La Revolution: 1789-1871: Ecriture d'une Histoire Immediate. Edited by Philippe Bourdin

Abstract

In May 1803, the Journal de Paris's editors complained of being ‘overwhelmed’ by the thousands of histories of the Revolution that had appeared in recent years. The figure was certainly exaggerated for comic effect, but as this volume of essays demonstrates, the Journal de Paris had good cause for complaint because the Revolution did give rise to an enormous, and very varied, outpouring of historical writing. Much of this was plainly polemical, most of it was pretty poor history, but some of it did represent a real attempt to re-think France's past in the light of the Revolution and, just as importantly, to re-imagine the historian's craft in a time of radical political and social change. Arising from a conference held at the Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille, in September 2005 this collection approaches the troubled relationship between the experience of Revolution and the writing of history from a variety of perspectives. Some of the sixteen essays here are more successful than others in exploring this relationship in all its tangled forms but taken as a whole they offer valuable insights into both history's place in Revolutionary culture and the Revolution's rôle in the making of the modern historian.