Francois Furet needs little introduction. Widely considered one of the leading historians of the French Revolution, he was a maverick for his time, shining a critical light on the entrenched Marxist interpretations that prevailed during the mid-twentieth century. Shortly after his death in 1997, the New York Review of Books called him "one of the most influential men in contemporary France." Lies, Passions, and Illusions is a fitting capstone to this celebrated author's oeuvre: a late-career conversation with philosopher Paul Ricoeur on the twentieth century writ large, a century of violence and turmoil, of unprecedented wealth and progress, in which history advanced, for better or worse, in quantum leaps. This conversation would be, sadly, Furet's last - he died while Ricoeur was completing his edits. Ricoeur did not want to publish his half without Furet's approval, so what remains is Furet's alone, an astonishingly cohesive meditation on the political passions of the twentieth century. With strokes at once broad and incisive, he examines the many different trajectories that nations of the West have followed over the past hundred years.It is a dialogue with history as it happened but also as a form of thought. It is a dialogue with his critics, with himself, and with those major thinkers - from Tocqueville to Hannah Arendt - whose ideas have shaped our understanding of the tragic dramas and upheavals of the modern era. It is a testament to the crucial role of the historian, a reflection on how history is made and lived, and how the imagination is a catalyst for political change. Whether new to Furet or deeply familiar with his work, readers will find thought-provoking assessments on every page, a deeply moving look back at one of the most tumultuous periods of history and how we might learn and look forward from it.

A study of Communism and a history of the myth of Communism as perpetuated by its admirers. Francois Furet illuminates how the support for Communism and its embodiment, the Soviet Union, became virtually synonymous with "anti-Fascism" and how this strategic arrangement reverberated through the West. During the first half of the 20th century, to be against the Soviet Union (and its Communism), argues Furet, was tantamount to betraying the fight against Fascism, despite the fact that both Fascism and Communism ultimately spring from the same nationalist impulse. Thus the struggle against Fascism resulted in the sanitizing or glorification of Communism. This whitewashing of the Soviet regime's excesses not only kept alive the myth and attractiveness of the Communist promise but had complex moral, intellectual, and political ramifications for the West. This book is a history of the ideological passions that have fueled and characterized the modern era. It serves as an effort to revise the understanding of the 20th century at the "fin de siecle".

The Old Regime and the Revolution is Alexis de Tocqueville's great meditation on the origins and meanings of the French Revolution. One of the most profound and influential studies of this pivotal event, it remains a relevant and stimulating discussion of the problem of preserving individual and political freedom in the modern world. Alan Kahan's translation provides a faithful, readable rendering of Tocqueville's last masterpiece, and it includes notes and variants which reveal Tocqueville's sources and include excerpts from his drafts and revisions. The introduction by France's most eminent scholars of Tocqueville and the French Revolution, Francoise Melonio and the late Francois Furet, provides a brilliant analysis of the work.

The continuation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s great meditation on the origins and meanings of the French Revolution. With his monumental work The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59)—best known for his classic Democracy in America—envisioned a multivolume philosophical study of the origins of modern France that would examine the implications of French history on the nature and development of democratic society. Volume I, which covered the eighteenth-century background to the Revolution, was published to great acclaim in 1856. On the continuation of this project, he wrote: "When this Revolution has finished its work, [this volume] will show what that work really was, and what the new society which has come from that violent labor is, what the Revolution has taken away and what it has preserved from that old regime against which it was directed." Tocqueville died in the midst of this work. Here in Volume II is all that he had completed, including the chapters he started for a work on Napoleon, notes and analyses he made in the course of researching and writing the first volume, and his notes on his preparation for his continuation. More than ever before, readers will be able to glean how Tocqueville's account of the Revolution would have come out, had he lived to finish it. This handsomely produced volume completes the set and is essential reading for anyone interested in the French Revolution or in Tocqueville’s thought.

Revolutionary France is a vivid narrative history.It is also a radical reinterpretation of the period, and testimony to the power both of ideas and of personality in movements of the past. Francois Furet is France's leading historian of the periodA work of great range and originality that was a bestseller in FranceIllustrated with paintings, cartoons, maps and chronological charts.

This volume, comprising Part I of the authors classic work Revolutionary France 1770-1880, offers a vivid narrative and radical reinterpretation of the years surrounding the momentous events of 1789 and their aftermath. During this period there were not one, but two revolutions: by intent the first was egalitarian, the second- Bonapartes authoritarian. The tension between the two characterized the period and was to shape the Republic that eventually emerged from the ruins of the ancien regime.

