The trial and execution of Louis XVI, for instance, is covered in barely two pages. Because space is at a premium, Popkin never takes the time to build a scene or deliver a satisfactory narrative set-piece. With a topic this vast, no single volume can hope to give every aspect the depth it really needs. In 560-pages of text, he manages to touch on just about everything, from the storming of the Bastille to the writing of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, from the death of a King to the Revolution’s consumption of its own. Popkin approaches the material chronologically, and as I mentioned above, he finds the sweet balance between accessibility and scholarliness. The other is Louis XVI, the King of France and “heir to fourteen centuries of French monarchy.” By giving an overview of the roads traveled by these two men, Popkin provides a panoramic view of the country just before it changed forever.įrom there, A New World Begins takes you through the upheavals, the upheavals, and the upheavals that marked the years from 1789 to 1799. The first is Jacques-Louis Menetra, a glazier who later became one of the few “ordinary people” to leave an account of his life during the Revolution. Popkin begins this sweeping tale with a fun introductory chapter, comparing and contrasting the lives of two Frenchmen on the eve of tumultuous times. Not only has this given me a better springboard for learning about the Napoleonic Wars, it also affords a fuller sense of other historical eruptions, such as the Bolshevik Revolution during the First World War. Reading this provides an all-important framework for understanding the ebb and flow of things, for seeing how one moment – after a fashion – led to another. Thus, instead of focusing on a discrete part of the Revolution, such as the Reign of Terror, Popkin tries to embrace it all. It begins with the fall of the Old Regime, and ends with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. This is a book that can make a learned case for revising our view of Maximilien Robespierre, but only after properly introducing Robespierre and identifying his role in the proceedings.Īnother great thing is that A New World Begins is a complete history. The great thing about Jeremy Popkin’s A New World Begins is that even though it is written by an expert, he’s an expert who doesn’t mind explaining things to a relative ignoramus such as myself. I would read about sans culottes, and be left puzzling over why these people didn’t have culottes. I have been hampered by my preternatural inability to differentiate between Jacobins, Girondins, and Montagnards. My past efforts to study this event has been stymied by unexplained concepts, authorial assumptions, and the parroting of the Revolutionaries’ proto-Orwellian Newspeak. Up until now, however, I have found it difficult to find a volume that does not already presuppose a rather broad working knowledge of the subject. Of course, if you want to read something while waiting for the show, you will find no shortage of books on the French Revolution. To put it in television terms, there is enough drama here for six or seven seasons of prestige drama on Netflix or HBO.
The reverberations have never fully subsided, and exist down to our own day. Somehow, over the course of a single decade, France’s dire financial straits led to the overthrow and execution of a king, a massive social reordering, the gruesome execution of thousands, and ultimately, years of bloody warfare that killed tens of thousands of people all across Europe. The French Revolution is one of the more momentous and complex events in history. Popkin, A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution Certainly all of the participants could have agreed on at least one thing: the truth of the words of a young revolutionary legislator, Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, when he remarked that ‘the force of things has perhaps led us to do things that we did not foresee…’” Ordinary men and women were capable of both acts of courage, such as the storming of the Bastille, and acts of inhuman cruelty, including the September massacres of 1792. Prominent revolutionary leaders, from Mirabeau to Robespierre, advocated admirable principles, but they also approved measures with a high human cost in the name of the Revolution. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette could not comprehend the revolutionary principles of liberty and equality, but they had a sincere devotion to what they saw as their duty to defend the nation’s long-established institutions.
“Hardly any of the hundreds of figures readers will meet in these pages can be portrayed in simple terms.
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