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Book Recommendations on the French Revolution (the "short" list version)

(For some reason, the original anonymous ask and answer I thought I had saved in my drafts has disappeared? Did I accidentally delete it? Who knows with Tumblr. Anyway, good thing I screenshotted it, I guess.)

Since I am STILL working on my extremely long post series going in depth into recommendations, I guess I should really just answer this ask and give a plain and simple list, as it was requested -_- (Don't worry, the extremely long post series is still going to happen.)

First of all, let’s just say, again (and it really must be insisted on), that most Anglophone historiography is… not very good. There are exceptions, but not many. At least, not enough to satisfy me. Fortunately, some good French books have been translated to English – so that’s great news!

So here are my main recommendations:

Sophie Wahnich’s La liberté ou la mort. Essai sur la Terreur et le terrorisme (2003) which was translated to In Defence of the Terror: Liberty Or Death in the French Revolution with a foreword by Slavoj Zizek in 2012.

This essay basically changed my life, and led me to take the path I have walked since as a historian. Zizek’s foreword is very good in summarizing the ideological oppositions to the French Revolution (until he rambles the way he usually does).

It opens with a quote from Résistant poet René Char which perfectly sets the tone:

“I want never to forget how I was forced to become – for how long? – a monster of justice and intolerance, a narrow-minded simplifier, an arctic character uninterested in anyone who was not in league with him to kill the dogs of hell.”

Keep in mind that when I first read it, in 2003, the very notion of anything like the Charlottesville rally happening was still in the realm of pure fantasy.

Marie-Hélène Huet’s Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution (1997). One of the rare books in my list that was originally written in English (!). I think a lot of it might be available to read via Google Books, but it’s worth buying.

This book is hard to categorize: it talks of historiography and ideology, and it’s overall a fascinating book.

It feels a lot like Sophie Wahnich’s first essay – it was also similarly influential on my research. It inspired a lot of my M.A. thesis. I’ve recently found my book version of it, and this book was annotated like I’ve rarely annotated a book. It was quite impressive.

Dominique Godineau’s Citoyennes Tricoteuses: Les femmes du peuple à Paris pendant la Révolution française (1988) which was translated to The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution (1998).

It’s the best book on women’s history during the French Revolution IMO. I really don’t have much more to say about it: it’s excellent. It talks of working class women, it talks of the conflicts between different women groups, it talks of what happened after Thermidor and the Prairial insurrections, and the women who were arrested. No book has compared to it yet.

Jean-Pierre Gross’s Fair Shares for All: Jacobin Egalitarianism in Practice (1997). You can download it for free via The Charnel House (link opens as pdf).

Another rare book that was originally written in English, and later translated to French, though the author is French! (I think some French authors have picked up that the real battlefield is in Anglophonia…) It’s very important to understand social rights, a founding legacy of the French Revolution.

François Gendron’s essential book on the Thermidorian Reaction: first published in Québec as La jeunesse dorée. Episodes de la Révolution française (1979)  (The Gilded Youth. Episodes of the French Revolution). It was then published in France as La jeunesse sous Thermidor (The Youth During Thermidor). As I explained here, its publication history is quite controversial (though it seems no one noticed?). It was thankfully translated to English as The Gilded Youth of Thermidor (1993). However, the English translation follows Pierre Chaunu’s version – which didn’t alter the content per se, but removed the footnotes and has a terribly reactionary foreword – so be careful with that. If anything, that’s a very good example of all the problems in historiography and translations.

Much like Godineau’s book on women, no book can compare. In the case of women’s history during the French Revolution, it’s because most of it is abysmally terrible; in the case of the Thermidorian reaction, it’s because no one talks about it. And it’s not surprising once you start reading about it.

(You might notice that Gendron’s translated book, much like many others, are prohibitively expensive. I do own some of these so if you ever want to read any, send me a message and we’ll work it out!)

