Themes in Modern European History 1780-1830 is an authoritative and lively exploration of a period dominated by events which have shaped modern Europe. In a series of articles, six leading academics present some controversial conclusions:
* the east/west contrast in Europe today has more to do with responses to the French Revolution of 1789 than the Russian Revolution of 1917
* the conservative Europe of 1814 was the product of the Romantic imagnation, not a Restoration' of the old regime
Spanning political, social, economic and demographic facets of revolutions, this is...

French socialism traces its origins to the revolutionary communist Gracchus Babeuf (1760-1797) and for a time during the Second Republic socialists such as Louis Blanc, Etienne Canet, Victor Considerant, Jeanne Deroin, Pauline Roland, Blanqui, and Raspail occupied a prominent place in the attempt to create a reforming social democracy. For Karl Marx, and the dominant academic historians of twentieth-century France who took up his thesis, the early French socialists were worthy only of faint praise or scorn, yet the French parliamentary socialist groups that emerged in the 1880s can be...

This book is a fascinating survey of nineteenth-century republicanism, the first of its kind this century. It investigates why it was that although France was one of the first countries in modern Europe to become a republic in 1792, it was nearly a hundred years before a republic was acceptable to the majority. Pamela Pilbeam suggests that republicanism was a witch's brew of Enlightenment rationality, bloody memories and conflicting socialist expectations. The book concludes that the successful republic of 1871 used the rhetoric of democracy to conceal persistent elitism.