Teaching Representations of the French Revolution

In many ways the French Revolution?a series of revolutions, in fact, whose end has arguably not yet arrived?is modernity in action. Beginning in reform, it blossomed into wholesale attempts to remake society, uprooting the clergy and aristocracy, valorizing mass movements, and setting secular ideologies, including nationalism, in motion. Unusually manifold and complicated, the revolution affords many teaching opportunities and challenges. This volume helps instructors seeking to connect developments today?terrorism, propaganda, extremism?with the events that began in 1789, contextualizing for students a world that seems always unmoored and in crisis.

The volume supports the teaching of the revolution's ongoing project across geographic areas (from Haiti, Latin America, and New Orleans to Spain, Germany, and Greece), governing ideologies (human rights, secularism, liberty), and literatures (from well-known to newly rediscovered texts). Interdisciplinary, intercultural, and insurgent, the volume has an energy that reflects its subject.

"[T]his volume, with its clear, jargon-free prose, welcomes newcomers to the field, especially professors who may be daunted by teaching the French Revolution for the first time." ?Clorinda Donato, California State University, Long Beach

"The text serves as an excellent reference book on the Revolution . . . [and] as a teaching manual for courses in French history, culture, and current events. It is an excellent read for its own sake as well as an important pedagogical tool."?The French Review