The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution brings together a sweeping range of expert and innovative contributions to offer engaging and thought-provoking insights into the history and historiography of this epochal event. Each chapter presents the foremost summations of academic thinking on key topics, along with stimulating and provocative interpretations and suggestions for future research directions.
Placing core dimensions of the history of the French Revolution in their transnational and global contexts, the contributors demonstrate that revolutionary times demand close analysis of sometimes tiny groups of key political actors - whether the king and his ministers or the besieged leaders of the Jacobin republic - and attention to the deeply local politics of both rural and urban populations. Identities of class, gender and ethnicity are interrogated, but so too are conceptions and practices linked to citizenship, community, order, security, and freedom: each in their way just as central to revolutionary experiences, and equally amenable to critical analysis and reflection.
This volume covers the structural and political contexts that build up to give new views on the classic question of the 'origins of revolution'; the different dimensions of personal and social experience that illuminate the political moment of 1789 itself; the goals and dilemmas of the period of constitutional monarchy; the processes of destabilisation and ongoing conflict that ended that experiment; the key issues surrounding the emergence and experience of 'terror'; and the short- and long-term legacies, for both good and ill, of the revolutionary trauma - for France, and for global politics.
Part 1: Origins 1: Silvia Marzagalli: Economic and Demographic Developments 2: Lauren R. Clay: The Bourgeoisie, Capitalism, and the Origins of the French Revolution 3: Jay M. Smith: Nobility 4: Joël Félix: The monarchy 5: Simon Burrows: Books, Philosophy, Enlightenment 6: Annie Jourdan: Tumultuous Contexts and Radical Ideas (1783-89). The 'Pre-Revolution' in a Transnational Perspective 7: Thomas E. Kaiser: The Diplomatic Origins of the French Revolution Part 2: The Coming of Revolution 8: John Hardman: The View from Above 9: Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire: The View from Below: the 1789 cahiers de doléances 10: Peter McPhee: A Social Revolution? Rethinking Popular Insurrection in 1789 11: Micah Alpaugh: A Personal Revolution: National Assembly Deputies and the Politics of 1789 Part 3: Revolution and Constitution 12: Michael P. Fitzsimmons: Sovereignty and Constitutional Power 13: Malcolm Crook: The New Regime: Political Institutions and Democratic Practices under the Constitutional Monarchy, 1789-91 14: Jeremy D. Popkin: Revolution and Changing Identities in France, 1787-1799 15: Edward J. Woell: Religion and Revolution 16: D. M. G. Sutherland: Urban Violence in 1789 17: Manuel Covo: Revolution, race and slavery Part 4: Counter-revolution and collapse 18: Ambrogio Caiani: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette 19: Kirsty Carpenter: Emigration in Politics and Imaginations 20: Noelle Plack: Challenges in the Countryside, 1790-2 21: Charles Walton: Club, Party and Faction 22: Alan Forrest: Military Trauma Part 5: The New Republic 23: David Andress: Politics and Insurrection: The Sans-culottes, The 'Popular Movement' and the People of Paris 24: Marc Belissa: War and Diplomacy (1792-1795) 25: Paul Hanson: From Faction to Revolt 26: Dan Edelstein: What was the Terror? 27: Marisa Linton: Terror and Politics 28: Ronen Steinberg: Reckoning with Terror: Retribution, Redress, and Remembrance in Post-Revolutionary France 29: Mike Rapport: Jacobinism from Outside Part 6: After Thermidor 30: Laura Mason: Thermidor and the Myth of Rupture 31: Howard G. Brown: The Politics of Public Order, 1795-1802 32: Jean-Luc Chappey: The New Elites: Questions about political, social and cultural reconstruction after the Terror 33: Philip Dwyer: Napoleon, The Revolution, and The Empire 34: Isser Woloch: Lasting Political Structures 35: Jeff Horn: Lasting Economic Structures: Successes, Failures, and Revolutionary Political Economy 36: Jennifer Heuer: Did Everything Change? Rethinking Revolutionary Legacies 37: David A. Bell: Global Conceptual Legacies
David Andress received his DPhil from the University of York in 1995, and has worked at the University of Portsmouth for the last twenty years. He has published widely on the French Revolution, from micro-studies of Parisian responses in 1789-91 to introductory textbooks, and from monographs to major syntheses and works of comparative history. His most recent major contribution was as editor of the volume Experiencing the French Revolution (2013).
Reviews for The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution
This collection provides an excellent overview of the current state of French Revolution scholarship. * Liam Chambers, BARS Review * an excellent volume with a consistently high level of contribution. * Neil Davidson, H-France Review * David Andress, the editor, and his contributors should be warmly congratulated for providing generally excellent summaries of recent research on the French Revolution, together with stimulating suggestions for further investigation. * Roger Price, Intelligence and National Security * The great success of this Handbook is to present a picture of the Revolution, and its historiography, as the hectic criss-crossing of many individual paths: this bustling, confusing, noisy, and fearful time of upheaval is well conveyed in these pages. The reader is given good directions to follow one, or many, of these paths in the ample footnotes and readings ... The Handbook offers a convenient and scholarly starting-point or refresher on many different aspects of that turbulent epoch and on its repercussions, one which will be valuable in teaching and research. The editor and his collaborators are to be congratulated. * Dr Anne Byrne, Reviews in History * This handbook is a gem ... a superb reference work that doubles as a good read for anyone interested in this massive and complex subject ... Essential. * G. P. Cox, CHOICE *
