Political History of the French Revolution since 1989
Paul R Hanson
Journal of Social History, Volume 52, Issue 3, Spring 2019, Pages 584–592
Abstract
The French Revolution was a supremely political event. Indeed, it might be seen as marking the invention of modern politics. Broadly speaking, virtually any work of scholarship dealing with the French Revolution might be said to address revolutionary politics. This essay focuses more narrowly, however, on recent works that have explicitly addressed aspects of the political history of the Revolution, paying particular attention to three broad areas. The first is a growing body of work focusing on the French Revolution in the provinces, including important provincial cities, as well as village studies and regional studies. Some of this scholarship explores the dialectical relationship between political currents in Paris and developments in the provinces. Paris has hardly been ignored, however, and a number of important books in recent years have been devoted to important political events centered in the capital. These include works on the Night of August 4, the king’s flight to Varennes, and the massacre on the Champ de Mars. A spate of recent works on the origins and nature of the Terror promise to generate continuing debate on that topic. Finally, an array of historians has produced significant scholarship over the past twenty years on the period of the Directory, making it clear that the revolutionary dynamic did not end with the fall of Robespierre. Thus, the historiography of the Revolution since the bicentennial has broadened our understanding of revolutionary politics both geographically and chronologically.