Antoine de Baecque’s The Body Politic. Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770-1800 (1997), which is a translation of Le Corps de l’histoire : Métaphores et politique (1770-1800) (1993). (Here’s the table of contents.) It’s a peculiar book belonging to a peculiar field, and it can be a bit complicated/advanced in the same way most of Sophie Wahnich’s books are, but I still recommend them. See also: La gloire et l’effroi, Sept morts sous la Terreur (1997) and Les éclats du rire : la culture des rieurs aux 18e siècle (2000), but I don’t think either have been translated. Le Corps de l’histoire and La gloire et l’effroi also are nice complements to Marie-Hélène Huet’s book.

If you can read French, I really recommend the five essays reunited in Pour quoi faire la Révolution ? (2012), especially Guillaume Mazeau’s on the Terror (La Terreur, laboratoire de la modernité) – which I might try to eventually translate or at least summarize in English coz it’s really worth it.

The following books are extremely important to understand the historiographical feud and the controversies that surrounded the Bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989 (and both have been translated to French so that’s cool too):

First, Steven L. Kaplan’s two volumes called Farewell, Revolution: Disputed Legacies (1995) and The Historians’ Feud (1996).

Then, Eric Hobsbawm’s Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution (1990) which gives you the Marxist perspective on the debate. If you want to look for the non-Marxist perspective: look at literally any other book written on the French Revolution and its historiography (I’m not kidding). For example, you can read the introduction by Gwynne Lewis (1999 book edition; 2012 online edition) to Alfred Cobban’s The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964), the founding “revisionist” book.

Again, if you can read French, I recommend Michel Vovelle’s Combats pour la Révolution française (1993) and 1789: L’héritage et la mémoire (2007). I have not read La bataille du Bicentenaire de la Révolution française (2017) but it might recycle parts of the previous two books, so I’d look that up first.

Marxist historiography is near inexistant in Anglophonia, because of reasons best explained in this short historiographical recap on Anglophone historiography and specifically Alfred Cobban (link opens as pdf), but there was Eric Hobsbawm, who wrote a series of very important books on “The Ages of…”:

The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848

The Age of Capital: 1848-1875

The Age of Empire: 1875-1914

The Age of Extremes: 1914-1991

Some of Albert Soboul’s works have been translated as well:

A Short History of the French Revolution, 1789-1799 (1977)

The Sans-Culottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionary Government, 1793-1794 (1981)

Understanding the French Revolution (1988), which is a collection of various essays translated to English (here’s the table of contents)

While we’re on the subject of classics: I do need to re-read R. R. Palmer’s The Twelve Who Ruled (1941) to see if I still like it, but I believe it’s still positively received? I’ve never actually read C. L. R. James’ The Black Jacobins. Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1963) but I’m going to rectify that this summer.

That’s a good way to segue into a final part.

Here is a list of books I technically have not read yet (I skimmed through them), but would still recommend because I trust the authors:

Michel Biard and Marisa Linton’s The French Revolution and Its Demons (2021) which was originally published in French as Terreur ! La Révolution française face à ses demons (2020). It looks like an excellent summary of all the controversies surrounding the Terror: Robespierre’s black legend, how the Terror was “invented”, the conflicts between different political factions and clubs, the Vendée, and stats on who actually died by the guillotine (no, there was no “noble purge”). (Here’s the table of contents.)

Peter McPhee wrote several good syntheses, the most recent being Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (2017). Others he wrote: Living the French Revolution, 1789-99 (2006) and A Social History of France, 1789-1914 (1992, reedited in 2004). Why 1914? The 19th century was defined by Hobsbawm (see above) as “the long 19th century” (by contrast with “the short 20th century”), or “the cultural and political 19th century”, which is regarded as lasting from the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte to the First World war.

Eric Hazan’s A People’s History of the French Revolution (2014) and A History of the Barricade (2015), which are translations (Une histoire de la Révolution française, 2012, and La barricade: Histoire d’un objet révolutionnaire, 2013). If you can read French, check out his essay published by La Fabrique: La dynamique de la révolte. Sur des insurrections passes et d’autres à venir (2015).

