Revolutionary France

This book nicely introduces the reader to the historio-political but also the socio-cultural processes during the French revolution. Dr Andrea Beckmann, Lecturer in Criminology, Dept. Policy Studies, University of LincolnIn this volume, one of the first to look at 'Revolutionary France' as a whole, a team of leading international historians explore the major issues of politics and society, culture, economics, and overseas expansion during this vital period of French history.

Annotation A sophisticated and groundbreaking book on what women actually did and what actually happened to them during the French Revolution.

This book investigates the bitterly contested development of environmental conservation in France from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, suggesting that conflicts over forests between the state, landowning elites, and the peasantry not only reflected escalating demand for this most vital of natural resources but also shaped the country's revolutionary struggles.

In Friendship and Politics in Post-Revolutionary France, Sarah Horowitz brings together the political and cultural history of post-revolutionary France to illuminate how French society responded to and recovered from the upheaval of the French Revolution. The Revolution led to a heightened sense of distrust and divided the nation along ideological lines. In the wake of the Terror, many began to express concerns about the atomization of French society. Friendship, though, was regarded as one bond that could restore trust and cohesion. Friends relied on each other to serve as confidants; men and women described friendship as a site of both pleasure and connection. Because trust and cohesion were necessary to the functioning of post-revolutionary parliamentary life, politicians turned to friends and ideas about friendship to create this solidarity. Relying on detailed analyses of politicians’ social networks, new tools arising from the digital humanities, and examinations of behind-the-scenes political transactions, Horowitz makes clear the connection between politics and emotions in the early nineteenth century, and she reevaluates the role of women in political life by showing the ways in which the personal was the political in the post-revolutionary era.

Sewell synthesizes the material on the social history of the French labor movement from its formative period to the first half of the 19th century. Centers on the Revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848.

Festivals and the French Revolution--the subject conjures up visions of goddesses of Liberty, strange celebrations of Reason, and the oddly pretentious cult of the Supreme Being. Every history of the period includes some mention of festivals; Ozouf shows us that they were much more than bizarre marginalia to the revolutionary process.

In the decades following the French Revolution, four artists - Girodet, Gros, Gericault, and Delacroix - painted works in their Parisian studios that vividly expressed violent events in faraway, colonial lands. This book examines six of these paintings and argues that their disturbing, erotic depictions of slavery, revolt, plague, decapitation, cannibalism, massacre, and abduction chart the history of France's empire and colonial politics. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby shows that these paintings about occurrences in the West Indies, Syria, Egypt, Senegal, and Ottoman Empire Greece are preoccupied not with mastery and control but with loss, degradation, and failure, and she explains how such representations of crises in the colonies were able to answer the artists' longings as well as the needs of the government and the opposition parties at home. Empire made painters devoted to the representation of liberty and the new French nation confront liberty's antithesis: slavery. It also forced them to contend with cultural and racial difference. Young male artists responded, says Grigsby, by translating distant crises into images of challenges to the self, making history painting the site where geographic extremities and bodily extremities articulated one another.

Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France challenges widely held assumptions about both the genre of portraiture and the political and cultural role of images in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. After 1789, portraiture came to dominate French visual culture because it addressed the central challenge of the Revolution: how to turn subjects into citizens. Revolutionary portraits allowed sitters and artists to appropriate the means of representation, both aesthetic and political, and articulate new forms of selfhood and citizenship, often in astonishingly creative ways. The triumph of revolutionary portraiture also marks a turning point in the history of art, when seriousness of purpose and aesthetic ambition passed from the formulation of historical narratives to the depiction of contemporary individuals. This shift had major consequences for the course of modern art production and its engagement with the political and the contingent.