Levi Hobbs's Reviews > A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution

This is one of, if not the, most engaging history book I've ever read. It also feels very complete, even-handed, and it views things from multiple dimensions. It follows the stories of two different individual people (one of the King Louis, and the other a glassmaker named Menetre) in addition to the broader descriptions. It pulls together from a huge number of sources and has many endnotes if you want to go deeper. And all this while still managing to be very engaging (sans the last fourth of the book, which is just inherently a less interesting phase of the revolution as it fizzled out and was gradually dismantled by the Thermidorians and Napoleon).

Popkin even does a good job of foreshadowing, introducing important characters and foreshadowing important events before they happening. I don't think I've ever read a history book before where I genuinely just really wanted to keep reading to find out what happened next.

He addresses many of the glaring faults of different revolutionaries and doesn't really making anyone into a saint. He addresses questions that we as modern readers would be more interested in, such as the revolutionaries' treatment of women and slaves. He also tells you which things had lasting effects hundreds of years into the future and what those affects were, which helps you understand how important certain things were, as well as which things quickly fizzled out and went nowhere. He makes the time period very fascinating, and pitches it as being a period where there was a cauldron or incubator of every idea imaginable about government and representation, etc. So many things were first tried here. You can see the seeds of communism, fascism, women's rights, the end of slavery, anti-colonialism, and so many other things here.

It's a time of great desperation and violence, where even women stage violent uprisings, often because people are starving. It's also the age of many enlightenment ideas getting tried out for the first time. It's an age of so many things. He explores at the beginning what conditions led to this era happening. He also explores why it developed the way it did, why he doesn't think the French Revolution was inevitable, and what King Louis could have done differently to avert it.

He also shows the rise of Napoleon, although this book isn't primarily about him, but it's a good introduction to his character and importance to ending the French Revolutionary period. I get a feeling this is an ideal thing to read first and then launch into reading a more detailed biography of Napoleon, and/or history of the Napoleonic Wars. By the way, if you didn't know anything about Napoleon, don't get your hopes up to high. He was quite racist and authoritarian, not a hero of our time, but he is a very fascinating character in history.

There are so many other good things I could say about this book. Just read it.