A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution

Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution francaise #1-5

by François Furet (Editor), Mona Ozouf (Editor), Arthur Goldhammer (Translator)

Two centuries later, the French Revolution that extraordinary event that founded modern democracy continues to give rise to a reevaluation of essential questions. The ambition of this magnificent volume is not only to present the reader with the research of a wide range of international scholars on those questions, but also to bring one into the heart of the issues still under lively debate. Its form is as original as its goal: neither dictionary, in the traditional sense of the word, nor encyclopedia, it is deliberately limited to some ninety-nine entries organized alphabetically by key words and themes under five major headings: "events," including the Estates General and the Terror; "actors," such as Marie Antoinette, Marat, and Napoleon Bonaparte; "institutions and creations," among them Revolutionary Calendar and Suffrage; "ideas," covering, for example, Ancien Regime, the American Revolution, and Liberty; and "historians and commentators," from Hegel to Tocqueville. In addition, there are synoptic indexes of names and themes that give the reader easy access to the entire volume as well as a key to its profound coherence. What unifies all the varied topics brought together in this dictionary is their authors effort to be critical. As such, the book rejects the dogmatism of closed systems and definitive interpretations. Its aim is less to make a complete inventory of the findings of the history of the French Revolution than to take stock of what remains problematical about those findings; this work thus offers the additional special quality of incorporating the rich historiographical literature unceasingly elaborated since 1789. With "A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution," Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf invite the reader to recross the first two centuries of French democracy in order to gain a better understanding of the origins of the world in which we live today.

Genres: French Revolution, History, France, Reference

1120 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1988

About the author

François Furet (27 March 1927, Paris – 12 July 1997, Figeac) was a French historian, and president of the Saint-Simon Foundation, well known for his books on the French Revolution.

He was elected to the Académie française in March 1997, just three months before he died in July.

Reviews

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the Great Historiography Wars among scholars of the French Revolution, Francois Furet and his fellow anti-Marxists emerged victorious. Evidence has a funny way of upending ideologically driven interpretations in the field.

Furet's formidable skills as both editor and author (particularly his essay on The Terror) are on full display in "A Critical Dictionary," a remarkable collection of essays that's not only informative and incisive, but also serves as a victory lap of sorts, a valedictory for those critical of the Marxist (as well as the structuralist, Annales School-style) interpretations of the French Revolution.

An indispensable volume for any student or scholar on the subject.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the most expensive book I own and a beauty to flick through. I have only read a few chapters so far but I have enjoyed them all. This is as much a historiography as a history, with reviews of how the subjects have been interpreted since the event. Given the millenial potency of the Revolution, the interpretations of it in history have themselves shaped events. One of the things I like is its rejection of the materialist myopia in history-writing and restoration of cultural factors as important. (Although that may be a resulkt of the chapters I have principally read: Tocqueville, Burke, Montesquieu and others I cannot recall at the moment.)