History of France – serie

In this second volume of the History of France series, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie provides a masterful account of the early modern period combining a compelling narrative with broad analysis of events and wider comparisons with European history.

In this book, now available in paperback, he examines the history of France from the rise of the Capetians in the mid-tenth century to the execution of Joan of Arc in the mid-fifteenth. He takes the evolution of power and the emergence of the French state as his central themes, and guides the reader through complex - and, in many respects, still unfamiliar, yet fascinating terrain. He describes the growth of the castle and the village, the building blocks of the new Western European civilization of the second millenium AD.

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.