Talk:Historiography of the French Revolution

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Contents 1 POV 2 Revisionism 3 Marcel Gauchet 4 better? 5 About Rancière's book: The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge

[edit] POV

Normally, I'm the scourge of POV; in this case, I can't bring myself to remove what are clearly well-informed and useful remarks on these historians. However, it would be a lot better if these assessments of the historians were, themselves, attributed appropriately. I did this myself in one case (citing the 1911 EB's assessment of Michelet). -- Jmabel | Talk 00:45, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Revisionism

At the moment the terms "revisionsist", "anti-revisionsist", and "neo-revisionsist" are thrown around lightly, without explanation. Probably they should either be explained here, or linked appropriately to an article that explains their meaning in a manner relevant to this context. -- Jmabel | Talk 00:45, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Marcel Gauchet

There's no English article for him, but I've put him on the list for his Révolution des droits de l'homme.--WadeMcR 21:23, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] better?

I dunno. Hope so. I think I may have left out a handful of the more recent folk, but it's too late and i've made too many spelling errors to go back in and fish them out. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 203.173.30.157 (talk • contribs) 11 September 2006.

Nice job. Please consider creating an account! - Jmabel | Talk 05:35, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Looking more closely, I see that you dropped several things without comment. Usually, when doing that, it is best to be explicit on the talk page, in case someone thinks that something merits inclusion.

It appears that the following were totally cut:

• Owen Connelly - The French Revolution (with Fred E. Hembree) 1993.
• Marcel Gauchet - pupil of Furet, author of La révolution des droits de l'homme
• Daniel Guerin stresses the antagonism between the Jacobins like Robespierre and the masses they instrumentalised.
• Olwen Hufton
• Dale K. Van Kley - The Religious Origins of the French Revolution from Calvin to the Civil Constitution

I'm not making a specific case for restoring these (of these, I'm familiar only with Guerin—should be Guérin, by the way; I'd be interested in knowing why he was dropped). There does seem to be a bit less "history from below" in the piece now than perhaps there should be (not to say that it was better before). Also (again, nothing new) Tocqueville probably deserves a bit more: his work on the French Revolution was probably his most important. (It's shorted in his bio, too. Americo-centrism, I suspect, in that case if not in this.) - Jmabel | Talk 03:02, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, they were just dropped because I lost track of things and I'm not familiar with those authors - no substantial reason. I don't know where to fit them in, so how about we just add them back to the bottom for now? Agree about Tocqueville, too - it's been a long while since I read his book though. I've just been worried for a while now that this (as you say, POVish but still worthwhile) list was going to be deleted once a narky editor came across it. Hopefully we can work it into something a lot less biased. 203.173.30.157 06:38, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Oh and I know it's minor but I would really like to find a reference for that Zhou Enlai quote I put in the intro. Everything I've found is anecdotal. Did he really say it? 203.173.30.157 06:42, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

PS I now have an account. Foraminifera 06:46, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

If Zhou didn't say it, he should have. It is variously attributed as having been said in 1949 and at the time of Kissinger's visit, not a great sign. I suspect we will never know with certainty. I think it would be reasonable to say that it is a possibly apocryphal quotation generally attributed to Zhou. - Jmabel | Talk 07:18, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Okay and all, but there really are a lot of important authors and works absent, consider the following section of my reading list for the Doctoral Candidacy Exam:

The (Problem of the) Origins of the French Revolution

Some Marxian “Classics”

Lefebvre, Georges. The Coming of the French Revolution. trans. R.R. Palmer. Princeton U. Press, 1946.

Lefebvre, Georges. The French Revolution: from its Origins to 1793, trans. Elizabeth Moss Evanson. Routledge and Coumbia U. Press, 1962.

Lefebvre, Georges. The French Revolution: from 1793-1799, trans. John Hall Stewart and James Friguglietti. Routledge and Columbia U. Press, 1964.

Rudé, Georges. The Crowd in the French Revolution. Oxford U. Press, 1959

Soboul, Albert. La civilisation et la Révolution française. Vol. 1, La crise de l’ancien régime. Arthaud, 1970

Soboul, Albert. The Sans-Culottes: The Popular Movement and the Revolution, trans. Remy Inglis Hall, Doubleday, 1972.

Some indispensable classics in a different key

Quinet, Edgar. La révolution (Belin, 1987)

Palmer, Robert R. The Age of the Democratic Revolution. Vol. 1: The Challenge (Princeton U. Press, 1959)

Tocqueville, Alexis de. The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert. Doubleday reissue, 1995 (or new trans. Published by U. of Chicago Press).

Collections of essays in the revisionist mode (some of them reprints of “classics”)

Baker, Keith Me., ed. The Political Culture of the Old Regime. Permamon, 1987, vol. 1 in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 4 vols., Keith Baker, Francois Furet and Colin Lucas, eds. Pergamon, 1987-94.

Blanning, Timothy C. W., ed. The Rise and Fall of the French Revolution. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Johnson, Douglas, ed. French Society and Revolution. Cambridge U. Press, 1976.

Kates, Gary, ed. The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies. Routlege, 1998.

Lucas, Colin, ed. Rewriting the French Revolution. Clarendon, 1991.

Van Kley, Dale K., ed. The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the French Declaration of Rights of 1789. Stanford U. Press, 1994.

Social-economic (and fiscal) origins in a revisionist mode

Betty Behrens, “Nobles, Privileges, and Taxes in France at the End of the Ancien Regime,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, 15 (1963):451-75.

Bien, David, “Offices, Corps, and a System of State Credit: The Uses of Privilege under the Ancien Regime” in The Political Culture of the Old Regime, ed Keith M. Baker, above.