Two centuries later, the French Revolution—that extraordinary event that founded modern democracy—continues to give rise to a reevaluation of essential questions. The ambition of this magnificent volume is not only to present the reader with the research of a wide range of international scholars on those questions, but also to bring one into the heart of the issues still under lively debate.Its form is as original as its goal: neither dictionary, in the traditional sense of the word, nor encyclopedia, it is deliberately limited to some ninety-nine entries organized alphabetically by key words and themes under five major headings: events, including the Estates General and the Terror; actors, such as Marie Antoinette, Marat, and Napoleon Bonaparte; institutions and creations, among them Revolutionary Calendar and Suffrage; ideas, covering, for example, Ancien Régime, the American Revolution, and Liberty; and historians and commentators, from Hegel to Tocqueville. In addition, there are synoptic indexes of names and themes that give the reader easy access to the entire volume as well as a key to its profound coherence.What unifies all the varied topics brought together in this dictionary is their authors’ effort to be “critical.” As such, the book rejects the dogmatism of closed systems and definitive interpretations. Its aim is less to make a complete inventory of the findings of the history of the French Revolution than to take stock of what remains problematical about those findings; this work thus offers the additional special quality of incorporating the rich historiographical literature unceasingly elaborated since 1789.With A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, François Furet and Mona Ozouf invite the reader to recross the first two centuries of French democracy in order to gain a better understanding of the origins of the world in which we live today.

In his major work on communism, the international bestseller The Passing of an Illusion, the eminent French historian François Furet devoted a lengthy footnote to German historian Ernst Nolte's interpretation of fascism. Nolte responded, a correspondence ensued, and the result was the remarkable exchange presented in this volume. Fascism and Communism offers readers the rare opportunity to witness and learn from a confrontation between two of the world's most distinguished historians over one of the most serious subjects of our time. Each from a different perspective, Furet and Nolte offer compelling arguments for the common genealogy of these two ideologies as well as reasons for the intellectual community's rejection of this explosive thesis throughout the twentieth century. This discussion leads to a deeper understanding of the nature of totalitarianism as well as the trajectory and interpretation of modern European history.

Francois Furet needs little introduction. Widely considered one of the leading historians of the French Revolution, he was a maverick for his time, shining a critical light on the entrenched Marxist interpretations that prevailed during the mid-twentieth century. Shortly after his death in 1997, the New York Review of Books called him "one of the most influential men in contemporary France." Lies, Passions, and Illusions is a fitting capstone to this celebrated author's oeuvre: a late-career conversation with philosopher Paul Ricoeur on the twentieth century writ large, a century of violence and turmoil, of unprecedented wealth and progress, in which history advanced, for better or worse, in quantum leaps. This conversation would be, sadly, Furet's last - he died while Ricoeur was completing his edits. Ricoeur did not want to publish his half without Furet's approval, so what remains is Furet's alone, an astonishingly cohesive meditation on the political passions of the twentieth century. With strokes at once broad and incisive, he examines the many different trajectories that nations of the West have followed over the past hundred years.It is a dialogue with history as it happened but also as a form of thought. It is a dialogue with his critics, with himself, and with those major thinkers - from Tocqueville to Hannah Arendt - whose ideas have shaped our understanding of the tragic dramas and upheavals of the modern era. It is a testament to the crucial role of the historian, a reflection on how history is made and lived, and how the imagination is a catalyst for political change. Whether new to Furet or deeply familiar with his work, readers will find thought-provoking assessments on every page, a deeply moving look back at one of the most tumultuous periods of history and how we might learn and look forward from it.

A study of Communism and a history of the myth of Communism as perpetuated by its admirers. Francois Furet illuminates how the support for Communism and its embodiment, the Soviet Union, became virtually synonymous with "anti-Fascism" and how this strategic arrangement reverberated through the West. During the first half of the 20th century, to be against the Soviet Union (and its Communism), argues Furet, was tantamount to betraying the fight against Fascism, despite the fact that both Fascism and Communism ultimately spring from the same nationalist impulse. Thus the struggle against Fascism resulted in the sanitizing or glorification of Communism. This whitewashing of the Soviet regime's excesses not only kept alive the myth and attractiveness of the Communist promise but had complex moral, intellectual, and political ramifications for the West. This book is a history of the ideological passions that have fueled and characterized the modern era. It serves as an effort to revise the understanding of the 20th century at the "fin de siecle".

