Please recommend books about the French Revolution
Dec. 14th, 2025 09:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizbeeI started playing Assassin's Creed: Unity and realised that I know almost nothing about the French Revolution. We did study it in grade 10, but I missed a lot of time due to a never-identified virus -- I was out for most of the American Revolution and all of the French, and mostly passed the class because I knew more about the Chinese Communist Revolution than my teacher. (It's not her fault, she was an art teacher who was roped in to teach history for ... reasons which I'm sure made sense at the time.)
Anyway, I've decided to fill the gap in my knowledge. I started out by trying to listen to The Rest Is History, a podcast my mum recommended, but the hosts are two English men, and they spend a weird amount of time comparing Marie Antoinette to Meghan Markle, but in a derogatory "maybe we should decapitate the Duchess of Sussex" way that I did not care for.
Then I read The French Revolution by Christopher Hibbert, which I think is from 1980. It was a solemn, dispassionate accounting of events and personalities, but didn't get into the question of, for example, why the Parisian mob went from zero to heads on pikes in the storming of the Bastille.
I've requested an inter-library loan for Citizens by Simon Schama, which I've seen recommended a lot, but I would also be eager to read a history that's not ... British? Because the British, for understandable reasons (I guess) weren't really down with the beheading of the monarch and the end of the monarchy (even though they did it first), and I feel like a pro-aristocratic bias has pervaded a lot of what I've encountered. And obviously the Terror was bad, but, like, maybe Robespierre was an asexual smol bean who was a convenient scapegoat! I'm open to the possibility!
I am open to suggestions, is what I'm saying.
Anyway, I've decided to fill the gap in my knowledge. I started out by trying to listen to The Rest Is History, a podcast my mum recommended, but the hosts are two English men, and they spend a weird amount of time comparing Marie Antoinette to Meghan Markle, but in a derogatory "maybe we should decapitate the Duchess of Sussex" way that I did not care for.
Then I read The French Revolution by Christopher Hibbert, which I think is from 1980. It was a solemn, dispassionate accounting of events and personalities, but didn't get into the question of, for example, why the Parisian mob went from zero to heads on pikes in the storming of the Bastille.
I've requested an inter-library loan for Citizens by Simon Schama, which I've seen recommended a lot, but I would also be eager to read a history that's not ... British? Because the British, for understandable reasons (I guess) weren't really down with the beheading of the monarch and the end of the monarchy (even though they did it first), and I feel like a pro-aristocratic bias has pervaded a lot of what I've encountered. And obviously the Terror was bad, but, like, maybe Robespierre was an asexual smol bean who was a convenient scapegoat! I'm open to the possibility!
I am open to suggestions, is what I'm saying.