David A. Bell | The New York Review of Books

A Haunted Patrimony

Through their art collecting wealthy Jews staked a claim to being French, but the nation they loved savagely betrayed them.

The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France

by James McAuley

July 1, 2021 issue

An engraving of the capture of the Duchesse de Berry at Nantes, 1832

The Duchess & the Jews

The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal That Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern

by Maurice Samuels

September 24, 2020 issue

John Trumbull: The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar, 1789

Did Britain Win the American Revolution?

To Begin the World Over Again: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe

by Matthew Lockwood

April 23, 2020 issue

Alexandre Grégoire: Toussaint Louverture Boarding, late twentieth century

The Contagious Revolution

In 1791 enslaved people in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue—now called Haiti—staged the largest and most successful slave revolt in history.

The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution

by Julius S. Scott, with a foreword by Marcus Rediker

Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti

by Johnhenry Gonzalez

December 19, 2019 issue

Léonard Defrance de Liège: The Shield of Minerva, 1781. The painting was inspired by the Austrian emperor Joseph II’s 1781 edict of religious tolerance. Announcements of works by Enlightenment philosophers are posted on the walls of the bookstore, while the bundles of books stacked outside for shipment to other countries signify the free diffusion of ideas.

From Readers to Revolutionaries

A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution

by Robert Darnton

June 27, 2019 issue

Eugène Delacroix: Liberty Leading the People, 1830

The Many Lives of Liberalism

Three new books illuminate the fragile nature of the ideas underlying rights-based liberal democracy.

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World

by James Miller

The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century

by Helena Rosenblatt

On the Spirit of Rights

by Dan Edelstein

January 17, 2019 issue

The execution of Maximilien Robespierre in Paris on July 28, 1794

‘Pity Is Treason’

A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France

by Ronald Schechter

June 28, 2018 issue

The French Revolution: An Exchange

October 9, 2014 issue

‘The Tennis Court Oath, 1789’; oil sketch by Jacques-Louis David

A Very Different French Revolution

Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre

by Jonathan Israel

July 10, 2014 issue

Exchange

Jonathan Israel

The French Revolution: An Exchange

October 9, 2014 issue