A common misconception about the French Revolution is that it was some sort of classical liberal or libertarian revolution.

"The American Revolution, the European right realized, was a vital milestone in the advance and development of the western ...

From the storming of the Bastille to the Terror and the guillotine, ordinary witnesses recorded the personal impact of 1789, political violence, revolutionary identity and everyday life in Paris. In ...

David A. Bell teaches French history at Princeton. His “Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present” is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Two hundred twenty-six years after ...

It was the summer of 1789, and a strange fever was sweeping across France. It wasn’t a plague, or at least not a plague of the body. To some, it a plague of the mind. Parisians had stormed the ...

Whenever a revolutionary movement begins calling for the existing social order to be overthrown, it doesn’t take long for a reference to July 14, 1789, to surface – that’s when an angry mob dismantled ...

1. The quality that makes Jules Michelet’s history so powerful is what the French call souffle—literally, breath; figuratively, inspiration, creativity, energy. Michelet understood the French ...