A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674177282 ISBN 13: 9780674177284

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 1989

Synopsis

Two centuries later, the French Revolution―that extraordinary event that founded modern democracy―continues to give rise to a reevaluation of essential questions. The ambition of this magnificent volume is not only to present the reader with the research of a wide range of international scholars on those questions, but also to bring one into the heart of the issues still under lively debate.

Its form is as original as its goal: neither dictionary, in the traditional sense of the word, nor encyclopedia, it is deliberately limited to some ninety-nine entries organized alphabetically by key words and themes under five major headings: events, including the Estates General and the Terror; actors, such as Marie Antoinette, Marat, and Napoleon Bonaparte; institutions and creations, among them Revolutionary Calendar and Suffrage; ideas, covering, for example, Ancien Régime, the American Revolution, and Liberty; and historians and commentators, from Hegel to Tocqueville. In addition, there are synoptic indexes of names and themes that give the reader easy access to the entire volume as well as a key to its profound coherence.

What unifies all the varied topics brought together in this dictionary is their authors’ effort to be “critical.” As such, the book rejects the dogmatism of closed systems and definitive interpretations. Its aim is less to make a complete inventory of the findings of the history of the French Revolution than to take stock of what remains problematical about those findings; this work thus offers the additional special quality of incorporating the rich historiographical literature unceasingly elaborated since 1789.

With A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, François Furet and Mona Ozouf invite the reader to recross the first two centuries of French democracy in order to gain a better understanding of the origins of the world in which we live today.

About this title

About the Authors

François Furet, former president of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, is presently director of the Institut Raymond-Aron in Paris and Professor of History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Mona Ozouf is Director of Research at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris.

Reviews

This work is sure to be compared to two other recent publications: John Paxton's Companion to the French Revolution (LJ 1/88) and Samuel F. Scott and Barry Rothaus's Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 1789-1799 ( LJ 2/15/85). Paxton's book contains hundreds of short entries. Scott/Rothaus and Furet/Ozouf's books, however, contain substantial essays written by numerous scholars. The main difference between the last two collections is that the volumes by Furet and Ozouf have a distinctly revisionist character. The 43 essays by Furet and Ozouf and the 56 contributed by other scholars all tend to stress the political and cultural dimensions of the Revolution, as opposed to the class-conflict interpretation of Marxist historians. The entries are grouped into five sections: events, actors, institutions and creations, ideas, and historians and commentators. The level of scholarship remains uniformly high, and nearly every entry contains a useful historiographical discussion. Recommended for most university and large public libraries.
- Thomas J. Schaeper, St. Bonaventure Univ., N.Y.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674177282
• ISBN 13: 9780674177284
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1120
• Editor: Francois Furet, Mona Ozouf