The book that brought down the Bastille...Linguet, a journalist, was in the Bastille for 20 months and went right to London when he was released - to write this book, which was an immediate sensation: an inside look at France's most famous prison, just years before its fall. This new edition includes extensive notes - many derived from other accounts of the Bastille -, appendices and illustrations.
"Zinoman makes original contributions on multiple fronts, including colonial systems; prisons as social institutions; political life in prison; public campaigns concerning prisons; and released prisoners in action. He also takes us beyond the colonial/anticolonial, nationalist/communist, and war/peace dichotomies that have long dominated Vietnam studies."—David Marr, author of Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 "This is a wonderful, lucidly argued, and meticulously documented book."—Ann Stoler, author of Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things
Legends of the Bastille is a book by Frantz Funck-Brentano. The Bastille was a fortress in Paris used as a state prison. Stormed by a crowd during the French Revolution in the late 18th century, it became a symbol for the republic and also for having imprisoned several notable French freethinkers.
Madame Guyon's translated prison autobiography provides a compelling account of her eight years of incarceration from 1695 to 1703. The courage she shows sheds light on her most difficult years, including interrogation practices. This text is a testimony to her perseverance in those times of stress and humiliation.
A soldier’s true story of danger and adventure as a modern-day legionnaire in Kuwait, Bosnia, and beyond. With no French language ability, Alex Lochrie approached recruiters for the French Foreign Legion in Paris and embarked on the demanding selection process that followed. When he was accepted, he and other prospective legionnaires were sent to Southern France to begin the harsh recruit training course. The mix of nationalities and backgrounds among his fellows was enormous. New members are traditionally allowed to change their identities—and Lochrie chose to alter his age, becoming twenty-eight instead of thirty-eight. Elite paratrooper training followed in Corsica before Lochrie earned his wings. The FFL is never far from the front line, and in this book he tells of challenging active service in former French colonies in Africa as well as during the first Gulf War, evicting Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, and operations in Bosnia and Sarajevo. This gripping account lifts the veil of mystery and myth, pulling you into the action—and revealing much about the realities of service in the Foreign Legion.
A bold new history of the French Revolution from the standpoint of the peasants, workers, women and sans culottes The assault on the Bastille, the Reign of Terror, Danton mocking his executioner, Robespierre dispensing a fearful justice, and the archetypal gadfly Marat—the events and figures of the French Revolution have exercised a hold on the historical imagination for more than 200 years. It has been a template for heroic insurrection and, to more conservative minds, a cautionary tale. In the hands of Eric Hazan, author of The Invention of Paris, the revolution becomes a rational and pure struggle for emancipation. In this new history, the first significant account of the French Revolution in over twenty years, Hazan maintains that it fundamentally changed the Western world—for the better. Looking at history from the bottom up, providing an account of working people and peasants, Hazan asks, how did they see their opportunities? What were they fighting for? What was the Terror and could it be justified? And how was the revolution stopped in its tracks? The People’s History of the French Revolution is a vivid retelling of events, bringing them to life with a multitude of voices. Only in this way, by understanding the desires and demands of the lower classes, can the revolutionary bloodshed and the implacable will of a man such as Robespierre be truly understood.
From an award-winning historian, a “vivid” (Wall Street Journal) account of the revolution that created the modern world The French Revolution’s principles of liberty and equality still shape our ideas of a just society—even if, after more than two hundred years, their meaning is more contested than ever before. In A New World Begins, Jeremy D. Popkin offers a riveting account of the revolution that puts the reader in the thick of the debates and the violence that led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a new society. We meet Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Danton, in all their brilliance and vengefulness; we witness the failed escape and execution of Louis XVI; we see women demanding equal rights and Black slaves wresting freedom from revolutionaries who hesitated to act on their own principles; and we follow the rise of Napoleon out of the ashes of the Reign of Terror. Based on decades of scholarship, A New World Begins will stand as the definitive treatment of the French Revolution.
The voices of the women who witnessed the French Revolution are finally restored to history. Yalom focuses on the most unforgettable chronicles: the governess of the royal children; the servant attending Marie-Antoinette in her last days; Robespierre's sister, Charlotte; and others bound together by a common nightmare.
