The book that brought down the Bastille...Linguet, a journalist, was in the Bastille for 20 months and went right to London when he was released - to write this book, which was an immediate sensation: an inside look at France's most famous prison, just years before its fall. This new edition includes extensive notes - many derived from other accounts of the Bastille -, appendices and illustrations.

Legends of the Bastille is a book by Frantz Funck-Brentano. The Bastille was a fortress in Paris used as a state prison. Stormed by a crowd during the French Revolution in the late 18th century, it became a symbol for the republic and also for having imprisoned several notable French freethinkers.

Madame Guyon's translated prison autobiography provides a compelling account of her eight years of incarceration from 1695 to 1703. The courage she shows sheds light on her most difficult years, including interrogation practices. This text is a testimony to her perseverance in those times of stress and humiliation.

"Zinoman makes original contributions on multiple fronts, including colonial systems; prisons as social institutions; political life in prison; public campaigns concerning prisons; and released prisoners in action. He also takes us beyond the colonial/anticolonial, nationalist/communist, and war/peace dichotomies that have long dominated Vietnam studies."—David Marr, author of Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 "This is a wonderful, lucidly argued, and meticulously documented book."—Ann Stoler, author of Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things

This book is both an analysis of the Bastille as cultural paradigm and a case study on the history of French political culture. It examines in particular the storming and subsequent fall of the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789 and how it came to represent the cornerstone of the French Revolution, becoming a symbol of the repression of the Old Regime. Lüsebrink and Reichardt use this semiotic reading of the Bastille to reveal how historical symbols are generated; what these symbols’ functions are in the collective memory of societies; and how they are used by social, political, and ideological groups. To facilitate the symbolic nature of the investigation, this analysis of the evolving signification of the Bastille moves from the French Revolution to the nineteenth century to contemporary history. The narrative also shifts from France to other cultural arenas, like the modern European colonial sphere, where the overthrow of the Bastille acquired radical new signification in the decolonization period of the 1940s and 1950s. The Bastille demonstrates the potency of the interdisciplinary historical research that has characterized the end of this century, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, and taking its methodological tools from history, sociology, linguistics, and cultural and literary studies.

A bold new history of the French Revolution from the standpoint of the peasants, workers, women and sans culottes The assault on the Bastille, the Reign of Terror, Danton mocking his executioner, Robespierre dispensing a fearful justice, and the archetypal gadfly Marat—the events and figures of the French Revolution have exercised a hold on the historical imagination for more than 200 years. It has been a template for heroic insurrection and, to more conservative minds, a cautionary tale. In the hands of Eric Hazan, author of The Invention of Paris, the revolution becomes a rational and pure struggle for emancipation. In this new history, the first significant account of the French Revolution in over twenty years, Hazan maintains that it fundamentally changed the Western world—for the better. Looking at history from the bottom up, providing an account of working people and peasants, Hazan asks, how did they see their opportunities? What were they fighting for? What was the Terror and could it be justified? And how was the revolution stopped in its tracks? The People’s History of the French Revolution is a vivid retelling of events, bringing them to life with a multitude of voices. Only in this way, by understanding the desires and demands of the lower classes, can the revolutionary bloodshed and the implacable will of a man such as Robespierre be truly understood.