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Department of History

The French Revolution, 1774-1799 (HI31J): Bibliography

Abbreviations used for primary document collections in the weekly readings

FRDC = Laura Mason and Tracey Rizzo, eds., The French Revolution: A Document Collection (1999), primary documents.

ORFR = Keith M. Baker, ed., The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1987), primary documents.

OHFR = David Andress, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution (2015)

CFR = Peter McPhee, ed., A Companion to the French Revolution (2013)

FRCMPC = The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 4 vols. with different editors: C. Lucas, K. M. Baker, François Furet.

For further primary document collections, see Primary Documents below

General Overviews of 18th Century France

  • C. Jones, The Great Nation: France 1715-99 (2002)
  • A. Cobban, A History of Modern France, 1715-99 (1961)
  • W. Doyle (ed.), Old Régime France, 1648-1788 (2001)
  • E. Le Roy Ladurie, The Ancien Régime, 1610-1774 (1996)
  • J. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (1995)

  • For a useful bibliography, see

    • The Colin Jones’s websiteLink opens in a new window, which contains commented bibliographies for his books, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon, 1715-99 (2002) and Paris; Biography of a City (2004)

 

The Enlightenment & the Origins of the French Revolution

  • D. Outram, The Enlightenment (1995)
  • P. Gay, The Enlightenment, 2. vols. (1966, 1969)
  • E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932)
  • R. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1985)
  • R. Darnton, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-revolutionary France (1995)
  • D. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France, Inventing Nationalism, 1685-1800 (2001)
  • D. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (2007)
  • D. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 1560-1791 (1996)
  • K. M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (1990)
  • D. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (2001)
  • A. Lilti, The World of the Salons: Sociability and Worldliness in Eighteenth-century Paris (2015)
  • P.R. Campbell, The Origins of the French Revolution (2006)
  • E. A. Bond, The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France (2021)
  • W. Sewell, Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France (2021)
  • J. Sweetman, The Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution, 1700-1850 (1998)
  • R. Porter, The Enlightenment (2001 edn)
  • D. Roche, France in the Enlightenment (1998)
  • R. Chartier, Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (1993)
  • G. Kates (ed.), The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies (1998)
  • R. Schechter (ed.), The French Revolution: The Essential Readings (2001)
  • D. Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (2002)
  • S. Maza, Private Lives, Public Affairs: The Causes Celebres of Pre-revolutionary France (1993)
  • W. Doyle, The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Regime ((2014)
  • T. Kaiser and D. Van Kley (eds), From Deficit to Deluge: The Origins of the French Revolution (2010)
  • C. Walton, Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment (2011)


The French Revolution: Overviews and Essay Collections

  • P. McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (2016)
  • T. Tackett, The Coming of the Terror (2014)
  • P. McPhee, A Companion to the French Revolution (2014)
  • Robert H. Blackman, 1789: The French Revolution Begins (2019)
  • D. Andress (ed), The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution (2015)
  • S. Desan, L. Hunt, W. Nelson, The French Revolution in Global Perspective (2013)
  • C. Walton, ed. Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment (State College: Penn State University Press, 2011), see essays on the French Revolution.
  • A. Forrest, The French Revolution (1995)
  • D. Andress, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (2005)
  • D. Sutherland, France 1789-1815 (1985)
  • C. Jones, The Longman Companion to the French Revolution (1989)
  • S. Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989)
  • P. Hanson, Contesting the French Revolution (2009)
  • J.R. Censer & L. Hunt, Exploring the French Revolution (2001)
  • J. Popkin, A Short History of the French Revolution (5th edition, 2009)
  • A. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (2000)
  • F. Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770-1880 (1992)
  • F. Furet and M. Ozouf, Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (1989)
  • K. M. Baker, ed. The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture. 4 vols. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987-1994.
  • W. Doyle. The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
  • P. McPhee, The French Revolution, 1789-1799. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
  • P. McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution, 2014.
  • D. Andress, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
  • G. Kates, ed. The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies. London: Rutledge, 1998.
  • G. Lewis. The French Revolution: rethinking the debate. London: Routledge, 1993.
  • T. C. W. Blanning, ed. The Rise and Fall of the French Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
  • P. R. Hanson, Contesting the French Revolution (Malden, Maine: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
  • J. Popkin. A Short History of the French Revolution. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002 (3rd edition).
  • J. Censer and L. Hunt, eds. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001.
  • R. Schechter, ed. The French Revolution. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
  • F. Fehér, ed. The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
  • D. Andress, ed. Experiencing the French Revolution. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013.
  • I. Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820s (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1994)
  • Temple, N., The Road to 1789: from Reform to Revolution in France (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992).
  • Forest, Alan, The French Revolution, 1789-1799 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1995).

