The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Description

The author is a pedant, I'll tell you that right now. And unless you share his pedantic outlook, you're part of the unwashed herd. Look: this was supposed to be a "Very Short Introduction" to the French Revolution, right? So nobody needs a earful on the intricacies of various historiographical debates on the subject. Nevertheless, that's what interests the author, so that's what's supposed to interest you. A more accurate title for this book would have been "A Primer on Divers Ponderous, Hair-Splitting Debates and Arcana Related to the French Revolution." At one point, the author takes Simon Schama to task over his thoroughly enjoyable Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution for "merely telling a story" without weighing one down with the more abstruse matters that historians of Doyle's brilliance are presumably consumed with. Actually, isn't that what your book, Doyle, was supposed to be doing: just telling the basic story? You couldn't do that without getting doctrinaire and pompous? Seems like you're simply jealous of Schama, whose book I found about twenty times more readable than your own. I came to this book because I enjoyed others in this series and was in need of a brief recounting of what happened shortly before and after 1789. Didn't get that. Instead I felt like I had just spent the evening with a tendentious grad student with several bones to pick.