The French Revolution

After it languished for months in my bag, and motivated in part by strife in France over the possibility that the social safety net might be rewoven, tonight I finally finished Jeremy Popkin's excellent Short History of the French Revolution (3rd ed., 2002). A textbook in the truest sense, it's also a quick and pointed primer on the French Revolution as a historical event and as a subject of historical scholarship. If the book has one weakness, it is that there are too few citations to other sources. But this weakness is balanced by good historiographical materials, including fifteen pages considering various streams of interpretation and listing numerous additional "suggested readings."

That scholarly apparatus aside, the book serves to introduce the reader to the main contours of the Revolution from its origins in ancien regime France to Napoleon's Hundred Days in 1815. The classic episodes are all covered: Louis XVI's travails, the urban uprising that toppled the king, the tumultous passage from the "liberal revolution" of the National Assembly to the "radical revolution" and the staggeringly brutal Terror, the reestablishment of order under the Directory and, finally, the usurpation of the Revolution by its most brilliant offspring, Napoleon. The book includes a few primary sources and a smattering of excellent visual materials, and it also delves into many of the socio-cultural matters that have more recently come to dominate the study of the Revolution, such as the place of women and the proletariat in fomenting and furthering the Revolution, the antagonism of conservative rural Catholics to the secularizing revolutionaries, and the urban bourgeoisie's ability to control the Revolution so as to increase their social and economic power or to avoid losing it.

Amidst these events, Popkin capably develops the crucial themes of Revolutionary history, including especially the way conflict and war can further national development, the movement toward a centralized government (with both civil and military obligations), and perhaps most relevantly right now, the assertion of individual rights and liberty against autocracy - whether in the form of Louis XIV at the height of the ancien regime, of Louis XVI as the regime collapsed, of the Commmittee of Public Safety during the Terror, or of the strongman whose military adventures ultimately abase his nation and destroy him.