http://mersirena.livejournal.com/ ([identity profile] mersirena.livejournal.com) wrote in [community profile] revolution_fr2009-06-04 06:29 pm
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Hello everyone! I was wondering if anyone could recommend the best, most informative non-fiction books on the French Revolution. I'll be purchasing several, as I need a broad range of topics, from music and art, to politics and economics. I browsed through quite a few entries, but I mostly found recommendations for novels and the like.

Thanks in advance!

[identity profile] elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com 2009-06-06 06:39 pm (UTC)(link)
Equidistance and critical reading are not the same. I find for the latter it's generally more useful to compare historians to their original sources than to each other

I generally try to avoid alleging my roots (geographical, national, historical or however you wish to call it) but in this situation I think it would be necessary to clarify my point of view. I'm from Poland, a small country in Central Europe, not to bore you with history: rubed out from maps by a few political powers for over a hundred years, independent for twenty years, then after Second World War for half a century under forced Soviet "protection". Sorry if you know that all, but I think it may be important here that I'm neither American nor Western European. Polish access to bare facts and the possibility to freely discuss it were limited for a time long enough to teach us how easily facts can be manipulated, forcing to learn how to find them, digging in the mass of author's opinions. The line between left and right wing was so thick that it was easy to bascially guess sometimes even before opening the book what a person from a particular group will write, making reading a kind of game: what to omit and what to search for and how to separate author's opinion.

Of course, there are no "both sides", but many - either the author is from the left wing and pro-Revolutionary, or from the right wing and anti-Revolutionary.Of course, there are as many shades as many authors exist, but generally you are able to sense one of these directions. Objective historians do not exist.

I try to read as much as I can to know in which moments the author manipulates the facts to make them go well with his or her personal outlook on life.

(Anonymous) 2009-06-06 06:56 pm (UTC)(link)
I am sorry to disagree, but I would not simplify like that, saying that left-wing historians are pro-revolutionary and the rightists are against. In France, for example, the French Revolution was admitted and glorified by the Gaullian right. Of course, the right did not coincede with the left in which part of the Revoluton had been the best one, but both the left and the right mainstream agreed on the perception of the Revolution as a glorious moment of the French history.

[identity profile] elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com 2009-06-06 07:07 pm (UTC)(link)
I meant Polish historians, and the ones translated (& officially published) in the years 1945-1989; making a list of what was published for the first time during last twenty years would take a while, but I'm suddenly willing to do it. And it is very interesting what you are writing about! Would you mind developing a bit?

(Anonymous) 2009-06-06 07:19 pm (UTC)(link)
Of course, I agree about the impossibility of being objective.
On the other hand, what does it mean left wing, right wing historians? To be left-wing in the 1830s indeed meant a pretty different thing than being French marxist historian in 1968 :-) I am sure that even during the communism, you could find in Poland the works of the 19th-century French and British historians of the French revolution. And I just cannot see how for ex. Soboul, Michelet, Taine, Carlyle, Jaures, Aulard or even intellectuals like Tocqueville or Constant etc. can be easily separated to right-wing anti-revolutionary and left-wig pro-revolutionary, and read as such in order to create an equidistant image..BTW, even if you think of Przybyszewska, a communist. What did she have in common with the official Polish communist historiography of the 1970s? Anyway, I think that we are trained to see and mistrust the Marxist interpretation, but we may be much less sensitive to the nationalist "naturalizations" or an economicist view of human beings, shared paradoxically by Marxism and the contemporary neoliberal historiography.

[identity profile] elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com 2009-06-06 07:27 pm (UTC)(link)
Probably being politically "left" and "right" means different things in different countries.

[identity profile] estellacat.livejournal.com 2009-06-08 02:47 pm (UTC)(link)
Of course, if original sources aren't available, you use what you have. I didn't mean to imply that nothing can be learned by comparing historians... Though even there, it's more useful to compare their choice of sources than their opinions per se. Though I doubt with a background like that you'd be likely to take any opinion for granted.