Reading History: The French Revolution
This month History Today publishes the first in a new regular series of bibliographical essays on a wide variety of historiographical topics. The idea of the series is to survey the subject and to provide a guide to the most important and most recent books about it. In the first of the series, Douglas Johnson looks at the French Revolution.
Historians are less interested in causations than they were. History, especially as taught in schools and universities, used to be dominated by the notion that one needed to know why certain things had happened in the past. Possibly this was a sign of how the 1914-18 war cast a long shadow over all thought and emotion. How could such a catastrophe have occurred in a Europe which was so civilised and so prosperous? And as historians searched for responsibility amongst a multitude of diplomatic documents, so their mental approach to one historical problem came to ensure a dominating position with regard to all historical problems. This is no longer the case. Possibly because the Second World War, being infinitely more complex, was not susceptible of the same treatment. Most likely it is because, at this stage of the twentieth century, we are more conscious of the devastating effects of wars and other changes than concerned to trace their causes.
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