Liberty or Death

Starred review from April 4, 2016
McPhee (Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life), emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne, skillfully and with consummate clarity recounts one of the most complex events in modern history. It is difficult to see another single-volume history of the French Revolution surpassing this one. The work of a top-notch scholar, it avoids all the snares that have for so long encumbered accounts of the subject. McPhee moves majestically along his narrative path with balance, comprehensiveness, and grace. He also brings specific developments brilliantly alive with relevant anecdotes, illustrations, and quotations. Covering (as any such volume must) the revolution’s political, institutional, and military events, the book also puts changing ideas, social attitudes, and cultural norms in the foreground. Best of all, McPhee makes clear the extent to which chance determined the course of history from before 1789 until Napoleon Bonaparte effectively ended the French Revolution around 1800. This book fits into none of the schools of history that have for so long vied for supremacy over this vast subject. Its great achievement is to show how people trying to create a new world in France revolutionized all Western history. McPhee’s extraordinary work is destined to be the standard account of the French Revolution for years to come.

Starred review from May 1, 2016

McPhee (emeritus, history, Univ. of Melbourne; Robespierre: A Life) has written on many aspects of the French Revolution but never more beneficially than in this articulate and perceptive volume. McPhee's revolution is truly national in scope; Paris interacting with the hinterlands rather than a case of Paris playing the dog and the rest of France the tail. The author also makes solid use of primary source materials from outside France. How did the uprising play out, not just in western Europe, but in Haiti, India, Egypt? Lastly, McPhee carefully and clearly delineates crisis points from start to finish during the decade of 1789-99, showing how decisions and actions in each year altered the course of subsequent events. His skillful employment of journals and memoirs gives the account a personal side that complements the structural analysis which is its backbone. VERDICT Numerous histories of the French Revolution exist; while many are good, none is so current on the literature and lucidly presented as this. Scholars and history lovers will rejoice.--David Keymer, Modesto, CA

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