Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A History French Revolution, Vol. 1 of 3
Fortescue, the superintendent of the reading-room, who knows the collection better than any one else. This great collection has been used especially for Chapter I. Of the present volume on the Elections, which is based entirely upon it, but in subsequent chapters the contemporary journals have formed the groundwork of the story, though corrected and amplified by these pamphlets and by modern monographs.
The history of the French Revolution has gone through four distinct stages in France, which must be noticed successively, though the boundaries of the third and fourth stages cannot be distinctly defined. The first stage is that of contemporary histories. Though the various journals and pamphlets give the narrative of events at first hand, they were quickly followed up and made use of in regular histories. Of these the earliest in point of date is that of Rabant de Saint Etienne, the Protestant pastor, and member of the Constituent Assembly and of the Convention, who wrote his Histoire de la Revolution francaise in 1792, in the happy conviction that the Revolution was all over, before it had reached the critical period in which he himself died on the guillotine. Of the numerous histories published under the Directory, the best known are those of the Deux Amis and of Lacretelle, of which Carlyle made copious use. But these writers lived too close to the time of which they wrote to be able to clear their minds of prejudices or to have knowledge of the documents which could alone unravel hidden intrigues.
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