The French Revolution, A Very Short Introduction
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loginTo produce a very short book about a subject on which one haswritten at varying lengths before is more of a challenge than it mightseem. We can all think of people who have ‘written the same book’several times over in different forms; and we all dread becoming likethem. So I have not set out primarily to retell a familiar story, althoughanything calling itself an introduction must to some extent do that.My concern has been much more to discuss why the French Revolutionmattered, and has continued to matter in innumerable ways in thetwo centuries since it occurred. The whole story of the Revolution,both as a series of late eighteenth-century events and as a set of ideas,images, and memories in the minds of posterity, is a powerfulargument for the importance of history, as well as a striking exampleof its complexity. Whether it will remain as relevant for understandingthe twenty-first century as it was for the nineteenth and twentiethis perhaps, as a Chinese sage is reputed to have observed, too earlyto say.
