Recent debates around the French Revolution have questioned the need for an overall paradigm of interpretation, as the certainties underpinning both 'classic' and 'revisionist' views have faded. In Experiencing the French Revolutionauthors argue against a single 'paradigm quest', in favour of a plurality of approaches to underscore the diverse ways in which the turbulent changes of late eighteenth-century France can be explored. From broad cultural trends to very personal trajectories, a team of experts offers fresh perspectives on the individual and collective experience of Revolution, both within and outside France. Using a range of methodologies, including biographical studies of key individuals and groups, archival studies of structures and institutions, and new sources available from digital humanities archives, contributors provide: new insights into the clandestine book trade of pre-revolutionary France, and the surprising effectiveness of Louis XVI's state control a reappraisal of Robespierre, whose opinions were shaped and transformed by years of upheaval an exploration of how revolutionary situations inspired both dissent and discipline within the new citizen armies an analysis of the revolutionary shockwaves felt beyond France, and how its currents were exploited for national political ends in Belgium, England and Wales.

Aimed firmly at the student reader, this handbook offers an overview of the full range of the history of France, from the origins of the concept of post-Roman ‘Francia’, through the emergence of a consolidated French monarchy, and the development of both nation-state and global empire into the modern era, forward to the current complexities of a modern Republic, integrated into the European Usnion and struggling with the global legacies of its past. Short, incisive contributions by a wide range of expert scholars offer both a spine of chronological overviews, and a diverse spectrum of up-to-date insights into areas of key interest to historians today. From the ravages of the Vikings to the role of gastronomy in the definition of French culture, from Caribbean slavery to the place of Algerians in present-day France, from the role of French queens in medieval diplomacy to the youth-culture explosion of the 1960s, and the explosions of France’s nuclear-weapons programme, this handbook provides accessible summaries and selected further reading to explore any and all of these issues further, in the classroom and beyond.

A short, brilliant and controversial new interpretation of arguably the most important revolution of all time: the event that made the rights of man and the demand for liberty, equality and fraternity central to modern politics. In this miraculously compressed, incisive book David Andress argues that it was the peasantry of France who made and defended the Revolution of 1789. That the peasant revolution benefitted far more people, in more far reaching ways, than the revolution of lawyerly elites and urban radicals that has dominated our view of the revolutionary period. History has paid more attention to Robespierre, Danton and Bonaparte than it has to the millions of French peasants who were the first to rise up in 1789, and the most ardent in defending changes in land ownership and political rights. 'Those furthest from the centre rarely get their fair share of the light', Andress writes, and the peasants were patronised, reviled and often persecuted by urban elites for not following their lead. Andress's book reveals a rural world of conscious, hard-working people and their struggles to defend their ways of life and improve the lives of their children and communities.

The massacre exposed the widely differing ways in which post-Revolutionary Parisians construed the word "patriotism", and why the great Revolutionary goal of political unanimity was so elusive. On 17 July 1791 the revolutionary National Guard of Paris opened fire on a crowd of protesters: citizens believing themselves patriots trying to save France from the reinstatement of a traitor king. To the National Guard and theirpolitical superiors the protesters were the dregs of the people, brigands paid by counter-revolutionary aristocrats. Politicians and journalists declared the National Guard the patriots, and their action a heroic defence of the fledgling Constitution. Under the Jacobin Republic of 1793, however, this "massacre" was regarded as a high crime, a moment of truth in which a corrupt elite exposed its treasonable designs. This detailed study of the events of July 1791 and their antecedents seeks to understand how Parisians of different classes understood "patriotism", and how it was that their different answers drove them to confront each other on the Champ de Mars. David Andress is Professor of Modern History at the School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies, University of Portsmouth.

In this blistering book, David Andress shows how the West has abandoned its history and lost its memory.

The former great powers of the historic 'West' have abandoned themselves to senile daydreams of recovered youth. They have stirred up old hatreds given disturbing voice to destructive rage, and risked the collapse of their capacity for decisive, effective and just government.

At the core of this is an abandonment of political attention to history, understood as a clear empirical grounding in how we reached our present condition. In Britain, France and the USA, historical stories are deployed in public debate as little more than dangerous fantasies.

In recent years historians have been drawn to the political culture of dictatorial violence surrounding this period in French history, at the expense of recognizing the profound liberation, and ultimate social transformation, that the period represented for the French people. This work aims to retrieve the social history of the French Revolution from unjustified neglect. This study plots a narrative course through a turbulent time, examining both the structural and cultural elements behind the breakdown of the 18th-century monarchic state and its aristocratic social system. Engaging with the late-1990s historical research, it presents a picture of the tensions evolving in this system and tracks elements of conflict throughout the revolutionary decade. The limitations and failings of revolutionary attempts at liberation are confronted, particularly in the fields of gender and the treatment of poverty, and the beliefs and situations that hindered efforts to create a genuine political community are analyzed. The Revolution is firmly acknowledged as failing within its own time to fulfil its goals, but the continual attempts by counter-revolutionaries to destroy it must be recalled as part of the explanation for this. Ultimately, the Revolution is seen as having long-term benefits for the French population and for European society.

'If it had not been for you English, I should have been Emperor of the East; but wherever there is water to float a ship, we are sure to find you in our way.' Emperor Napoleon But just thirty-five years earlier, Britain lacked any major continental allies, and was wracked by crises and corruption. Many thought that she would follow France into revolution. The British elite had no such troubling illusions: defeat was not a possibility. Since not all shared that certainty, the resumption of the conflict and its pursuit through years of Napoleonic dominance is a remarkable story of aristocratic confidence and assertion of national superiority. Winning these wars meant ruthless imperialist expansion, spiteful political combat, working under a mad king and forging the most united national effort since the days of the Armada. And it meant setting the foundations for the greatest empire the world has ever known.