  • C. Jones, The Longman Companion to the French Revolution (1988)

  • S. Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989)

  • A. Mathiez, The French Revolution (London, 1928).

  • G. Lefebvre, The French Revolution, 2 vols. (1964)
  • J. Jaurès, A Socialist History of the French Revolution (2015, abridged; orig. early 20th)

 

Saint Domingue and the Haitian Revolution (see also primary document collections in separate heading below)

  • M. S. Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (2008).
  • Y. Bénot et al., The Abolitions of Slavery from Léger-Félicité Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher
  • D. Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975)
  • R. Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1845 (1989)
  • T. Burnard and J. Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (2016)
  • P. Cheney, Cul-de-sac, Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (2017)
  • S. Dunn, Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light (1999)
  • L. Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004)
  • L Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1824 (2004)
  • L. Dubois, 'The price of Liberty: Victor Hugues and the administration of freedom in Guadeloupe, 1794-1798', in French Revolution. New Debates and controversy, pp. 254-282.
  • C Fick, The Making of Haiti: the Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below (1990)
  • A. Forrest, The Death of the French Atlantic: Trade, War, and Slavery in the Age of Revolution (2020)
  • C. Forsdick and C. Hogsbjerg, Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (2017)
  • J. Garrigus, 'Vincent Ogé Jeune (1757-1791): social class and free colored mobilization on the eve of the Haitian Revolution', The Americas 68: 1 (2011), pp. 33-62.
  • D. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (2002)
  • D. Geggus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (2006)
  • D. Geggus, ‘The Haitian Revolution’ in F.W. Knight & C. Palmer (eds), The Modern Caribbean (1989)
  • D. Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution on the Atlantic World (2001)
  • D. Geggus & B. Gaspar, A Turbulent Time: the French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (1997)
  • D. Geggus and Norman Fiering (eds.), The World of the Haitian Revolution (2009)
  • M. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (2012)
  • P. Girard, Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life (2016)
  • S. Hazareesingh, Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture (2020)
  • P. Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism (1988)
  • C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L-Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1963/2001)
  • P. Linebaugh & M. Rediker, The Many-headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2000)
  • J. E. McClellan, Colonialism and Science: Saint-Domingue in the Old Regime (1992)
  • J. L. Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (2016)
  • R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution (2 vols) (1959 & 1964)
  • S. Peabody, 'There are no slaves in France': The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (1996)
  • J. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (2010)
  • A. Sepinwall, Haitian History: New Perspectives (2014)
  • M. Spieler, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (2012)
  • R. L. Stein, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax: The Lost Sentinel of the Republic (1985)
  • Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995)
  • 'Revolutions in the Americas', Forum, American Historical Review (2000)
  • 'Slavery and Citizenship in the Age of the Atlantic Revolutions', Special issue, Historical Reflections (2003)

