Volume 35, Number 9 · June 2, 1988
Four French Revolutions
By Norman Hampson
Le Coût de la Révolution francaise
by René Sédillot
Perrin, 285 pp., fr95
Festivals and the French Revolution
by Mona Ozouf, translated by Alan Sheridan
Harvard University Press, 378 pp., $37.50
Necker and the Revolution of 1789
by Robert D. Harris
University Press of America, 805 pp., $38.75
The People's Armies
by Richard Cobb, translated by Marianne Elliott
Yale University Press, 776 pp., $17.95 (paper)
In 1989 historians throughout the world will be celebrating the bicentenary of the French Revolution. The Revolution itself was an immensely divisive experience, splitting Frenchmen into royalists and republicans, Catholics and anticlericals, in ways that have survived until the present day. It was the legacy of these revolutionary conflicts, more than the consequences of industrialization and urbanization, that made France a very difficult country to govern in the nineteenth century. Naturally enough, the history of a revolution that left such deep fissures in French society has reflected the divisions that it set out to explain. French historians saw themselves as crusaders for political causes in their own times that perpetuated the conflicts of the revolutionary period. Defending a particular point of view about the French Revolution was one way of legitimizing the monarchy before 1848, or the Republic in 1848 and again after 1870, or the Empire from 1851 to 1870.
Review, 4035 words
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