Here are 100 books that Inventing the French Revolution fans have personally recommended if you like
Inventing the French Revolution.
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I am a historian of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World, specializing in the American and French Revolutions. The relationship between ideas and politics has fascinated me since I worked in media relations in Washington, DC. Because I think history can help us better understand our current political controversies and challenges, I write about the origins of representative democracy in the eighteenth century. I’m also an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame where I teach classes on colonial and revolutionary America, the Constitution, and history of the media.
The Haitian Revolution was long left out of the history of Atlantic revolutions, dismissed as a violent uprising of enslaved people without an ideological dimension.
Dubois’s book walks readers through the twists and turns of this decade-long revolution, highlighting the intellectual agency of enslaved and freed people and the ideological consequences of this transformative event.
The Haitian Revolution is a notoriously complicated event, but I found that this book provided coherence and a compelling analysis of the effects of this crucial moment in the history of democracy and movement for human rights. And it was a gripping read at that.
The first and only successful slave revolution in the Americas began in 1791 when thousands of brutally exploited slaves rose up against their masters on Saint-Domingue, the most profitable colony in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Within a few years, the slave insurgents forced the French administrators of the colony to emancipate them, a decision ratified by revolutionary Paris in 1794. This victory was a stunning challenge to the order of master/slave relations throughout the Americas, including the southern United States, reinforcing the most fervent hopes of slaves and the worst fears of masters.
I am a historian of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World, specializing in the American and French Revolutions. The relationship between ideas and politics has fascinated me since I worked in media relations in Washington, DC. Because I think history can help us better understand our current political controversies and challenges, I write about the origins of representative democracy in the eighteenth century. I’m also an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame where I teach classes on colonial and revolutionary America, the Constitution, and history of the media.
No book has done more to change my thinking about the American Revolution and Constitution.
It’s a tome, but if you want to understand the political philosophy of the American Revolution—from the Stamp Act to the ratification of the federal Constitution—then this is your book. Wood follows the evolution of and innovation in American political thought from the struggle for independence through the creation of a new nation.
In doing so, he makes the case for why the American Revolution was revolutionary and raises the possibility of seeing the Constitution as an act of counter-revolution.
This volume describes the evolution of political thought from the Declaration of Independence to the ratification of the Constitution and in the process greatly illuminates the origins of the present American political system. In a new preface, he discusses the debate over republicanism that has developed since the book's original publication by UNC Press in 1969.
I am a historian of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World, specializing in the American and French Revolutions. The relationship between ideas and politics has fascinated me since I worked in media relations in Washington, DC. Because I think history can help us better understand our current political controversies and challenges, I write about the origins of representative democracy in the eighteenth century. I’m also an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame where I teach classes on colonial and revolutionary America, the Constitution, and history of the media.
Understanding what turns someone into a revolutionary has always interested me.
Sure, there are ideas floating around and there may be material interests motivating decisions. But what causes someone to go from being a reformer to a revolutionary? Tackett digs into the memoires, diaries, and correspondence of deputies sent to the Estates General in 1789 to illuminate how their perspectives evolved throughout the first years of the French Revolution.
His account captures the pressure of crowds, the fumbling of inexperienced politicians, the fears for family back home, and the un-relenting unpredictability of events in a way that clarifies how people and dynamics radicalized. It made me think about revolutions in a totally new way by bringing in the day-to-day experiences of those who took part shaping the course of events.
Winner of the Leo Gershoy Prize from the American Historical Association, 1998, for the best book in Early Modern European History.
Timothy Tackett's Becoming a Revolutionary revisits one of the most controversial moments in history: the beginning of the French Revolution. How did it arise? Why did French men and women become revolutionaries? To answer these questions, Tackett focuses on the experiences of the 1200 members of the first French National Assembly. Drawing upon on a wide range of sources, including contemporary letters and diaries, Tackett shows that the deputies were a group of practical men, whose ideas were governed…
I am a historian of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World, specializing in the American and French Revolutions. The relationship between ideas and politics has fascinated me since I worked in media relations in Washington, DC. Because I think history can help us better understand our current political controversies and challenges, I write about the origins of representative democracy in the eighteenth century. I’m also an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame where I teach classes on colonial and revolutionary America, the Constitution, and history of the media.
Going beyond any one political revolution, this book traces an underlying epistemological convulsion that facilitated the formation of modern democracy in the late eighteenth century.
Common sense is supposed to defy historical analysis; we assume everyone has it, always has had it, and always will. But I love this book because it completely undoes these assumptions; Rosenfeld shows how the concept of common sense was a historical creation of the long eighteenth century.
