The bicentenary of the French Revolution has been dominated by those who do not like the French Revolution or its heritage. This book deals with a surprisingly neglected subject: the history, not of the revolution itself, but of its reception and interpretation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A Critical assumption of the book is that while it is necessary and inevitable that historians write out of the history of their own times, those who write only out of their own times cannot understand the past and what came out of it. The recent historiographical reaction against the...