 
Primary Document Collections: printed and in the Library

  • L. Dubois and J. Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents, 2nd ed. (2017)
  • M. Alpaugh, The French Revolution: A History in DocumentsLink opens in a new window (on order with Library; should arrive by autumn 2021)
  • P. Dwyer and P. McPhee, eds, The French Revolution and Napoleon: A Sourcebook (2002).
  • P. M. Jones, French Revolution In Social And Political Perspective (2003).
  • Iain Hampsher-Monk, The Impact of the French Revolution: texts from Britain in the 1790s (2005). For British sources!!!
  • J. Hardman (ed.), The French Revolution Sourcebook (1999).
  • L. Mason (L.) and T. Rizzo, The French Revolution: a document Collection (1999).
  • D. G. Levy, H. B. Applewhite, M. D. Johnson (eds), Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1795 (1979).
  • K. M. Baker, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1987).
  • J.R. Censer & L. Hunt, Exploring the French Revolution (2001).
  • P. Dwyer and P. McPhee, The French Revolution and Napoleon: A Sourcebook (2002).
  • O. Browning (ed.), Despatches from Paris, 1784-1790, 2 vols. (1909-1910). (avail online)
  • G. K. Fortescue. French Revolutionary Collections in the British Library (1979).
  • J. Censer and L. Hunt (eds.), Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001.
  • P. Dwyer and P. McPhee. The French Revolution and Napoleon: A Sourcebook (2002).
  • J. H. Stewart. A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution (1951).
  • C.-A. Dauban. Paris en 1794 et en 1795. Histoire de la rue, du club, de la famine, composée d'après des documents inédits, particulièrement les rapports de police et les registres du Comité de salut public, avec une introduction. Paris: Plon, 1869.
  • G. K. Fortescue. French revolutionary collections in the British Library: list of the contents of the three special collections of pamphlets, journals and other works in the British Library, relating chiefly to the French Revolution (London: British Library, 1979).
  • Browning, Oscar (ed.), Despatches from Paris, 1784-1790. 2 vols. London: Office of the Society, 1909-1910.
  • Arthur Young, Travels in France in the Years 1787- 1788, 1789. Edited by C. Maxwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929)
  • Bernard and Rene Wilkin (eds.), Fighting for Napoleon: French Soldiers' Letters, 1799-1815. (Pen and Sword Military, 2015 - on order w/Library)
  • Helen Maria Williams, Letters on the French Revolution, written in France, in the summer of 1790, to a friend in EnglandLink opens in a new window; containing, various anecdotes relative to that interesting event, and memoirs of Mons. and Madame Du F--. (Boston,: by J. Belknap and A. Young).
  • Rothney, John. The Brittany Affaire and the Crisis of the Ancien Régime (OUP, 1969). Useful for excerpts by officials and philosophes, translated into English, on the crisis of the Old Regime.
  • Open Access database Napoleon – Letters and Papers: Sources of a family Use the institutional login for Warwick. You can ask ChatGPT to translate the letters into English.
  • See an index of French sources in English. It covers the early modern and revolutionary period. NB: you may have to request titles through inter-library loan.
  • For British women's responses to the French Revolution, you might track down relevant sources by reading this: Adriana Craciun, Kari E. Lokke, Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution (NY: 2001).

 

Primary Documents on Saint-Domingue and the Haitian Revolution

  • Laurent Dubois and David Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804 (2017) Library, digital.
  • David Geggus, The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (2014). Library, digital.
  • See the collection on Haiti, in French and English, at the John Carter Brown LibraryLink opens in a new window.
  • J. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Uprising (2007). Library, hardcopy and digital.


Primary Documents (internet)


    Historiographical Readers

    Collections of important essays in the field

    • Jones, P.M. (ed), The French Revolution in Social and Political Perspective (London: Arnold, 1996).
    • Censer, J.R. (ed.), The French Revolution and Intellectual History (Chicago: The Dorsey Press, 1989).
    • Blanning, T.C. (ed.), The Rise and Fall of the French Revolution (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
    • Kates, G. (ed.), The French Revolution. Recent debates and new controversies (Routledge, 1998)
    • Kafker, F. and Laux, J., Napoleon and His Times: Selected Interpretations (1989)
    • Censer, J.R. and Hunt, Lynn, Exploring the French Revolution (2001)
    • R. Schechter (ed), The French Revolution: the Essential Readings (2001)
    • Lewis, G., The French Revolution: Rethinking the Debate (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).

     

    Comparative Studies

    • Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)
    • François Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770-1880 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing Limited, 1992)
    • R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800, 2 vols. (1959, 1964)
    • Jacques Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799, translated by Herbert H. Rowen (New York: Free Press, 1965)
    • Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)
    • Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492-1992 (1993)
    • William Sewell, “Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case,” Journal of Modern History 57: 1 (1985), 57-85.
    • Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963)
    • Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (1979)

     

    Eyewitness Accounts and Memoirs

    Below is a small sampling of what you can find in the Library. You will inevitably find more sources online.

    • Madame de Staël. Considerations on the principal events of the French Revolution 1818)
    • Memoirs of Madame Roland, An appeal to impartial posterity, by Citizenness Roland, wife of the Minister of the Home Department (1795).
    • Abbé Barruel. Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, translated from the French. (1797-98).
    • Grace Elliott. During the Reign of Terror: Journal of My Life During the French Revolution (1910). Arthur Young. Travels in France During the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789, ed. by Kaplow (1969).
    • Helen Maria Williams, Letters on the French Revolution, written in France, in the summer of 1790, to a friend in EnglandLink opens in a new window; containing, various anecdotes relative to that interesting event, and memoirs of Mons. and Madame Du F--. (Boston,: by J. Belknap and A. Young).
    • Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Panorama of Paris, excerpts from (ed. Jeremy Popkin; 1999)
    • Arthur Young, Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789, (ed. Jeffrey Kaplow, 1976)
    • Last Letters: Prisons and Prisoners of the French Revolution (compiled by Olivier Blanc, trans. Alan Sheridan; 1987)
    • Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Journal of My Life (ed. Daniel Roche; intro. Robert Darnton; trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 1986)

