On social conditions, see Robert Mandrou, Classes et luttes de classes en France au début du XVIIe siècle (1965); James R. Farr, Hands of Honor: Artisans and Their World in Dijon, 1550–1650 (1988); and Georges Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France Since the Middle Ages (1988; originally published in French, 1985). The Age of Louis XIV
Pierre Goubert, Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen (1970, originally published in French, 1966), provides a synthesis of Louis’s reign; it is supplemented in such special accounts as Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (1965); John C. Rule (ed.), Louis XIV and the Craft of Kingship (1969); Louis André, Louis XIV et l’Europe (1950), on foreign policy; and John B. Wolf, Louis XIV (1968). François Bluche, Louis XIV (1990; originally published in French, 1986), is the most recent full biography of France’s most famous king. Daniel Dessert, Louis XIV prend le pouvoir (1989, reissued 2000), offers a revisionist account of the reign’s beginnings. Albert N. Hamscher, The Parlement of Paris After the Fronde, 1653–1673 (1976), and The Conseil Privé and the Parlements in the Age of Louis XIV: A Study in French Absolutism (1987), provide good introductions to the period. Roger Mettam, Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France (1988); and Roger Mettam (ed.), Government and Society in Louis XIV’s France (1977), analyze the political structure. William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France (1985), demonstrates in detail how Louis XIV’s government enlisted the collaboration of the nobility. John A. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610–1715 (1997), recounts the rise of the main tool of France’s international power. Warren C. Scoville, The Persecution of Huguenots and French Economic Development, 1680–1720 (1960), is important in assessing the effects of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (1992), shows the interconnection between politics and art under the “Sun King.” J.H. Shennan Jeremy David Popkin France from 1715 to 1789
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution (1955, reprinted 1978; originally published in French, 1856), is still a basic source for the study of the period. Comprehensive histories include Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment (1998; originally published in French, 1993), a detailed survey of the period’s society and culture; and vol. 1 of Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, 3 vol. (1969). Michel Antoine, Louis XV (1989), is both a biography and an exhaustive account of high politics in that monarch’s reign. Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century (1985; originally published in French, 1986), explains the changing nature of the country’s ruling elite.
Steven Laurence Kaplan, Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade During the Eighteenth Century (1984), describes a basic feature of the period’s economy. Economic histories make much use of the 18th-century travelogue of Arthur Young, Travels During the Years 1787, 1788, & 1789: Undertaken More Particularly with a View of Ascertaining the Cultivation, Wealth, Resources, and National Prosperity of the Kingdom of France, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1794), available in many later editions. There are fascinating glimpses of urban life in Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Panorama of Paris: Selections from Tableau de Paris (1999; originally published in French, 1781); and Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Journal of My Life (1986; originally published in French, 1982). The culture and ideology of the period are explored in Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995); Lieselotte Steinbrügge, The Moral Sex: Woman’s Nature in the French Enlightenment (1995; originally published in German, 1992); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1994); and Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1985). David Bell, The Cult of the Nation (2001), offers an important new analysis of the growth of national identity. A classic analysis of his thought is Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Transparency and Obstruction (1988; originally published in French, 1957). Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (1990); and Dale K. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution (1996), show how revolutionary ideas developed out of prerevolutionary political discourse. Patrice Louis-René Higonnet Jeremy David Popkin France from 1789 to 1815
Reliable overviews of the period include D.M.G. Sutherland, France 1789–1815: Revolution and Counter-Revolution (1985); William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (1989); and Norman Hampson, A Social History of the French Revolution (1963, reissued 1995).
On the origins of the Revolution, see Jean Egret, The French Pre-Revolution (1977; originally published in French, 1962); and William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, 3rd ed. (1998). The best book on the Terror is still R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (1941, reissued 1989). George Rudé, Robespierre (1967), provides excerpts from the Jacobin leader’s speeches. Martyn Lyons, France Under the Directory (1975), surveys the Revolution’s later phase. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (1989; originally published in French, 1988), is an important and original collection of short essays on selected events, actors, institutions, ideas, and historians of the French Revolution. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984), analyzes the imagery and sociology of revolutionary politics. Notable thematic studies include Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (1973, reissued 1989; originally published in French, 1932); P.M. Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (1988); Albert Soboul, The Parisian Sans-culottes and the French Revolution, 1793–4, trans. from French (1964, reprinted 1979); George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (1959, reprinted 1986); Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution (1998; originally published in French, 1988); John McManners, The French Revolution and the Church (1969, reprinted 1982); Jean-Paul Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution (1988; originally published in French, 1979); Emmet Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution (1989); and Jacques Godechot, The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action, 1789–1804 (1971, reissued 1981; originally published in French, 1961). The international dimension of the Revolution is interpreted in R.R. Palmer, The World of the French Revolution (1971). The best biography of a revolutionary leader is Leo Gershoy, Bertrand Barère: A Reluctant Terrorist (1962). John Hardman, Louis XVI (1993), is a life of the movement’s most illustrious victim; and the reasons for his fate are explained in David Jordan, The King’s Trial (1979, reprinted 1993). Isser Woloch, The New Regime (1994), shows how the Revolution’s principles were institutionalized. Jeremy D. Popkin, Revolutionary News (1990), explains the “media revolution” that was an integral part of the upheaval after 1789.