The French Revolution The Essential Readings

by Schechter, Ronald

• ISBN13: 9780631212713
• ISBN10: 063121271X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-03-05
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This book presents ten selections from the most important scholarship on the French Revolution over the past quarter century, introduced and contextualized for student readers. Historians typically categorize the historiography of the French Revolution according to each author's approval or disapproval of the Revolution, political agenda (for example Marxist, liberal, conservative, or feminist), or methodology (for example social, political, or cultural history). This book demonstrates the inadequacy of these categories of analysis for a nuanced understanding of the Revolution and emphasizes the surprising connections between historians typically seen simply as opponents in a debate. In its thorough introduction, The French Revolution: The Essential Readings demonstrates the success of an eclectic, interdisciplinary approach to this central period in modern European history and the larger relevance of the historiography to the humanities more generally.

Author Biography

Ronald Schechter is Assistant Professor of History at the College of William and Mary, Virginia.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Editor's Introduction	1	(30)
Interpreting the French Revolution	31	(21)
Francois Furet
On the Problem of the Ideological Origins of the French Revolution	52	(23)
Keith Michael Baker
The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution	75	(31)
Roger Chartier
The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France	106	(32)
Robert Darnton
The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution	138	(37)
Colin Jones
Luxury, Morality, and Social Change: Why There Was No Middle-Class Consciousness in Pre-Revolutionary France	175	(35)
Sarah Maza
French Feminists and the Rights of ``Man'': Olympe de Gouges's Declarations	210	(26)
Joan Wallach Scott
The Band of Brothers	236	(27)
Lynn Hunt
Church, State, and the Ideological Origins of the French Revolution: The Debate over the General Assembly of the Gallican Clergy in 1765	263	(38)
Dale Van Kley
The Revolutionary Festival: A Transfer of Sacrality	301	(20)
Mona Ozouf
Index	321