100 books like Scotland and the French Revolution

Harry Dickinson supervised my Ph.D. thesis, and I am a huge fan of his writing, which is clear and accessible.

This book covers a lot of ground, explaining the different political positions people took in eighteenth-century Britain, inside and outside Parliament, but it’s so clearly set out. It’s an important book because it swam against the tide at the time it was published. The dominant opinion was that politics was an aristocratic pursuit and politicians were mainly motivated by self-interest.

This book shows that many politicians were driven by ideas, principles, and assumptions and that many more ordinary people were heavily involved in political campaigns and protests, too. 

This is a fantastic recent book that offers a walk-off-the-page sense of its large cast of characters—Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Paine, William Cowper, William Blake, Benjamin Franklin, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and many others.

They were all regular guests at the dinner table of the London publisher, and bookseller Joseph Johnson, where he sat back and listened to his talented collection of authors talk about the issues of the day.

It’s both a great way into the world of publishing and selling books and a wonderful introduction to lots of famous writers of the period from a fresh new angle.

What’s not to love about eighteenth-century cartoons?! They are a brilliant way to understand at least some strands of public opinion on all kinds of issues, and I’m all about trying to understand what people were thinking and why.

This is a wonderful book, which contains a wealth of colour plates of graphic satires by James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and many less well-known names. Their subjects range from political crises and the monarchy to fashion and manners to the role of the crowd.

It’s not just a catalogue of images with captions, though: it’s a really substantial discussion of the emergence and role of the genre of pictorial satire in the reign of King George III (1760–1820) and how to ‘read’ these images. 

Poor George III: ridiculed in caricatures and the object of attempted assassinations!

This enormous book is a real page-turner. Its aim is to show that the changing meanings of words had a huge impact on the politics of the 1790s in Britain. The fourteenth-century statute of treason listed among its crimes that of ‘imagining the king’s death.’

In the reign of Edward III, that meant actually planning the death of the monarch, but by the 1790s, the word ‘imagine’ had taken on the modern definition of ‘envisaging’ or ‘fantasising.’ This much wider definition of ‘imagining’ had dire consequences for reformers who had no intention of arranging the death of the king but whose language might be loose enough to open them up to the charge of ‘imagining’ it. 

At the celebrations on 14 July 1790 for the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, Louis XVI took an oath to work with the National Assembly as a constitutional monarch. Less than a year later, on 20 June 1791, the royal family tried to flee the Revolution. The king’s flight convinced masses of French people that he was a perjurer: the monarchy never recovered its mystique.

In contrast, his capture near the border with Luxembourg convinced the crowned heads of Europe that the royal family was in mortal danger. Ten months later France was at war with Marie-Antoinette’s native Austria, and Europe was engulfed in a generation of bloodshed. The great American historian of the Revolution, Timothy Tackett, recounts the engrossing story of the botched flight and its repercussions for a cast of unforgettable characters.    

Ribeiro is the author of numerous books on beauty and fashion, but this is the one I always come back to. Here, she explicitly connects social and political trends to changes in dress, beginning in the 1780s to the rise of Napoleon. The analysis is straightforward and compelling, although she also acknowledges the nuance. It’s a terrific introduction to the political importance of fashion during a period when fashion could not have been more politically salient.

You can reasonably infer that a book whose title nods toward a touchstone of the French Revolution and a landmark civil rights document will provide a treasure trove of historical references. It does indeed, but it’s history as accoutrement, with characterization at the forefront even as the mystery deepens in the background and the inexorable pull of monumental events inextricably entwines the fates of our heroes and villains. Declaration is ultimately about the flawed individuals who drive, and then become caught up in, sweeping change. Also, vampires. And necromancers. Not to mention weather mages, slaves in revolt, legendary politicians, religious converts, and the undeniable pleasure of being held in the thrall of an author who reveres the power of stories and words and excels at putting them to good use.

This book, set in the court of King Louis XVI (late 18th century), immersed me in the days leading up to the French Revolution and the storming of the Bastille. I especially appreciated that the story was told from the points of view of two young people: Joliette, who serves as Maid of Honor to Queen Marie Antoinette while at the same time striving to preserve her own family’s legacy, a French winery (I do love wine!); and Henri, an orphan raised by a washerwoman.

This is the first in the three-book Château de Verzat series. I really enjoyed the dual perspectives of the plucky noblewoman and the determined commoner as they experienced the beginnings of the French Revolution.

Blanc discovered in the National Archives in Paris a remarkable cache of letters kept in an old tin labelled as the property of Fouquier-Tinville, the Public Prosecutor of the French revolutionary Tribunal. He was a man who in sending off the last batch of victims to be beheaded, even after hearing that Robespierre was dead and with him, the Terror, said ‘justice must run its course’

The letters, written by prisoners on the eve of their own execution, to wife, family, plangent pleas to be remembered – some containing a little keepsake: a shirt stud, maybe – were never delivered, but, on Fouquier’s order, impounded as possible evidence. Post mortem? What was the point? The letters are heart-rending, sad, pathetic, drained of hope, but as poignant a souvenir of the effect of the vicious law which was sending their authors to the scaffold as any you will read. Fouquier, whose… show more.

This book depicts the violence and devastation of the ‘Reign of Terror’ (a period of extreme violence during the French Revolution) with breathtaking power. It weaves into it a tale that grips, convinces, and profoundly moves the reader. If one is looking to understand human nature and its true depth of depravity, look to no other book.