Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914 - Hardcover

Gildea, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674032098 ISBN 13: 9780674032095

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2008

Synopsis

For those who lived in the wake of the French Revolution, from the storming of the Bastille to Napoleon’s final defeat, its aftermath left a profound wound that no subsequent king, emperor, or president could heal. Children of the Revolution follows the ensuing generations who repeatedly tried and failed to come up with a stable regime after the trauma of 1789. The process encouraged fresh and often murderous oppositions between those who were for, and those who were against, the Revolution’s values. Bearing the scars of their country’s bloody struggle, and its legacy of deeply divided loyalties, the French lived the long nineteenth century in the shadow of the revolutionary age.

Despite the ghosts raised in this epic tale, Robert Gildea has written a richly engaging and provocative book. His is a strikingly unfamiliar France, a country with an often overwhelming gap between Paris and the provinces, a country torn apart by fratricidal hatreds and a tortured history of feminism, the site of political catastrophes and artistic triumphs, and a country that managed—despite a pervasive awareness of its own fall from grace—to fix itself squarely at the heart of modernity. Indeed, Gildea reveals how the collective recognition of the great costs of the Revolution galvanized the French to achieve consensus in a new republic and to integrate the tumultuous past into their sense of national identity. It was in this spirit that France’s young men went to the front in World War I with a powerful sense of national confidence and purpose.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Gildea is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, and the author of Marianne in Chains, the winner of the Wolfson Prize for history.

Reviews

In this thoroughly researched work of scholarship, Gildea (history, Oxford Univ.) argues that the French Revolution spawned two conflicting ideologies that dominated the course of French history from 1800 to 1914. Through the lives of five generations of French citizens, Gildea elucidates the seemingly irrevocable differences between these two opposing camps. The Monarchists viewed the Revolution as an abhorrent rebellion against legitimate authority, while the Republicans embraced the Revolution as the unfettering of human potential. This conflict became manifest through the turbulent events of 1815, 1848, 1851, and 1871 when French blood was shed to assert the conflicting legacies of the Revolution. Gildea (Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation) maintains that this conflict permeated the entire fabric of French society, and it was only the unifying crisis of the Great War that finally ended the turbulent debate over the legitimate legacy of the Revolution. This thesis should generate controversy since historians like Julian Jackson (France: The Dark Years 1941–44) maintain that the divisive legacy of the Revolution survived beyond World War I and the conflict included Bonapartists, Socialists, and Communists as well as monarchists and republicans. Still, Gildea's book is a worthy addition to all comprehensive modern French history collections.—Jim Doyle, Rome, GA
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Starred Review. The French Revolution's cries of liberty, fraternity, and equality reverberated throughout Europe and America. Yet in France, as Oxford historian Gildea (Marianne in Chains) demonstrates in this elegant political and cultural history, the consequences of the revolution were far more ambiguous: its mixed legacy included hope for a new day as well as anarchy, bloodletting and despotism. Chronicling five generations, Gildea discovers diverse responses, including opposition and a longing for the monarchy in the first generation. The second generation after the revolution—those born around 1800—longed for liberty, equality and fraternity without the terror and dictatorship that called into question the revolutionary project. The third generation, born around 1830, was more pragmatic than ideological, but did develop a secular morality that challenged the political power of the church. Later in the 19th century, the revolution sharply divided the French Republic, but by WWI, both opponents and proponents laid aside their differences and fought side by side for France's greatness and unity. Invoking writers and thinkers from Musset to Flaubert to Péguy, Gildea's spellbinding book offers a challenging new portrait of the long-term impact of the French Revolution. Maps. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This survey examines nineteenth-century France through its domestic and foreign politics, the Industrial Revolution, the arts, and feminism and interprets the country as having settled its account with the original French Revolution. Reading like a well-honed lecture from a university professor (which Gildea is, in Britain), the narrative focuses on the antagonists over the French Revolution’s legacy, conservatives and Catholics repelled by its excesses, liberals and non-Catholics inspired by its ideals. How these opposing factions changed over the generations, from Napoléon to the Second Empire to the Third Republic, comes through in Gildea’s biographical sketches of their members, not so much of leaders, who are described sparingly, but of rank-and-filers who in the political game rose, fell, or met with death. In addition to reflecting regime changes, the French Revolution’s meaning for women’s equality emerges in Gildea’s examples of challengers to legal and professional discrimination. Including aesthetic developments that made Paris the world capital of art and literature, Gildea makes a fine delivery of the sociopolitical essentials of France’s conflict-riven 1800s. --Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674032098
• ISBN 13: 9780674032095
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 576