In this miraculously compressed, incisive book David Andress argues that it was the peasantry of France who made and defended the Revolution of 1789. That the peasant revolution benefitted far more people, in more far reaching ways, than the revolution of lawyerly elites and urban radicals that has dominated our view of the revolutionary period.

History has paid more attention to Robespierre, Danton and Bonaparte than it has to the millions of French peasants who were the first to rise up in 1789, and the most ardent in defending changes in land ownership and political rights. 'Those furthest from the centre rarely get their fair share of the light', Andress writes, and the peasants were patronised, reviled and often persecuted by urban elites for not following their lead.

Andress's book reveals a rural world of conscious, hard-working people and their struggles to defend their ways of life and improve the lives of their children and communities.

An extraordinarily gripping narrative of how Britain, seemingly on the ropes after losing control of America and with growing internal dissent, built the military and naval might to defeat Napoleon--and in doing so transformed its destiny In this brilliant, sweeping history of the period, David Andress fuses two hitherto separate historical perspectives--the military and the social. Britain's defeat of Napoleon is one of the great accomplishments in the nation's history, yet it was by no means certain that Britain itself would survive the revolutionary fervor of the age, let alone emerge victorious from such a vast conflict. From the late 1790s, the country was stricken by naval mutinies, rebellion in Ireland, and riots born of hunger, poverty, and grinding injustice. As the new century opened, with republican graffiti on the walls of the cities, and revolutionary secret societies reportedly widespread, King George III only narrowly escaped assassination. Jacobin forces seemed to threaten a dissolution of the social order. Above all, the threat of French invasion was ever-present. Yet, despite all this, and new threats from royal madness and rampant corruption, Britain did not become a revolutionary republic. The elites proved remarkably resilient, and drew on the power of an already-global empire to find the strength to defeat Napoleon abroad and continued popular unrest at home. From the conditions of warfare faced by the British soldier and the great battles in which they fought, to the literary and artistic culture of the time, this is a searing narrative of dramatic events and an important reassessment of one of the most significant turning points in British history.

For two hundred years, the Terror has haunted the imagination of the West. The descent of the French Revolution from rapturous liberation into an orgy of apparently pointless bloodletting has been the focus of countless reflections on the often malignant nature of humanity and the folly of revolution. David Andress, a leading historian of the French Revolution, presents a radically different account of the Terror. In a remarkably vivid and page-turning work of history, he transports the reader from the pitched battles on the streets of Paris to the royal family's escape through secret passageways in the Tuileries palace, and across the landscape of the tragic last years of the Revolution. The violence, he shows, was a result of dogmatic and fundamentalist thinking: dreadful decisions were made by groups of people who believed they were still fighting for freedom but whose survival was threatened by famine, external war, and counter-revolutionaries within the fledging new state. Urgent questions emerge from Andress's trenchant reassessment: When is it right to arbitrarily detain those suspected of subversion? When does an earnest patriotism become the rationale for slaughter?
Combining startling narrative power and bold insight, "The Terror" is written with verve and exceptional pace-it is a superb popular debut from an enormously talented historian.

The French Revolution marks the foundation of the modern political world. It was in the crucible of the Revolution that the political forces of conservatism, liberalism and socialism began to find their modern form, and it was the Revolution that first asserted the claims of universal individual rights, on which our current understandings of citizenship are based. But the Terror was, as much as anything else, a civil war, and such wars are always both brutal and complex. The guillotine in Paris claimed some 1,500 official victims, but executions of captured counter-revolutionary rebels ran into the tens of thousands, and deaths in the areas of greatest conflict probably ran into six figures, with indiscriminate massacres being perpetrated by both sides. The story of the Terror is a story of grand political pronouncements, uprisings and insurrections, but also a story of survival against hunger, persecution and bewildering ideological demands, a story of how a state, even with the noblest of intentions, can turn on its people and almost crush them.

The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution brings together a sweeping range of expert and innovative contributions to offer engaging and thought-provoking insights into the history and historiography of this epochal event. Each chapter presents the foremost summations of academic thinking on key topics, along with stimulating and provocative interpretations and suggestions for future research directions. Placing core dimensions of the history of the French Revolution in their transnational and global contexts, the contributors demonstrate that revolutionary times demand close analysis of sometimes tiny groups of key political actors - whether the king and his ministers or the besieged leaders of the Jacobin republic - and attention to the deeply local politics of both rural and urban populations. Identities of class, gender and ethnicity are interrogated, but so too are conceptions and practices linked to citizenship, community, order, security, and freedom: each in their way just as central to revolutionary experiences, and equally amenable to critical analysis and reflection. This Handbook covers the structural and political contexts that build up to give new views on the classic question of the 'origins of revolution'; the different dimensions of personal and social experience that illuminate the political moment of 1789 itself; the goals and dilemmas of the period of constitutional monarchy; the processes of destabilisation and ongoing conflict that ended that experiment; the key issues surrounding the emergence and experience of 'terror'; and the short- and long-term legacies, for both good and ill, of the revolutionary trauma - for France, and for global politics.

The French Revolution of 1789 was the central event of modern history. Although the Revolution started with the resistance of a minority to absolutist government, it soon spread to involve the whole nation, including the men and women who made up by far the largest part of it - the peasantry, as well as townspeople and craftsmen, the poor and those living on the margins of society. The French Revolution and the People is a portrait of the common people of France, in the towns and in the countryside; in Paris and Lyon; in the Vendee, Brittany, Provence. Popular grievances and reactions affected the events and outcome of the Revolution at all stages, and in turn everyone in France was affected by the Revolution. The French Revolution and the People tells a vivid story of conflict, violence and death, as the injustices of the Ancien Regime were thrown off.