Lectures On The History Of The French Revolution

This collection of the lectures of Lord Acton on the French Revolution comprises a disciplined, thorough, and elegant history of the actual events of the bloody episode. It is as thorough a record as could be constructed in Acton's time of the actions of the government of France during the Revolution. Delivered at Cambridge University between 1895 and 1899, Lectures on the French Revolution is a distinguished account of the entire epochal chapter in French experience by one of the most remarkable English historians of the nineteenth century. In contrast to Burke a century before, Acton is not concerned with condemning the Revolution, but in providing an accurate history of its advent, its bloody action, and its aftermath. There are twenty-two essays in the collection, commencing with "The Heralds of the Revolution," in which Acton presents a taxonomy of the intellectual ferment that preceded and prepared the Revolution. An important appendix explores "The Literature of the Revolution," offering assessments of the accounts of the Revolution written during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by, among others, Burke, Guizot, and Taine. Stephen J. Tonsor is Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Michigan. He is a longtime student of the history of Germany and of Lord Acton. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

The two volumes of his lectures on modern history and on the French Revolution give us in their full ripeness the sum of Acton’s historical judgments. History was not to Acton a mere academic pursuit. With that view of history which considers it, beneath the dry light of science, as a series of phenomena capable of detachment from the present, susceptible to separate analysis, he had no sympathy. Still less did he consider history a mere form of literary exposition. The one justification for the study of history was to Acton its value as a guide in the affairs of the every-day world. The present is what it is because of what the past has been. Human development has been a continuous chain of cause and effect. Any course of action in the present must be based upon a knowledge of the way in which things we now do are hedged in, limited by what men have done before us. History thus becomes a great mentor, a schoolmaster of action.