This book provides a critical history of the movement associated with the journal Annales, from its foundation in 1929 to the present. This movement has been the single most important force in the development of what is sometimes called ‘the new history’. Renowned cultural historian, Peter Burke, distinguishes between four main generations in the development of the Annales School. The first generation included Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, who fought against the old historical establishment and founded the journal Annales to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration. The second generation was dominated by Fernand Braudel, whose magnificent work on the Mediterranean has become a modern classic. The third generation, deeply associated with the ‘cultural turn’ in historical scholarship, includes recently well-known historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jacques Le Goff and Georges Duby. This new edition brings us right up to the present, and contemplates the work of a fourth generation, including practitioners such as Roger Chartier, Serge Gruzinski and Jacques Revel. This new generation continued much of the cultural focus of the previous Annales historians, while diversifying further, and becoming increasingly ‘reflexive’, a move that owes much to the sociocultural theories of Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bourdieu. Wide-ranging yet concise, this new edition of a classic work of analysis of one of the most important historical movements of the twentieth century will be welcomed by students of history and other social sciences and by the interested general reader.

This book attempts to introduce students to the major events that make up the story of the French Revolution and to the different ways in which historians have interpreted them. It covers the relationship between France and the United States.

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.

This book provides a critical history of the movement associated with the journal Annales, from its foundation in 1929 to the present. Burke argues that this movement has been the single most important force in the development of what is sometimes called the 'new history'. Burke distinguishes three main generations in the development of the Annales School. The first generation included Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, who fought against the old historical establishment and founded the journal Annales. The second generation was dominated by Braudel, whose magnificent work on the Mediterranean has became a modern classic. The third generation includes well-known contemporary historians such as Duby, Le Goff and Le Roy Ladurie. Wide-ranging and yet concise, this is an accessible examination of one of the most important historical movements of the twentieth century.

What Is the Third Estate? was the most influential pamphlet of 1789. It did much to set the French Revolution on a radically democratic course. It also launched its author, the Abbé Sieyes, on a remarkable political career that spanned the entire revolutionary decade. Sieyes both opened the revolution by authoring the National Assembly's declaration of sovereignty in June of 1789 and closed it in 1799 by engineering Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état. This book studies the powerful rhetoric of the great pamphlet and the brilliant but enigmatic thought of its author. William H. Sewell's insightful analysis reveals the fundamental role played by the new discourse of political economy in Sieyes's thought and uncovers the strategies by which this gifted rhetorician gained the assent of his intended readers--educated and prosperous bourgeois who felt excluded by the nobility in the hierarchical social order of the old regime. He also probes the contradictions and incoherencies of the pamphlet's highly polished text to reveal fissures that reach to the core of Sieyes's thought--and to the core of the revolutionary project itself. Combining techniques of intellectual history and literary analysis with a deep understanding of French social and political history, Sewell not only fashions an illuminating portrait of a crucial political document, but outlines a fresh perspective on the history of revolutionary political culture.

Festivals and the French Revolution--the subject conjures up visions of goddesses of Liberty, strange celebrations of Reason, and the oddly pretentious cult of the Supreme Being. Every history of the period includes some mention of festivals; Ozouf shows us that they were much more than bizarre marginalia to the revolutionary process.