This book provides a critical examination of over 300 historical works about the French Revolution, published in Europe (in particular in France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy and Russia) as well as in the United States between 1789 and 1989. It also goes on to examine recent trends in French Revolution historiography and consider where histories of this landmark event may go in the future. By emphasizing the elements which have been valued or hidden, exalted or silenced, Historicizing the French Revolution shows how reflections on 1789 are always fundamentally tied to the times in which they are formulated. Antonino De Francesco looks at the ways in which these historical accounts can be seen to support and, at times, contrast with the formation of political modernity – both in national and international contexts – as it has taken shape in the hundreds of years that have followed this key moment in world history.

Three decades ago, François Furet famously announced that the French Revolution was over. Napoleon's armies ceased to march around Europe long ago, and Louis XVIII even returned to occupy the throne of his guillotined brother. And yet the Revolutionâ (TM)s memory continues to hold sway over imaginations and cultures around the world. This sway is felt particularly strongly by those who are interested in history: for the French Revolution not only altered the course of history radically, but became the fountainhead of historicism and the origin of the historical mentality. The sixteen essays collected in this volume investigate the Revolutionâ (TM)s intellectual and material legacies. From popular culture to education and politics, from France and Ireland to Poland and Turkey, from 1789 to the present day, leading historians expose, alongside graduate students, the myriad ways in which the Revolution changed humanityâ (TM)s possible futures, its history, and the idea of history. They attest to how the Revolution has had a continuing global significance, and is still shaping the world today.

Fran�ois Hartog explores crucial moments of change in societyÕs Òregimes of historicityÓ or its way of relating to the past, present, and future. Inspired by Arendt, Koselleck, and Ricoeur, Hartog analyzes a broad range of texts, positioning the The Odyssey as a work on the threshold of a historical consciousness and then contrasting it against an investigation of the anthropologist Marshall SahlinsÕs concept of Òheroic history.Ó He tracks changing perspectives on time in Ch‰teaubriandÕs Historical Essay and Travels in America, and sets them alongside other writings from the French Revolution. He revisits the insight of the French Annals School and situates Pierre NoraÕs Realms of Memory within a history of heritage and our contemporary presentism. Our presentist present is by no means uniform or clear-cut, and it is experienced very differently depending on oneÕs position in society. There are flows and acceleration, but also what the sociologist Robert Castel calls the Òstatus of casual workers,Ó whose present is languishing before their very eyes and who have no past except in a complicated way (especially in the case of immigrants, exiles, and migrants) and no real future (since the temporality of plans and projects is denied them). Presentism is therefore experienced as either emancipation or enclosure, in some cases with ever greater speed and mobility and in others by living from hand to mouth in a stagnating present. Hartog also accounts for the fact that the future is perceived as a threat and not a promise. We live in a time of catastrophe, one he feels we have brought upon ourselves.

"This concise introduction to the French Revolution explains the origins, development, and eventual decline of a movement that defines France to this day. Through an accessible chronological narrative, Sylvia Neely explains the complex events, conflicting groups, and rapid changes that characterized this critical period in French History. She traces the fundamental transformations in government and society that forced the French to come up with new ways of thinking about their place in the world and led to liberalism, conservatism, terrorism, and modern nationalism. All readers interested in France and revolutionary history will find this a rewarding read."--BOOK JACKET.

In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates. Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a "new humanism," one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity.