Volume 16, Number 10 · June 3, 1971
Revolution à la Mode
By C.B.A. Behrens
La Révolution Française: Mythes et Interprétations 1789-1970
by Alice Gérard
Flammarion, 140 pp., $1.50
The World of the French Revolution
by R. R. Palmer
Harper & Row, 282 pp., $8.50
Alice Gérard has written an interesting little book on the historiography of the French Revolution. The continuous controversies, she points out, to which the interpretations of the Revolution have given rise themselves have a history which deserves to be studied. Her own study of them, which has had to be adapted to the needs of a series, is very short, but it nevertheless displays a wide knowledge and sets out a body of evidence which students of history cannot fail to find disturbing. For she not only shows, what we already knew, that every generation wants to rewrite its history; she reveals the intimate connection which has always existed in France between historians' attitudes toward the Revolution and the political moods of the moment.
Review, 3851 words
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