The Revolutionary Century? Revolts in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

Three times within forty years — in 1830, 1848 and 1870–71 — popular revolt in Paris succeeded in toppling apparently well-established political régimes. Ever since, the dominant organising principle of narrative histories of nineteenth-century France has been the theme of revolution and reaction, as the ideological and social divisions of the French Revolution were fought out in a cycle of violent challenge from the heirs of the sans-culottes and its repression by post-revolutionary elites. This has thus been a history both of Revolutionary France, the name of a collection edited by Malcolm Crook, and of The Bourgeois Century, the title of Roger Magraw’s history of nineteenth-century France..