On 17 July 1791 the revolutionary National Guard of Paris opened fire on a crowd of protesters: citizens believing themselves patriots trying to save France from the reinstatement of a traitor king. To the National Guard and their political superiors the protesters were the dregs of the people, brigands paid by counter-revolutionary aristocrats. Politicians and journalists declared the National Guard the patriots, and their action a heroic defence of the fledgling Constitution.

"Some of the greatest names in the history of art are those of Florentine sculptors: Ghiberti, Donatello and Luca della Robbia; Verrocchio and Michelangelo; Cellini and Giovanni Bologna. These were the creators of a school of sculpture that remained supreme for over two centuries."--BOOK COVER.

An exploration of current scholarly thinking about the wide and surprisingly complex range of historical problems associated with the study of Ancien Régime Europe

A comprehensive survey of the work of this most influential Florentine artist and teacher Andrea del Verrocchio (c. 1435–1488) was one of the most versatile and inventive artists of the Italian Renaissance. He created art across media, from his spectacular sculptures and paintings to his work in goldsmithing, architecture, and engineering. His expressive, confident drawings provide a key point of contact between sculpture and painting. He led a vibrant workshop where he taught young artists who later became some of the greatest painters of the period, including Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Lorenzo di Credi, and Domenico Ghirlandaio. This beautifully illustrated book presents a comprehensive survey of Verrocchio's art, spanning his entire career and featuring some fifty sculptures, paintings, and drawings, in addition to works he created with his students. Through incisive scholarly essays, in-depth catalog entries, and breathtaking illustrations, this volume draws on the latest research in art history to show why Verrocchio was one of the most innovative and influential of all Florentine artists. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

"Filled with critical insights, Brown's revisionist study utilizes an impressive array of archival sources, some only recently cataloged, to support his thesis that the French Revolution survived until 1802 and the Consulate regime.... This volume should be a priority for all historians and serious students interested in modern French history. Summing Up: Essential."--Choice "What Brown has done is to put all historians of the French Revolution in his debt by the thoroughness with which he explores an important aspect of the complex and interrelated problems posed by any attempt to create a new social and moral order based on principles that could prove to be self-contradictory and were neither understood nor welcomed by a substantial proportion of the population."--English Historical Review "This is one of the most important pieces of scholarship on the French Revolution since the 1989 bicentennial."--David Bell, Johns Hopkins University For two centuries, the early years of the French Revolution have inspired countless democratic movements around the world. Yet little attention has been paid to the problems of violence, justice, and repression between the Reign of Terror and the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. In Ending the French Revolution, Howard Brown analyzes these years to reveal the true difficulty of founding a liberal democracy in the midst of continual warfare, repeated coups d'état, and endemic civil strife. By highlighting the role played by violence and fear in generating illiberal politics, Brown speaks to the struggles facing democracy in our own age. The result is a fundamentally new understanding of the French Revolution's disappointing outcome. Howard G. Brown, Professor of History at Binghamton University, State University of New York, is the author of War, Revolution, and the Bureaucratic State: Politics and Army Administration in France, 1791-1799 and coeditor of Taking Liberties: Problems of a New Order from the French Revolution to Napoleon. Winner of the American Historical Association's 2006 Leo Gershoy Award and the University of Virginia's 2004 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies