A Companion to the French Revolution, ed. Peter McPheeExperiencing the French Revolution, ed. David AndressThe Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution, ed. David AndressThe Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History, ed. Alan Forrest and Matthias Middell

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Appearing around a generation after the explosion of publications marking the Bicentenary of 1989, these four collections bring together no fewer than ninety-five new essays on the French Revolution by seventy-one authors from eleven countries. Together they provide a tour d’horizon of where the scholarly study of the French Revolution now stands. Three of them, as companions or handbooks, explicitly set out to provide this sort of collective overview—although the geographically wider scope of the Routledge Companion is conceptually narrower. Experiencing the French Revolution stands apart: it is a much more eclectic assemblage of research essays with ‘experience’ as only the loosest of linking themes. David Andress’s editorial introduction, in fact, takes explicit issue with the ‘paradigm-mongering’ (p. 15) of some leading figures longing to introduce new orthodoxies of overall interpretation. Andress is everywhere in these volumes—editing and planning two of them, contributing pieces to all four and, unlike some of the other multiple contributors, managing not to repeat himself in any. Peter McPhee also ranges widely in all four, and it is interesting to compare the choice of topics by two editors from different generations of revolutionary historians. McPhee, who emerged in the 1970s as a leading figure in the George Rudé-inspired Australian school of revolutionary historians (whose achievements he usefully surveys in the Routledge Companion), gives plenty of space to social history, but has no chapters on the nobility, the bourgeoisie, emigration, or counter-revolution except as a source of violence. Napoleon, who was the Revolution’s most spectacular product, and who closed it down, hardly appears either. And where is the ‘cultural turn’? Although the volume is dedicated to Lynn Hunt, her work gets little discussion. Jürgen Habermas is mentioned just once, and the iconoclastic bibliometrics of Simon Burrows, who has done so much to challenge easy culturalist assumptions about a desacralisation of the old regime, appear nowhere. Andress, by contrast, has Burrows in both his volumes. A product of Norman Hampson’s and Alan Forrest’s York, who first began to publish only after the bicentenary, Andress pitches an altogether bigger tent. The nobility and its role are expertly analysed for him by Jay Smith, and there are entries on counter-revolution and Napoleon (from Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Dwyer—both from McPhee’s Australasia) and concluding reflections on the Revolution’s long-term importance by David Bell. Only in two areas does the McPhee volume come out ahead. One is in the greater space it accords to religious questions, including an outstanding authoritative contribution from Dale Van Kley. The other is gender, which has been a major area of historiographical debate in this field since Joan Landes launched her attack on revolutionary misogyny in 1988. Yet even here the treatment is uneven. Alongside a solid and comprehensive survey from Suzanne Desan of the Revolution’s impact on the family, there is a rambling and confusing discussion of gender, sexuality and political culture from Anne Verjus—a missed opportunity.