HIST 228: The French Revolution (HC)

Rare Book Collections at Bryn Mawr and the University of Pennsylvania

Selected Titles at Bryn Mawr's Rare Book Library

Often books printed in the 18th century are kept in libraries' rare book collections. You can go to Bryn Mawr and other local libraries to see these books.

Librarians at Bryn Mawr have put together lists of titles concerning France with pamphlets, periodicals, and books:

Materials in Quaker & Special Collections

Two volumes detailing the events of the French Revolution (dated from 1/1/1793 through 12/24/1795). Each volume contains an assortment of printed documents and handwritten manuscript copies of published articles.

By James Mackintosh. London : Printed for G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1792. The 4th edition, with additions.

By Louis Marie Prudhomme. A Paris : Au bureau des Révolutions de Paris . ; A Lyon : Chez Prudhomme aîné, 1791.

Jean Jacques Calet. London : Printed by W. Browne and J. Warren, 22, Poppins Court, and sold for the author, by C. Stalker, Stationers-Court, Ludgate-Street ; J. Walter, Piccadilly ; and all the Booksellers in town and country, 1789.

Online Source Collections

There are some online collections available for early modern printed texts. They reproduce every page in a book and are searchable by word and phrase.

Henry Knox to Thomas Russell introducing asylum seekers from France
The French foreign minister Talleyrand and a companion were visiting the United States and hoped to stay given "the troubles in their native country."

The Archives volumes are a collection of documents about the French Revolution assembled by archivists and historians beginning in 1862. The French Revolution Digital Archive has made available the volumes covering 1789- Jan. 4, 1794 (vols. 1-82).

Offers full-text access to English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800 including books, pamphlets, almanacs, Bibles and treatises. Subjects covered include history, geography, fine arts, medicine, science, literature, language, religion, philosophy and law. Significant collections of women writers, collections on the French Revolution, and numerous eighteenth-century editions of the works of Shakespeare are also included.

Gallica is a digital library of French and francophone culture maintained by the Bibliothque nationale de France. Contains numerous electronic texts, images, maps, animation, and sound files of French and other publications in history, literature, science, philosophy, law, economics, and political science. Covers the Middle Ages to the present.

This website provides digital copies of newspapers edited by Jean-Paul Marat. He published L'Ami du peuple 1789-1792.

This digital collection primarily consists of material published between 1780 and 1810 from the French Revolution Collection (FRC), the Louis XVI Trial and Execution Collection, and several smaller collections of French Revolution era material. See the website Translating the French Revolution (DePaul University) for English translations of selected pamphlets from the Newberry Library.

Sources in Printed Form

Some texts from the era of the French Revolution have been edited and published. Notable titles available in print include:

Newspaper founded by Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, a prominent publisher in the Ancien Regime. The Monitor was intended to be a newspaper of record for the Revolution. It includes speeches from the Estates General and factual, accurate reporting rather than editorials.

Source Anthologies

Collections of primary texts in anthologies can be good for browsing. They touch on many different issues, often excerpting brief passages from full works that you can find in the tricolleges or through interlibrary loan.

Editions of sources not available in the tricolleges can be requested through interlibrary loan (See the links on this guide's first page). Use subject terms including "sources" or "correspondence" to locate additional primary texts in Tripod and in WorldCat.

For example, the subject search france revolution 1789-1799 AND (sources OR correspondence) produces results including:

The Impact of the French Revolution: Texts from Britain in the 1790s. Cambridge University Press, 2005

The French Revolution and Human Rights : A Brief History with Documents Bedford, 2016

This anthology brings together a transnational selection of literature, some translated into English, about the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), from the beginnings of the conflicts that led to it through the end of the nineteenth century.

This website, edited by Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt, offers more than 350 primary documents in English translation, as well as images and essays. Searchable by topics and by browsing.

Primary Sources in French

"Est-il des moyens de rendre les Juifs plus utiles et plus heureux?" Le concours de l'Académie de Metz (1787)

Maclure Collection, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.
Van Pelt Library, 3420 Walnut St., Philadelphia.
The Maclure Collection contains some 20,000 pamphlets published in France between 1788 and 1802. The collection documents Revolutionary political and economic concerns in great depth. For a title-by-title listing of the collection, see the printed guide listed above.

The University of Warwick has an extensive collection of 18th and 19th century French plays. They have digitized 300 plays from the decade of the French Revolution and 150 more from the Napoleonic era. The texts are fully searchable by keyword and can be viewed both in facsimile and in type script.

The editor brings together letters, descriptions and other documents for a thematic treatment of the queen's life and historiography.

Mémoires de l'abbé Morellet de l'Académie française sur le dix-huitième siècle et sur la Révolution

Consists of more than 30,000 pamphlets and more than 23,000 issues of 180 periodicals published between 1780 and 1810. The collection reflects a wide variety of political opinions.

