David A. Bell teaches French history at Princeton. His “Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present” is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Two hundred twenty-six years after ...

It was the summer of 1789, and a strange fever was sweeping across France. It wasn’t a plague, or at least not a plague of the body. To some, it a plague of the mind. Parisians had stormed the ...

Whenever a revolutionary movement begins calling for the existing social order to be overthrown, it doesn’t take long for a reference to July 14, 1789, to surface – that’s when an angry mob dismantled ...

1. The quality that makes Jules Michelet’s history so powerful is what the French call souffle—literally, breath; figuratively, inspiration, creativity, energy. Michelet understood the French ...

Study finds that politics, public expectations fuel hyperinflation. More than 200 years later, historians are still gleaning some unexpected insights from the French Revolution -- not about tyranny or ...

The Adobe Flash player and Javascript are required in order to view a video which appears on this page. You may wish to download the Adobe Flash player. The French ...

The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and Nazism will no longer be part of class IX student’s history syllabus. NCERT officials said these modern world-history themes will be taken up in class ...