The Oxford History Of The French Revolution

An account of the French Revolution.

This is the most authoritative, comprehensive history of the French Revolution of 1789. Published to mark the bicentenary of its outbreak, this survey draws on a generation of extensive research and scholarly debate to reappraise the most famous of all revolutions. Opening with the accession of Louis XVI in 1774, the book traces the history of France through revolution, terror, and counter-revolution, to the triumph of Napoleon in 1802; and analyses the impact of events both in France itself and the rest of Europe. William Doyle shows how a movement which began with optimism and general enthusiasm soon became a tragedy, not only for the ruling orders, but for the millions of ordinary people all over Europe whose lives were disrupted by religious upheaval, and civil and international war. It was they who paid the price for the destruction of the old political order and the struggle to establish a new one, based on the ideals of liberty and revolution, in the face of widespread indifference and hostility. - ;France under Louis XVI; A crisis of confidence; The collapse of Government, 1776-1788; The Estates-General, September 1788-July 1789; The principles of 1789 and the reform of France; The breakdown of revolutionary concensus, 1790-1792; Europe and the Revolution, 1788-1791; The Republican Revolution, 1791-January 1793; War against Europe, 1792-1797; The revolt of the Provinces; Government by terror, 1793-1794; Thermidor, 1794-1795; Counter-revolution, 1789-1795; The directory, 1795-1799; Occupied Europe, 1794-1799; An end to Revolution, 1799-1802; The Revolution in perspective; chronology; annotated list of further reading -

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.

This title brings together a sweeping range of expert and innovative contributions to offer engaging and thought-provoking insights into the history and historiography of the French Revolution, particularly its legacies in transnational and global contexts.

Beginning with a discussion of familiar images of the French Revolution, this work looks at how the ancien régime became ancien as well as examining cases in which achievement failed to match ambition.

The kingdom of France, a byword for upheaval and instability for a century before 1660, was transformed over the subsequent generation into the greatest power in Europe and an institutional model admired and imitated almost everywhere. A further century elapsed befoer this hegemony waschallenged, and even then the collapse of monarchy in 1788 took most people by surprise. This book, bringing together an authoritative international panel of historians, portrays and analyses the life of France between two revolutions, a time later known as the old regime. All aspects of French lifeare covered: the economy, social development, religion and culture, French activity overseas, and not least politics and public life, where our understanding has been completely renewed over recent years. A detailed chronology and full bibliography complete this compelling analysis of an age behindwhose calm and assured facade forces were developing which were to shape a very different country and continent.

"David Bell wrote the essays in this collection over the course of more than fifteen years, each in response to a new book or political event and published in the New Republic, New York Review of Books, or London Review of Books. Their common thread is France and French history, of which Bell is one of the world's acknowledged experts. Shadows of Revolution is divided into seven sections: The Longue Duree; From the Old Regime to the Revolution; The Revolution; Napoleon Bonaparte; The Nineteenth Century; Vichy; and Parallels: Past and Present. Bell argues that so much of French (and European) history revolves around and returns to the French Revolution of 1789 to 1799. So much happened in so short a time that Chateaubriand later claimed that many centuries had crammed themselves into a single quarter-century. Bell's other main focus is World War Two and the French Vichy regime. He has followed the long and painful process by which the French have come to terms with their collaboration with Nazi Germany, including the creation of monuments to the Holocaust, exhibitions devoted to Vichy and the fate of the French Jews, and the speech that President Jacques Chirac gave in 1995, finally recognizing French responsibility for the deportation of Jews to the death camps. In its way, each of the essays in this collection--Bell's first book of the kind--reflects upon the ways that political and cultural patterns first set in the age of the Revolution continue to resonate, not just in France, but throughout the world"--