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These are the first two volumes of a new series, Histoire de la France contemporaine. They replace the previous Seuil series, published in the 1970s. As a reflection of the attitudes of current French academic specialists, they are interesting on two levels. Each is a careful synthesis of recent research on the two periods.
When one thinks of political negotiations that run through the night one thinks of tense situations, matters of war and peace and highly dedicated individuals committed to a higher purpose. On the night of 31 August 1679 courtiers of Louis XIV mediated a very sensitive matter, one that affected both courtiers, king and foreign dignitaries alike.
A People’s History of the French Revolution is David Fernbach’s translation of Eric Hazan’s 2012 book Une histoire de la Révolution française. The change of title hints at what indeed is Hazan’s original stance in his account of this historical event, an event that up to now has never ceased to fascinate writers and intellectuals.
Histories of the fate of the Ottoman Armenians have long, and understandably, been dominated by two themes. Firstly, the quest for ‘proof’ of the genocidal intent behind the treatment of the Armenians in 1915.
French revolutionary money is funny stuff.
Linda Colley's Britons has enjoyed a long afterlife. Her 1992 volume has become a key historiographical battleground for long-18th-century British historians. 'Four Nations' scholars have tested (and for the most part rejected) the British unity that Colley argued was forged in this period (1), while those of England have remained just as sceptical.
The historiography of the French Revolution is a diverse and ever expanding field. It is an eminently useful idea to produce a guide to it, though not one Oxford University Press is alone in having.
From the moment it was first published in 1997, Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans became an instant must-read, in particular but not only, for readers interested in the history of the ‘Balkans’. Concerns about the situation in Southeast Europe at the time, in the aftermath of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, guaranteed that its impact reached beyond the specialist public.
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’, is how Charles Dickens began his stirring evocation of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities. He had it about right. The first ten years of the French Revolution was a time of limitless hope and shattering violence.
Sarah Badcock has made a name for herself as, alongside the likes of Aaron Retish, one seeking to spread and deepen our understanding of the Russian Revolution in hitherto under- or little-explored regions – both geographical (the Volga provinces) and social (the peasantry of European Russia’s periphery).(1) She has now moved both eastwards and backwards to explore the