Opinions, please...?

[spurnedambition.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I was at the Barnes and Noble at the mall today and saw this on display. It's called Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France by Lucy Moore.

So has anyone read it or is reading it, and is it good?
I don't think it seems too biased, as she does seem to cover women revolutionaries, looking at the contents, and surprisingly, doesn't give a spotlight to Marie-Antoinette.

Comments

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's incredibly biased. The women discussed are two royalists, two Girondins, two Merveilleuses, and only one actual left-wing revolutionary. The heroines are, of course, the royalists and Merveilleuses, while the one "woman of the people," Pauline Léon, is never discussed except in the most condescending tones. Even Manon Roland, who most would consider not the most radical revolutionary is dicussed in the same way... that is, until she is emprisoned by the Evil!Jacobin!Regime (...what less biased people know as the Republic), at which point the tone concerning her completely changes.

Meanwhile, to fit the author's thesis that the rather wide group of "Jacobins" were anti-women, she refuses to acknowledge that any women supported any Montagnard, from Danton, to Marat, to Robespierre, to Hébert. Which is just ridiculous--ignoring these women doesn't make then disappear.

And this is far from the only instance in which she twists evidence to suit her purposes. While she goes on about "Robespierre, ruthlessness of"--for which her only source is Furet--she completely ignores the people Tallien had massacred in Bordeaux because he is in love with her heroine, and God forbid the man who overthrew Robespierre (also referred to as "the high priest of a sect") could ever do anything wrong.

The bottom line is, you would expect to find this kind of lurid, biased, and picturesque history in a book from the 19th century, not from a supposedly "serious historian" in the early 21st.