Just as a final note: this post is the equivalent of four half single-spaced pages in Times New Roman 12 pts. It also took two hours to write and format (and make the side-posts with table of contents) even though most of it is already written in several drafts – i.e. the long post series of in-depth recommendations, so that gives you an idea of why that other series of posts is taking so long to write.

I’m going to go lie down now. -_-

ETA: Corrected some typos and a link that didn't quite go to the right place.

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if you're wondering what the big deal is about the louis-philippe sentence in les misérables, it is, in the original french, 760 words long. the subject of the sentence doesn't appear until 95% of the way through, at word #711; the main verb is word #712. the sentence contains 91 commas and 49 semicolons and is almost entirely a list of laudatory adjectival phrases describing the erstwhile king of france. this is perhaps especially notable because les mis is, shall we say, not known for being particularly gung-ho about the monarchy.

this sentence copied and pasted into Word takes up more than one page single-spaced. in the 1800-page folio classique edition, it is fully two and a half of those 1800 pages. that means that les mis is 0.14% this single sentence. more of les mis is made up of this sentence than earth's atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide (0.04%). if the page count of les mis stayed the same but every sentence was the length of this one, les mis would consist of only 720 sentences total.

incidentally, guess who named hugo a peer of france 17 years before the publication of les mis?

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It's that time of the year again! Remember to leave out bread and absinthe for Victor Hugo and he will leave you 50 pages on a subject that is off-topic but that he is vaguely interested in. Be safe out there!

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objectively, “I would know those rippling muscles anywhere…” is the funniest plot point in les miserables

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jean valjean in a coffin: haha fuck yeah!!! yes!!

jean valjean getting Actually Buried: well this fucking sucks. what the fuck

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inspector javert moodboard

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All the nun’s names during the Les Mis convent escape chapters are actually puns about their roles in the Grand Coffin Switcheroo heist! Nun Puns:

Mother Crucifixion— the one who dies like a grand martyr

Mother Ascension— the one who helps Fauchelevent lift up the altar stone

Mother Innocence— the guiltiest one who arranges the heist and lies to the cops

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OK so Hugo in 2.8.4 refers to gulls as exotic birds that would never be seen in a city gutter 

Since he specifically mentions the gutters of Paris, I assumed this was just about Paris not having gulls,(since of course lots of cities do!)  but I went to make sure

and apparently there were not seagulls in Paris in Hugo’s era? But they’re there now 

and they’re allies  XD 

(ID:  headlilne reading “Seagulls stop Paris police getting a bird’s-eye view”over a picture of a statue surrounded by seagulls) 

Criminals, revolutionaries, vandals and drunks have long made life a misery for Parisian police officers. Now they have a new problem: seagulls.

(ID: headline reads “Seagulls the feathered scourge of Paris claim police”  over a picture of seagulls flying at a camera) 

The Paris Gendarme may have survived the plots of anarchists, revolutionaries, and a German occupation. However the Parisian police force has since declared the streets overrun with a new reign of terror: seagulls.

Seagulls are Here For The Revolution XD if only Hugo had known..! 

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For anyone who wants the reminder…

It’s 2 ½ weeks until Barricade Day!

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i always think it's funny when les amis just make fun of marius' crush. i think he deserves it for being such a loser actually

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I’ve seen the concept of a Javert detective game thrown around, and that idea is inherently super funny to me? Because it’d really fail as a traditional detective game, in a way that’s both funny and sad. LIKE:

(Most) detective games tend to run on a set of really specific Assumptions about police– that there might be some bad apples but ultimately the police are agents of Truth/Justice who are here to solve important mysteries and keep us normal people safe from the Evil Criminals™

But Les Mis is the exact opposite…….like.

I’ve mentioned before that the whole thing about Javert is that he’s a Perfect Cop. He does his job perfectly— but Javert’s job, as a cop, is to Violently enforce existing power structures, to protect the upper classes and beat down the lower classes. And THAT is the job he does perfectly.

