French Society and the Revolution

by Douglas Johnson

Taken as a whole the essays in this volume illustrate the outstanding contribution made to French Revolutionary scholarship by British and American authors. Professor Johnson has selected essays which cover a wide spectrum of time, place and social class but are vitally concerned to describe and explain the social reality of revolution in its various phases. The essays fall into three main groups; the first sets the scene with studies of the social, economic and intellectual life of pre-Revolutionary France; the second studies the role of fate of certain social groups during the Revolution; and the third examines counter-revolution in two provincial areas. The editor has added an introduction and index, and some minor changes have been made to the essays. Many of these articles are already well known to professional historian and it is hoped that publication in the present form will make them available to a wider audience interested in the social experience of the most dramatic and far reaching of revolution in modern times.

328 pages, Paperback

First published November 24, 1976

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. The other Douglas Johnson is an artist. See this thread for more information.

Douglas Johnson was born in Edinburgh in 1925 and was educated at the Royal Grammar School, Lancaster, and Worcester College, Oxford. Subsequently he was one of the few Englishmen to have completed his education at the famous Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Formerly Professor of Modern History and Chairman of the School of History at the University of Birmingham, he became Professor of French History at University College, London, in 1968. He spends a great deal of time in France and has lectured at many French universities. His books include France (1969) in the NEW NATIONS AND PEOPLES LIBRARY, Guizot: Aspects of French History 1787-1874 (1963), and other history books. He died in