that something momentous
was happening. Edmund Burke was the first to respond in print by hurriedly laying down the principles of conservatism in Reflections on the
Revolution in France (1790), which warned against the Revolution’s evangelical tendencies and disturbing potential for violence, while Mary
Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine produced indignant responses—Rights of Man (1791–1792) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792), respectively—to Burke’s assault on progressive ideas by promoting Enlightenment ideals of universal rights. Hampsher-Monk 2005
provides an essential selection of these and other key texts produced in response to the Revolution. The political context to many of these
publications, including the response to them, and coverage of the radical and counterrevolutionary movements, is provided by the excellent
collection of essays in Clemit 2011. Philp 2013 and Johnston 2013 both present perceptive accounts of British politics in the shadow of the
Revolution, showing how repressive it became following the outbreak of war and subsequent exacerbation of domestic tensions. Their
studies focus, respectively, on the developing process of polarization in British politics and the repercussions of the government’s “Reign of
Alarm,” which set the agenda for a crackdown on radicalism in all its guises or, in Ireland’s case, open rebellion. Williams 2001 provides a
sympathetic and influential eyewitness account in the form of poet and social critic Helen Maria Williams’s collected letters to a friend in
England.

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Clemit, Pamela, ed. The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Clemit presents an interdisciplinary collection of essays from literary critics and historians focusing on the inventive variety of responses to
events in France and the political reaction at home. Exploring the close relationship between politics and literature, the contributors analyze
the political context behind the most important texts, including those by Burke, Paine, Wollstonecraft, and Godwin, and examine popular
radical and counterrevolutionary cultures as well as the literary responses, including woman’s voices.

Hampsher-Monk, Ian, ed. The Impact of the French Revolution: Texts from Britain in the 1790s. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
Part of the Cambridge Readings in the History of Political Thought series, Hampsher-Monk presents an essential selection of many of the
key responses to the Revolution, including texts by Burke (1790), Price (1790), Paine (1791–1792), Wollstonecraft (1792), Goodwin (1793),
and Thelwall (1796). This volume should ideally be read in conjunction with Alfred Cobban’s varied collection of more ephemeral material,
including letters, speeches, and pamphlets, The Debate on the French Revolution, 1789–1800 (London: Nicholas Kaye, 1950).

Johnston, Kenneth R. Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013.
In this timely history, Johnston argues that Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror” spawned an evil twin in Pitt the Younger’s “Reign of Alarm”
(1792–1798), which blighted the lives of many liberals whose enthusiasm for the American and French Revolutions had raised hopes for
parliamentary reform. Instead, they saw their prospects blasted by Pitt’s repressive, wartime regime, which sought to suppress all forms of
dissent, both legally—with over a hundred trials for sedition—and less formally, through blacklisting and smears.

Philp, Mark. Reforming Ideas in Britain: Politics and Language in the Shadow of the French Revolution, 1789–1815. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Philp’s collection of essays, written over several decades, provides an innovative, interdisciplinary perspective on British political culture
between 1789 and 1815 that challenges previous interpretations. In place of a confrontation between opposing, but settled, traditions of
thought and behavior, he demonstrates a continually developing polarization, as the government responded with increasing severity to new
forms of protest, revealing a more chaotic and improvisatory dynamic to popular politics.

Williams, Helen Maria. Letters Written in France: In the Summer 1790, to a Friend in England, Containing Various Anecdotes
Relative to the French Revolution. Edited by Neil Fraistat and Susan B. Lanser. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2001.
The poet, novelist, and social critic Helen Maria Williams exiled herself to France in June 1790, where she received Wordsworth and
Wollstonecraft among other visitors, and she published several volumes of her observations on revolutionary affairs. Framed as letters,
these self-consciously literary efforts reveal a euphoric, proto-Romantic sensibility as she becomes gradually disillusioned with the
Revolution’s increasing radicalism. This edition has an invaluable appendix with excerpts from later volumes covering the period from 1791
to 1795, including her brief imprisonment, as well as contemporaneous reviews.

Literary Reactions

While the French Revolution usually conjures up visions of violent mobs and the guillotine, it also marked a literary publishing revolution,
with over 1,200 novels published between 1789 and 1804. Caleb Williams (Godwin 2000, originally published in 1794) is one of the first
responses, with the author using the novel format to popularize his radical social commentary in response to developments across the
Channel, combining Gothic and detective elements with his “victim-of-society” tale. William Wordsworth’s epic biographical poem, The
Prelude (Wordsworth 1995, originally published in 1805), was another that enthusiastically responded to this “hour of universal ferment”

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even if an older, more conservative Wordsworth would later disown his youthful follies. Baldick 1987 examines the influences upon, and
legacy of, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), one of the most enduring imaginative responses to the
Revolution’s images of “monstrosity” run amok. The collection of interdisciplinary essays in Jones, et al. 2009 performs a similar task of
contextualizing Charles Dickens’s hugely influential A Tale of Two Cities (1859) in British popular culture by revealing a myriad of divergent
readings, ranging from Franco-British relations to Christian sacrifice. Fictional treatments of real, and imagined, events and characters in
Mantel 1992 and Orczy 2005 (originally published in 1905) reveal two quite different approaches. Where the former re-creates the thoughts
and feelings of three closely related revolutionary figures (Camille Desmoulins, Georges Danton, and Maximilien Robespierre), showing
how each responded to the opportunities thrown up by the Revolution, the latter touches a popular nerve with its creation of a cunning
leader of a covert band of English noblemen dedicated to saving condemned aristocrats from the guillotine. Hugo 1988 (originally publish in
1874) and France 1979 (originally published in 1912) supply two of the most enduring French responses by electing to fictionalize the civil
war and the Terror and to dramatize the dangers of fanaticism. Büchner 1993 (originally published in 1835) and Weiss 1965 provide
powerful dramatic treatments, based upon the characters of two leading revolutionary personalities: Danton and Marat.

Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.
Baldick explores the history surrounding one of the most powerful imaginative responses to the Revolution—Mary Shelley’s bleak vision of
Frankenstein’s attempt to create a “new man” from dismembered corpses—showing how it became a reference point for the Romantic
zeitgeist. Using the “monstrous” images generated by the Revolution as a starting point for his investigation into the influences upon
Shelley’s account of a creature that turns against its creator, Baldick explores how this “modern myth” continues to resonate with later
writers.

Büchner, Georg. Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Writings. Translated by John Reddick. London: Penguin, 1993.
Originally published in 1835. A medical student with no prior literary experience, Büchner took five weeks to complete Danton’s Death, one
of the most remarkable first plays in any language. Drawing most of his material from Adolphe Thiers’s Histoire de la Révolution française
(1823–1827), Büchner’s psychological play portrays the process leading to Danton’s execution. The Polish playwright Stanisława
Przybyszewska tackled a similar theme in The Danton Case (1935). Her fourteen-hour play, which was finally staged in 1967, was adapted
by Andrzej Wajda into his film Danton (1983).

France, Anatole. The Gods Will Have Blood. Translated by Frederick Davies. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1979.
Originally published in 1912. Written toward the end of France’s distinguished and politically engaged life—he was a “Dreyfusard” who
would win the Nobel Prize—and widely considered his masterpiece, this emotionally charged novel provides a vivid account of
revolutionary fanaticism and corruption in France’s classically allusive style. It recounts how Evariste Gamelin, an idealistic young artist who
becomes a magistrate during the Terror, is led by his ideals to endorsing the murder of his countrymen while sundering his links to family
and friends.

Godwin, William. Caleb Williams. Edited by Gary Handwerk and A. A. Markley. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000.
Originally published in 1794 under the title, Thing as They Are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams. Following the backlash against the
publication of Political Justice (1793), Godwin chose to popularize its commentary on “domestic tyranny” in a Gothic suspense format,
combining elements of (fantastic) adventure, (unjust) persecution, and (long-buried) secrets with a master/servant trope. Embracing a
range of political issues from crime and punishment to morality and honor, Godwin’s novel—published on the day the government
suspended habeas corpus to begin arresting suspected radicals—provides a powerful exposé of social inequality and abuses of power in
Britain in the 1790s.

Hugo, Victor. Ninety-Three. Translated by Frank Lee Benedict. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1988.
Originally published in 1874. Hugo’s last novel, set during the Vendée civil war, and published on his return from exile, recalls the year that
marked the beginning of the Terror. Partly inspired by the bitter aftermath of the fratricidal 1871 Commune, it was also one of his most

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deeply felt works. In it, he attempted to reconciliate various republican strands, and his own troubled family history, by viewing the
Revolution through the conflicting loyalties of an aristocratic royalist, a diehard republican, and a ci-devant noble turned sans-culotte.

Jones, Colin, Josephine McDonagh, and Jon Mee, eds. Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities” and the French Revolution.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” is the most famous line in one of the most popular historical novels ever written—with
over 200 million copies sold—that leaned heavily on Carlyle’s breathless history. This collection of interdisciplinary essays, including
contributions from Mark Philp, Gareth Stedman Jones, Keith Baker, and Sally Ledger, examines its iconic status within British popular
culture and accommodation of many divergent readings.

Mantel, Hilary. A Place of Greater Safety. London: Viking, 1992.

A remarkably ambitious and assured debut novel (although published later) that re-creates the Revolution through the domestic lives—
restoring the voices of historically “silent” women—and thoughts of her three “musketeers”: Camille Desmoulins, Georges Danton, and
Maximilien Robespierre, all obscure lawyers trying to make their way in the capital. Explaining her theory of history, Mantel writes, “He saw
that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, not the threads themselves” (p. 871).

Orczy, Baroness Emmuska. The Scarlet Pimpernel. London: Hodder, 2005.

Originally published in 1905. “They seek him here, they seek him there, those Frenchies seek him everywhere . . . that damned elusive
Pimpernel!” The first of thirteen adventure novels by the Hungarian-born Orczy, this work is based on her popular stage play whose
eponymous hero has passed into popular culture as a dashing icon of British cunning. A society fop by day, Sir Percy Blakeney secretly
leads a group of brave English aristocrats by night, devoted to saving their distressed French counterparts from the dreaded guillotine.

Weiss, Peter. The Marat/Sade, or Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of
Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Translated by Geoffrey Skelton. London: Calder and Boyars, 1965.
Originally published in 1963. This “play within a play,” in which inmates perform scenes from the final weeks of the revolutionary Marat’s life,
for the benefit of the asylum’s director and guests, combined Berthold Brecht’s ideas of alienation with Antonin Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty”
concept to create a new kind of immersive theater. One that presented core revolutionary ideas through a Marxist sensibility, asking
whether true revolution came from changing society or oneself. Peter Brook’s groundbreaking theater and film (1967) productions
succeeded in shocking their audiences.

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850). Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth. Harmondsworth,
UK: Penguin Classics, 1995.
Wordsworth’s epic poem, which explores “the growth of a poet’s mind,” sought the origins of his personality in the formative moments of
childhood and youth, including his heartfelt response to the French Revolution’s “hour of universal ferment.” After visiting France in 1791
and falling in love, he was moved to compose possibly the best-known couplet on revolutionary hope ever written: “Bliss was it in that dawn
to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven!”

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