The French Revolution was published by Allen Lane in 1980. Hibbert covers the period from the convening of the Estates-General in 1789 to the fall of Robespierre in July 1794, concentrating on the five years in which the old regime was destroyed and a new political order — violent, idealistic, and ultimately self-consuming — was created.
Hibbert’s approach is narrative rather than analytical: he tells the story through scenes and characters rather than through abstract discussion of ideology or class structure. The fall of the Bastille is rendered as a chaotic, bloody, and largely accidental event — the crowd surging, the garrison panicking, the governor’s head paraded on a pike. The October Days — when Parisian women marched to Versailles and forced the royal family to return to Paris — are told from the perspective of participants whose emotions ranged from righteous anger to opportunistic violence to genuine terror.
The book’s greatest strength is its treatment of the Terror. Hibbert does not explain the Terror as an inevitable consequence of revolutionary logic (as Marxist historians do) or as an aberration caused by evil individuals (as conservative historians do). Instead, he shows how ordinary political processes — factional rivalry, wartime emergency, ideological purity tests — produced extraordinary results: a system in which the accusation of moderation was sufficient for a death sentence, and in which the revolutionaries devoured each other with the same efficiency they had applied to the aristocracy.
Collecting The French Revolution
First edition (Allen Lane, London, 1980): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good/very good: $8–$20