Gouges is most famous for her political pamphlets, particularly Les droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (1791). She became embroiled in revolutionary politics and was executed in 1793.

Hébert was a leader of the Paris sans-culottes and published his newspaper for that readership. He wrote using the slang and expressions of the street.

Newspaper founded by Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, a prominent publisher in the Ancien Regime. The Monitor was intended to be a newspaper of record for the Revolution. It includes speeches from the Estates General and factual, accurate reporting rather than editorials.

Primary Sources in English

Primary sources, accounts and other kinds of documents written at the time of an event or era, allow a nuanced and detailed understanding of historical issues. Sources can take many different forms.

"Bringing together scholarly essays and helpfully annotated primary documents, African Americans and the Haitian Revolution collects not only the best recent scholarship on the subject, but also showcases the primary texts written by African Americans about the Haitian Revolution. Rather than being about the revolution itself, this collection attempts to show how the events in Haiti served to galvanize African Americans to think about themselves and to act in accordance with their beliefs, and contributes to the study of African Americans in the wider Atlantic World."--BOOK JACKET.

Disorderly Families by Arlette Farge; Michel Foucault; Nancy Luxon (Editor); Thomas Scott-Railton (Translator)

These letters of arrest (lettres de cachet) from France's Ancien Regime were often associated with excessive royal power and seen as a way for the king to imprison political opponents. In Disorderly Families, first published in French in 1982, Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault collect 94 letters from ordinary families who, with the help of hired scribes, submitted complaints to the king to intervene and resolve their family disputes. The letters evoke a fluid social space in which life in the home and on the street was regulated by the rhythms of relations between husbands and wives, or parents and children. Most impressively, these letters outline how ordinary people seized the mechanisms of power to address the king and make demands in the name of an emerging civil order.

"Helen Maria Williams (1761-1827), English poet, novelist, and chronicler of the French Revolution, here vividly recounts her experiences in France during the Terror. Arrested in the fall of 1793, Williams records with passion and sorrow the degeneration of the Revolution into chaos and murder. She sketches the colorful personalities of her friends and acquaintances (Madame Roland, Charlotte Corday, Georges-Jacques Danton) and enemies (Maximilien Robespierre, Louis-Antoine de St. Just, Jean-Paul Marat), while all the time displaying her enduring optimism that the Revolution would eventually succeed in liberty and justice for people everywhere."--BOOK JACKET.

This selection of original documents examines the constitutional and political problems of France in the decade 1785-1795 through the writings of contemporaries. A collection of documents translated into English with commentaries. The focus is on the constitutional and political problems in France.

Chateaubriand's autobiography encompasses the ancien regime, French Revolution, exile in America and the reign of Napoleon. The second volume, covers the years 1800-1815.

By calming revolutionary turbulence while preserving fundamental gains of 1789, Napoleon Bonaparte laid the foundations of modern France. But his impact reached beyond France's borders as well. His legacy of war, civil rights, exploitation, and national awakening reshaped identities across the European continent, while in the Atlantic world he destroyed the colonial order and helped plant the seeds of American power.

The Old regime and the French Revolution by John W. Boyer (Editor); Julius Kirshner (Editor); Keith M. Baker (Editor)

A group of translated documents that deal with political culture, in particular the origins and development of revolutionary political culture.

Ourika: an English translation by Claire de Durfort Duras; John Fowles (Foreword by, Translator); Joan DeJean (Introduction by); Margaret Waller (Introduction by)

"Based on a true story, Ourika relates the experiences of a Senegalese girl who is rescued from slavery and raised by an aristocratic French family during the French Revolution. Brought up in a household of learning and privilege, she is unaware of her difference until she overhears a conversation that makes her suddenly conscious of her race - and of the prejudice it arouses. From this point on, Ourika lives her life not as a French woman but as a black woman "cut off from the entire human race." As the Reign of Terror threatens her and her adoptive family, Ourika struggles with her unusual position as an educated African woman in eighteenth-century Europe." "A best-seller in the 1820s, Ourika captured the attention of Duras's peers, including Stendhal, and became the subject of four contemporary plays. The work represents a number of firsts: the first novel set in Europe to have a black heroine, the first French literary work narrated by a black female protagonist, and, as John Fowles points out in the foreword to his translation, "the first serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black mind." An inspiration for Fowles's acclaimed novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, Ourika will astonish and haunt modern readers."--BOOK JACKET

Mercier's Le Tableau de Paris, published from 1781 to 1788, is one of the forgotten treasures of French literature, offering a wealth of vivid portraits of Parisian life. Mercier was a pioneering urban ethnographer, a participant observer who described the society around him with the same sense of curiosity that drove the period's explorers to portray the natives of remote Pacific islands.