DO BOOKS MAKE REVOLUTIONS? REVISITED

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) In one of his best-known essays, whose title I have borrowed for this review, Roger Chartier quoted three famous predecessors of different political inclinations in support of the claim that 'If the French of the late eighteenth century fashioned the Revolution, it is because they had in turn been fashioned by books.'1 Strikingly different in their approach, the four works reviewed here cover the same historical period, overlapping geographical terrains, and a good number of the same historical actors. Hammersley's ostensible goal is to alert historians to the pitfalls of offering too local an explanation of the origins of the French Revolution, by tracing an extensive body of English republican literature, reprinted and reread from the late seventeenth century until the 1790s, in both England and France. [...]there was no massive wave of opposition to the nobility before the Revolution, and nobles themselves, not commoners or radicals, were the prime movers in abolishing their own estate. [...]his description of the Assembly of Notables shows it petering out in stalemate, and that failure is attributed to the indecisiveness of the monarch and the political jockeying of heedless elites.