The Old Regime and the Revolution is Alexis de Tocqueville's great meditation on the origins and meanings of the French Revolution. One of the most profound and influential studies of this pivotal event, it remains a relevant and stimulating discussion of the problem of preserving individual and political freedom in the modern world. Alan Kahan's translation provides a faithful, readable rendering of Tocqueville's last masterpiece, and it includes notes and variants which reveal Tocqueville's sources and include excerpts from his drafts and revisions. The introduction by France's most eminent scholars of Tocqueville and the French Revolution, Francoise Melonio and the late Francois Furet, provides a brilliant analysis of the work.

The continuation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s great meditation on the origins and meanings of the French Revolution. With his monumental work The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59)—best known for his classic Democracy in America—envisioned a multivolume philosophical study of the origins of modern France that would examine the implications of French history on the nature and development of democratic society. Volume I, which covered the eighteenth-century background to the Revolution, was published to great acclaim in 1856. On the continuation of this project, he wrote: "When this Revolution has finished its work, [this volume] will show what that work really was, and what the new society which has come from that violent labor is, what the Revolution has taken away and what it has preserved from that old regime against which it was directed." Tocqueville died in the midst of this work. Here in Volume II is all that he had completed, including the chapters he started for a work on Napoleon, notes and analyses he made in the course of researching and writing the first volume, and his notes on his preparation for his continuation. More than ever before, readers will be able to glean how Tocqueville's account of the Revolution would have come out, had he lived to finish it. This handsomely produced volume completes the set and is essential reading for anyone interested in the French Revolution or in Tocqueville’s thought.

Revolutionary France is a vivid narrative history.It is also a radical reinterpretation of the period, and testimony to the power both of ideas and of personality in movements of the past. Francois Furet is France's leading historian of the periodA work of great range and originality that was a bestseller in FranceIllustrated with paintings, cartoons, maps and chronological charts.

This volume, comprising Part I of the authors classic work Revolutionary France 1770-1880, offers a vivid narrative and radical reinterpretation of the years surrounding the momentous events of 1789 and their aftermath. During this period there were not one, but two revolutions: by intent the first was egalitarian, the second- Bonapartes authoritarian. The tension between the two characterized the period and was to shape the Republic that eventually emerged from the ruins of the ancien regime.

Two centuries later, the French Revolution—that extraordinary event that founded modern democracy—continues to give rise to a reevaluation of essential questions. The ambition of this magnificent volume is not only to present the reader with the research of a wide range of international scholars on those questions, but also to bring one into the heart of the issues still under lively debate.Its form is as original as its goal: neither dictionary, in the traditional sense of the word, nor encyclopedia, it is deliberately limited to some ninety-nine entries organized alphabetically by key words and themes under five major headings: events, including the Estates General and the Terror; actors, such as Marie Antoinette, Marat, and Napoleon Bonaparte; institutions and creations, among them Revolutionary Calendar and Suffrage; ideas, covering, for example, Ancien Régime, the American Revolution, and Liberty; and historians and commentators, from Hegel to Tocqueville. In addition, there are synoptic indexes of names and themes that give the reader easy access to the entire volume as well as a key to its profound coherence.What unifies all the varied topics brought together in this dictionary is their authors’ effort to be “critical.” As such, the book rejects the dogmatism of closed systems and definitive interpretations. Its aim is less to make a complete inventory of the findings of the history of the French Revolution than to take stock of what remains problematical about those findings; this work thus offers the additional special quality of incorporating the rich historiographical literature unceasingly elaborated since 1789.With A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, François Furet and Mona Ozouf invite the reader to recross the first two centuries of French democracy in order to gain a better understanding of the origins of the world in which we live today.

In his major work on communism, the international bestseller The Passing of an Illusion, the eminent French historian François Furet devoted a lengthy footnote to German historian Ernst Nolte's interpretation of fascism. Nolte responded, a correspondence ensued, and the result was the remarkable exchange presented in this volume. Fascism and Communism offers readers the rare opportunity to witness and learn from a confrontation between two of the world's most distinguished historians over one of the most serious subjects of our time. Each from a different perspective, Furet and Nolte offer compelling arguments for the common genealogy of these two ideologies as well as reasons for the intellectual community's rejection of this explosive thesis throughout the twentieth century. This discussion leads to a deeper understanding of the nature of totalitarianism as well as the trajectory and interpretation of modern European history.