     

    Historical Dictionaries and Reference Works

    • Samuel F. Scott, and Barry Rothaus, eds. Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 1789-1799. Historical Dictionaries of French History, 1. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.
    • Albert Soboul, ed. Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989.
    • François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds. Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Presse, 1989.
    • D. G. Wright. Revolution and Terror in France, 1789-1795. London: Longman, 1990.
    • Ronald Caldwell. The Era of the French Revolution. New York//London: 1985.
    • Alfred Fierro. Bibliographie critique des mémoires sur la Révolution. Paris, 1989.
    • Edna HindieLemay,. Dictionnaire des Constituants, 1789-1791. 2 vols. Paris: Universitas, 1991.
    • Colin Jones. The Longman Companion to the French Revolution. London, New York: Longman, 1988.
    • A. Kuscinski, A. Dictionnaire des conventionnels. Yvelines: Editions du Vexin Français Brueil-en-Vexin, 1973.

     

    Culture and the Intelligentsia

    • Keith M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
    • Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991.
    • Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-revolutionary France. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1995.
    • Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
    • Emmet Kennedy, Cultural History of the French Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
    • Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
    • Charles Walton, Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech (Oxford University Press, 2009).
    • British Responses to the French Revolution
    • Mark Philp, ed. The French Revolution and British Popular Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
    • Marilyn Morris. The British Monarchy and the French Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
    • J. E. Cookson. The British Armed Nation, 1793-1815. New York: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1997.
    • Iain Hampsher-Monk, The Impact of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
    • Emma Vincent Macleod, ‘British Attitudes to the French Revolution,’ The Historical Journal 50: 3 (Sept 2007), 689-709, very good overview of the recent literature on the topic.

    The Press and Revolution

    • Darnton, Robert and Roche, Daniel, The Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775-1800 (1989)
    • Godechot, Jacques. "La Presse française sous la Révolution et l'Empire." In Histoire générale de la presse française. Edited by Claude Bellanger et al. Vol. 1, 405-569 3 vols. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969-1972.
    • Hesse, Carla, Publishing and Cultural Politics and Revolutionary France, 1789-1810 (1991)
    • Gough, Hugh. The Newspaper Press in the French Revolution. Chicago: The Dorsey Press, 1988.
    • Hatin, Eugène. Histoire politique et littéraire de la presse en France. 8 vols. Paris: Poulet-Malassis, 1859-1861.
    • Popkin, Jeremy D. Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789-1799. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990.
    • Popkin, Jeremy D. The Right-Wing Press in France, 1792-1800 (1980).
    • Murray, William James, The Right-Wing Press in the French Revolution, 1789-1792 (1986)
    • Stuart Andrews. The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution, 1789-1799. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
    • Lindsay Porter, Popular Rumor in Revolutionary Paris, 1792-1794. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

    Printed Archives, Legislative Debates, Legislation

    • Actes de la Commune de Paris pendant la Révolution Sigismond Lacroix, 392-414. Paris: L. Cerf//Charles Noblet//Maison Quantin, 1895.
    • Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860: Recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises. eds. M. J. Mavidal, and M. E. Laurent. 1st series, 82 vols. Paris: P. Dupont, 1867-1913. (see www.archive.org to consult volumes; for which volumes correspond to which dates, see http://ihrf.univ-paris1.fr/spip.php?article61)
    • Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, seule histoire authentique et inaltérée de la Révolution française depuis la réunion des Etats-Généraux jusqu’au Consultat (mai 1789-novembre 1799) avec des notes explicatives. Paris: Plon Frčres, 1850-1854. Mortimer-Ternaux, Louis. Histoire de la Terreur. 8 vols. Paris: Lévy frères, 1869.

    Fictional Representation of the Revolution

    • C. Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
    • V. Hugo, Ninety Three.
    • H. Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety.
    • R. Sabatini, Scaramouche
    • Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel
    • K Quinn, L Kamoie, H Webb, Ribbons of Scarlet: A Novel of the French Revolution's Women (2019)

    Films

    See hereLink opens in a new window for a list of films on the late Ancien Regime and French Revolution.

    Among these, a few stand out as classics: Danton, The Lady and the Duke, Marat-Sade, The Marseillaise, Napoleon (1927 film by Gance), That Night in Varennes. But any film could still be analysed for how it represents the Revolution and what that says about the time it was made and about the Revolution's legacies.