The Oxford History Of The French Revolution By William Doyle

A good book to learn the basics about the French Revolution. Well written and researched. I thoroughtly enjoyed it.

This book, from one of the leading revisionist historians of the French Revolution, has received high praise from a number of historians and newspapers, saying it’s the most authoritative and comprehensive history of the French Revolution. That it may be; however, the book has a number of opportunities for improvement in its next edition:

1. Many passages and phrases are in French and beg immediate translation.
2. The author has a tendency to expand upon interesting but less important facts to the detriment of flow.
3. Characters are briefly introduced, then show up in snippets many pages later, which, for full comprehension of the points made, either requires the reader to have a more than fairly good memory or frequently access the index. Thus, it’s often quite a challenge to connect the dots of information sprinkled throughout the book.
4. Some characters are included in the index, only to have the briefest of descriptions. Eg, on page 422, this is the only information one finds about Mmm de Staël in a somewhat difficult to follow sentence: “Meanwhile, whereas at the highest level the closet [sic] influence of political wives like Mme Roland and Mme Talien, or Necker’s busybody daughter Mme de Staël, continued the well-established traditions of the old regime, the unprecedented atmosphere of early revolutionary Paris threw up new and unusual figures.”
5. One finds a number of nonparallelisms throughout the book. Eg, most of the time there is no line separation between paragraphs; however, without apparent reason, this is not always the case. As well, many paragraphs are quite lengthy. At random, I found one that goes on for four pages.
6. While some subjects receive great coverage, others, such as the Storming of the Bastille are very quickly glossed over. Eg, the suggestion is made that the Storming was part of a continued search for armaments. Actually, the crowd had already collected some 30,000 muskets. What they were hoping to obtain at the Bastille was gunpowder and ammunition.
7. The book contains relatively few illustrations, with opportunities for “a picture is worth a thousand words” on a number of blank pages.
8. The book contains no Bibliography. The combination of its mostly chronological listing of historians and it Notes section is a somewhat inadequate substitute.

The book does contain, at least for me, a lot of “Wow, I didn’t know that’s!” Just one example: the Girondins went to guillotine singing the “Marseillaise.” As well, the author provides a fairly good listing of the factors as to end of the Terror with the Thermidorian Reaction. This listing includes external factors reducing the need for drastic measures (such as the guillotine) to suppress “traitors” to end the war: 1. On 1 June 1794, the British failure to prevent a major grain convey from arriving from America. 2. Also, in this same naval battle [the Glorious First of June], the British sinking of the French ship Vengeur [du Peuple] was spun not as a total defeat but an example of heroic defense with its crew going down with the ship rather than surrender. Actually, the “kind” British were able to rescue only half the crew before it sank. 3. On 26 June 1794, more importantly, came the victory at the Battle of Fleurus, which removed the last Austrian threat and opened the way for a renewed invasion of Belgium.

Bottom-line, the book is an excellent, informative read, with opportunities for improvement in its next edition.

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What an awe inspiring read! This is my first brush with the French Revolution and I am shocked by the scale and violence of the French revolution. This book is very long, more like 1000 pages as opposed to 500 pages. Very interesting and I highly recommend!

I think it is very well written. It helped me to get a better grasp of many of the important characters, without either demonizing or canonizing them.

This is a long but very thorough and complete history of the French Revolution. The writing style is clear, eminently readable and informative. This is a great book

I have found it difficult to find books written in English about the French Revolution, until I came across this. Initially I discounted it because it is the “Oxford history of…” but that was my mistake, I think. The author’s understanding of France’s development–the Enlightenment, the country-wide agrarian poverty, the recession of the 1790s, the class conflicts; other than the Monarchy, the absence of clear political cohesion; the international distrust of the Revolution, the antagonism between France and the other European powers–these and many more topics were thoroughly interesting.

I am grateful I found this book. If readers have others to suggest, please do so. After all, my understand of the French Revolution was based on Tale of Two Cities, from the eighth grade.

A view of the dynamics that created the horrible necessity of revolution and the amalgam of violent ideologies in conflict that fanned the flames. Whenever we actively create and/or passively allow evils to multiply, there always comes a moment of reckoning where the cost of ‘revolution’ is vastly greater than the cost of active confession and courageous confrontation would have been.