Daily Life during the French Revolution (review)

It is not entirely clear who this book is aimed at. It forms part of the publisher's 'Daily Life through History' series, and its sturdy, shiny binding suggests a textbook. It has plenty of illustrations, is clearly and simply written, and has a full apparatus of appendices, including a chronology, a glossary, the text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, a guide to the revolutionary calendar, and an eight-page descriptive bibliography. The approach throughout, in fact, is descriptive rather than analytical, and the text is enlivened by a wide range of quotations from contemporary sources. After a somewhat breathless introduction outlining the course of the Revolution, a series of thematic chapters covers topics from the economy and travel through fashion and entertainment to urban, rural, and military life, and law and order. But much of the content is about the old regime rather than the Revolution. There is a whole chapter, for instance, on life at Versailles, which came to an end within months of the Revolution's outbreak. Only the chapter on women, perhaps the best, maintains a consistent revolutionary focus. And all the chapters have their share of factual errors, and the spelling of French names and terms throughout is unforgivably poor. The bibliography is eccentric —a mixture of the latest research and old pot-boilers, even including a modern historical novel about Marie Antoinette. No reader with any knowledge of the field will have much new to learn here. Anybody with no prior knowledge risks absorbing much petty misinformation.