Bien, David. La reaction aristocratique avant 1789; l’example de l’armee,” trans. J. Rovet, Annales E. S. C., 26 (1971):23-48, 505-34. (I have English original)

Bien, David. “The Secretaires du Roi: Absolutism, Corporatism, and Privilege under the Ancien Regime,” in Ernst Hinrichs, Eberhard Schmidt, and Rudoff Vierhaus, eds., De l’ancien regime a la Revolution francaise (Göttingen, 1978), pp. 153-68.

Bosher, John. French Finances, 1770-1795. Cambridge U. Press, 1970.

Bossenga, Gail. The Politics of Privilege: Old Regime and Revolution in Lille. Cambridge U. Press, 1991.

Chaussinand-Nogaret, Guy. La noblesse au XVIIIe siècle. Hachette, 1976.

Cobban, Alfred. The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1964

Doyle, William. “Was there an Aristocratic Reaction in Pre-Revolutionary France,” Past and Present, 57 (1972):97-122.

Garrioch, David. The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, 1690-1830. Harvard U. Press, 1996.

Garrioch, David. Neighborhood and Community in Paris, 1740-1789. Cambridge U. Press, 1986.

Goldstone, Jack. Revolution and Rebellion in Early-Modern Europe. California, 1991

Higonnet, Patrice. Class, Ideology and the Rights of Nobles during the French Revolution. Clarendon, 1981.

Kwass, Michael. Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Egalité, Fiscalite. Cambridge U. Press, 2000.

Lucas, “Nobles, Bourgeois, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” Past and Present, 60 (August 1973): 84-126, and in Johnson, above.

Root, Hilton. Kings and Peasants in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism. U. of Calif. Press, 1987.

Smith, Jay M. The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France. U. of Mich. Press, 1996

Political origins (revisionist by definition)

Campbell, Peter. Power and Politics in Old-Regime France, 1720-1745. Routedge, 1996.

Doyle, William. The Origins of the French Revolution. Oxford, 1980.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth. “Who Intervened in 1788?”

Hardman, John. French Politics: 1774-1789: From the Accession of Louis XVI to the Fall of the Bastille. Longman, 1995.

Price, Munro. Preserving the Monarchy: The Comte de Vergennes, 1774-1787. Cambridge U. Press, 1995.

Rogister, John. Louis XV and the Parlement of Paris, 1737-1755. Cambridge U. Press, 1995.

Swann, Julian .Politics and the Parlement of Paris under Louis XV, 1754-1774. Cambridge U. Press, 1995.

Taylor, “Non-Capitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution,” AHR, 72 (1967):469- 96.

Van Kley, Dale. “Pure Politics in Absolute Space,” Journal of Modern History, 69 (December 1997): 754-84.

Geo-Political Origins

Scokpol. Theda. Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China. Cambridge U. Press, 1979.

Stone, Bailey. The Genesis of the French Revolution: A Global Historical Interpretation. Cambridge U. Press, 1994.

Wallerstein, Emmanuel. There’s an article somewhere by him that’s pertinent.

Cultural origins in a revisionist mode

Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia Cochrane. Duke U. Press, 1991.

Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. U. of Calif. Press, 1984.

Sarah Maza’s “Luxury, Morality, and Social Change: Why There was no Middle-Class Consciousness in Prerevolutionary France, Journal of Modern History, June

Maza, Sarah. Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France. California, 1993.

Intellectual origins in a revisionist mode

Baker, Keith. Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on Political Culture in Eighteenth Century France. Cambridge, 1990.

Darnton, Robert. The Forbidden Best Sellers of Prerevolutionary France. Norton, 1995, plus most if not all of Darnton’s work listed under cultural and social history of the Enlightenment above.

Furet, François. Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster. Cambridge, 1981.

Religious-intellectual origins in a (perforce) revisionist mode

Maire, Catherine. La cause de Dieu a la cause de la nation: le jansenisme du XVIIIe siecle (Gallimard, 1998).

Van Kley, “The Estates General as Ecumenical Council.” Journal of Modern History, 61 (March 1989):1-52

Van Kley, Dale K. The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560-1791. Yale, paper ed., Nov. 1999.

Woodbridge, John. Revolt in Prerevolutionary France: The Prince de Conti’s Conspiracy against Louis XV, 1755-1757 . John Hopkins U. Press, 1994.

Some (more or less) Marxian restatements

Colin Jones, “The Great Chain of Buying,” in ???

Comninel, George C. Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge. Verso, 1987.

Post-revisionism

Vivien Gruder, “Whither Revisionism?” French Historical Studies, ???

The above list, while in obvious draft form, nevertheless reflects what professional historians and professors consider to be THE essential readings on the French Revolution. Sincerely, --164.107.92.120 17:56, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Please, feel free to add this material to the article, in similar style to what we've got. By the way, I have to say: over half of these, I haven't even heard of. But then, this is an area where I'm definitely amateur. - Jmabel | Talk 06:12, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Yes, please please help! Also a confirmed amateur. Foraminifera 03:25, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] About Rancière's book: The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge

The book it self does not tackle the French Ravolution in particular, since it focusses more towards a philosophy of history direction. However it does discuss the different historiographic approaches taken by different historians in the matter of understanding and explaning of The French Revolution -particularly the works of Michellet and Furet. Therefore I would consider valuable to discuss whether to incorporate some of Rancière views, condensed in his book: "The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge" in this article o not. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.127.215.76 (talk) 00:30, August 25, 2007 (UTC)

• Someone has vandalised the list of authors at the bottom of this page

A concerned Wikipedian - 12 Feb 08 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.101.152.68 (talk) 12:13, 12 February 2008 (UTC)