Yuromi

A mutual of mine (@yur0m1) drew me chewing on Saint-Just..

Since i see people in that community talk about, french revolution historians who are not accurate or them being biased.

That is a great but pretty tricky question. Bias will of course always be a problem when studying history, and to be honest, I personally didn’t feel like I could truly trust any historian to tell me what was true or false until I learned how to go back all the way to check the primary sources. Nowadays I can’t really believe anything a historian says unless there’s a footnote with such a source attached to it… 😅 But of course, starting with reading those when new to this is perhaps still not what one ought to do. Unfortunately, I can’t really point to a book that I think truly Has It All for a newcomer (I’ve never actually looked at any of the books literally titled An Introduction to the French Revolution or something similar). It of course also much depends on what part of this ten years old super complex mess you’re interested in. The following are however the books I can remember myself looking at when I first started reading up on the revolution five years ago omg it’s been half a decade already. I invite everyone on here to give their own recommendations as well  if you have any to help out here. 😊

Liberty or Death: the French Revolution 1789-1799 (2014) by Peter McPhee — the only book about the entire revolution I’ve only really looked at. A chronological account that is very well sourced and easy to read, however, since its objective is to provide a bird’s eye view of the revolution’s effects all over France, this also leads to big events like the storming of the Bastille being decribed over a paragraph and important players basically being reduced to just a name. So I still don’t know if it would be ideal for a complete newcomer.

Twelve who ruled (1941) by R.R Palmer — the standard account for an overview over the period of the revolution known as ”the terror” and the decisions made under it. It is an easy to read book, however, since Palmer doesn’t use footnotes it’s become pretty much wasted at least on me… 😅

Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (2006) by Ruth Scurr and Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life (2010) by Peter McPhee — my first two Robespierre biographies. They are both rather short and easy to read. The first one is one of those books you’ll see people here on tumblr dissuade from picking up, while the second one is generally recommended. I too would recommend McPhee over Scurr, not the least because he is an actual historian. Scurr is however more hostile to Robespierre while McPhee is more sympathetic, and I guess I thought they balanced each other out nicely when reading them side by side for the first time. I have however spotted some factual errors in both of them over the years, so maybe don’t treat them like the Robespierre Bible or whatever you wanna call it…

Robespierre (1935) by J.M Thompson — my favorite Robespierre biography in my early days. It brings up and analyzes close to everything there is on Robespierre — letters, speeches/interventions and descriptions of him from contemporaries — though this of course also leads to it becoming a very long read…

Choosing Terror (2014) by Marisa Linton — a good look at the political violence the French revolutionaries used against each other between the years 1792-1794.

Terror: the French Revolution and its Demons (2020) by Marisa Linton and Michel Biard — a book that looks over what’s true and what’s myth about the period of the revolution we in hindsight call the Terror. But in order to read a ”reconstruction” of the terror, one should perhaps have an idea of what happened already prior to coming into it…