Perhaps epitomized by Thomas Paine’s famous 1776 pamphlet, common sense was more than an idea; it became a style of politics and justification for free speech and popular sovereignty. Common sense became not only a precondition for democratic politics but a precursor of populism.
Common sense has always been a cornerstone of American politics. In 1776, Tom Paine's vital pamphlet with that title sparked the American Revolution. And today, common sense-the wisdom of ordinary people, knowledge so self-evident that it is beyond debate-remains a powerful political ideal, utilized alike by George W. Bush's aw-shucks articulations and Barack Obama's down-to-earth reasonableness. But far from self-evident is where our faith in common sense comes from and how its populist logic has shaped modern democracy. Common Sense: A Political History is the first book to explore this essential political phenomenon.
I’ve worked in the field of metrology for over 40 years, and I love this field of science. During these many years, I realized that instruments have become an often invisible but always present part of our lives and, if we learn to use them correctly, they can improve our lives, while, on the contrary, if we trust them more than we should, they can easily ruin our lives. For this reason, I like to explore also the philosophical implications of metrology and how it can help justice to render fair decisions and I love to share my passion with other people.
When I introduce measurements to my students, I talk about “an exciting adventure across centuries.” I love this book because it tells the long history of measurement, starting from prehistory and arriving at our days as if it were a true, fantastic adventure humankind has lived since the beginning of its existence.
This is not a technical book, nor a book of history, in a strict sense. It is written by a journalist as an adventure novel, telling the story of a fantastic journey across generations to build our present knowledge.
I read it as a novel, eager to discover the next adventure, always discovering players and facts I ignored.
From the cubit to the kilogram, the humble inch to the speed of light, measurement is a powerful tool that humans invented to make sense of the world. In this revelatory work of science and social history, James Vincent dives into its hidden world, taking readers from ancient Egypt, where measuring the annual depth of the Nile was an essential task, to the intellectual origins of the metric system in the French Revolution, and from the surprisingly animated rivalry between metric and imperial, to our current age of the "quantified self." At every turn, Vincent is keenly attuned to the…
I’m a historian of eighteenth-century France, above all, the French Revolution. Throughout my career, my primary goal has been to try to reconstruct the experience of revolution in all its dimensions. I have published extensively on subjects relating to the French Revolution, including the French revolutionary terror; the politics of the Jacobins; ideology, emotions, and revolution; revolutionary leaders – including Robespierre and Saint-Just; fear of conspiracy as a driver of actions; the influence of classical antiquity; women participants in the Revolution.
This is a gripping, wide-ranging, and detailed study of the explosive years of ‘the Terror’. Andress ranges far beyond the claustrophobic assemblies, clubs, and streets of Paris to show the country-wide impact of war, revolution, and terror. Andress has little time for revolutionary idealism, and there are no heroes in this book. His deep knowledge of his subject shines out from every page. The result is a vivid and disturbing account, dense, lively, and well-written.
The French Revolution marks the foundation of the modern political world. It was in the crucible of the Revolution that the political forces of conservatism, liberalism and socialism began to find their modern forms, and it was the Revolution that first asserted the claims of universal individual rights on which our current understandings of citizenship are based. But the Terror was, as much as anything else, a civil war, and such wars are always both brutal and complex. The guillotine in Paris claimed some 1500 official victims, but executions of captured counter-revolutionary rebels ran into the tens of thousands, and…
I have always been fascinated by the Regency Period, and because of this fascination, I explored its historical context in full. That includes, of course, the French Revolution and its repercussions in England and globally. I am also obsessed with the literary concept of the heroine, and wanted to create characters who in some ways synthesized Moll Flanders andJane Eyre, bridging the gap between 18th and 19th Century expression.
Essential historical background work for anyone wanting to read French Revolution-based fiction. I am especially attracted to this work because, although non-fiction, it has emotion, and a sense of first-person involvement. I was also very much grabbed by the legend of the first manuscript having been destroyed by fire, and the work having to be re-written – true literary heroism, and an example to us all.
The French Revolution: A History was written by the Scottish essayist, philosopher, and historian Thomas Carlyle. The three-volume work, first published in 1837 (with a revised edition in print by 1857), charts the course of the French Revolution from 1789 to the height of the Reign of Terror (1793–94) and culminates in 1795. A massive undertaking which draws together a wide variety of sources, Carlyle's history—despite the unusual style in which it is written—is considered to be an authoritative account of the early course of the Revolution.
Now an emeritus professor of history at the University of York, I have long been fascinated by France, by its history and identity, and by its innumerable tensions and contradictions. In the course of my career I have published more than a dozen books on different aspects of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, ranging from a biography of Napoleon in 2011 to more specialized works on the experience and memory of war – on the soldiers of the Revolution, on the letters and memoirs they wrote, and on the legacy of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars for nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. My current research focuses on France’s place in the wider Atlantic world and on the significance of the Revolution and Empire in world history.
Napoleon’s defeat led to the demobilization of thousands of soldiers and their officers, and a sudden surplus of weapons and ammunition that would be exported to feed other wars across the world, especially in the Americas. Some of these men remained adventurers, unable to settle into civilian life, and serving the cause of independence in revolutions across Central and Latin America. Others tried to establish a French way of life in the New World, among them the colonies of settlers in the American South studied by Rafe Blaufarb in this pioneering study of the Vine and Olive communities in Alabama.
Bonapartists in the Borderlands recounts how Napoleonic exiles and French refugees from Europe and the Caribbean joined forces with Latin American insurgents, Gulf pirates, and international adventures to seek their fortune in the Gulf borderlands. The U.S. Congress welcomed the French to America and granted them a large tract of rich Black Belt land near Demopolis, Alabama, on the condition that they would establish a Mediterranean-style Vine and Olive colony. This book debunks the standard account of the colony, which stresses the failure of the aristocratic, luxury-loving French to tame the wilderness. Instead, it shows that the Napoleonic officers involved…
In my research and teaching, I have long been fascinated with the effects of the French Revolution on France, Europe, and the broader world. In my most recent book, Our Friends the Enemies, I sought to examine the aftermath of the wars provoked by the Revolution, which lasted (with only two short breaks) from 1792 to 1815. In particular, I wanted to reconstruct the story—which had long been overlooked by historians—of the occupation of France by the Allies who defeated Napoleon. Lasting from 1815 to 1818, this occupation was the first modern peacekeeping mission, with profound consequences for the history of France and Europe in the nineteenth century and beyond.
It is widely accepted that the French Revolution would not have occurred without the preceding Enlightenment. But what exactly was the Enlightenment? In this now classic study, Robert Darnton broadened the perspective on this question, to examine the writers, publishers, booksellers, peddlers, and smugglers responsible for the circulation of “enlightened” ideas. Often operating illegally underground or even abroad in “Grub Street,” these producers and distributors of Enlightenment played a key role in subverting the Old Regime centered on monarchy, Church, and aristocracy, which would come crashing down in 1789.
Robert Darnton introduces us to the shadowy world of pirate publishers, garret scribblers, under-the-cloak book peddlers, smugglers, and police spies that composed the literary underground of the Enlightenment.
Here are the ambitious writers who crowded into Paris seeking fame and fortune within the Republic of Letters, but who instead sank into the miserable world of Grub Street-victims of a closed world of protection and privilege. Venting their frustrations in an illicit literature of vitriolic pamphlets, libelles, and chroniques scandaleuses, these "Rousseaus of the gutter" desecrated everything sacred in the social order of the Old Regime. Here too are the workers…
I have been a professional writer for over 40 years. Much of my work has been focused on biographies and historical drama for radio. Both topics involve extensive research. The French Revolution has always fascinated me. The stories about the wild extremes of human behaviour exercise a morbid power on the imagination. I have written much on the subject and the people caught up in, and often generating, the madness and inhuman folly. I have, I believe, developed a particular feel for the period and the lesson it teaches us. My book about the Terror is the culmination of many years of study and deliberation. I write well, vividly, and forcefully and I speak and read French.
Anouilh shapes his play in parallel reference to two of the most traumatic periods in French history: the immediate aftermath of the 1945 Liberation and the end of the Terror with the death of Robespierre. In post-war France, a group of friends hit on a plan to explore what twisted logic shapes the individual who gets caught up in the violence of oppression. They invite a local man, one Bitos, to attend a masked dinner where each of the guests will take on the role of a prominent figure of the Revolution, Bitos himself, who has greatly profited by collaboration with the occupiers, to take on that of Robespierre, whom Thomas Carlyle referred in his magisterial History of the French Revolution as the ‘sea-green incorruptible’, from the tinted spectacles he wore.
Carlyle’s prose is lush, baroque, strong meat but well worth dipping into. The idea is brilliant as a vehicle…
“Poor Bitos” is the strongest and most strikingly contemporary of Jean Anouilh’s plays. With freezing precision and extraordinary theatrical skill, Anouilh here exposes the evil at the heart of political extremism, with specific reference to the French people but with implications that are tragically universal. The principal character is one André Bitos, a thin-lipped, Eichmann-like public prosecutor with a fanatical sense of justice that outrages every normal feeling of compassion. Bitos since the close of World War II has made it his gruesome business to track down fellow countrymen suspected of collaborating with the Germans and to bring about their…
