Category: French Revolution

I’ve probably read close to a thousand works of non-fiction at this point in my life, and Simon Schama’s “Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution” is in my Top Five. That’s really swaying something! Citizens is one of those rare works of history that truly reads like an epic novel, bursting with vivid characters,…

God only knows how many books have been written about the French Revolution. “The Coming of the French Revolution” by Georges Lefebvre, first published in 1967, is one of the few that has endured as a bona fide classic, regularly assigned as required reading as “the classical interpretation” of events from 1788-89 in university-level courses…

Oxford University Press has hit a homerun with their snappy “Very Short Introduction” series of books, covering literally hundreds of topics from Accounting to Writing & Script. This volume on the French Revolution by William Doyle, also the author of the authoritative single volume “The Oxford History of the French Revolution,” offers a crisp and…

There are plenty of general histories of the French Revolution for the general reader to choose from. If I had just one to recommend it would be either Simon Schama’s magisterial “Citizens” or William Doyle’s classic “Oxford History of the French Revolution.” If asked what book would make a good companion to one of these…

Nearly a quarter-millennium after his public beheading Maximilien Robespierre remains a controversial figure. There are over 50 schools, streets and buildings named after “The Incorruptible” in France today, but none within the city limits of Paris. A 2009 attempt to get a street named after him in the City of Lights was voted down by…

“How had the high ideals of 1789 turned to the violence and terror of 1794?” That is the question that Timothy Tackett, professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Irvine, seeks to answer in his well-acclaimed 2015 book “The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution.” It’s a great question and one…

Few books about the French Revolution have had better legs in the academy than R.R. Palmer’s classic, “Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution.” First published in 1941, it is still often found on college syllabi across the country today. In its fifth summer, 1793 or Year II according to the…

Marie Antoinette may have never said, “Let them eat cake!” Then again, much of what she had been accused of wasn’t true either, according to Antonia Fraser in this well researched, sympathetic biography of France’s most famous queen. The fifteenth child and youngest daughter of the august Maria Teresa, Empress of the Holy Roman Empire,…