A New World Begins

There are a thousand books on the French Revolution, but most of them focus on the foibles of the aristocracy, or the wild rage of the crowds, or the heroism of Napoleon. Popkin’s new history does a masterful job of covering all the key events and personalities in France in the years leading up to the Revolution and in its unfolding over almost two decades. He is particularly good at placing the Revolution in the context of world history (showing its relation to events in the New World, from the American Revolution to the Revolution in Haiti), and in keeping… show more.

If you read only one book on the French Revolution, this new comprehensive synthesis should be the one. Based on a half-century of study of the subject, it evocatively reconstructs the main stakes and debates of this first modern “revolution,” in the sense of a break with the past, from its origins in the 1770s and 80s to its overthrow by Napoleon Bonaparte after 1799. Attentive to the experiences of ordinary people in the Revolution, including women and blacks, it is one of the few works (so far) to treat the related unrest in the Caribbean, especially Haiti, not as… show more.