Books like Scotland and the French Revolution — picked by fans

Harry Dickinson supervised my Ph.D. thesis, and I am a huge fan of his writing, which is clear and accessible.

This book covers a lot of ground, explaining the different political positions people took in eighteenth-century Britain, inside and outside Parliament, but it’s so clearly set out. It’s an important book because it swam against the tide at the time it was published. The dominant opinion was that politics was an aristocratic pursuit and politicians were mainly motivated by self-interest.

This book shows that many politicians were driven by ideas, principles, and assumptions and that many more ordinary people were heavily involved in political campaigns and protests, too. 

This is a fantastic recent book that offers a walk-off-the-page sense of its large cast of characters—Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Paine, William Cowper, William Blake, Benjamin Franklin, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and many others.

They were all regular guests at the dinner table of the London publisher, and bookseller Joseph Johnson, where he sat back and listened to his talented collection of authors talk about the issues of the day.

It’s both a great way into the world of publishing and selling books and a wonderful introduction to lots of famous writers of the period from a fresh new angle.

What’s not to love about eighteenth-century cartoons?! They are a brilliant way to understand at least some strands of public opinion on all kinds of issues, and I’m all about trying to understand what people were thinking and why.

This is a wonderful book, which contains a wealth of colour plates of graphic satires by James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and many less well-known names. Their subjects range from political crises and the monarchy to fashion and manners to the role of the crowd.

It’s not just a catalogue of images with captions, though: it’s a really substantial discussion of the emergence and role of the genre of pictorial satire in the reign of King George III (1760–1820) and how to ‘read’ these images. 

Poor George III: ridiculed in caricatures and the object of attempted assassinations!

This enormous book is a real page-turner. Its aim is to show that the changing meanings of words had a huge impact on the politics of the 1790s in Britain. The fourteenth-century statute of treason listed among its crimes that of ‘imagining the king’s death.’

In the reign of Edward III, that meant actually planning the death of the monarch, but by the 1790s, the word ‘imagine’ had taken on the modern definition of ‘envisaging’ or ‘fantasising.’ This much wider definition of ‘imagining’ had dire consequences for reformers who had no intention of arranging the death of the king but whose language might be loose enough to open them up to the charge of ‘imagining’ it. 

Women played a major role in the French Revolution. Providing fuel for the core of the revolution, the female sans-culottes, poissardes, and other working-class women were instrumental in shaping the events and opinions of the revolutionaries such as Robespierre and Danton.

During the revolution, prominent women became agitators, hosted politically influential salons, led several major revolutionary clubs, wrote contemporary political position papers, organized and led women in para-military groups, and murdered key revolutionaries. The women of the French Revolution were no “shrinking violets.”

Ms. Stephens’s book is an excellent introduction to the various women who influenced the revolutionaries on a day-to-day intellectual basis. Madame Guillotine did not discriminate by gender⏤many of these women ultimately lost their heads.

This book depicts the violence and devastation of the ‘Reign of Terror’ (a period of extreme violence during the French Revolution) with breathtaking power. It weaves into it a tale that grips, convinces, and profoundly moves the reader. If one is looking to understand human nature and its true depth of depravity, look to no other book.

When I introduce measurements to my students, I talk about “an exciting adventure across centuries.” I love this book because it tells the long history of measurement, starting from prehistory and arriving at our days as if it were a true, fantastic adventure humankind has lived since the beginning of its existence.

This is not a technical book, nor a book of history, in a strict sense. It is written by a journalist as an adventure novel, telling the story of a fantastic journey across generations to build our present knowledge.

I read it as a novel, eager to discover the next adventure, always discovering players and facts I ignored. 

Napoleon’s defeat led to the demobilization of thousands of soldiers and their officers, and a sudden surplus of weapons and ammunition that would be exported to feed other wars across the world, especially in the Americas. Some of these men remained adventurers, unable to settle into civilian life, and serving the cause of independence in revolutions across Central and Latin America. Others tried to establish a French way of life in the New World, among them the colonies of settlers in the American South studied by Rafe Blaufarb in this pioneering study of the Vine and Olive communities in Alabama.

Blanc discovered in the National Archives in Paris a remarkable cache of letters kept in an old tin labelled as the property of Fouquier-Tinville, the Public Prosecutor of the French revolutionary Tribunal. He was a man who in sending off the last batch of victims to be beheaded, even after hearing that Robespierre was dead and with him, the Terror, said ‘justice must run its course’

The letters, written by prisoners on the eve of their own execution, to wife, family, plangent pleas to be remembered – some containing a little keepsake: a shirt stud, maybe – were never delivered, but, on Fouquier’s order, impounded as possible evidence. Post mortem? What was the point? The letters are heart-rending, sad, pathetic, drained of hope, but as poignant a souvenir of the effect of the vicious law which was sending their authors to the scaffold as any you will read. Fouquier, whose… show more.

It is difficult to settle on just five books; I include Iggers here because this book transcends its primary subject, German historiography. It offers an insight into some of the key thinkers that have helped to shape predominant and pervasive thinking about human progress and socio-political development. Thinkers such as Kant and Herder, Hegel and Schiller. It is important to have a good understanding of the foundations of a train of thought, and Iggers knows his subject matter well and astutely highlights the various strengths and weaknesses.