When Javert arrests Fantine, she is innocent. She did nothing wrong and acted in self-defense, something other people even point out; Bamatabois was the guilty one. But that doesn’t matter– because Javert understands that the purpose of the current legal system isn’t to “save the world with justice and truth” or whatever the propaganda says. The purpose is to keep people like Fantine in line. Fantine is legally, according to the law, “less” than Bamatobois. Because she’s poor and a sex worker Fantine’s life legally matters less, and she is legally already guilty.

Javert doesn’t arrest Fantine because “he did detective work and solved the mystery.”  He arrests her because he understands that the entire Point of the current legal system is to create excuses to arrest people like her. Fantine is guilty because she is poor and a sex worker and doesn’t keep her head low enough to evade notice; there doesn’t need to he anything else.

It’s like the way cities create obscure laws against loitering or sleeping on specific benches or “stealing” cans from garbage, and then use them as excuses to arrest homeless people. Whether the person is actually guilty of “can stealing” or whatever is ultimately sorta irrelevant– because their real “crime” was being homeless, and the other things were just flimsy excuses to arrest them for it.

The “inverse” of this is how often Javert decides people must be innocent simply because they are upper-middle class. Like: at one point a man is suspected of kidnapping a child, but Javert is reassured that the man was actually the child’s grandfather, a man whose last name was Lambert. Javert decides that everything must be fine because “Lambert is a good respectable middle-class name.”

So a Javert Detective Game would be incredibly funny for how much it would fail as a traidtional detective game:

You interview a bunch of suspects. You discover that one of them Is Poor. You arrest the poor person with no further evidence needed!! Because everyone knows that Poor People Are Inherently Guilty!!!!! CASE CLOSED

A man is suspected of a crime. You interview him and discover that his last name is Lambert– a respectable middle-class name. You decide he’s innocent, because rich people don’t do crimes!!!!!!!! What, do you think a RICH person is actually gonna go to PRISON? Like a POOR PERSON would?? Prisons were built as storage facilities for poor and homeless people, you can’t send a rich person there! CASE CLOSED

The final Mystery is based on the whole Valjean-Champmathieu thing. It’s your most challenging case yet– you think that a rich person might actually be a Poor Person/criminal in disguise! oh no!

This is the one case that involves some serious detective work and puzzle solving, because Madeleine is a MAYOR. A mayor has POWER, a mayor is your SUPERIOR, and critiquing someone who is legally and socially your superior is forbidden (unless you can prove that they’re committing identity fraud and are not your social superior at all.)  Arresting someone who has actual money and power is difficult– it’s much easier to arrest homeless people and sex workers.

But anyway it takes a lot of hard work and dialogue trees and puzzle solving, but eventually you collect enough evidence to definitively say that “Mayor Madeleine” is actually the convict “Jean Valjean” in disguise. You offer all of your exhaustive research to the prefecture.

They laugh in your face.

“Madeleine can’t be a criminal! He’s rich and a mayor!” They laugh. “Besides, we already found Jean Valjean. He’s this random homeless guy we have some flimsy evidence against.”

They are your superiors, and are always right. You decide you were just being crazy and agree with their judgement; Madeleine is not Valjean, the Random Homeless Guy is Valjean. You order your bosses to fire you from your job for caring about meaningless things like “evidence.” CASE CLOSED

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You guys are so focused on your Nine Shippable Twink amis that you’ve forgotten the REAL main characters of Les Mis are “the Infinite” and “Man.” Can’t believe there’s not a single ship in the Infinte/Man tag on ao3. Smh

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the only Amis who have to Actually Care about their studies are the med students

all the rest are on a sliding scale from 'we don't actually know if they're even in college' to ' actively resisting the college they are enrolled in like they've been dumped behind enemy lines'

they are shit terrible students and that is actually canon

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If I was hypothetically writing a Les Mis fic and needed a map of Paris between 1820-1830, where can I find one?

I mean, I found some on google, but they end up very blurry if I try to zoom in.

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why isn’t bahorel depicted as devastatingly sexy both for his ideas and his appearance in more les mis fanfiction when that was barely subtext in the book

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