Lexington Books
Pages: 222
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-1-4985-3533-5 • Hardback • September 2016 • $109.00 • (£84.00)
978-1-4985-3534-2 • eBook • September 2016 • $103.50 • (£80.00)
Bette W. Oliver is an independent scholar with a PhD in modern European history from the University of Texas at Austin.
Chapter 1: Early French Perspectives of America
Chapter 2: Brissot in America, 1788
Chapter 3: Great Expectations, 1789–1790
Chapter 4: Legislating Change
Chapter 5: From Monarchy to Republic
Chapter 6: War, Division, and Terror
Chapter 7: Destruction of the Dream
Oliver opens a window on some new questions and offers a more realistic and less partisan view of the ambiguities of Brissot’s character than much of the work undertaken since Darnton published “The Grub Street Style of Revolution” in 1968.
— H-France Review
The life of Jacques Pierre Brissot deserves to be much better known. As leader of the French Revolutionary group the Girondins, he played a central role in the early years of the Revolution, above all in the fatal decision for France to go to war in 1792. That war dragged on for twenty-three years, far outlasting Brissot himself, who perished in the Revolutionary Terror in 1793. In this engaging and sympathetic study, Oliver focuses on the key years of his life—the time he spent in America—and his subsequent role as a leader of the French Revolution. Oliver portrays Brissot as an idealistic man, out of his depth in the labyrinthine drama of revolutionary politics. Brissot appears as a tragic figure, fated to be consumed by the Revolution to which he had devoted his life.— Marisa Linton, Kingston University
This lively narrative not only provides a political biography of an important French revolutionary leader, but also explores the intellectual, political, and personal links between the French and American Revolutions. Bette W. Oliver argues that Jacques Pierre Brissot associated key democratic ideals with the United States and that these ideals shaped his career as a revolutionary journalist and politician.— William S. Cormack, University of Guelph
This timely book joins renewed interest in the Atlantic dimensions of the revolutionary period, particularly the connections between the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Bette W. Oliver provides a splendid portrait of a coterie of itinerant revolutionaries, who travelled back and forth between the old world and the North American colonies, exchanging ideas, goods, and good times, and, more generally, causing endless trouble. Oliver focuses on Jacques Pierre Brissot—a key revolutionary figure who has been relatively neglected on this side of the Atlantic—and provides a glimpse into the lived experience of a revolutionary movement that, quite literally, crossed the ocean.— Ronen Steinberg, Michigan State University; author of The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France
This is a much-needed study that focuses on Brissot’s American sojourn and its relationship to his influential political philosophy and leadership during the French Revolution. It is a careful and thoughtful analysis that should persuade scholars to re-examine Brissot’s book on the new republic and place it deservedly on par with Crèvecoeur and a number of other French commentators.— Thomas C. Sosnowski, professor emeritus, Kent State University