(no subject)

[mersirena.livejournal.com]

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!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com]

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)]

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.

[elwen-rhiannon.livejournal.com]

Probably being politically "left" and "right" means different things in different countries.