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[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)]

What an interesting debate. Actually, in France there has been a period of neoliberal revolution-bashing, comparing the revolution to stalinism, etc.
Being from a post-communist country you may be more sensitive to the "manipulations" of Marxist history (though the historiographical production of the communist countries was also heavily nationalistic, which seems to be more difficult to realize for those who denounce the impositions of the Marxism), but the common-sense approach of many UK and US historians hides ideologies, as well. And I would say that it can be even more dangerous, as it is not declared. Doing history from gender approach, for example, is not more, nor less, manipulative, than writing an empiricist list of the executed, which, eventually, can serve to present the French revolution as a perverted massacre, at the same time implying the glorification of, for example, the slow elite reformism on the other side of the La Manche Channel (...and making invisible the hundreds of people condemned to gallows by aristocratic judges for petty crime resulting from poverty).

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

Very true.