About this item
Highlights
- The People's Revolution of 1789 analyzes the historic events that unleashed a vast panoply of anarchic, destructive, and creative disorders that demolished France's Old Regime and founded a new revolutionary order.
- About the Author: Micah Alpaugh is Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri and the author of four books on French and Atlantic history, including Non-Violence and the French Revolution and Friends of Freedom.
- 402 Pages
- History, Europe
Description
About the Book
"Examines the era's popular movements in all of their complexity, providing an integrated synthesis of France's most important protest campaign"-Book Synopsis
The People's Revolution of 1789 analyzes the historic events that unleashed a vast panoply of anarchic, destructive, and creative disorders that demolished France's Old Regime and founded a new revolutionary order. It captures the complex and dynamic interplay of uprisings, elections, meetings, and revolutionary moments that helped create modern freedom.
The People's Revolution of 1789 is the first book to chronicle the Parisian, provincial, and colonial movements of 1789 together. In doing so, Micah Alpaugh builds from hundreds of local and regional studies and sources on the French Revolution to provide a new interpretation of the powerful contestations that created the modern revolutionary tradition. He explores the multiplicity of movements--anarchistically operating without a common leader and usually in only loose coordination--that gave the revolutionary dynamic its power, without which the legislators' revolution at Versailles would have failed or been severely curtailed. The rapid onslaught of protests across the First Year of Liberty compounded their effects, overpowering authorities' efforts to maintain a degenerating order and forcing the establishment of a more open system.
The People's Revolution of 1789 reveals in new ways how the French revolutionaries ended feudalism, established human rights, abolished the police, and instituted new elected governments. By returning emphasis to the people's revolution, we can better understand how world history's most consequential revolution developed, as millions of French people embraced direct action in hopes of fundamental change. Through the movements of millions, the French created the most powerful revolution the world had yet experienced.
Review Quotes
Micah Alpaugh has written a genuinely engaging, stimulating narrative of the route that France took into and out of the revolutionary events of 1789, focused resolutely on initiative from below as it was expressed in protest, confrontation, and coercive direct action.
-- "H-France Review"Micah Alpaugh's account is both accessible and fascinating. Highly recommended.
-- "Choice"About the Author
Micah Alpaugh is Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri and the author of four books on French and Atlantic history, including Non-Violence and the French Revolution and Friends of Freedom.
