Can anyone recommend a good book about the French Revolution?
Citizens is my absolute favorite book on this subject. In fact, it’s one of my favorite books ever. It’s readable (boy, is it ever), drawing you through what is actually a fairly dense and provocative argument about the nature of the revolution and the regime that preceded it through wonderfully vivid images and vignettes. But I wouldn’t recommend you read it first. It might spoil you for anything else, and also, it might help to have the events and persons of the period in mind. It is a polemic, more than a history. I would suggest Hibbert’s The Days of the French Revolution, a good narrative overview, and full of helpful maps and chronology. And it’s written for those unfamiliar with the subject, and, inspite of the scholarship, can be read like a novel. Colourful characters and plenty of drama, scheeming and turmoil, of course. Then there’s Robert Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, written in 1838, and a classic, but a mighty strange book to contemporary eyes. Lurid, vivid,
