Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity offers readers an accessible and lively introduction to the French Revolution that is also grounded in the latest and most sophisticated historical scholarship. It does so through two paths―a book and a companion CD-ROM. The book gives a brief but comprehensive narrative of the Revolution. The CD-ROM offers readers an unprecedented multimedia overview of the Revolution through images, primary documents, and song. Together they introduce readers to the fascinating story of the world’s first great revolution.

The book, written by Lynn Hunt and Jack Censer, preeminent authorities on the French Revolution, includes selected images and documents from the accompanying CD-ROM, prepared by the authors with the support of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the American Social History Project at City University of New York. Features of the CD-ROM include primary documents (carefully chosen, translated, and placed in their proper historical contexts by a team of historians), songs, maps, and more than 300 images (caricatures, portraits, sculptures, and photographs of artifacts of material culture)―many previously available only to specialists in the field. These hard-to-find images, gathered from repositories in France and the United States, comprise an unparalleled and powerful visual record of the Revolution. Given the centrality of visual artifacts (imagery, symbolism, and print culture) to the history of the Revolution, and the inability of print reproduction to present such images with clarity and detail, the companion CD-ROM will provide an entry into the Revolution unavailable in any other form.

Jack Censer is Professor of History at George Mason University. His many books include The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment (1994) and, most recently, an edited volume Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth- Century France (Penn State Press, 1997).

Lynn Hunt is Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at UCLA. Her many books include Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution(1984).