Publisher Description

This book, first published in 2004, offers an interesting synthesis of the long- and short-term causes of the French Revolution.

The author applies the philosophies of Alexis de Tocqueville and Augustin Cochin to both historical and contemporary explanations of the French Revolution.

The wars between 1792 and 1815 saw the making of the modern world, with Britain and Russia the key powers to emerge triumphant from a long period of bitter conflict. In this innovative book, Jeremy Black focuses on the strategic contexts and strategies involved, explaining their significance both at the time and subsequently. Reinterpreting French Revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare, strategy, and their consequences, he argues that Napoleon’s failure owed much to his limitations as a strategist. Black uses this framework as a foundation to assess the nature of warfare, the character of strategy, and the eventual ascendance of Britain and Russia in this period. Rethinking the character of strategy, this is the first history to look holistically at the strategies of all the leading belligerents from a global perspective. It will be an essential read for military professionals, students, and history buffs alike.

Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Rebecca L. Spang, who revolutionized our understanding of the restaurant, has written a new history of money. It uses one of the most infamous examples of monetary innovation, the assignats—a currency initially defined by French revolutionaries as “circulating land”—to demonstrate that money is as much a social and political mediator as it is an economic instrument. Following the assignats from creation to abandonment, Spang shows them to be subject to the same slippages between policies and practice, intentions and outcomes, as other human inventions. “This is a quite brilliant, assertive book.” —Patrice Higonnet, Times Literary Supplement “Brilliant...What [Spang] proposes is nothing less than a new conceptualization of the revolution...She has provided historians—and not just those of France or the French Revolution—with a new set of lenses with which to view the past.” —Arthur Goldhammer, Bookforum “[Spang] views the French Revolution from rewardingly new angles by analyzing the cultural significance of money in the turbulent years of European war, domestic terror and inflation.” —Tony Barber, Financial Times

This book explores Hegel's response to the French Revolutionary Terror and its impact on Germany. Like many of his contemporaries, Hegel was struck by the seeming parallel between the political upheaval in France and the intellectual upheaval in German thought inaugurated by the Protestant Reformation and brought to a climax by German Idealism. He believed, as did many others, that a political revolution would be unnecessary in Germany, because this intellectual "revolution" would preempt it. Mourning Sickness provides a new reading of these ideas in the light of contemporary theories of historical trauma. It explores the ways in which major historical events are experienced vicariously and the fantasies we use to make sense of them. Rebecca Comay brings Hegel into relation with the most burning contemporary discussions around catastrophe, revolution, and the role of media in shaping our political experience. The book will be of interest to readers of philosophy, literature, cultural studies, history, political theory, and memory studies.